Into the Drift – Kira's Solo Recon
The interior edge of Rift Site V9 was colder than memory suggested.
Kira crouched low beside a collapsed support beam, breath misting in the chill. Her boots made no sound over the fine, glass-like sand that dusted the floor—crystallized sediment, formed from concrete splintered by years of dimensional friction. The walls shimmered faintly, like they remembered the shape of themselves but not the material.
She moved slow, deliberate. Every motion calculated.
A flick of her wrist brought the frost-sink gauge online. The pulse readout blinked amber, ticking for the third time in under five minutes.
Not temperature. Resonance drift.
Something's moving.
"Site V9—Outer Trace Layer," she muttered into her recorder. "Temperature drop holding at -3.4°C. Structural drift stable, but local resonance threading is fluctuating—repeat, threading is non-static."
She tapped her temple, activating the internal visor overlay. The world tilted slightly as data flooded her lenses. Faint threads of red and violet stretched across her vision like webbing suspended in motion—resonance trails. Most were old, decayed… but not all of them.
She stiffened.
A new cluster pulsed gently near the wall, spiraling in perfect symmetry. Not random. Patterned. Like neural strands looping in practiced intervals.
Like memory.
Kira's jaw tightened as she followed the trail. Her breath was slow. Controlled. But her eyes flicked constantly, scanning every inch of the corridor with surgical intensity. She was alone out here—purposefully alone. No team. No back-up.
She rounded a corner, visor pinging an alert.
[THREADLINE MATCH DETECTED]
[Origin Signature: Rift Site 12. Cross-Field Emotional Sync Detected.]
She stopped dead.
"Site 12?" she whispered, brows furrowing. "That's… not possible."
There was no active link between the two zones. Not even shared resonance anchors. They were independent breach points, located miles apart—physically and temporally sealed.
And yet…
She crouched, running a gloved hand along a vibrating seam in the floor where the signature was strongest. It thrummed beneath her touch, like a heartbeat in hibernation. Then—
A whisper.
Soft. Too soft.
"He likes this version better."
Her entire body tensed.
She drew her blade in one smooth, practiced motion—cold steel catching the dim ambient glow from the corridor.
She wasn't breathing.
That voice—it had sounded like Lucian. But smoother. Confident. Like a version of him that had never hesitated, never hurt. Like the one Rowan might dream of. The one Rowan might love.
Her lip curled in revulsion.
She'd read the logs. She knew what Rowan had endured. What he'd described. What Ava and Evelyn had failed to explain.
And now it was here.
She looked up. The threads were no longer just pulsing—they were reacting to her presence. Brightening as if feeding off recognition. Their glow spread up the walls, dancing like neurons firing in recognition.
She hit her comms.
"This is Kira. V9 drift layer. We've got echo contamination bleeding across rift zones—repeat, V9 is syncing with Site 12, possibly more. Threadlines show mimicry behavior. And…"
A pause.
Her throat was dry.
"It's… speaking."
Static buzzed in her earpiece.
Then—barely audible—Rowan's voice.
"I want him back."
But no comm reverb. No biometric link.
Just air and whisper and echo.
Kira's eyes hardened. "That's not him," she muttered. "That's you."
She stood slowly, blade still drawn. Her breath fogged in front of her, but her hands were steady now. Cold resolve seeped through every movement.
"You want a reaction?" she said softly. "You've got one."
And she moved forward, alone, deeper into the bleeding light of Rift Site V9—following the threadlines that no longer pretended to be dormant.
They were awake now.
And watching.
The Ones Who Didn't Make It
The corridor stretched on in dim pulses of light and low static.
No movement. No sound.
Just that heavy, pressed-skin silence—the kind that settles into your lungs and weighs down your breath.
Kira kept her steps light, boots gliding over fractured tiles veined with frozen dust. Her blade remained low, ready, but her grip was calm. Mechanical. She had walked alone before.
But not like this.
Something about the Rift here was… off. Too aware. Like the walls were holding their breath, waiting for her to notice them watching.
And then—
"Kira?"
She froze.
The voice wasn't filtered through her comms.
It came from behind her. Too close.
Slowly, she turned.
Nothing.
Just the long stretch of corridor she'd cleared moments ago—its frost-rimed edges untouched.
"Still walking five paces ahead of the team, huh?"
