Corrupted Bonds
Chapter 109: Splinter Signal

Chapter 109: Chapter 109: Splinter Signal

The sky did not belong to them.

They stood under the bruised heavens—silver and humming, wrong in every way—and the weight of that realization pressed on them like gravity too heavy to ignore. Every breath they drew felt like a question unanswered. Every sound echoed back like a voice not quite their own.

Rowan’s tetherlight flared weakly as he adjusted his field, trying to orient them within reality. But nothing responded. No familiar anchors. No calls from command. Just that signal—that impossible flicker of his own signature, pulsing faintly from nowhere and everywhere.

"It’s like the Veil kept a piece of you," Ren murmured, eyes scanning static-filled readings.

Lucian stood to the side, arms crossed, but his posture tense. "Or it copied him."

Rowan didn’t respond. He was listening. Not to them—but to the hum beneath the world.

They had emerged from Havenfield only to find that it had followed them. The recursion had not ended with the chamber. It had leaked.

"There are inconsistencies in the soil patterns," Haru noted, crouched over a scanner. "Memory loops buried into the terrain. Like the land itself is unsure which version it belongs to."

"Time is folding," Mira added. "Subtle now. But we’ll see the ripples. This whole region is going to destabilize."

"So what now?" Jasper asked, grim. "We find whatever’s sending that signature?"

"We find it," Rowan said, voice steady, "and we find who it’s becoming."

Before they moved, Ren toggled the uplink. "Command deck, this is Operation Threadfall. Havenfield engagement complete. Target: Synthlord—escaped. Casualties minimal. Environmental recursion—ongoing. We need containment support."

Static answered. Then a crackle.

Evelyn’s voice filtered through, shaky but firm. "Copy that, Threadfall. Read you at partial strength. We’re tracking distortion fields expanding beyond Havenfield. Veil layers unstable across three quadrants. Return to safe zone perimeter if able. We’ll triangulate your signal for extraction. And... Rowan. That signature—monitor it. We see it, too."

Lucian muttered, "That’s comforting."

They pressed forward, through a dead grove where trees hummed low with stolen memory. Vespera trailed her fingers along bark that shifted textures—wood to metal to bone—and said nothing.

Kira quietly recorded everything, her tetherstream flickering like a pulse trying to stay steady. Sloane and Zora walked flank, blades low, heads on swivels.

Mira and Haru found traces of collapsed anchorlines, nodes folded in like snapped vertebrae. Ren paused beside one and stared longer than necessary. "This used to be a safe point. I stayed here. In another loop."

No one contradicted him. They just moved slower.

They stopped near a cratered ridge. The light dimmed, though it was midday. Rowan sat on a half-buried resonance stone and rested his head in his hands. The others quietly formed a perimeter, not just for safety—but space.

Lucian leaned against a broken pillar. "You okay?"

Rowan looked up. His voice was quiet. "No. But I will be."

Ren sat next to him, letting the silence breathe a moment longer. Then, without looking directly at Rowan, he said, "You know... the Veil never copies something unless it sees potential."

Rowan gave a tired exhale, eyes still on the dirt. "Or it copies something it’s afraid of."

"That too," Ren said. "But fear and potential—they’re two sides of the same tether. If it duplicated you, it’s because it couldn’t predict you. Couldn’t contain what you might become."

Rowan finally turned his head, gaze distant but sharper. "Or maybe it saw something broken enough to manipulate. A crack in the constant."

Ren shrugged, his tone softer. "Then maybe that crack is what’s letting the rest of us hold together. Doesn’t have to be clean to be strong."

Rowan didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Tetherlight glowed faint along the horizon.

Still waiting.

Downtime

Sloane sat on a low ridge, sharpening his blade with rhythmic strokes, not because it needed it, but because it kept his hands moving. Vespera sat nearby, legs crossed, fingers wrapped around a canteen she hadn’t drunk from. The silence between them stretched—familiar, but weighted.

"You ever wonder what version of you the recursion would have made?" Vespera asked softly, not looking at him.

Sloane didn’t pause the motion of the blade. "Yeah. A colder one. One who didn’t look back."

She nodded slowly. "Mine would’ve let people die sooner. Just to stay upright."

He looked up at her, blade resting across his knees. "But we didn’t become that."

"No. But it’s not gone either."

A quiet understanding passed between them. No absolution. Just the shared weight of what could have been.

A few meters away, Jasper sat on a crumbling slope, his back against Zora’s. The two men stared out over the broken terrain, both battered, both quiet.

Zora broke the silence first. "You good?"

Jasper tilted his head. "Define good."

Zora gave a breathless laugh. "Still breathing. Still sarcastic. I’ll take it."

"I was sure we weren’t walking out of there," Jasper said after a pause. "Thought maybe that was the loop where we ended."

