Page 23 of Third

Tor’Vek did not move at first. His hands stayed loosely at his sides, posture composed, every movement deliberate. The only flicker of tension came in the faint pulse of the bracelet on his wrist, mirroring a response he chose not toshow.

“Prepare yourself,” he called to Selyr, certain the scientist listened.

His words weren’t a threat. They were a declaration made with the clarity of a warrior who no longer believed in mercy. Selyr had drawn the first blood long before this moment—Tor’Vek had merely accepted the terms. The board was no longer Selyr’s. Every move from here on belonged to Tor’Vek.

He turned to Anya. She stood a few paces behind him, tense, watchful, waiting. Not afraid—not anymore—but rigid in that quiet, fierce way she had when she braced herself for truth. He gave a single nod, and they moved.

The lab beyond the meeting chamber had been largely untouched since his arrival. Corridors once lined with flickering lights were now dark, consoles dormant, the hum of the facility fading beneath the silence. Power still ran to the deepest layers—he could hear the low, steady pulsation beneath the floor panels and see faint glows in the seams of the walls. Energy hadn’t been cut. It had been redirected. Suppressed. Waiting for reactivation. Abase like this did not truly sleep.

It waited.

He bypassed the biometric lock to Selyr’s private data vault, the mechanism accepting his clearance with an almost reluctant chime, as if the system itself resented his intrusion.

They entered a room bathed in pale blue light. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with old tech and organic samples in sealed containment units. At the center of the room, an elevated platform housed a sprawling terminal system surrounded by auxiliary control nodes.

A cracked data core flickered lazily at its base, its surface riddled with scorched microfractures and deep channel scars from overload reroutes. It looked like it had survived at least one purge—possibly more—each leaving behind damage that corrupted data without fully erasing it. Enough function remained to suggest that the core still held fragments, shadows of what Selyr once stored. Information worth salvaging—if Tor’Vek could coax it back tolife.

He moved toward the main console without hesitation.

Anya followed him in but veered toward the far wall. She didn’t speak. Her expression had sharpened into something purposeful. She began touching panels, eyes scanning each screen as it poweredup.

He approved of her silence. Of her initiative.

She was not waiting to be rescued. She was here to uncover her own truth.

He turned his focus to the central terminal. The access logs were half-corrupted, degraded by time or intentional damage. Still, he worked quickly, fingers darting across the interface, bypassing security gates and bending subroutines like steel under flame, reshaping them with precision until the system yielded to hiswill.

Keywords. Command hierarchies. Psychological pairing matrices. Jump logs. Encryption tables.

He chased them all, tracing their shadows across fragmented code like a hunter stalking prey through dense fog. Every path led deeper into the dark, into the mind of the man who’d built this place to be unreadable.

The data was fragmented, scattered across partitions like a puzzle snapped mid-assembly. Some files referenced interstellar transmission relays—asign Selyr had sent updates somewhere. Tor’Vek began cloning what he could to a secondary drive.

He paused only once—when he saw the date stamp on the last outgoing transmission.

It was sent less than an hourago.

Which meant Selyr had been here—recently. Not long before Tor’Vek had gone feral tearing through the base to reach Anya. Likely during that final surge of chaos, Selyr had initiated his departure. That would explain the intact systems, the half-scrubbed logs, the fragments left behind like breadcrumbs. It hadn’t been abandonment. It had been evacuation.

Tor’Vek’s fingers stilled on the console. Not in hesitation. In recalibration. The information he’d uncovered reshaped the perimeter of the problem. Selyr hadn’t abandoned the base—he’d staged its departure like a scientist closing the lid on a specimen jar. And now Tor’Vek understood: the test was still running. The trap was still active. His next move had to be precise, and it had to be final.

This wasn’t an abandoned lab Tor’Vek was dissecting—it was an active environment, engineered to be observed long after Selyr’s physical presence vanished. The data wasn’t simply left behind. It had been curated, monitored, possibly manipulated. Tor’Vek wasn’t uncovering a crime scene. He was walking through an open experiment, one Selyr still controlled from a distance.

He did not tell Anya. Not yet. If she knew Selyr had been here so recently—had possibly watched their suffering in real time—her focus would crack. She needed to stay sharp, not spiral. Let her have her clarity now. The truth could wait. Just a few more minutes. Until he had what they needed.

Behind him, he heard her exhale sharply—not fear, but recognition. Aterminal flared to life beside her, its screen stuttering before stabilizing, the glow casting lines of pale blue across her features.

Her posture shifted as she leaned closer, fingers poised above the interface. Whatever she saw had her full attention. It wasn’t incidental. It was a thread she intended to follow.

“This one’s personal,” she murmured. “It has my name on it.”

He glanced over his shoulder. Her jaw was tight, hands steady. She looked fierce, prepared, as if bracing for answers she already suspected. He did not interrupt. She had earned this confrontation with her past. Shielding her now would only weaken the lucidity she fought so hard to gain. Some truths needed to be seen with openeyes.

Turning back to his own terminal, he entered a deeper partition.

Another file blinked to life. This one buried under three levels of override, labeled in Vettian:

CONTINGENCY: SERIES17

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