Her stomach dropped.
Trent.
Her eyes narrowed, visor scanning. No biosign. No resonance pulse. Just air.
But that voice—
Rough around the edges. Slightly amused. Always the one who poked at her quiet focus before missions.
She hadn't heard it in three years.
Kira turned forward again. Her face was blank, jaw locked, but her fingers twitched around her weapon.
The Rift wanted her to remember. That's what this was. A mimic. Emotional residue echoing through the structure.
But why Trent?
"You never look back," the voice said again. "Even when we're bleeding."
She stopped walking.
The hallway dimmed.
Her breath fogged. Slower now.
"Shut up," she whispered.
"Thought maybe, after I didn't come through that rift with the others… maybe you'd turn around."
She closed her eyes briefly. Just one heartbeat.
Then she said softly, "I did."
Silence.
Then—*
"I know."
Her eyes opened. Hard.
The air felt denser now. Grief pressing in through invisible seams.
"You're not him," she growled.
But something in her voice cracked.
Because Trent wouldn't have said that.
Not in life.
He would've joked. Called her Ice Queen. Tossed a protein bar at her and said she owed him a drink after the breach.
He wouldn't have…
He wouldn't have let her remember it like this.
Kira moved faster now.
Deeper in the Drift
Kira's boots slowed as the corridor widened.
Her breath curled visibly in the air. What waited ahead didn't feel like a chamber.
It felt like a conscious pause. Like a held breath in the lungs of something much larger.
She stepped into the core.
The space was vast, cathedral-like. Light floated instead of shined. Threads of energy curled across the walls like arteries, converging on a suspended spire that flickered in and out of dimensional sync. It wasn't just projecting light—it was translating memory into motion.
Kira narrowed her eyes.
The structure didn't resemble any known rift formation. The chamber walls weren't fractured or decayed—they were sculpted, almost grown.
Her visor pinged a dense cluster of data. Faint. Deep-rooted.
[EMOTIONAL THREADLINE SYNC POINT: ACTIVE]
[PATTERN INDEX: CLASS-Aligned]
[EXTERNAL SIGNAL MATCH: [REDACTED]]
[PROJECT: [REDACTED]]
[Access Level: BLACKOUT. Timestamp: 14 Years Ago]
Kira's breath caught.
"Again with the blackout," she muttered. "But that timestamp…"
She swept her blade outward, disrupting a flickering thread. It pulsed violet, then recoiled like a nerve—disappearing into the wall.
Her mind worked fast, cycling through every breach briefing she'd ever read.
The threading wasn't native to Site V9. Not corrupted, not spontaneous. It was deliberate. Built to map emotional resonance. Trace psychic patterns. Store them.
That wasn't standard Rift behavior.
This wasn't a Rift.
This was a containment vessel. An interface node.
Her eyes widened slightly.
"…You're not just bleeding energy. You were made to listen."
The spire pulsed again. And in her mind, pieces clicked into place.
Emotion-based mimicry. Recursion shadows. Echoes built from resonance memory. Patterns that shouldn't survive rift collapse—but did.
Emotional retention.
Cross-zone threading.
False-link imprinting.
She stepped back slowly.
"You're not just a reflection," she whispered. "You're a receptor."
She scanned again—one last deep sweep—and the result nearly locked her visor.
[System Ping: Traceline Confirmed]
[Connected Node: [REDACTED]]
[Threadline Anchor: Suppressed]
[Reactor Code Classification: [PV-A-001]]
[PROJECT: [REDACTED]]
Her blood ran cold.
"PV-A-001," she repeated aloud.
PV. The code prefix was old. Buried in pre-recursion files. She'd only seen it once—in a black-box training packet that had mysteriously vanished a day later.
Project Veil.
The name wouldn't appear on the HUD. But it was here—tangled beneath redaction layers, hiding in system residue.
Her hand tightened around the recorder.
"Kira to HQ," she said, steady now. "This chamber is artificially structured. Resonance threads are mimicking stored emotional patterns. There's a receiver node—intentional. I've pinged a reactor code that matches PV-A-001. I think this entire site is a relay for a hidden system. Not originating here. Not from here."
Static scratched in her ear. No response yet.
She took one last look at the hovering spire. It pulsed once—then dimmed. Almost shy.
