Chapter 4 FOUR

"Loop two has begun," AIDEN said. "You have four hours and twelve minutes before the breach."

The pre-dawn air hit him hard. He stopped outside the barracks door and looked at the sky.

Still the right colour.

'Think,' he told himself. 'You have time. Use it differently.'

In loop one he had spent every minute reacting. Moving from one fire to the next without a plan. He had survived on AIDEN's upgrades and nothing else. And he had still died.

Dying faster with better reflexes was not a strategy.

"The classified file," he said.

"Which one."

"The one under the name Omega. The one with the Seekers."

"You need command level access to reach it."

"Okay." Ken started walking. "Dave gets to central command at 0645 every morning. He leaves his access card on the desk when he goes to look at the tactical display."

AIDEN was quiet for a moment.

"How do you know that?"

"Because I eat breakfast in that corridor every morning and nobody ever looks at the cadet with no band sitting on the floor." Ken kept walking. "Invisible has its uses."

He reached central command at 0620 and sat in the corridor with a tactics manual on his knee. He had read this particular manual four times. He could recite the third chapter from memory. But it was the right kind of prop. Nobody questioned a nobody studying things he was never going to use.

At 0643 Dave walked past him without looking down.

Ken counted thirty seconds. Then he went in.

Dave stood at the tactical display with his back to the room. The access card sat on the desk two steps from the terminal exactly where Ken knew it would be.

Eight steps across the room. Card into the slot. Two words typed.

Seekers of Light.

One file returned.

Classified. Restricted. Flagged under a single name.

Omega.

Ken stared at the screen.

"Download it," AIDEN said. Something in the voice had shifted. The steady calm was still there but underneath it something else was moving.

Ken copied the file. Replaced the card. Crossed back to the corridor in eight steps and sat down with the manual on his knee before Dave turned around.

He opened the file as he walked back toward the east block.

Most of it was buried under redaction. Black bars across entire sections. But three things came through.

The Seekers were real. Documented. Two individuals carrying a biological frequency that existed before the band system. Not selected. Not engineered. Born with it.

Their location had been known for six years. Someone chose not to deploy them.

And at the bottom of the file. One line that had survived the redaction. Whether by accident or intention Ken could not tell.

Subject K confirmed viable. Monitor until activation.

Ken stopped walking.

Subject K.

He read it again. Then a third time.

"AIDEN."

"Yes."

"Is that me?"

The silence that followed was the kind that answers before the words do.

"Yes," AIDEN said.

Ken stood in the middle of the empty path between the east and west blocks and felt something shift in his chest that had nothing to do with the system. Every door that had opened slightly too easily. Every situation that should have finished him and did not. Every year of feeling like he was living in a story someone else had already written.

'How long.'

"Since before you were born," AIDEN said quietly.

The base alarm tore through the air.

Ken checked his unit.

'That is wrong. The breach was at 0812 in loop one.'

"AIDEN—"

"I see it. Something changed. Someone moved the timeline."

The west wall came down.

Ken was already running toward it but when he reached the gap he stopped hard.

In loop one there had been four creatures coming through.

Now there were twelve.

And standing at the back of them with her hands at her sides and her eyes already on him through all the smoke and the chaos and the distance between them was the Lady of Chaos.

She had not been supposed to arrive until the afternoon.

She smiled at him slowly.

"Hello again," she said.

Ken's blood went cold.

She remembered the loops.

He was not the only one who reset.

[System Alert: New threat detected. Enemy has temporal awareness. Previous loop data compromised. Recalculating survival probability.]

[Survival probability: 12%]