Traq's Resistance - Chapter 3: The Gathering Storm

The station smelled like recycled air and desperation.

Haven was exactly what Adeline had described—a lawless sprawl of interconnected modules, bolted together over generations by refugees and criminals who'd needed a place beyond government reach. The corridors were cramped and dirty, the lighting inconsistent, the population a mix of smugglers, black marketeers, and people running from something they couldn't name. Underneath everything was the sound—a three-beat rhythm from the atmospheric processors, thump-hiss-clank, thump-hiss-clank, the mechanical heartbeat of a station that should have been decommissioned decades ago. Residents said you stopped hearing it after the first week. Traq had been here four days, and it was still the first thing he noticed when silence fell.

Traq fit right in.

He walked with a cane now—not because he needed it anymore, but because the limp in his left leg remained visible enough to invite questions. A cane made him look old, infirm, harmless. Easy to dismiss. The kind of man nobody noticed.

Adeline had suggested the disguise. She'd been full of suggestions since they'd left Meridian Station three weeks ago—practical advice drawn from years of surviving in places like this. How to move through crowds without drawing attention. How to identify safe routes and dangerous corners. How to read the subtle social hierarchies that governed life on the margins.

She walked beside him now, wearing nondescript spacer's clothes and a cap that shadowed her face. Three months of regular meals and safety had continued to fill out her frame, erase some of the gauntness that captivity had carved into her. She looked stronger. More like herself.

More like the woman Traq remembered from before everything went wrong.

"There." She nodded toward a bar on the corner—the sign was in three languages, none of them standard, but the universal symbol of alcohol needed no translation. "Jim said they'd be waiting."

Traq adjusted his cane and limped toward the entrance. A food cart squatted beside the bar's doorway, run by an old woman with burn-scarred hands who ladled thick, dark stew into chipped ceramic bowls. Char stew—reconstituted protein seared in recycled cooking oil with whatever dried herbs the station's hydroponic gardens produced that week. The smoke carried an unexpectedly sweet aroma, the kind of smell that made a place feel inhabited rather than merely occupied. A line of four people waited, each holding their own bowl—Haven custom, apparently, since the vendor didn't provide them.

The bar was dim and crowded, the air thick with the smell of cheap alcohol and the char stew's lingering spice, bass-heavy music thumping through floor panels that vibrated underfoot. The kind of place where people didn't want to be seen and didn't want to see anyone else. Perfect.

He spotted Oliver first—the big man was hard to miss, even hunched over a table in the back corner. Jim sat across from him, nursing a drink with the casual wariness of someone who'd spent years looking over his shoulder.

Oliver looked up as Traq approached, and something shifted in his expression—quiet assessment—he'd watched Traq rebuild himself one painful day at a time, and the progress showed. Jim's mouth curled into the dry half-smile that hadn't changed since the academy.

"About time." Oliver pushed a chair out with his foot. "We ordered you something. It's terrible."

"Consistent with everything else on this station." Traq settled into the chair, propping his cane against the table. Adeline took the seat beside him, nodding greetings to the others.

"You're moving better," Oliver said, studying Traq across the table. "Two weeks ago you could barely make it to the cargo bay without collapsing."

"I'm functional. Barely." Traq tapped the back of his skull—the smooth, surgically sealed socket where the implant had once been. "Still baseline. Still just meat and bone. But the meat is starting to cooperate."

"That's not all you ever were," Jim said. "I seem to remember you being pretty dangerous before the academy ever got their hands on you."

"I was dangerous because I was stupid and didn't know when to quit." Traq took a sip of the drink Oliver had ordered. It was, indeed, terrible. "Now I'm just stupid."

"Self-deprecation doesn't suit you." Oliver signaled a server for another round. "Besides, we didn't come here to reminisce. You said you had information about what's coming. Information that might help."

The drinks arrived—cheap synthehol that tasted like machine oil, but served its purpose. Traq took a sip, gathering his thoughts.

"The transmission," he said finally. "You both saw it?"

"Everyone saw it." Jim's voice was grim. "Half the galaxy thinks it was mass hysteria. The other half is buying guns and building bunkers. The independent systems are in chaos—three stations in Sector Four went dark last week. Nobody knows if it's raiders or refugees or the start of something worse."

