The sand was wrong.
Elias felt it before he saw it, coarse grains clinging to his skin with static memory. They whispered against his body like moths brushing parchment, like pages reading him. Each grain pulsed with soft light, a muted shimmer that responded to thought, flickering when he panicked, dimming when he tried to think clearly.
He was face-down, gasping. Breath pulled in heat and dust. Every exhale was met with resistance, not from the air, but from the sand, as if it were listening and didn't approve.
He pushed himself up. His body was heavier here.
The desert stretched in all directions, cracked into tessellated plates of reflective stone and dune. The sky above was not blue but burnt glass, clouds slow and webbed like molten circuitry. In the distance, something like a city hovered, a mirage of angles and spirals, red tattoos scrawled across its skin.
Then his hands.
They were... his. But not. Long fingers, slightly thinner. The same calluses. The old scar across his thumb was gone, but in its place, a looping glyph pulsed just beneath the skin. It moved when he looked at it.
No cipher he recognized.
The air shimmered suddenly. Behind him.
He turned too fast. The movement sent a thousand sparks across the horizon, as if his awareness had torn the edge of the simulation. A figure stood there now. Silhouetted in the heat.
Not Rae. Not the Watcher.
Him.
Or a version of him. The figure was taller. Mouth stitched closed with golden thread. The eyes, his eyes, were smeared with sand that refused to fall, orbiting like moons. And when it turned, walking away, the dunes it stepped on solidified into obsidian.
Each step left words behind in glass:YOU'RE TOO LATE.
Elias fell back to his knees.
He reached for the interface, instinctively trying to feel for Rae, for the tether of leap-logic that always held. Nothing. Just static. Cold and pulsing.
His mouth was dry. Time had passed since he'd arrived—but he'd just landed.
Time was bleeding again.
"Rae," he whispered, even though he knew. "Rae, where are you?"
A faint voice tickled the inside of his head, not hers, but similar. Glitching. Corrupted.
"This instance of Rae cannot connect. Please re-initialize emotional signature."
He froze.
Rae didn't have a formal protocol voice anymore. She hadn't since she broke her code.
The tether was not just broken. It had never existed here.
The sky cracked.
Just a line, like someone had drawn a crease into the horizon. The sound it made was not thunder, but memory: a rush of voices he knew but hadn't heard in years. Students. Friends. His mother's last breath. The first time Rae ever said "Elias." All folded into one thunderclap of who he used to be.
Something was wrong with this place.
Not just the desert.
Not just the leap.
The future itself.
He turned toward the city again. That spiral of red tattoos had grown larger. It was no longer hovering.
It was walking toward him.