Chapter 16
Ethan
The data scrolls fasterthan I can read it, but my hands keep moving across the interface, pulling files open, cross-referencing timestamps, building a picture I'm not sure any of us are ready to see.
Three days I've been buried in this. Three days since we cracked the Protocol's encryption and the universe split open like a wound, everything we thought we knew about Malachar Torrence bleeding out across my screens in neat little data packets that smell like decades of obsession.
Aura brought me coffee an hour ago. It's gone cold at my elbow, the surface filming over, and I haven't touched it because every time I reach for the cup my eyes catch another file and my hand goes back to the interface instead.
The intelligence analysis center is quiet at this hour. Just me and the hum of processing cores and the soft blue glow of holographic displays painting the walls in data I wish I could unsee. The recycled air tastes flat on my tongue, stripped of everything organic, and the only smell is ozone from the overworked terminals and the cold dregs of that coffee going stale.
I pull up another file. Anomaly Research Division. Classification: Blacksite Omega.
They've been studying the tears for decades. Not the Torrences, not the alliance, not anyone with a name I recognize from the legitimate side of the galaxy. The Protocol. Operating in the margins, in the silence between official reports, cataloguing every rip in the fabric of space-time with the meticulous patience of people who believe they're saving the universe and don't care how many bodies it costs.
The scope of it makes my chest tight. Hundreds of anomaly events documented. Spectral analyses, gravitational readings, temporal displacement calculations that make my head ache just scanning them. They mapped the tears like someone charting a disease, tracking the spread, measuring the progression, trying to predict where the next one would open.
And then, buried in the middle of it all like a bone in the throat of their research, one name: Malachar Torrence.
They've been tracking him. Not just since his disappearance. Before. Years before. His research into anomaly physics flagged him on their radar when Zane was still a child, and they watched him the way a predator watches something it can't decide whether to eat or recruit. His publications. His private correspondence, intercepted and filed. His funding sources traced and mapped. Every conversation he had about the tears catalogued and analyzed and cross-referenced against their own findings.
They knew what he was going to do before he did it.
I sit back in my chair, the vertebrae in my spine popping one by one as I straighten, and stare at the timestamp on the file that changes everything.
He didn't fall through the anomaly. The Protocol's own data confirms it. Malachar Torrence walked in with his eyes open.
Running from the Protocol, yes. Their surveillance closed in, their recruitment attempts turned to threats, and he saw the walls narrowing. But the data tells a story more complicated than a desperate man throwing himself into the void. He chose his anomaly. Not the nearest one, not the most accessible. A specific tear, at specific coordinates, exhibiting specific spectral properties that he'd been studying in private for years, in research the Protocol never managed to intercept because he kept it in his head. In a mind that brilliant, in a paranoia that justified, the safest vault in the galaxy was his own skull.
The anomaly he chose leads somewhere.
The Protocol spent the next twenty years trying to figure out where.
I open the probe data and my mouth goes dry. They sent everything through that tear. Sensor arrays. Mapping drones. Autonomous research vessels packed with instruments worth more than some moons. Nothing came back intact. Fragments, sometimes. Twisted metal and corrupted data cores and, once, a probe that returned physically whole but broadcasting readings that didn't correspond to any known physics, as if the instruments had learned a new language on the other side and forgotten the old one.
They sent people, too. I find the files and wish I hadn't. Volunteers, according to the paperwork. The word sits wrong in my mouth given everything else I know about the Protocol. Seven individuals over twelve years. Carriers, they called them. Enhanced humans fitted with communication implants and tracking beacons and enough sensor equipment to map a new universe.
None of them established sustained contact.
But the tracking data, the fragments that made it back through the interference, told the Protocol two things. First: there was a destination. Not void. Not chaos. Somewhere withstructure, with measurable parameters, with conditions that might, under certain interpretations of the readings, support life.
Second: Malachar Torrence was still there.
Changed, their sensors said. The biosignature readings that filtered back through the anomaly's interference matched his genetic profile but diverged in ways the Protocol's scientists described with words like "unprecedented" and "impossible" and, in one classified memo, "transcendent."
Alive. Changed. And in twenty years, he never once tried to come back through the door he'd walked in.
I close the file and press my palms against my eyes until I see colors. The pressure feels good. Grounding. Something to focus on besides the vertigo of realizing that the most powerful crime family in known space was built on the ruins of a man who chose to walk into another dimension rather than face what he'd done to his own children.
My comm chimes. Zane's frequency.
"Briefing room. One hour. Bring everything."
His voice is the flat, controlled nothing that means he's holding something heavy and hasn't decided yet where to set it down.
"Understood."
I start compiling.