"It's the start of something worse." Traq set down his glass. "What I showed everyone in that transmission—it was real. All of it. The fleet. The entity. The consumption of the Indeil's passengers." He paused. "But I didn't show them everything."

Oliver leaned forward. "What do you mean?"

"When my implant shattered, I was connected to the entity for a brief moment. Not receiving—transmitting. It felt me in a way it hadn't expected. And in that moment, I saw things that didn't make it into the broadcast." Traq's jaw tightened. "Older things. Memories that go back farther than human civilization."

The table went quiet. Condensation from his glass seeped between his fingers, cold and steady. Even the ambient noise of the bar seemed to fade.

"The entity behind the Arcadia—it's not alone. It's part of something larger. A collective, maybe, or a hierarchy. Whatever it is, this isn't the first time it's harvested a galaxy. It's done this before. Many times. It consumes civilizations, absorbs their minds, moves on to the next feeding ground."

"How long?" Adeline's voice was steady, but Traq caught the thread of fear beneath it. "How long until the fleet arrives?"

"Months. Maybe a year. The astronomers keep arguing about trajectory and velocity, but the consensus is that we have time. Not much, but some." Traq met each of their eyes in turn. "Time we need to use wisely."

"Use how?" Oliver asked. "The Empire and Union are at each other's throats. The independent systems are paralyzed. Even if we could convince someone to take the threat seriously, what could they do against something that's been consuming civilizations for millions of years?"

"That's what I've been trying to figure out." Traq leaned back in his chair. "When I was inside the entity's mind, Something unexpected came through. Surprise. Maybe even fear. It didn't expect me to fight back. Didn't expect a dying man with a plasma blade to keep coming."

"Because you're stubborn and don't know when to quit," Jim said. "We've established that."

"Because it's ancient. And arrogant." Traq's voice hardened. "It's been doing this so long that something about my response confused it. I don't know what—the implant's gone, and without it I can't analyze the impression properly. But for a moment, in that connection, it hesitated. Whatever it expected from me, I didn't give it."

"And you don't know why?" Adeline asked.

"No. But the fact that it can be surprised at all means it has limits. It's not omniscient. Not infallible." Traq shook his head. "If we can understand those limits, maybe we can find a way to exploit them."

"That's a thin thread to hang hope on," Oliver said.

"It's the only thread we've got." Traq pulled out a data chip—one of several he'd been compiling since leaving Meridian Station. "This is everything I remember from the connection. Fragments of alien memory. Impressions. Images. It's incomplete, contradictory in places, but it's a starting point."

"A starting point for what?"

"For understanding our enemy. For finding vulnerabilities we can exploit." Traq handed the chip to Oliver. "I've been analyzing this for weeks. There are patterns in what the entity showed me. References to something it fears—or at least respects. Something that fought back once before."

Jim's eyebrows rose. "Something that fought it and survived?"

"Something that fought it and hurt it." Traq's voice was quiet. "I don't know what it was. The memories are too fragmented. But the entity remembers. And it's careful to avoid whatever that something was."

"If we could find out what it was," Adeline said slowly, "we might be able to replicate it. Use the same tactics. The same weapons."

"That's the hope." Traq finished his drink. "But I can't do it alone. I need people I can trust. People who won't sell me out to the Empire or the Union or whoever else is looking for the man who broadcast the end of the world into every enhanced mind in the galaxy."

Oliver and Jim exchanged glances—the wordless communication of men who'd been through too much together to need speech.

"You have us," Oliver said. "You've always had us. Even when you were too stubborn to admit you needed help."

"I'm admitting it now." Traq allowed himself a small smile. "The crew of the Indeil, back together. Minus a few faces."

"Minus too many faces." Jim's voice was heavy. "Elizabeth is safe—she stayed behind at Meridian Station to maintain our cover story. Corinne is still out there somewhere, digging through Union archives for information about the Arcadia's origins. But the others..."

"Gone." Traq nodded. "The ones who died on the station. The ones who never came back from Parwen. The ones we lost along the way." He paused. "We carry them with us. We fight for them. That's all we can do."

Silence fell over the table. The weight of absent friends pressed down on them—names unspoken but not forgotten.

Then Oliver straightened. "So what's the plan? Where do we start?"

Traq pulled out his terminal and activated a holographic display. A star map bloomed above the table, pale blue light washing across their faces and casting shifting shadows on the wall behind them. Key locations pulsed amber against the stellar backdrop.

