He was back at the base, but the air still tasted like stone.
Elian walked the corridor outside diagnostics, boots silent on the reinforced floor, shoulders tense like he expected the walls to close in again. They didn’t. The light overhead didn’t flicker. The glass was clear. The hum of the cooling units was steady.
Too steady.
He passed two medtechs without looking up. One of them said something — not to him, just behind him — and he turned a moment too late. Like the conversation had already moved on.
The delay hit him harder than it should have.
That was happening a lot now.
He wasn’t late. But everything else felt early.
—————————————
The debrief was scheduled for 0600. It came and went.
He sat in the side wing of the diagnostics room while two officers reviewed the data on a terminal facing away from him. Their backs didn’t move. They didn’t ask questions.
His hands sat in his lap, ungloved.
Someone brought coffee. It wasn’t for him.
He waited until they spoke.
“You didn’t complete the path to the chamber. Why?”
He didn’t answer.
Not because he didn’t want to.
Because he didn’t remember leaving.
—————————————
When he stepped into the hallway again, it was snowing.
It wasn’t snowing outside.
But there was snow in the air. Just for a second. Near the doorframe. Suspended, then gone.
He didn’t touch it.
Didn’t react.
Just blinked. Once.
The corridor kept going.
So did he.
—————————————
His bunk hadn’t been touched.
The cot was too clean. His bag was zipped, but not the way he zipped it. The room didn’t smell like sweat, like time, like him.
It smelled like citrus.
He stopped short.
He hadn’t smelled citrus since the east compound. Since the heat wave op. Since—
He couldn’t place it.
The smell was gone now.
—————————————
He ran a system scan on his suit.
Not for function.
For rhythm.
The pulse calibration was supposed to read his stress level, sync respiration with suit intake and heating pads.
It was off.
By seven seconds.
Every seven seconds, a flicker.
Not an alert. Not a fail.
Just a subtle delay in the internal heater, as if the system thought his body didn’t need warming at all.
Like someone else was already inside it.
—————————————
He accessed the op archive. Nothing restricted. Just logs from other deployments.
He told himself it was curiosity.
But it felt more like guilt—like leaving the chamber unfinished had taken something, and now something wanted it back.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
He scrolled through visual data. Most were blank. One flickered.
The timecode matched his vault entry by less than a second.
He tapped it open.
A fragment of wall.
Two intersecting circles.
One jagged.
One smooth.
But not carved.
Frosted.
Like breath had drawn them.
He checked the metadata.
Location: Unlisted.
Operator: None.
Timestamp: 07:07:07
He stared for a long time.
Didn’t download it.
Didn’t log it.
Just stared.
—————————————
At 0230 he tried to sleep.
He turned the lights off. Shut the door. Closed his eyes.
And saw something that wasn’t his.
A hallway with no doors.
A hand reaching for a scanner.
Two symbols pulsing on a small screen.
He didn’t know what the symbols meant.
But they made him feel… late.
He woke before his body did. Gasped.
Chest tight. Breath out of sync.
The scanner on his nightstand blinked once.
Not an alert.
Just recognition.
—————————————
A memory surfaced that wasn’t his.
Not a full picture.
Just sound.
Breath.
A female voice, low, whispering: “Not yours.”
He sat upright. Looked around.
No one in the room.
No sound from the hallway.
The scanner stayed dark.
—————————————
He checked the med logs for the base.
Looked for anomalies.
Cross-checked sensor pings.
In the list of file anomalies — buried three levels deep — he found a single outlier.
One partial packet, forwarded from a remote Arctic relay.
Not flagged.
Not reviewed.
He opened it.
Two shapes in snow.
Circles.
One jagged.
One smooth.
But in this one, something new.
Beneath the symbols — almost invisible — a line of text.
Four words:
This is not hers.
He didn’t know who “her” was.
But something in him burned at the sentence.
Not curiosity.
Not fear.
Something… like memory.
—————————————
He reached for the console.
Paused.
And wrote a single word:
Simir.
