Elian couldn't stop watching her hands.
They were steady—mechanically precise. Kaia Tran moved like someone trained to kill without hesitation and taught to regret it only later. Every motion, from lifting the scanner to tapping her comms node, was tight and efficient. No wasted time. No wasted breath.
He didn't trust her yet.
But trust wasn't something the poor could afford anyway.
They were in a safehouse now—at least, that's what she called it. A forgotten apartment buried three stories beneath the sub-sector tram lines. The walls were reinforced with old polymer-steel, thick enough to scramble surveillance drones. The furniture was minimal: a cot, a terminal, and two chairs. No screens. No comforts.
"I ran your ID through my contact net," Kaia said. "You're a ghost."
"I've been broke for most of my adult life," Elian replied. "No one notices you when you're dying slowly."
She glanced over at him. "It's not just that. Your name popped up once. Five years ago. Voluntary time donation. You gave twelve years to someone on a terminal list."
Elian said nothing.
She pressed. "Family?"
"My mother."
"Did it work?"
"For a while."
Kaia looked away. "That's more time than most people give to anyone."
"I wanted her to live like she mattered. Just once."
He didn't mention that those twelve years had been taken from him with cold needles and heat-seared forms. That he'd been twenty-five and promising and stupid. That his mother had lasted only six more months.
That wasn't the point.
Kaia returned to the terminal and pulled up a schematic: ChronoCorp OuterNet Relay Node // Access Denied. A red lock symbol blinked at the center of the screen.
"I think I know where the device came from," she said. "There's a research shell under the Citadel—codenamed Bastion. Built in the early years of the Time Credit System. Rumors say it housed early prototypes of decentralized time transfer—tech they scrapped because it was 'too free.'"
"And you think this device is one of those prototypes?" Elian asked.
"I think it's worse. I think it's something they were trying to bury."
She looked at him. "And now it's keyed to you."
Elian frowned. "You said it burned you. Can it reject anyone?"
"It's not just bio-locked. It's chronologically synced. Every human has a time signature, based on their exact moment of birth, motion through spacetime, neural decay rate… We're walking timestamps."
Elian sat back. "So it only works for me. That's not good."
Kaia smirked. "Depends on what you do with it."
Later that night, Kaia activated the terminal's offline breach simulator.
They were going to test the device.
"I built a dummy node," she said. "Unconnected to the Net. But it's formatted like a relay from Bastion. If the device is as smart as I think it is, it'll try to interface."
She placed the device in a small induction field.
"Ready?" she asked.
Elian nodded.
He pressed his palm to the device.
It flared to life.
TEMPORAL KEY ONLINE. STANDBY… ACCESSING NODE…
The terminal went dark. Then green.
LINK ESTABLISHED. GATEWAY UNLOCKED.
Kaia's eyes widened.
Elian could feel it in his teeth—a vibration, a frequency below hearing. The room pulsed with energy, and for a moment, the walls shimmered.
And then…
The air split.
A burst of static. A flicker of another place—not here—flashed across the screen: a hallway lined with capsule pods, stacked five high. Inside each pod, a person.
Sleeping? Frozen? Stored?
Then the screen shut off.
Kaia backed away. "That was a live relay."
"You said it was disconnected."
"It was. That shouldn't have been possible."
They looked at each other.
Neither said what they were thinking.
The Vault is real.
And they had just knocked on its door.