"Three priorities. First—" he highlighted a region near the rim "—the Vaalin system. That's where the fleet was first detected. There might be information there, remnants of the Arcadia's activities, something that could tell us more about the entity's nature."

"That area is crawling with Imperial patrols," Jim said. "They've been increasing security since the transmission. Apparently, they don't want anyone else stumbling onto what you found."

"Then we'll have to be careful. But we have an advantage—I know the Arcadia's layout. I know how it thinks. If there are other installations, other fragments of the same technology, I might be able to identify them."

"And the second priority?" Adeline asked.

Traq highlighted another area—Union space, specifically the region around the Galactic Council station.

"The political situation. Right now, the galaxy is fracturing. Empire versus Union, independent systems pulling in every direction. If the fleet arrives and finds us already at each other's throats, we're done. We need to find a way to bring people together—or at least stop them from actively undermining each other."

"That's not really our area of expertise," Oliver said dryly. "We're smugglers and survivors, not diplomats."

"We're witnesses. That counts for something." Traq paused. "There's something happening at the Galactic Council. An archaeological team found evidence of another Imperial cover-up—a place called Novum. Bioweapons research that went wrong centuries ago. The Council is hearing testimony about it."

"How does that help us?"

"Because the same people who covered up Novum are the same people who've been suppressing information about the Arcadia. The Ministry of Truth." Traq's voice hardened. "If we can connect those threads—show that the Empire's shadow government has been hiding evidence of existential threats for centuries—we might be able to create enough political pressure to force cooperation."

"That's a lot of 'ifs' and 'mights,'" Jim observed.

"It's what we have." Traq highlighted the third priority—a region of space marked with question marks. "And this is the long shot. Somewhere in the galaxy, there's information about whatever fought the entity before. Whatever hurt it. The fragments I saw suggest it might be recorded somewhere—an archive, a library, maybe even a survivor from a previous harvest. If we can find that information..."

"We might find a weapon," Adeline finished.

"We might find hope." Traq reached for the holographic display to deactivate it—

And the entity found him.

It came without warning. Not the slow, probing pressure of his dreams on the Adelina—not the patient locksmith testing tumblers through the sealed door. This was a fist. The residual connection at the base of his skull blazed white-hot, and Traq's vision shattered into fragments.

He heard Oliver say his name. Heard the chair scrape against the floor as someone stood. But the sounds arrived through layers of distance, muffled by the roaring flood of alien awareness that poured through the crack in his consciousness like water through a fractured hull.

The entity was looking for him. Not passively—not scanning the vast network of enhanced minds for his particular signature. Hunting. Following the residual connection like a wire strung between two points, tracing the thread of damaged neural tissue that Traq had assumed was too degraded to transmit. It had been patient. It had been waiting for him to use the connection—to access the memories, to review the fragments, to reach for the data on that chip. And when he did, when his mind engaged with the alien impressions stored in his biological memory, the connection had flared bright enough for the entity to see.

Images flooded through him. Not the fragmented impressions of his dreams—these were sharp, immediate, the entity's actual perception transmitted in real time. He saw the fleet through its eyes. Hundreds of organic ships, vast and terrible, their hulls pulsing with consumed consciousness. But they were closer than the astronomers had estimated. Much closer. The trajectories he'd seen on news feeds and intelligence briefings were wrong—based on conventional physics, on the assumption that the organic fleet moved through space the way human ships did. They didn't. The organic ships folded distance in ways that human sensors couldn't detect, slipping between dimensional boundaries, covering parsecs in hours instead of weeks.

Not months. Not a year.

Weeks. The fleet would reach the Vaalin system in weeks.

And the entity knew where he was. The connection was a beacon—his damaged neural pathways broadcasting his location with every alien memory he accessed. Haven Station. Sector Nine. A bar in the lower levels where four humans sat around a table and pretended they could resist an intelligence that had consumed civilizations since before their species learned to walk upright.

Traq's hand locked around the edge of the table. His knuckles went white. Blood vessels in his right eye burst—a bright red starburst spreading across the sclera. The holographic display flickered, the star map distorting as his trembling hand disrupted the terminal's proximity sensors.