Zora nudged him lightly with his shoulder. "Maybe it was. Maybe this is the one where we keep going anyway."

They didn’t speak after that. But they didn’t move either.

Sometimes survival was enough of a statement.

But even survival had a direction.

The pulse of Rowan’s signal—his other self, or something like it—still blinked faintly on Ren’s display, like a heartbeat lost behind static. They had no coordinates, no fixed heading. Only the ripple.

As the team packed up and moved forward again, the terrain continued to defy definition. Roads appeared and twisted away. The sun pulsed wrong. Mira tracked her scans with narrowed eyes, muttering, "We’re moving toward the signal, but the terrain’s rewriting around it. Like it’s moving us with it."

Lucian grunted. "Then we don’t follow the road. We follow the noise."

They advanced through a corridor of fractured pines that dripped with threadlight like veins. At the edge of the bend, Rowan held up a hand—his tetherlight had surged without warning.

A figure moved in the mist ahead.

Not just a shadow—distinct. Tall, upright. Its silhouette shimmered like a projection fighting against static. For a heartbeat, the mist around it glowed faintly golden.

Rowan’s breath caught in his throat.

It turned its head—just enough. Enough for him to see his own face. Not reflected, not corrupted. Calm. Composed. Familiar.

Then the figure’s tetherlight flickered in violet.

Lucian took a step forward instinctively, hand tightening around his weapon.

"Rowan," he said. "Tell me you didn’t see—"

"I saw it."

And then it vanished, like mist through recursion.

They broke into motion. Faster. The landscape twisted subtly underfoot, growing less stable with each step. Ren’s scanner spiked off the charts. Whatever it was, it was close—and it had seen them.

The recursion, patient and waiting, inhaled once more.

And for the first time, it felt personal.

They moved fast.

Lucian led the charge, Rowan close behind, tetherlight streaming behind him like the wake of something barely held together. The team followed, each step marked by flickers in the environment—trees blinking in and out of form, the ground humming beneath their feet as if reality were holding its breath.

The mist ahead thickened. The signal pulsed brighter. The figure appeared again—closer this time. Lucian didn’t hesitate.

"Contact front!" he barked.

Rowan surged forward, and the world around them contracted into a tunnel of static and flickering echoes. The figure raised its hand, not in aggression—but recognition.

Rowan stopped short.

So did the figure.

They were mirror images—one grounded in pain and truth, the other in something polished and untouched.

"I don’t understand," Rowan muttered.

The double tilted its head. Then spoke. Its voice was Rowan’s, but tempered, devoid of wear. "You were the necessary fracture. I am the iteration beyond doubt."

Before Rowan could react, the figure dissolved into a splinter burst of light.

The shockwave hurled the team backward.

Reality reasserted around them in fragments—trees where there were none, sky flickering between night and dusk.

"Status!" Quinn shouted.

Everyone responded, breathless but intact. Except Rowan.

He remained on one knee, clutching his head, tetherlight flickering violently.

"It touched something in him," Haru said. "We need to extract. Now."

Ren toggled the comms. "Command, we’re in proximity of the safe zone. Requesting immediate pickup."

Static. Then Evelyn’s voice: "VTOL en route. Hold your perimeter. Repeat—hold your perimeter."

They formed a circle around Rowan, blades and rifles ready.

Because now they knew:

The recursion wasn’t done with them.

And it had a version of Rowan that was learning fast.

As they waited, Rowan’s tetherlight surged and faltered, pulsing erratically in his hands. The others steadied around him, weapons drawn, eyes on the trees, instincts taut.

But the next pulse wasn’t outward.

It was inward.

Rowan’s body arched slightly—his eyes igniting with molten gold, his breath sucked in like the wind had been ripped from his lungs. His tetherlight flared so intensely it blinded those closest to him.

Then—stillness.

Not quiet. Stillness. No sound. No motion. The world around him stopped responding, like a pause in a simulation too complex to resume.

A breathless second passed. Then his form flickered—his entire body fragmenting at the edges into strands of static and resonance, like he was being unraveled by code. The ground beneath him twisted, shadows lengthening into impossible angles. The air rippled like glass in slow collapse.

Lucian reached out, panic blooming in his voice. "Rowan—"

Rowan turned his head, and in that final moment, there was clarity. A single flash of recognition, not fear—resolve. His eyes locked on Lucian’s, and there was something in them like goodbye.

And then he was gone.

No scream. No warning. Just absence.

The tether signature snapped shut like a dying star collapsing into itself. An aftershock of cold rushed outward, brushing over their skin like breath from an open grave.

"No, no, no—" Ren scrambled to recalibrate his scanner. His hands shook. "He’s not... he’s not reading. It’s blank."

Vespera gasped, one hand over her mouth. "He’s out of sync. Out of phase. It didn’t kill him—it claimed him."