"You're not a breach point," she whispered to it. "You're a doorway."
The corridor behind her groaned.
Not with sound—but with resonance. The threadlines that once shimmered softly across the walls now pulsed like veins under a fevered skin—bright, erratic, and angry.
Kira ran.
Not out of panic. Not yet. But her body was moving faster than thought now, instincts screaming that she'd stayed too long. That she'd touched something the Rift had meant to stay buried.
The atmosphere thickened with each step, like walking through molasses. Her limbs strained as though the space around her had increased its own gravity in resistance.
And beneath it all, she could feel the chamber breathing behind her.
It knew she was leaving.
It hated that she was leaving.
A chill cracked down her spine as her visor flared a warning.
[WARNING: FIELD DISTORTION – ACTIVE PURSUIT DETECTED]
The Rift wasn't just destabilizing.
It was chasing her.
Threadlines began rearranging in real time, reshaping the very structure she'd entered through. A side hall sealed itself behind her—coated in flickering light like a growing scar. Another corridor began to twist, folding like metal under pressure.
The Rift was changing shape to trap her.
"No. No, not yet—"
She surged forward, her breath ragged in her throat. The cold tore at her lungs. Her suit systems began to glitch from the spike in interference, static creeping across her HUD like spiderweb cracks.
"Wake protocol," she gasped. "It's triggering some kind of wake protocol—reactive resonance."
Her mind flashed back to the reactor code: PV-A-001. Buried. Hidden. Protected by layers of blackout access even Evelyn couldn't touch.
She remembered the way the spire had pulsed—as if blinking awake for the first time in years.
"I should never have seen it," she muttered.
But she had.
And now it wanted her to stay.
She didn't look back. She didn't need to.
Instead, she exhaled—controlled, sharp. The mist of her breath turned to crystalline vapor as her resonance flared outward.
Cryo-frost bled across the hallway behind her, coating the floor in a slick sheet of black ice. The threadlines slithered toward her—but hit the sudden chill and froze mid-pulse, suspended like glass nerves. Her ability bought her seconds. That's all she needed.
Think. Control. Precision—always precision.
She twisted her wrist, fingers splayed wide. A pulse of Cryo Lockdown burst from her palm, firing a trail of frost up the wall and across the archway overhead. It solidified instantly—a frozen shield of layered kinetic ice, sealing the corridor just behind her.
The Rift screamed in response—psychic noise grinding into the back of her skull.
Still running, Kira tapped into her secondary sync reservoir. She clenched her left fist and pulled.
The air around her crystallized.
A shimmering field of ice shimmered across her back—Cryo Barrier Skin—a protective layering that would delay any intrusive resonance hooks for a few seconds longer.
But the Rift was growing faster, angrier.
Threadlines ahead of her began to twist—reforming her exit path.
It was trying to reshape the space she'd memorized.
"No you don't," she muttered.
"Kira…"
Her name. Soft. Intimate.
Her feet stumbled.
That voice—it wasn't Trent this time. It wasn't any one person. It was a chorus of every team member she'd lost, braided into one haunting whisper.
Her fingers twitched again—another pulse.
This time, she swept her hand sideways. An arcing wall of jagged frost erupted at the corner, carving the collapsing tunnel into a forced funnel, locking the Rift's reforming structure into one linear route.
She didn't look back.
She couldn't.
She clenched her jaw until her teeth ached and ran faster, every breath a curse spat into the dark.
Ahead—finally—the pre-marked resonance gate shimmered like salvation. Her tether module pulsed in sync, the exit pattern waiting just on the other side.
She reached for it—
And the Rift screamed.
[INTERCEPTION ATTEMPT: PROJECT: [REDACTED]]
[Rewriting Exit Trajectory]
[Route Suggested: WAKE CORRIDOR LINKED TO PRIMARY NODE]
"No. No, no—fuck you!" she growled.
The Rift was trying to redirect her through the hidden gate—the one tied to Project Veil. It wanted her exit path traced back through the origin.
"You're not dragging me into your heart," she hissed, drawing the emergency pulse trigger from her belt.
Her hand trembled, but her grip was steady as she slammed the beacon against the wall just beside the sealed gate.
The pulse detonated in a flash of electric blue. The energy smashed through the Rift's interference like a breaking dam. The tether flared—
Then—
FLASH.