"Traq!" Oliver was beside him, hands on his shoulders. "What's happening? Talk to me—"

"It found me." The words came through clenched teeth. The entity's awareness pressed against his mind like a thumb against an eyeball—not trying to enter, not yet, just demonstrating that it could. That the door he'd thought was sealed had a crack the width of a hair, and the entity had spent weeks widening it with the patience of something that measured time in geological epochs. "It's here. In my head. Right now."

Adeline's hand closed around his wrist. Her grip was iron—the hands of a survivor anchoring him to the physical world while something ancient tried to drag him into the dark.

"Close it," she said. "Whatever door it's using, shut it."

"I can't—the connection—it's not a door I can close, it's scar tissue, it's the pathways the implant left behind—"

The entity pushed. A cold tendril of awareness wormed through the residual connection, and Traq tasted copper—the biological flavor of neural tissue under stress, of capillaries rupturing under pressure they were never designed to bear. The entity wasn't trying to consume him. It was reading him. His location, his companions, his plans—everything his mind held was being copied with the efficiency of a scanner processing a document.

Traq did the only thing he could think of. He slammed his fist against the back of his skull—against the sealed implant socket, against the scar tissue that covered the access port. The impact sent a spike of physical pain through his nervous system that overloaded the residual connection like feedback through a speaker. The entity's tendril recoiled—not from the pain itself, but from the chaos the pain created in Traq's neural patterns, the biological static of a body's damage response flooding the same channels the entity was trying to use.

The connection snapped shut. Not sealed—cracked, leaking, the neural equivalent of a window that wouldn't quite close. But enough to break the entity's active probe. Enough to give him back his own mind.

He was on the floor. Oliver was holding him upright, one arm behind his shoulders. Adeline knelt beside him, her face tight with controlled fear. Jim stood over them, his hand on the pulse pistol at his hip—a reflex, useless against what had just happened, but pure reflex—useless against what had just happened, but Jim needed to do something.

Blood dripped from Traq's nose onto the bar floor. His right eye was a mess of burst blood vessels, the white turned crimson. His hands shook with a tremor that had nothing to do with implant withdrawal.

"Talk," Oliver said. One word. The voice of a man who'd just watched his best friend get attacked by something he couldn't fight.

Traq wiped blood from his upper lip. His voice came out raw, scraped. "The fleet is closer than anyone thinks. Weeks, not months. The organic ships don't travel through normal space—they fold it. Every trajectory estimate we have is wrong."

"How do you know?" Jim asked.

"Because I just saw it. Through the entity's own eyes. It showed me—" He stopped. Not showed. It hadn't been a message. He'd read the information from the entity's active perception the same way the entity had been reading his. The connection went both ways. "I pulled it from the connection before I broke free. Real-time perception. The fleet's current position."

"And it knows where you are," Adeline said. Not a question.

"It knows where I am. And it knows about Haven." Traq pushed himself to his feet, Oliver steadying him. The bar's other patrons had noticed—a few heads turned, quickly looked away. On Haven, a man bleeding from the face in a bar was not an unusual sight. Not worth the risk of attention. "Every time I access the memories from the connection—every time I use those neural pathways—the residual link lights up like a beacon. The entity's been tracking it. Waiting for me to reach for the data."

The implications crashed over the table like a wave. Oliver's face went hard. Jim's hand tightened on his pistol grip. Adeline stood, her body shifting into the readiness of a woman who'd spent three years reading situations for the moment they turned dangerous.

"We need to leave," Oliver said. "Now. Tonight."

"Not just leave." Traq grabbed the edge of the table, steadying himself against the vertigo that accompanied the connection's aftershock. His skull throbbed where he'd struck it. "We can't do this sequentially. Three priorities, one crew—we planned to hit them in order. We don't have time for that anymore. Weeks, Oliver. Not months. Whatever we're going to do, we need to do all of it at once."

"Split up?" Jim's voice was sharp. "That's suicide. We barely survived together—"

"We barely survived when we had time. Now we don't." Traq looked at each of them in turn. Oliver, whose loyalty had never wavered. Jim, whose practical genius kept them alive. Adeline, whose survival instincts had already pulled them through the impossible. "Oliver and Jim—take the Adelina to Vaalin. You know how to run a blockade, and Jim knows the Arcadia's technology better than anyone except me. Find whatever the entity is hiding there."

"And you?" Oliver's voice was rough.

"The Council. The political situation. If the fleet arrives in weeks and the galaxy is still fighting itself, none of the rest matters." Traq turned to Adeline. "I need to get to the Galactic Council Station. Talk to whoever's running the Novum investigation. Connect the threads before the entity gets here."

