The flight to Istanbul was seven hours of suspended animation.

  Emre sat by the window, watching Europe scroll by beneath a blanket of clouds, and tried to apply the scientific method to the problem of his own dissolving reality.

  Hypothesis: What he had witnessed was real. Sulley had been taken. The sky had torn open. The world had glitched.

  Evidence: His memory. Sulley's missing presence. The photographs on her tablet. The phone call from a stranger who claimed to have seen the same thing.

  Complicating factors: The complete absence of corroboration from any other source. No news reports. No internet chatter. No official recognition that anything unusual had occurred. Either the entire event had been somehow erased from collective memory, or he was experiencing a psychotic break characterized by remarkably consistent and detailed hallucinations.

  Occam's razor: The simplest explanation was that he had lost his mind.

  But Emre had never been particularly fond of simple explanations.

  He pulled out his laptop—not the work machine, but the personal one, loaded with everything he'd copied from Sulley's accounts. The photographs. The emails. The research notes. He'd been through them all dozens of times in the past three days, but he looked again, searching for something he might have missed.

  The Velsar emails were the most promising lead. He'd traced the IP addresses—or tried to. They routed through half a dozen servers in as many countries, terminating in what appeared to be a virtual private server with no physical location. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to remain untraceable.

  But untraceable wasn't the same as invisible. Emre had spent the past forty-eight hours running every analysis tool he could find or improvise, and he'd discovered something interesting: the email headers contained a consistent anomaly. A timestamp offset that didn't match any known time zone. A pattern of microseconds that repeated in ways that shouldn't be possible.

  It was as if the emails had been sent from somewhere that didn't quite follow the same rules as everywhere else.

  He'd filed that information away and moved on.

  The photographs were more productive. The figurine with its code-like symbols—he'd spent hours enhancing and analyzing those marks, and he was increasingly convinced they weren't decorative. They had the structure of language. Repetition. Variation. Syntax. He couldn't read them, but he could see them, and the more he looked, the more they seemed to shift, to suggest meanings just beyond the edge of comprehension.

  Like the vision. Like the sensation of something running in the background of his mind.

  He closed his eyes and let the feeling come.

  The Nexus.

  The word surfaced again, and with it, images—fragments, impressions. A city built into the bones of something immense. A sky filled with floating continents. A woman with Sulley's face, but different—older, sadder, wrapped in light.

  Aya.

  His eyes snapped open.

  The flight attendant was standing in the aisle, offering drinks. Emre blinked at her, disoriented.

  "Something to drink, sir?"

  "Water," he managed. "Please."

  She moved on. Emre pressed his palm against the window, feeling the vibration of the engines, the solidity of the aircraft. Real. Tangible. Governed by physics he understood.

  But the images lingered. The sense of knowing something he had no right to know.

  He thought of Sulley, of the way she'd sometimes pause in the middle of conversation, head tilted, as if listening to something far away. She'd laugh it off when he asked—just thinking—but now he wondered. Now he wondered about a lot of things.

  The plane began its descent.

  ---

  Istanbul Airport was a cathedral of concrete and glass, designed to process thousands of human beings per hour through its gleaming corridors. Emre moved through it like a ghost, present but not present, his body on autopilot while his mind churned through possibilities.

  Joran Holloway had sent instructions. A cafe in the old city, near the Grand Bazaar. A specific table by the window. A time: 4:47 PM.

  The specificity bothered Emre, though he couldn't say why. It felt significant. Intentional. Like everything in this new reality, it suggested pattern where pattern shouldn't exist.

  He took a taxi through streets that grew narrower and older as they approached the historic peninsula. The Golden Horn glittered to his left, spanned by bridges that had connected continents for centuries. Europe to Asia. Known to unknown. Here, the boundaries had always been thinner.

  The taxi dropped him at the edge of the bazaar. Emre paid and stepped out into a chaos of sound and color and smell that assaulted every sense at once. Merchants called out in half a dozen languages. Spice fumes twisted through the air. Carpets hung from ceilings like exotic stalactites.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He pushed through, following the instructions, and emerged into a quieter street lined with cafes and souvenir shops. Tourists drifted past, cameras raised, already forgetting what they'd come to see.

  The cafe was small, tucked between a carpet dealer and a shop selling lamps that looked like they belonged in a sultan's palace. Emre checked his phone. 4:42 PM. Five minutes early.