The beacon detonated. The tether snapped tight.
And Kira was ripped from the Rift—leaving behind nothing but frost, breath, and defiance.
Unsealing the Forgotten
The extraction pad hissed once—then went still.
Steam curled upward from the frost-coated surface, illuminated in red emergency lighting. A shimmer passed through the air, faint and pulsing—like something had tried to cross the threshold.
But no one appeared.
No form. No sound. No impact.
Just silence.
Sharon stared.
Her hands hovered uselessly over the console, chest tight, jaw clenched.
"She should be here," she whispered, barely audible. "Her tether signal cleared. The pulse hit the return node."
Ava moved first.
She stepped closer to the bay window overlooking the pad, eyes narrowed, arms crossed tightly over her chest as though bracing for an impact that hadn't yet come. Her voice was calm, but brittle.
"Could be lag. Temporal hesitation. Field echo. She forced an unstable exit."
But even as she said it, her eyes flicked toward the corner display. She'd seen too many Rift extractions to mistake hesitation for failure.
Sharon's throat worked. She tried to speak—couldn't—then finally slammed her hand down on the console, hard enough to startle the junior techs at nearby stations.
"She made it!" she snapped. "Her tracer reached the pad—her manual override was clean! That signal passed every barrier!"
A long pause.
Then she inhaled sharply and forced herself to sit, fingers trembling as they flew back to the console.
"She left a full stream. A raw data bleed. I can still pull it."
From the upper deck, Evelyn finally descended the stairs, her coat half-unfastened, resonance monitor clipped to her side, still pulsing faint blue from a half-finished sync check.
She said nothing for a moment.
Her boots echoed softly across the tile until she came to stand behind Sharon. Quiet. Heavy.
"What do you have?"
Elia didn't look back.
"Her logs are still broadcasting… but she's not. She didn't re-materialize. The Rift accepted her exit request, but her body—her field signature—never completed reformation."
"So where is she?" Evelyn asked, flatly. The words felt too heavy for the air.
"I don't know," Sharon said, and for the first time, her voice cracked.
Ava turned, eyes sharp now, not with accusation—but with fear.
"We've had failed tether attempts before. Echo-locks. Interference spikes. But never—never when someone actually reached the gate."
"She didn't fail," Sharon muttered. "She succeeded. The Rift just didn't let her go."
A chime rang from the console.
They all turned.
Across the top of the primary screen, a single log flashed open—data flooding in from the last burst of Kira's emergency beacon.
Fractured telemetry. A snapshot of the spire. Emotion-thread readings. Cryo pulse resonance trailing across the chamber.
And then—beneath the feed:
[REACTOR CODE CONFIRMED]
[PV-A-001]
[ACCESS: BLACKOUT]
[PROJECT: [REDACTED]]
Sharon froze. Her pupils shrank.
"That's… Veil," she whispered. "That's one of the old tags. Pre-collapse. Deep quarantine protocol. The system buried it under a blackout—just like it was supposed to be erased."
Evelyn's gaze hardened. Her posture shifted—subtle, but distinct. Shoulders squared. Chin lifted slightly.
"I remember hearing about the reactor line," she said slowly. "But it was decommissioned. Stripped from active funding. I wasn't cleared for anything deeper."
"You weren't meant to be," Ava said, voice low. "None of us were. Only a few even knew it existed. But it's still there."
Sharon began typing again, eyes burning as she chased fragments.
"There's more—there's a deeper signal threading from her beacon. She left something."
Another pulse hit the screen. This one flickered and glitched—like a heartbeat struggling to find rhythm. Not from the Rift.
From beyond it.
[KIRA MENDEZ — SIGNAL STATUS: ACTIVE]
[LOCATION: [UNKNOWN]]
[TRACE PATH: LOST DURING EXIT COLLAPSE]
[STATE: IN TRANSIT]
The words hung there.
In transit.
Ava stepped closer to the screen, her expression no longer calm. Just raw and open. "So she's… alive?"
"We don't know," Sharon said hoarsely. "She's not back. She's not in the Rift. She's… somewhere between."
Evelyn's eyes didn't move from the terminal. "That means she didn't just disappear."
"She was taken," Sharon said.
Or worse—
She reached something that never intended to give her back.
And now, whatever it was…
knew they were watching.