"Where is he?" Mira demanded, voice raw and cracking.

No one answered.

Because Rowan Mercer wasn’t in their world anymore.

He had fallen into a recursion.

And somewhere else—a timeline not yet written—his eyes opened to a world he had never touched before.

The awakening

The sky was clear.

No Veil distortions, no flickering anomalies, no tetherlight bleeding from the horizon. The sun overhead cast natural warmth—not filtered through recursion fog, but real. Golden. Whole.

Rowan gasped, clutching his chest, tetherlight dim and coiled inward. The sensation of being clean hurt more than the collapse had. He sat up slowly in the middle of a wide field, grass brushing against his fingertips. Wind rustled through trees that hadn’t twisted in years.

Voices echoed in the distance. Familiar—too familiar.

He turned his head.

Mira. Zora. Sloane. Jasper. Ren. Vespera.

All alive. All smiling.

Lucian stood at the center of them, relaxed. Unscarred. Laughing as he pulled Ari into a shoulder-lock.

Rowan’s heart lurched.

Everything in him screamed wrong, even as the world showed him peace.

He wasn’t supposed to be here.

And yet, somehow, this place remembered him.

Rowan stood slowly, body aching in unfamiliar ways—not from battle, but from absence. The quiet here was absolute. Too pure. No recursion hum beneath the earth. No tetherlight flickers. Just life.

Too much life.

He took a step forward, eyes locked on the group ahead. They were laughing. Unwounded. Whole.

Mira turned and spotted him first. "There you are," she called out, her tone light and easy. "You always disappear after debriefs."

Sloane waved lazily. "We thought you were sulking again. Turns out you just needed air."

Lucian smiled. Smiled. "Come on, Rowan. Evelyn says the alignment’s holding. We’re clean for the first time in months. You should enjoy it."

Rowan’s breath caught in his throat. He opened his mouth, but no sound came.

None of them noticed the crackle at his fingertips. None of them saw the way his tetherlight refused to stabilize, flickering like a mismatched signal.

This wasn’t his world. It was perfect—and that made it impossible.

He finally managed a whisper. "What... year is it?"

The group exchanged amused looks.

"Same one as yesterday?" Ari replied. "Don’t tell me you finally fried your anchor interface."

"No," Rowan murmured. "I think something else did."

He took another step forward, eyes narrowing now. This wasn’t just a dream. It was a construct. A test.

But whose?

As he approached, a shadow moved behind Lucian—brief, cold, unnoticed by the others. A shimmer. A presence. It was him. The other Rowan. Watching.

Smiling.

Rowan stopped a few paces short, his voice rasping. "What is this place?"

Lucian turned, still grinning. "Home base, what else? You hit your head again?"

The others chuckled. It was warm, real—but hollow. Rowan didn’t laugh. His tetherlight sputtered with static.

"I—" he paused, trying to pull the lie from his throat, but none came. "Something’s wrong."

Ren stepped forward, arms crossed, expression skeptical. "You sure you’re okay? Your sync levels are—"

"I’m not syncing to anything," Rowan snapped, sharper than he intended. "Because none of this is mine."

The tension broke the mood. Silence stretched.

Lucian’s expression flickered, just for a second, then smoothed again. "Let’s not do this now, Rowan. It’s finally peaceful. Don’t pull the threads apart."

That—that was what broke Rowan’s composure. Lucian never said things like that. Not the real Lucian.

He stepped back, breath shallow. The ground pulsed faintly underfoot. The world felt too tailored.

And then he saw it again.

A shimmer across the lake’s surface. His reflection—no, another’s. Wearing his face, standing still, waiting behind mirrored eyes.

The fake Rowan.

And Rowan finally understood: this wasn’t just a simulation.

It was a trap.

One built from everything he ever loved.

And the one thing it needed was for him to stop remembering that.

Days passed—at least, he thought they were days. Time had the consistency of smoke here, soft around the edges. Rowan found himself walking through routines he didn’t remember choosing. Debriefs that felt scripted. Meals that tasted like nostalgia. Conversations looping with just enough variation to keep doubt soft.

And slowly, the friction inside him dulled.

Lucian was always around. Smiling. Easy. No fury, no fractures. And that comfort made it harder to resist.

"You’re tense again," Lucian said one night, handing Rowan a cup of tea that didn’t smell like anything he’d ever known—but felt like home anyway.

Rowan hesitated, then drank. "Just... ghosts," he said softly.

"Ghosts don’t linger where peace lives," Lucian replied. "You’ve earned this, you know."

The words curled in his mind like warmth. Like gravity.

He started to forget how long it had been since he resisted. Since he questioned.

Then one day, he looked in a mirror.

His tetherlight was steady.

Perfect.

And for the first time, Rowan wasn’t sure if that meant he was healing...

Or if he had finally begun to forget.

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