He went to the detention cell at seven in the morning.
Earlier than any previous visit. Early enough that the Chrono-Tower's lower levels were quiet — the overnight security rotation still present, the day staff not yet arrived, the silver corridor empty and humming its soft blue-white pulse into the stillness.
Rhea was awake.
He wasn't surprised. He was beginning to understand that Rhea existed in a state of continuous wakefulness — not restless, not anxious, but simply always running. Her mind the kind that didn't fully release into sleep because there was always another thread to follow, another sequence to analyze, another variable to turn over and examine from a different angle.
She was sitting on the metal bench with the cracked tablet in her lap and her midnight blue hair loose around her shoulders and her eyes already on the barrier when he appeared. She'd heard him coming — his footsteps in the corridor, the specific rhythm of his approach that was different from the security rotation's measured pace.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"Early," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Something happened," she said. Not a question.
Alex looked at her steadily. "Kronos made contact last night. Direct transmission through the lattice." He paused. "We met at the lagoon."
Rhea went very still.
"You met him," she said.
"Yes."
"And you're standing here having a conversation the next morning," she said. "Which means it wasn't an attack."
"A parley," Alex said. "He wanted to look at me. I wanted to look at him." He held her gaze. "At the end — just before he descended — he said something."
Rhea waited.
"He said ask Rhea about the Delta Node," Alex said. "Ask her what she found there before the Cult recruited her. Ask her what she was really looking for."
The detention cell was completely silent.
Rhea's expression didn't change dramatically. But something behind it did — something significant and tectonic and slow, the kind of shift that happens below the surface before it becomes visible. Her hands on the cracked tablet tightened fractionally. Her eyes moved to the middle distance and then back to Alex with a quality he hadn't seen in them before.
Not calculation.
Fear.
Real, genuine, carefully controlled fear.
"He knows about the Delta Node," she said quietly.
"Apparently," Alex said.
She looked at the cracked tablet. At Kola's name in the first panel. She looked at it for a long moment with the expression of someone who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time and has just been told that the weight is about to be examined.
"Sit down," she said.
Alex sat on the floor on his side of the barrier.
Rhea looked at him.
Then she began.
"Before the Cult," she said. "Before the activist group, before the blacklist, before any of it — I was trying to understand what killed Kola."
Alex said nothing. Just listened.
"The official report said Chrono-Reactor malfunction. Technical failure. Contained incident. Three fatalities." She said it with the flat precision of someone who has repeated the official language so many times it has become a kind of scar tissue — smooth on the surface, no feeling left in it.
"The university sealed the incident files. The research team was reassigned. The reactor wing was demolished and rebuilt within six months." She paused. "Six months. To demolish and rebuild an entire wing. That's not how you handle a technical failure. That's how you handle evidence."
"So you started looking," Alex said.
"I started looking," she confirmed. "Not through official channels — those were closed. Through everything else. Academic databases, decommissioned research archives, the kind of grey-literature repositories that universities maintain for internal use and assume nobody outside their walls knows exist." She paused. "I was good at finding things. That's what the Cult eventually valued — not just the glyph knowledge. The ability to find things that were meant to stay hidden."
"What did you find," Alex said.
Rhea looked at the cracked tablet.
"The reactor that malfunctioned wasn't a standard Chrono-Reactor," she said. "The university's official documentation described it as a contained temporal energy generation unit — experimental, low-output, standard research grade." She paused. "It wasn't. Based on the power consumption records I found in a decommissioned maintenance database — records they forgot to seal because nobody thought to look there — the reactor was drawing fifty times the power of a standard research unit."
Alex was very still.
"Fifty times," he said.
"Fifty times," she confirmed. "Which means it wasn't generating temporal energy for research purposes. It was doing something else. Something that required a massive sustained power input and produced — based on the temporal field readings from the campus sensors in the forty eight hours before the incident — a very specific output." She met his eyes. "A concentrated Void-adjacent frequency broadcast."
The words landed in the detention cell like stones.
Alex felt the Heartstone register them — not the emotional weight, the technical implication. A concentrated Void-adjacent frequency broadcast. From a university reactor. Three years before the Engine in the lagoon.
"Someone was experimenting with Void-resonance inversion," he said quietly.
"Before it was theoretical," Rhea said. "Before any published research suggested it was possible. Before anyone in the open academic community had even proposed the framework." She looked at him.
"Someone at Lagos Technical University was running advanced Void-adjacent frequency experiments using a reactor disguised as standard research equipment. And when something went wrong — when the broadcast destabilized and produced a shockwave — three students died and the university sealed every record they could find and demolished the evidence."
Alex looked at her.
"Kola," he said quietly.
"Kola was in the library when the shockwave hit," she said. Her voice stayed flat. The scar tissue doing its work. "He was studying for his quantum mechanics examination. He was twenty years old." She looked at the cracked tablet. "He didn't die because of a technical failure. He died because someone was running illegal Void-adjacent research in a building full of students and something went wrong and they decided their careers were worth more than the truth."
