The days that followed were not days at all.

  They were something else—stretches of time that passed without Emre's participation, like a program running in the background while the main process remained frozen. He moved through them because moving was what bodies did. He ate because hunger eventually became insistent enough to override the weight in his chest. He slept because exhaustion was a physical law, as reliable as gravity.

  But he was not present.

  His boss called. The presentation had gone well without him—they'd used his backup materials, his frameworks, his carefully documented systems. The project was approved. They wanted to celebrate. Did he want to join?

  No. He did not want to join.

  His mother called from Istanbul, her voice crackling with the familiar concern that had followed him across two borders and a decade of adulthood. Was he eating? Was he working too hard? Had something happened? He sounded strange.

  Nothing happened, he told her. He was fine.

  Lying, he discovered, was as easy as breathing.

  The police were less easily dismissed. He filed a missing person report on the third day, after Sulley missed two shifts at the museum and her supervisor called, worried. The officer who took the report was young, efficient, and gently skeptical. No signs of struggle in the apartment. No unusual activity on her bank accounts. No recent arguments, no history of mental health issues, no reason to believe she would simply disappear.

  "People leave sometimes," the officer said, not unkindly. "It's more common than you'd think."

  "She didn't leave." Emre's voice was flat. "She was taken."

  "Taken by whom?"

  He couldn't answer that. What could he say? Taken by the light. Taken by the void. Taken by shapes that hurt to look at, through a tear in the sky that no one else seemed to remember.

  The officer made notes. Promised to be in touch. Left.

  Emre stood in the doorway of his apartment long after the elevator doors closed, staring at nothing.

  ---

  On the fifth day, he stopped waiting.

  Waiting was passive. Waiting was accepting the system as it was. And Emre Ozkhan had spent his entire life refusing to accept broken systems.

  He started with her things.

  Sulley's belongings were scattered through his apartment like evidence of a life that had been interrupted mid-sentence. Her books. Her clothes. Her laptop, which he couldn't open because he didn't know her password. Her notes—handwritten, chaotic, covering every available surface in a script that slanted dramatically to the right.

  He gathered them all. Spread them across his dining table. And began to look for patterns.

  This was what he did. This was what he was for. He broke complex systems down into their component parts and reassembled them until they made sense. Architecture. Code. Relationships. It was all the same, if you looked at it right.

  Sulley's work was archaeology—specifically, the funerary practices of ancient Anatolian cultures. Hittites. Luwians. The Bronze Age civilizations that had risen and fallen in the land that was now Turkey, where Emre had been born and where his mother still lived.

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  He'd never paid much attention to her research. He'd listened—he always listened—but the details slipped through the sieve of his mind, displaced by structural loads and material stress tests and the elegant mathematics of cantilevered beams.

  Now he read everything.

  Her notes were dense, academic, filled with references he didn't recognize and translations that meant nothing to him. But beneath the scholarship, beneath the careful documentation of burial practices and ritual objects, something else emerged. A thread. An obsession.

  Over the past six months, Sulley had been increasingly focused on a single site: an unexcavated tell in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border. She'd mentioned it once or twice—Alacah?yük, she'd called it, though the name wasn't in any of the official records. A private collection, she'd said. Artifacts that hadn't been properly catalogued. A chance to see something no one else had seen.

  He found the email exchange on her tablet, which he'd finally managed to unlock by guessing her password—not her birthday, not his birthday, but the date of their first kiss, which she'd once told him was the most important day of her life.

  The emails were with a man named Dr. Arin Velsar, who claimed to represent a private foundation interested in funding new excavations in the region. His messages were formal, professional, filled with the appropriate academic jargon. But something about them bothered Emre—a too-perfect precision, a lack of the small errors and informalities that characterized real correspondence.

  He copied the emails. Saved the attachments. And then he did something that would have horrified him two weeks ago: he hacked into Sulley's cloud storage.

  Her password was the same. Her files opened easily. And in a folder labeled simply A, he found images that made his breath catch.

  Photographs of artifacts. Not the polished, well-lit images from museum catalogs, but hurried shots taken in what looked like a storage unit—fluorescent lighting, concrete floor, metal shelving in the background. Objects of bronze and clay and something that might have been gold, arranged on a folding table.

