CHAPTER 5 — The Blind Spot
I hit a floor made of cold, reinforced concrete. The air here was different—thick with the smell of ozone and old grease. We were in a basement, or perhaps a bunker, lit by the rhythmic amber pulse of a failing backup generator.
Lyra collapsed beside me, her silver hair fanned out like a spill of mercury. For the first time, she looked exhausted. Her Echoes were no longer a vibrant bloom; they were frayed, flickering like a dying candle.
"Where... are we?" I rasped. My head felt like it had been put through a centrifuge.
"A dead zone," she whispered, pushing herself up. "A place where the 'Progenitor signal' can't reach. It's a pocket of reality that never happened."
I looked around. There were no Echoes here. Not for the pipes on the wall, not for the crates in the corner. Even Lyra—usually a storm of possibilities—had only one shadow.
"Why can't I see them?" I asked, a sudden panic rising. "Why did they stop?"
"Because in this room, there is no future," Lyra said, her eyes regaining a sliver of their icy blue. "This is a Failed Timeline. A branch that was pruned by the Entities. It's the only place they can't find us, because to the rest of the universe, this room doesn't exist."
I stood up, my legs shaking. "You said I was a 'Hybrid.' That thing in the hospital called me an 'Anomaly.' Tell me the truth, Lyra. No more cryptic jumps."
Lyra walked to a rusted metal table and leaned against it. "The accident didn't just 'awaken' you, Alexian. It was an attempt to delete you. You were born from a project called The Chronos Initiative. Your DNA was mapped to perceive the fourth dimension. But something went wrong. You didn't just perceive it—you started collapsing it."
She stepped closer, and for a second, her single shadow flickered, doubled, then settled.
"Every time you 'choose' a branch, you aren't just predicting it. You're destroying the others. You're eating the possibilities of everyone around you. That's why the Entity wants you. You're a vacuum. A black hole in the fabric of time."
Before I could process the horror of that thought, a rhythmic thump-thump-thump echoed from the ceiling.
It wasn't footsteps. It was a heartbeat. A massive, metallic heartbeat that vibrated the very foundations of the room.
"Rook," I whispered.
"He's not here, Alexian," Lyra warned.
"No, I can feel him." I closed my eyes. Even in this 'dead zone,' a tiny, golden thread of a timeline was vibrating. I saw a vision of Cassian Rook, his face covered in blood, standing over a console in a high-tech facility. He wasn't looking for me. He was looking at a file labeled SUBJECT ZERO: THE MOTHER.
"He's found something," I said, turning toward the heavy steel door of the basement. "Something about why I exist."
Lyra grabbed my arm, her grip like iron. "If you leave this room, the Entity will see you instantly. You aren't ready to fight a Progenitor."
"I don't care," I said, pulling away. "If I'm a monster that eats futures, then I might as well start with the people who made me one."
I grabbed a heavy wrench from the floor. As my hand closed around the cold metal, the Echoes suddenly roared back to life—but they were different. They weren't just versions of me.
I saw the wrench breaking the door. I saw the door melting. I saw the door simply ceasing to be.
I didn't just choose a future. I commanded one.
The steel door groaned, the bolts snapping like toothpicks as the metal warped outward, as if a localized explosion had hit it.
Lyra stared at the wreckage, her expression a mix of awe and terror. "You're not just a Hybrid," she whispered to herself. "You're the Architect."
I stepped out into the dark hallway, the amber light catching the edge of my jaw.
"Let's go find Rook," I said. "I want to see what else I can break."