"You're not going alone," Adeline said. The same fierce certainty she'd shown on the Adelina. The same refusal to be separated from the fight.

"I won't be alone. I'll have you." He met her eyes. "You know how to move through dangerous territory without being seen. You know how to survive in places where the rules don't apply. I need that more than I need a ship."

"The third priority?" Jim asked. "The archive. Whatever fought the entity before."

"Corinne's already looking. She's been digging through Union archives for weeks. If anyone can find a lead on the ancient weapon, it's her." Traq straightened, and despite the blood on his face and the tremor in his hands, something in his posture shifted—command posture replacing the hunched calculation of a few minutes ago. "This isn't a research project anymore. It's a countdown. And the entity just told me how much time is on the clock."

The bar continued around them—the bass-heavy music, the clink of glasses, the murmured conversations of people who didn't know that the fleet bearing down on their galaxy was weeks away instead of months. The food cart outside still smoked, the old woman still ladled stew. Haven Station continued its endless cycle of commerce and survival, unaware that the man bleeding from the nose at a corner table had just changed the timeline of the apocalypse.

"What about the Vanguards?" Jim asked. "You said the implants are connected to the entity somehow. That they're receivers, tuned to whatever frequency it operates on. Doesn't that mean every enhanced soldier in the galaxy is potentially compromised?"

Traq nodded grimly. "That's the part I've been trying not to think about. The implants were designed—or at least adapted—to interface with the entity's psychic network. Every time a Vanguard uses their abilities, they're opening a door. A small one, but a door nonetheless."

"And when the fleet arrives?" Adeline's voice was quiet.

"I don't know. The entity might be able to use those connections. Control them. Turn the most powerful soldiers in the galaxy into weapons against their own people." Traq's jaw tightened. "Or it might just consume them first. Either way, the Vanguard program is a liability."

"You survived without your implant," Oliver pointed out. "Others could too."

"I almost didn't survive. The removal surgery was touch and go for days. And not every Vanguard would volunteer—many of them don't believe the transmission was real. They've been told it was mass hysteria, psy-ops, enemy propaganda." Traq shook his head. "Convincing them to give up their power, to become baseline human again... that's a hard sell. But if we can find a defense—a way to block the entity's access without removing the hardware entirely—that changes everything. That's what the Council needs to hear. That's why the political track matters as much as the military one."

"Then we need to find another way," Jim said. "A way to block the connection without removing the implant. Some kind of shielding, maybe."

"That's on the list of things to investigate," Traq agreed. "But it's a long list, and we're short on time." He touched the back of his skull, where the impact still throbbed. "The good news—if you can call it that—is that I've just learned something the entity didn't intend to show me. The connection goes both ways. When it reached into my mind, I reached into its. I saw fleet positions, trajectory data, tactical dispositions. Information worth more than anything on that data chip."

"You're talking about doing it again," Oliver said. His face had gone still—the careful blankness of a man controlling his fear through discipline. "Letting it in. Deliberately."

"No. Once was enough to know the cost." Traq wiped the last of the blood from his face. "But what I pulled from the connection is real-time intelligence. Fleet composition, approach vectors, the entity's assessment of our defenses. If I can get that information to the right people—the Council, military commanders, anyone who'll listen—it proves the threat is real and immediate. Not a theory. Not a year-away problem. A crisis happening now."

Oliver stared at him for a long moment. The bar's bass-heavy music thumped through the floor, vibrating in the bones of Traq's feet. Blood had pooled on the table where his hands had rested—tiny drops, already drying.

"Then we go tonight," Oliver said finally. "Jim and I prep the Adelina. You and Adeline find transport to the Council Station." He stood. "No more planning. No more discussion. The door just closed behind us."

Jim rose as well. "It's how we've stayed alive this long. But Traq—" he hesitated "—what happens if we succeed? Say we find this ancient weapon, or whatever it is. Say we figure out how to hurt the entity. What then?"

Traq turned his empty glass in his hands, feeling the rough edges of cheap manufacture against his palms. He stared into it as though the answer might be hiding at the bottom. The question had been haunting him since he'd woken up in the hospital on Meridian Station. What was the endgame? What did victory even look like against something that had been consuming civilizations since before humans learned to make fire?