  He found the table by the window and sat.

  The waiter appeared immediately—young, efficient, uninterested in conversation. Emre ordered tea and waited.

  4:45.

  4:46.

  4:47.

  A man sat down across from him.

  Emre hadn't seen him approach. One moment the chair was empty; the next, it was occupied by a figure in a worn leather jacket, with graying hair pulled back from a face that had seen weather and worry in equal measure. His eyes were pale blue, almost colorless, and they fixed on Emre with an intensity that was almost physical.

  "Joran Holloway," the man said. His voice was exactly as it had sounded on the phone—American, but overlaid with something else. Travel, maybe. Or loss.

  "Emre Ozkhan."

  Joran nodded, as if confirming something. "You came."

  "Did you think I wouldn't?"

  "I thought you might. I hoped you would. But hope and certainty are different things." He signaled the waiter, who appeared with two teas as if by magic. "Drink. You'll need it."

  Emre wrapped his hands around the small glass, letting the warmth seep into his fingers. "You said there was something I needed to see."

  "There is." Joran reached into his jacket and produced a tablet, worn at the edges, the screen covered in protective film. He placed it on the table between them. "But first, I need to understand what you already know. What you've seen. What you've felt."

  The question hung in the air. Emre considered lying—old habit, protecting himself from exposure—but something in Joran's eyes stopped him. This man knew. Had seen. Was, perhaps, as lost as Emre himself.

  "I saw the sky turn purple," he said quietly. "I saw the street freeze. I saw shapes in a tear in reality, and they took her. They took Sulley." He paused. "And since then, I've been... feeling things. Seeing things. Information that wasn't there before."

  Joran's expression didn't change, but something in his posture shifted. Leaning forward, intent.

  "What kind of information?"

  "Names. Places. A word—Nexus. Another word—Aya. Images of places I've never seen. And when I look at certain things—certain patterns, certain symbols—I can almost... read them. As if they're code."

  Joran was very still now. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.

  "Show me."

  Emre pulled out his own tablet, opened the photograph of the figurine, and turned it to face Joran.

  The older man stared at the image for a long moment. Then he did something unexpected: he laughed. A soft, disbelieving sound, more wonder than humor.

  "The Aya Figurine," he said. "I've been looking for this for three years. I thought it was lost. I thought it was destroyed."

  "You know what it is?"

  "I know what it's called. I know where it came from. I know—" He stopped, shook his head. "Tell me about the symbols. You said you could read them?"

  "Not read, exactly. More like... sense. They feel like instructions. Like a program waiting to run."

  Joran's eyes widened. "That's exactly what they are. Or what they're said to be. The Aya Figurine is one of seven artifacts—the so-called Echo Objects—that supposedly contain fragments of a language older than human civilization. A language that doesn't just describe reality, but shapes it."

  Emre stared at him. "That's not possible."

  "Six months ago, I would have agreed with you. Three months ago, I would have hesitated. Today—" He spread his hands, indicating the cafe, the city, the world beyond. "Today, I don't know what's possible anymore."

  The waiter appeared with more tea. They waited in silence until he left.

  "You said the next Glitch is going to happen here," Emre said. "In Istanbul. How do you know?"

  Joran reached for his own tablet, swiped through several screens, and turned it to face Emre. A map appeared—global, covered in dots of varying colors and sizes.

  "Three years of data," he said. "Every confirmed reality fluctuation I've been able to document. The early ones were small—localized distortions, brief temporal anomalies, people who reported seeing things that couldn't exist. But over the past eighteen months, they've been getting stronger. More frequent. And they follow a pattern."

  He zoomed in on the map, highlighting a cluster of dots in the eastern Mediterranean.

  "The pattern is geometric. Mathematical. I'm no expert, but I've had it analyzed by people who are. They say it's like nothing they've ever seen—a sequence of events that corresponds to no known natural phenomenon. But it does correspond to something else." He paused. "The locations of major archaeological sites from the Bronze Age. Hittite. Luwian. Sumerian. The civilizations that Sulley studied."

  Emre's mind was racing, connecting dots that suddenly seemed to form a picture.

  "The figurine came from Alacah?yük. Sulley was researching it. And now you're saying—"

  "I'm saying that someone—or something—is following a map. A map written in the ruins of the ancient world. And they're getting closer to whatever they're looking for."

