At first, he thought they were memories — muffled, drifting echoes of voices he recognized. But the longer he listened, the more they sharpened. They weren't drifting from his mind. They were bleeding in from outside the half-second.

He heard Rhea screaming orders through static.

He heard the iron groan of the Skybreaker engines.

He heard an impact — metal, sharp, panicked — followed by someone shouting his name.

Those weren't memories.

Those were events happening somewhere beyond this fractured sliver of reality.

Cain looked at his hands, expecting them to tremble. Instead, the motion took on a delayed smear before locking into place again. The realm was trying to hold him still. Trying to convince him he was part of the frozen moment.

He wasn't.

And the more he pushed against the stasis, the more the half-second warped. Fractures shimmered through the air around him like invisible stress lines in glass. Something about his presence rejected the stability of this place. Each breath destabilized the stillness. Each thought created pressure.

Cain clenched his fists.

He didn't know if anyone could hear him, but he growled anyway — a sharp, focused declaration to remind himself he still existed.

The cracks widened.

A jolt ran across his arms, sharp but not painful — more like static crossing skin. The air vibrated, sharp enough to sting his ears. The suspended fragments of light twisted, bending around him as if gravity had taken on a new shape. It wasn't random. It wasn't chaos. It was response.

This place was reacting to him.

Cain inhaled and braced himself. "If I'm the reason this moment hasn't collapsed," he muttered, "then I'm also the way out."

He pressed his palm forward.

The half-second resisted.

Reality around him quivered, shaking like a wall hit from the other side. He pushed harder. The cracks flared into a lattice of blinding lines, each one pulsing with a faint echo of his heartbeat. His vision flickered, and he felt his pulse inside the distortion itself — as if the realm wasn't just breaking, but syncing with him.

The moment burst.

Cain stumbled as a wave of sensation crashed over him. Wind roared. Heat blasted against his skin. Noise slammed into him — full, overwhelming, chaotic noise. He fell forward onto cold steel and didn't recognize the deck beneath him until he lifted his head.

He was inside the remains of the Skybreaker's lower hangar.

Half the room was gone, swallowed by a swirling void where the wall should've been. Loose metal spun slowly around the tear like planets caught in a broken orbit. Sparks leapt from severed cables and drifted instead of falling, caught between normal physics and something else entirely. The air smelled like burning coolant and scorched ozone.

Someone gasped.

Cain turned.

Rhea stood only a few meters away, armor cracked, face streaked with soot. She looked frozen — not by time, but by shock so raw she couldn't hide it.

She whispered, "Cain…? You— you're actually—"

A shudder rolled through the ship, cutting her off. The void at the far wall pulsed, sending out a wave that rattled every piece of metal in the hangar. Cain felt it slam into his chest, but instead of throwing him back, the impact bent around him like a river flowing around a stone.

Rhea saw it.

Her shock hardened into something sharper — comprehension, maybe fear, maybe both.

"You're the anchor," she said quietly. "Everything started destabilizing the moment you disappeared. The Rift didn't just break the timeline — it grafted you inside it."

Cain pushed himself to his feet. His legs felt heavy, like gravity hadn't fully decided how to treat him yet. "How long?" he asked, voice rougher than he expected.

Rhea hesitated.

"Long enough that half the sector thinks you're dead. Long enough that everything started spiraling in ways we can't track anymore."

Another pulse struck the hangar, stronger than before. The void expanded a meter outward. Loose bolts scattered away from it like frightened insects. Cain felt the surge of energy chase along his spine, an invisible link pulling tight.

He understood instantly.

The tear wasn't expanding on its own.

It was responding to him.

Rhea took a step toward him, raising her voice over the rising hum of unstable energy. "We have to move. The others are trying to hold things together topside, but if that tear widens any further—"

"It's following me," Cain said. "If I move, it moves."

Rhea froze, realization hitting her like a bucket of ice. "So you're telling me you're the epicenter of the destruction and the only one who can stop it?"

Cain didn't nod. Didn't speak.

He didn't need to.

Another crackling pulse confirmed it for them both.

Rhea swore under her breath. "Then you need to learn how to control whatever that is before it tears the whole ship in half."

Cain stared into the swirling void behind her.

For a brief second, he saw something inside it — a silhouette, unmoving, staring back. Not Nebula. Not any Fallen. Something older. Something patient.

The silhouette lifted a hand in slow, deliberate imitation of Cain's earlier motion.

Cain's heartbeat spiked.

Rhea didn't see it.

She only saw his expression change. "What is it?" she demanded.

He didn't answer.

Because the silhouette inside the void continued lifting its hand…

…until its palm pressed against the inner surface of the tear.

Matching his height.

Matching his stance.

Matching him.

His own reflection, trapped where he'd been moments ago.

But it didn't look confused.

It didn't look disoriented.

It looked awake.

And it smiled.

The reflection didn't vanish.

It didn't warp.

It didn't flicker like some unstable echo.

It stayed.

Perfect.

Composed.

As if it had been waiting for Cain far longer than the ship had been breaking apart around them.

Rhea kept her stance angled toward the expanding tear, blades drawn, attention fixed on the threat she could perceive. She didn't see what Cain saw — the exact copy of him pressing its palm against the inner surface of the void like a man testing the tension of a thin membrane.

Cain didn't speak yet. He couldn't. His breath cinched tight in his chest. This wasn't some hallucination or leftover vision from the fractured half-second. This was too focused, too deliberate. The reflection's eyes locked onto his like magnets, pupils burning with a strange, split luminescence — two faint colors threading together: something bright, something dark.