Then deleted it.
Not because it was wrong.
But because it felt like someone else had already written it.
——————————————————————————
The mess hall was louder the next day.
Not because people were talking more. Because he was quieter.
Elian stood in line, tray in hand, but couldn’t remember getting there. His breath didn’t match the ambient rhythm. Everything was out of sync. Even the steam from the ration trays moved slower on his side of the room.
Someone coughed behind him.
He flinched.
Not because of the sound.
Because he thought he’d heard it before. In a different room. At a different time.
He looked up.
No one was there.
—————————————
He sat at the edge of the room, eyes on a monitor left open across the hall. It looped field footage from another deployment—snow, base modules, static overlay.
Then it froze.
Not glitched. Not errored.
Just… stopped.
Seven full seconds.
Then resumed.
No one else reacted.
He waited for the breath in his chest to restart.
It didn’t.
He exhaled manually. Shallow.
—————————————
At 0500, he was summoned to the observation wing.
No context. No name. Just “Report to Level 2. Observation Chamber B.”
He followed the instruction like a script.
The room was empty.
One chair. One screen.
The screen showed a hallway he didn’t recognize.
At first.
Then he did.
It wasn’t his hallway. It was hers.
A camera. Mounted above a snow corridor.
But there was no log.
No ops data.
Just… her.
Just her shape moving through fog.
And then the frame froze.
She turned her head.
Looked into the camera.
Into him.
He blinked. Hard.
The image was gone.
The screen was black.
No one had entered the room.
No doors had opened.
But something in the center of his chest pulsed once, without heartbeat.
—————————————
He wrote the symbol again. On paper this time.
One jagged circle.
One smooth.
He left it on his nightstand.
Not to analyze.
To see if it would change.
When he came back three hours later, the paper was gone.
And drawn on the wall—tiny, almost invisible—was the same shape.
But mirrored.
Like someone else had written it back.
—————————————
He stopped logging his sleep hours.
Not to hide anything.
Because he didn’t trust which hours were his anymore.
—————————————
The next time the pulse hit, he was in the diagnostics wing.
He held a damaged sensor in one hand, idly turning it over.
Seven seconds.
The pulse hit.
The light overhead flickered.
And just for a second—just a second—the wall across from him bent inward.
Not visibly. Not physically.
Spatially.
Like the hallway wanted to fold.
He reached for the sensor tray.
Missed.
Because it was no longer where it had been.
He stepped back. Blinked.
Everything was fine.
But his breath came too fast.
Not from fear.
From misalignment.
—————————————
He heard a laugh outside the barracks.
Turned.
No one there.
But the laugh stayed. Echoed.
Then turned into breathing.
Not mechanical. Not his own.
Just breathing.
Right behind him.
He spun.
Nothing.
He faced forward again.
On the glass of the door, fog.
Two circles.
Breath-drawn.
—————————————
He stopped carrying the scanner.
Because he didn’t need to know anymore.
Not right now.
Not yet.
—————————————
That night, he dreamed of snow.
But it wasn’t cold.
It was wet.
The kind of wet that clings—not water, not blood. Something thicker.
He reached down.
Drew a symbol in the snow.
He didn’t recognize his own hand.
He looked up.
And across the valley—too far, too close—something watched him.
Not a figure.
A shape.
It had limbs. It had breath.
It had memory.
It didn’t speak.
But the valley did.
It said:
You’re still late.
—————————————
He woke up gasping.
The scanner on his desk blinked once.
Then shut off.
No alert.
No pulse.
Just silence.
He looked down at his chest.
There was nothing there.
No mark.
No scar.
Just a pressure. Faint. Familiar.
Like something unfinished had settled under the skin.
—————————————
He didn’t file any of it.
Didn’t write it down.
Didn’t mention it.
Not because he couldn’t explain it.
Because explanation would make it real.
And he wasn’t ready to surrender that silence.
—————————————————————
Across the ice, somewhere else, Sura blinked at the exact same time.
And neither of them knew why.
