"Peace is never the absence of danger, only the moment it forgets your name."
— Facility Maxim, Anonymous Source
The days after the August Visit drifted by like quiet ripples after a stone had struck still water. The sky over the New Facility had regained its calm pallor, a faint silver veil that shimmered gently over the towering spires and curved domes. For once, the air was not heavy with static. The rain had ended, yet its scent still lingered.
From orbital view, the New Facility looked whole again, a ring of living steel turning against the void, its light sweeping over the dark ocean of space. Inside its walls, though, the silence felt wrong. Not peaceful, but expectant. It was as if everything held its breath, unsure whether the storm had truly passed or simply paused.
The containment grids along the outer decks stabilized first. Their glow steadied from wild pulses to steady amber rhythms. The mechanical divisions reopened, the labs flickered back to life, and the inner cadet wings returned to their old routines. Announcements played across the halls: "Cadet training restored to normal sequence. Report to designated sessions by standard shift."
The world had learned, once again, how to pretend that nothing extraordinary had happened.
Yet everyone knew something had changed.
No one said it aloud, but the temporal rain had felt different this time. It had not simply distorted the flow of seconds, but had pressed deeper, folding itself into the seams of thought and memory. Some cadets claimed they lost whole fragments of conversation. Others said they blinked and found themselves standing meters away from where they'd been. It was temporal fatigue the medics called it. A harmless echo, treatable with neural rest and nutrient stabilizers. But for those who experienced it, there was something more. There was a lingering sense that their minds had skipped, as if they had momentarily ceased to exist.
Bale heard these whispers in the corridors, carried between training lines and dining tables. Though, he never joined in the conversations. He had no words to offer. His own sense of time had not fractured since that day. When he tried to recall the rain, he could remember vividly the sound of his pulse, that strange, hollow throb that did not belong to his heart, and the scene of the rain. Everything.
The Unbounds' arrival had steadied the storm, but their presence left an invisible scar. Everyone remembered how the air had bent around them, how their very silhouettes shimmered like ripples in space. They had not spoken, yet their power had silenced every drone and tremor. When they left, it was as if they had taken the world's balance with them.
---
Bale's mornings became a loop of observation and waiting. The diagnostics wing had assigned him a private cubicle now. It had metallic walls, transparent panels, and the quiet hum of monitoring lights that seemed to breathe. His neural band sat snug around his wrist, its faint red flicker reduced but never gone. The med drones hovered nearby, scanning, logging and recalibrating. Every few minutes, the screens beside his bed would ripple with static before stabilizing again.
He had memorized the sound of those machines though: the low whine, the clicks, and the faint shift of light across the surface of his skin. Sometimes, he thought they were whispering to one another.
'I'll be damned...'
Prometheus Division had taken over his case within forty-eight hours. Their insignia, a stylized flame encircled by the symbol of infinity, was stamped on every report. They never visited him directly, but he could feel their eyes through the walls, through the quiet. The New Facility worked that way. Observation without presence and control without words.
Instructor Jet barged in, his boots echoing softly against the floor. His expression was unreadable as always.
"You're under review," he said. "Prometheus handles anomalies. You'll cooperate, keep your patterns steady, and stay off the training grid until further notice."
Bale nodded.
Jet's gaze lingered on the neural band for a moment before he left.
"Don't give them a reason to decide for you," he added, his tone low, almost a warning.
After that, Bale saw him only through reflections. Once in the glass of the corridor, once in the distance of a briefing hall. Always just out of reach.
---
Classes resumed across the Academy. Cadets filled the simulation rooms again, their laughter returning in small, uncertain bursts. They joked about lost seconds, shared stories of misplaced memories as if they were old war tales. The human mind, Bale realized, had an incredible way of normalizing terror. When faced with the impossible, it learned to make light of it.
Tora sat beside him in several sessions. Her focus was sharper than before, her expressions quiet but aware. When she looked at Bale, it was with a question she didn't voice. They both understood that silence was safer. Whatever had happened during the August Visit, it had marked them in ways they couldn't yet name.
The lectures continued as though nothing had shifted in the structure of the universe. The instructors spoke of the Vortex Frontier, of spatial thresholds and neural harmonics, of mankind's persistence in mapping chaos. The cadets took notes, eyes bright, voices alive with curiosity. Yet, beneath it all, an unease lingered. The Facility itself seemed to pulse slower, its lights dimmer at the edges, its hum lower than before.
