The hum beneath the oak tree had not returned, but its silence was heavier than sound. Tylor couldn't shake the image of Amaira's drawing—the spiral etched into bark that shouldn't be there. For the first time since sealing the final fracture, he felt the timeline holding its breath. That night, after Amaira and Kayla had gone to bed, he crept outside with Elias. The air was still, unnaturally so. They circled the tree in silence, flashlights sweeping over soil that looked undisturbed yet strangely sunken. Tylor crouched, fingers brushing over a patch of earth that felt too warm.
"It's pulsing," he murmured. Elias knelt beside him, pulling out a small device—a residual scanner. The dial quivered before swinging wildly. "There's fracture residue here… buried."
By morning, they had unearthed a metallic shell, no bigger than a shoebox, fused with wires and etched in a pattern matching Amaira's sketch. Inside was not a weapon, but a recorder—old, corroded, yet blinking faintly. Lina joined them as they huddled around it in the garage, the screen flickering to life with static. A voice emerged, filtered and fragmented, but unmistakably that of Elena Vey.
"If you're hearing this," her voice crackled, "the Spiral has survived me. I couldn't destroy it... only delay it. It burrows under fixed time, dormant, waiting for stability to rebuild before feeding again."
Amaira stood in the doorway, clutching her sketchbook. "I saw it again," she said softly. "In the roots. It's not just watching. It's learning."
Kayla's journal flared open on its own across the workbench, pages rustling in an unseen breeze. A new symbol burned itself into the paper—interlocking spirals with a line torn through the center. Elias exhaled sharply. "That's not Collective. That's older."
Lina looked at Tylor, her voice barely above a whisper. "This isn't over, is it?"
Tylor closed the recorder, the weight of time pressing against his ribs. "No," he said, locking eyes with the oak beyond the window. "This is something else. Something deeper. The Collective fractured time. But this… this was already inside it."