The detention cell was very quiet.
"The Delta Node," Alex said. "Kronos mentioned the Delta Node specifically. What is it."
Rhea looked at him steadily.
"That's what I found next," she said. "After the reactor records. After I understood what the experiment was actually doing." She paused. "The power consumption records showed the reactor wasn't just broadcasting. It was broadcasting toward something. A receiver. A fixed point approximately four hundred kilometers southeast of the campus — in the Niger Delta, deep in the wetlands where the river channels split and the ground is saturated with decades of petroleum extraction runoff and the lattice threads run thick and close together because the environmental damage has compressed them."
She met his eyes. "Someone built a receiver station in the Delta. A node that was collecting the Void-adjacent frequency broadcasts from the university reactor and — doing something with them. Storing them. Amplifying them. I don't know exactly — I found the receiver's location and its power signature but I couldn't access its internal data remotely."
"You were going to go there," Alex said.
"I was going to go there," she confirmed. "I had a plan. I'd identified a research vessel I could book passage on, a cover story about environmental monitoring. I was going to get to the Delta Node and find out what it was doing and who built it and whether it was connected to what killed Kola." She paused. "And then Kade found me."
She said it simply. Without drama. The specific delivery of someone who has had a long time to think about the hinge point of their life and has made their peace with the fact that it was a hinge.
"The Cult found you before you could get to the Node," Alex said.
"Kade said he knew about the reactor incident. Said he had evidence of the cover-up. Said the Cult was fighting to expose exactly the kind of institutional corruption that had killed Kola." She looked at the cracked tablet. "He said the right things. In the right order. To someone who had been isolated and blacklisted and was running out of options and missing her friend." She paused. "I believed him."
"And the Delta Node," Alex said. "Did the Cult ever take you there."
"No," she said. "I asked. Several times. Kade said it was too dangerous, too exposed, that we'd get there when the time was right." She met Alex's eyes. "I think now that the Cult knew about the Delta Node. I think that's why Kade found me specifically — not just for the glyph knowledge. Because I was close to finding it independently and they needed to redirect me before I got there."
Alex sat on the floor of the silver corridor and felt the Heartstone processing everything and felt his mind building the architecture of what he was hearing.
A university reactor running Void-adjacent frequency experiments. Three students dead. A receiver station in the Niger Delta collecting and storing those broadcasts. The Rift-Cult redirecting Rhea before she could reach it. And Kronos — four hundred years old, patient, watching everything — telling Alex to ask about it.
"He wanted me to know," Alex said quietly. "Kronos. He gave me this deliberately."
"Yes," Rhea said.
"Why," Alex said.
Rhea looked at him with those intense eyes.
"Because whatever is at the Delta Node," she said carefully, "he either controls it or he wants it. And pointing you toward it serves his purpose somehow." She paused. "The question is whether finding it serves yours."
Alex looked at her.
"A gift from Kronos is a trap," he said. Soren's words.
"Yes," Rhea said. "Probably." She held his gaze. "But Kola died because of what's connected to that Node. And the people who killed him are still out there making decisions about who gets to know what." She paused. "Trap or not — I want to know what's there."
Alex looked at her for a long moment.
Then he stood.
"Rhea," he said.
She looked up.
"The Chrono-Reactor incident," he said. "The sealed files. The power consumption records you found." He held her gaze. "I need everything. Every piece of data you collected. Every location, every record, every thread you followed." He paused. "Can you reconstruct it from memory."
She looked at the cracked tablet.
"I've been reconstructing it in my head for four days," she said quietly. "There's nothing else to do in here." She met his eyes. "Give me something to write with."
Alex reached into his jacket pocket and produced a stylus — Mira had given it to him that morning without explanation, which meant she'd anticipated this moment with her usual several-hours-ahead thinking.
He held it through the barrier gap.
Rhea looked at it.
Then she took it.
Her fingers closed around it with the specific grip of someone who had been waiting to hold something useful for four days and had finally been given the chance.
She looked at the cracked tablet's dark screen. Then she began writing — not glyphs, not runes, just words and numbers and location coordinates and power readings, reconstructed from memory with the precise fluency of someone whose mind stored information with the same care she'd once etched Kola's name into crystalline panels.
Alex watched her write.
"I'll be back this afternoon," he said. "Have everything ready."
She didn't look up. Already working. Already somewhere in the memory of a decommissioned maintenance database three years ago finding the thread she'd almost pulled before Kade redirected her.
"Alex," she said without looking up.
"Yes," he said.
"The Delta Node," she said. "Whatever it is — whatever Kronos wants you to find there." She paused. Still writing. "Be ready for it to change everything you think you understand about how this started."
Alex looked at her bent head. At the stylus moving across the cracked screen. At Kola's name visible in the panel beside her writing hand.
"I'm ready," he said.
He walked back through the silver corridor.
Behind him the stylus kept moving.