Every night, Bale returned to the dorms and tried to sleep in his new cubicle of new cubemates. Now, most of the Unfits had been promoted to Explorers, their food rationing slightly increased, and placement in new cubes. The sound of the vents filled the room, steady and mechanical. Viewing the outside vista, the void hung silent, pierced by the thin glow of distant stars. They didn't twinkle here. They simply remained cold, unwavering and unfeeling.
He thought about the term the Unbounds used among themselves, "falling upwards". To fall, yet rise beyond humanity. To lose one's form, yet gain vision beyond the present.
It was said that every Unbound who survived their resonance test and unbnd, entered the Vortex Frontier not as explorers, but as sacrifices. They were those who gave their humanity to stabilize what remained of time.
Most became Riftborns.
That night, he wondered if he had already begun falling.
"Well, not that I'd unbind soon enough.."
---
One cycle passed. The diagnostics reports no longer changed. "Stable anomaly," they called it now. A paradox contained. Prometheus Division had yet to summon Bale for direct analysis, though their signals came regularly as encrypted pulses across the New Facility's neural grid, subtle but constant.
Cadets were warned not to speculate about internal affairs, though rumors spread anyway. Some said Prometheus was constructing new resonance chambers deep beneath the Frontier sectors. Others claimed the August Visit had damaged something far beyond repair. Bale listened, said nothing, and kept his eyes on his routines.
During one quiet afternoon in the training hall, he caught a glimpse of Tora near the far wall, calibrating her drone. The sunlight through the viewport cast a soft halo around her purple hair. For a moment, he wanted to call her name... but the sound died before it formed. Something inside him resisted, as though even small words could alter the balance he was struggling to keep.
When their eyes met, she smiled faintly. It wasn't the warmth of comfort, but of recognition. They had seen the same storm.
---
Evenings in the Facility grew longer. The lights dimmed earlier than usual, and the corridors were filled with reflections of their own glow. The hum of the reactors beneath the central wing deepened into a near-silent vibration that everyone felt in their bones. It was said that the Facility's core breathed, that it inhaled energy from the Vortex itself, exhaling life into the systems that sustained humanity's last colony.
Bale sometimes stood at the dormitory window, watching the stars shift position. He knew they weren't real anymore, not in the way they used to be. They were fragments of broken constellations stitched together through light refractions, distant echoes of the universe that had once existed before time fractured.
He placed his hand on the glass. It felt cold, yet pulsed faintly beneath his skin. A rhythmic vibration, not mechanical, not natural. Just... something in between.
That night, the neural band beside his bed flickered again. Once. Twice. Then went still.
---
When sleep finally came, it felt less like rest and more like descent.
He dreamed of walking again, through a mirrored plain beneath a sky that moved like water. His reflection followed half a step behind, moving slower, slightly out of rhythm. The ground beneath him rippled with light. Each step he took scattered faint, glowing symbols, like stars dissolving into the surface.
He saw the outline of towers in the distance, crumbling and rebuilding in endless repetition. Between them, rivers of time flowed backward. The world pulsed with heartbeat after heartbeat, but none belonged to him.
He turned and saw Tora once more. This time, her figure was clearer, but her expression hollow. Her voice reached him as a whisper of wind, words lost in distortion.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, her tone neither kind nor cruel. "This place remembers what we forget."
The mirrored surface beneath them began to crack. Beneath it, a vast light stirred. It was something ancient and alive, reaching upward. He tried to move, but the air thickened. The reflections around him splintered into countless fragments, each showing the same moment of himself, falling through light.
Then came the pulse.
That same rhythm from the neural band.
A slow beat that grew faster, sharper, until the sound became pain.
Gasping awake, his breath was shallow, his hands trembling. The dorm lights were flickering weakly, with shadows bending along the walls. The room was quiet except for the faint hum of the New Facility world beyond. Around him, his cubemates slept, remaining undisturbed. One was an Explorer like him, and the other two were Scouts.
The band on his wrist glowed faintly, softer than before, but alive.
He sat there in silence, the echo of that pulse still trembling inside him.
Outside the window, the horizon of the New Facility shimmered once, faint and brief, as if the air itself had just remembered something.
The storm had passed.
But the stillness that followed was not peace.
It was waiting.