  One image in particular drew his attention. A figurine, small enough to hold in one hand. A woman, or something like a woman, with arms raised toward the sky. Her face was worn smooth by time, featureless except for the suggestion of eyes. But around her, carved into the base on which she stood, were symbols.

  Not cuneiform. Not any script Emre recognized. They looked almost like...

  He pulled the image closer, zooming in until the pixels blurred.

  They looked almost like code.

  ---

  The sensation returned.

  That background process, running just below conscious thought. That strange awareness of something larger, something structured, something that hummed with the logic of systems he couldn't yet comprehend.

  Emre closed his eyes and let it come.

  And for a moment—just a moment—he saw it again. The fabric of everything, rendered as code. Lines and functions and variables. But this time, he saw something else. A connection. A thread leading from the figurine in the photograph to something vast and distant and pulsing with light.

  The Nexus.

  The word surfaced in his mind without origin, without context, as if it had always been there, waiting to be accessed.

  His eyes snapped open.

  The vision faded. The apartment returned—ordinary, familiar, suffocating in its normalcy. But Emre was different. Something had shifted. Something had unlocked.

  He looked at the photograph again. The symbols around the figurine's base. He couldn't read them—not yet—but he could see them now for what they were.

  Not decoration.

  Instructions.

  ---

  His phone rang.

  He almost didn't answer. The world outside had become irrelevant, a distraction from the only problem that mattered. But the ringing persisted, and finally, mechanically, he picked up.

  "Emre Ozkhan?"

  The voice was unfamiliar—male, middle-aged, with an accent he couldn't immediately place. American, maybe, but overlaid with something else.

  "Yes."

  "My name is Joran Holloway. I'm a journalist. I need to talk to you about Sulley Alt?n."

  The name hit him like a physical blow. He gripped the phone tighter.

  "How do you know Sulley?"

  A pause on the other end. When the voice spoke again, it was quieter. Careful.

  "I think we saw the same thing, Mr. Ozkhan. Five days ago. At exactly 7:43 AM Berlin time. I was in a hotel room in Chicago, and I watched the sky turn purple. I watched the city freeze. And I watched something—someone—taken through a tear in reality."

  Emre's hand was shaking.

  "I've been documenting these events for three years," the voice continued. "Global reality fluctuations. Disappearances that don't fit any pattern. People who vanish and are never found, while the world around them simply... forgets. I call them Glitches. And Sulley Alt?n isn't the first."

  "Who are you?" Emre's voice was rough. "What do you want?"

  "I want to help you find her. But more than that—I need to understand what's happening. Because something is changing, Mr. Ozkhan. The Glitches are getting stronger. More frequent. And I think—" Another pause, longer this time. "I think someone like you is the only one who can stop whatever comes next."

  Emre stared at the photograph on his screen. The figurine with its arms raised toward the sky. The symbols that weren't symbols.

  Instructions.

  "What do you know about Alacah?yük?" he asked.

  The silence on the other end was different now—sharp with surprise, or recognition.

  "How do you know that name?"

  "Sulley was researching it. A man named Arin Velsar contacted her about artifacts from the site. Private collection. Un catalogued."

  "Velsar." The journalist's voice had gone flat. "Mr. Ozkhan, I need you to listen to me very carefully. Arin Velsar doesn't exist. I've been trying to trace him for two years. Every email, every document, every academic reference—they're all dead ends. He's a ghost. A construct."

  "A construct?"

  "A front. A fiction. Someone using his name to gain access to people like Sulley. People on the edge of something important."

  Emre's mind was racing now, connecting dots that had been invisible moments before. The emails. The photographs. The figurine with its impossible symbols.

  "Sulley wasn't researching the past," he said slowly. "She was researching a doorway."

  Another silence. Then, quietly:

  "Meet me in Istanbul. Three days. There's something you need to see. Something I've been keeping safe for the right person."

  "Why Istanbul?"

  "Because that's where the next Glitch is going to happen. And if we're right—if Sulley is still alive, still there—that's where we might find a way to reach her."

  The line went dead.

  Emre lowered the phone. Around him, the apartment hummed with the ordinary sounds of an ordinary world—refrigerator, traffic, a neighbor's television bleeding through the wall. None of it felt real anymore. None of it mattered.

  He looked at the photograph one last time.

  The figurine's featureless face seemed to look back at him. Waiting. Judging.

  Sulley.

  He started packing.