  "Closer to what?"

  Joran met his eyes. "To the place where the boundaries are thinnest. To the place where they can bring something through. Or take something back."

  The words hung in the air between them. Emre thought of Sulley, of the shapes in the void, of the way the world had frozen and forgotten.

  "Where?" he asked. "Where's the next one?"

  Joran zoomed the map further, until a single location filled the screen. A city on two continents. A place where East met West.

  "Istanbul. Tomorrow. 7:43 PM local time." He looked up. "The same time as the Berlin event. The same time as every major Glitch for the past six months."

  Emre processed this. Same time, different locations. Pattern. Purpose.

  "What do we do?"

  "We go there. We watch. And if we're lucky—if the pattern holds—we might see something. We might understand something." He paused. "We might even find a way through."

  "Through?"

  Joran's expression was grave. "To wherever they took her. To the other side. To the Nexus."

  Emre stared at him. The word—his word, the word that had surfaced from somewhere deep in his mind—spoken aloud by a stranger.

  "You know about the Nexus?"

  "I know the name. I know it's mentioned in texts that predate any known civilization. I know it's described as a place where the laws of reality are different—more fluid, more accessible. And I know that every culture that's ever written about it has warned against trying to reach it." He leaned forward. "But I also know that some people have. Some people have gone through and come back. Changed. Damaged. Or worse."

  "How do you know that?"

  Joran was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was rough.

  "Because my daughter was one of them. Three years ago. She was seventeen. She disappeared from her bedroom in Chicago while I was making breakfast. The sky turned purple. The street froze. And she was gone." He met Emre's eyes. "I've been looking for her ever since. And everything I've learned—every Glitch, every artifact, every pattern—has led me here. To you. To the figurine. To tomorrow night."

  The confession landed like a physical weight. Emre felt it in his chest, in his throat, in the sudden pressure behind his eyes.

  "You understand," Joran said. It wasn't a question.

  "Yes." Emre's voice was barely audible. "I understand."

  They sat in silence for a long moment, two strangers bound by the same geometry of absence. The cafe hummed around them—other conversations, other lives, other losses that would never be spoken aloud.

  Finally, Joran reached into his jacket again and produced a small leather pouch, worn and soft with age.

  "There's something else," he said. "Something I've been keeping for the right moment. For the right person."

  He placed the pouch on the table and pushed it toward Emre.

  Emre looked at it, then at Joran. "What is it?"

  "Open it."

  He did. The pouch was heavier than it looked, and when he tipped its contents into his palm, he found himself holding a small object that made his breath catch.

  A figurine. Not the one from the photograph—smaller, cruder, made of some dark material that felt almost like stone but was warm to the touch. It depicted a woman with arms raised toward the sky. Her face was worn smooth, featureless.

  Around its base, symbols.

  The same symbols.

  Emre looked up, questions crowding his throat, but Joran was already speaking.

  "That's the real Aya Figurine. The one in the photograph is a fake—a plant, designed to draw people like Sulley into the search. I've had the real one for two years. I've studied it. I've protected it. But I've never been able to do what you just described. I've never been able to read it."

  He leaned forward, intensity radiating from every line of his face.

  "You can, Emre. You can feel it, see it, understand it in ways I can't. That means something. That means you're connected to this in a way that goes beyond coincidence. And tomorrow night—when the Glitch happens—that connection might be the only thing that matters."

  Emre looked down at the figurine in his palm. The symbols seemed to shift under his gaze, to suggest meanings just beyond reach. And beneath it all, that background process, running.

  Root Access.

  "What do you want me to do?" he asked.

  Joran's smile was thin, tired, and full of something that might have been hope.

  "I want you to be ready. I want you to trust what you feel, even when it doesn't make sense. And when the moment comes—if the moment comes—I want you to do whatever you have to do to find her. To find them both."

  He reached across the table and gripped Emre's arm.

  "My daughter's name is Maya. Maya Holloway. If you get through—if you find a way to the other side—look for her. Please."

  Emre looked at the figurine. At Joran. At the city beyond the window, where tomorrow night, the sky would tear open again.

  He thought of Sulley. Of her smile. Of the way she'd looked at him that last morning, scared and brave and full of love.

  "I'll find them," he said. "Both of them. I promise."

  It was, he knew, a promise he had no way to keep.

  But he meant it anyway.