"Then we fight," he said finally. "With everything we have. Every ship. Every soldier. Every person who's willing to stand up and say 'not us, not this time.' We might lose. Probably will lose. But we fight anyway."

"Why?" Adeline's voice was soft.

Traq turned to face her. The woman who'd survived three years of captivity. Who'd chosen to stand beside him despite knowing what he'd become. Who'd refused to be broken by the darkness that surrounded them.

"Because that's what we do," he said. "Because the alternative is surrender, and I've never been good at that." He paused. "Because somewhere out there, the entity is watching. Waiting. Expecting us to despair. And I want to give it something else."

"What?"

Traq smiled—a cold, hard expression that had nothing to do with joy.

"Defiance."

***

They moved fast after that. The leisurely planning session they'd imagined—hours of discussion, careful analysis, methodical preparation—had been replaced by the compressed urgency of people who'd just learned their deadline was a fraction of what they'd assumed.

Oliver and Jim headed for the docking bay within the hour, Oliver's stride carrying operational urgency. Jim walked beside him, already running maintenance calculations on the Adelina's FTL drive, muttering about fuel ratios and jump distances and the creative repairs he'd need to perform to get the old ship to Vaalin without falling apart.

Adeline worked her contacts on Haven with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd spent years navigating criminal networks. Within two hours, she'd arranged passage on a cargo transport bound for the Meridian transit corridor—from there, a series of connecting shuttles could get them to the Galactic Council Station in four days. Expensive. Dangerous. The kind of route that invited scrutiny from both Imperial and Union security.

But Traq carried something worth the risk. Real-time intelligence from the entity's own perception—fleet positions, approach vectors, the tactical assessment of a predator that had just learned its prey was more complicated than expected. Information that could change the strategic calculus for every government in the galaxy.

If anyone would listen.

They parted at the docking bay. Oliver clasped Traq's forearm—the old grip, the academy handshake that meant more than words. Jim offered a nod and a dry half-smile that promised nothing and guaranteed everything.

"If we find something at Vaalin—" Oliver started.

"Encrypted burst to Corinne's relay network. She'll get it to me." Traq met his friend's eyes. "Be careful."

"Careful's for people with better options." Oliver turned and walked up the Adelina's boarding ramp without looking back. He didn't need to. Thirty years of partnership communicated everything a backward glance could have offered.

Traq watched the ship until the bay doors sealed. Then he turned to Adeline.

"Ready?"

She adjusted the cap that shadowed her face. Her eyes were steady—the eyes of someone who'd already survived the unsurvivable and wasn't particularly intimidated by what came next.

"I've been ready since Bateria," she said. "Let's go change the galaxy's mind."

They walked together through Haven's corridors, moving with the careful anonymity of two people who'd learned that invisibility was a form of armor. Behind them, the Adelina's engines hummed to life—a sound Traq tracked until the vibration faded into the station's ambient noise.

Somewhere in the darkness of his mind, the residual connection throbbed—the cracked window the entity had used to find him. It would try again. It would keep trying, patient and vast, until either Traq found a way to seal the breach or the entity widened it enough to pour through.

The clock was running.

And for the first time since waking up in a hospital bed without his implant, Traq Lain wasn't afraid of what was coming. He was angry. The entity had reached into his mind and shown him the fleet, expecting fear. Instead, it had given him a weapon—real-time intelligence that proved the threat was immediate, that proved the astronomers' comforting timelines were lies, that proved every government in the galaxy needed to stop fighting each other and start fighting together.

The entity had tried to make him despair. Instead, it had given him urgency.

Outside the bar, the old woman with the burn-scarred hands was closing her food cart for the night. She ladled the last of the char stew into a container and sealed it, her movements careful and practiced, the same routine she'd performed a thousand times. The sweet smoke of the cooking oil lingered in the corridor like a ghost.

Haven Station hummed around them. People lived their lives. The atmospheric processors beat their endless rhythm—thump-hiss-clank, thump-hiss-clank—the mechanical heartbeat of a place that existed because people refused to be governed by forces larger than themselves.

It wasn't much of a metaphor. But it was the right one.

Traq Lain walked into the night cycle's dimmed corridors with blood drying on his face and a timeline burning in his mind, and behind him, the door that had been slowly opening now stood as a choice: step through it, or let the darkness step through him.

He chose the door.

Whatever the cost.