In the heart of the vestibule, before the sealed doors, Vesper held the single-use access card between two fingers. Its surface shimmered with faint traces of encoded Aether, the mark of her choice. She had selected it.

AETHER LAB.

She slid the card into the reader.

A soft chime answered her decision and the mechanisms within the wall groaned to life. Blue veins of energy ignited around the seams of the chosen door, pulsing like a heartbeat responding to her presence. With a final sigh of pressurized air, the door unsealed and slid open.

They stepped through together.

The corridor that greeted them was narrow and dark, carved from metal that drank the light. The walls were dark and lifeless, no trace of Aether pulsed within them. Whatever energy had once flowed here was long gone. Their footsteps echoed under flashlight beams, sharp against the silence. The lab was dead, and it had been dead for a long time. It felt less like an entryway and more like a throat, waiting to swallow them whole.

The corridor stretched like a memory left too long in silence, wet tiles reflecting pulses of dead light, broken panels hanging like ribs torn open. It was not a place that welcomed visitors. And yet Vesper felt as if it had been waiting for her.

Vesper walked ahead, her liquid-black bodysuit gleaming with each slow breath she took, threads of Aether on the suit faintly glowing, alive. Silas followed close behind, silent as a secret, eyes scanning everything.

Then something shifted.

She stopped. Turned toward a wall.

There was a sensation, subtle but certain as if the Lab itself was watching her, sensing her presence, calling to her like a memory desperate to be remembered.

Both of her hands rose, hesitant, then pressed flat to the cold, almost velvety surface of the dark metal.

The response was immediate.

From the point of contact, a ripple of soft blue light surged outward beneath the wall’s surface, winding through it like veins just beneath the skin. The glow didn’t blaze, it breathed, a faint awakening, like a body returning from a long coma. The air grew heavier, electric, and somewhere deep inside the complex, a distant system hummed to life.

Vesper inhaled sharply as she felt a faint pull, not violent, not draining, but intimate. As though something had reached up from a cliff’s edge and she had instinctively extended her strength to lift it back.

The corridor responded to her not with obedience, but with recognition. The blue energy that had accepted her presence receded into the walls like blood into veins.

Behind her, Silas shifted. “What the hell did you just do?” he muttered.

She glanced over her shoulder. “I… don’t know. It felt like it knew me.“

He looked around, scanning the shifting glow in the walls, the systems slowly breathing back to life. “Well, whatever you did… you woke it up.“

He took a cautious step forward and added more quietly, “Next time you decide to touch an ancient superstructure, maybe warn me first?“

They continued down the corridor until the floor began to slant, descending gently into shadow. The air grew thicker, the pulse of the walls more insistent. And then, suddenly, they saw it.

A wall of blue Aether energy blocked the path ahead. It filled the corridor completely, an almost transparent, electric barrier, alive with pulsing light. It shimmered like a curtain of water lit from within, humming with power. There was no way around it.

Vesper halted. Silas stepped beside her.

“What in all circuits is that?” he murmured.

He took a careful step forward, scanning the field with his cybernetic eye. His arm twitched, unsure.

“I don’t trust this thing,” he muttered. “But maybe I can scan it, just from a distance.” Silas leaned in, his cybernetic eye adjusting focus. “Don’t worry, I’m not touching anything.“

The moment his fingers neared the field, it reacted.

A violent pulse surged through the corridor. The forcefield burst forward like a tidal wave of energy and hurled Silas backwards. His body crashed into the wall with a heavy metallic thud and slumped to the ground.

“Silas!” Vesper rushed to him, crouching at his side.

He groaned, blinking rapidly as the glowing green threads under his skin flickered wildly. “I’m fine,” he said, breathless. “Damn thing hit like a train.“

“You shouldn’t move,” she warned.

“Well, I’m clearly not going through that,” he muttered. “No idea what it is, but it doesn’t like me.“

Despite his protest, Vesper rose and turned toward the barrier. Something inside her stirred, not fear, but… recognition.

“Vesper,” Silas called after her, voice strained, “don’t be reckless. You saw what it did.“

But she didn’t stop.

She stepped forward slowly, lifting her hand toward the barrier. The surface of the Aether shimmered. Her fingers passed through it effortlessly.

She felt a tingling sensation wash across her skin, a soft static hum, warm and pulsing. It wasn’t painful. It embraced her, like a forgotten song remembered by the body before the mind.

She took a breath and walked through.

On the other side, she turned back. The corridor behind her looked blurred, distorted through the curtain of energy. Silas stood behind the barrier, his face tense, his voice crackling through her comms.

“—esper? Can you—hear—me? You okay?“

The signal was breaking.

“I can’t come—through,” he said in broken fragments. “Be careful. I’m—waiting here.“

She nodded, though he might not see it.

Then she turned and walked alone into the depths of the Lab.

The corridor bent downward, descending further until the walls fell away and the floor levelled onto a platform, one that opened into a breathtaking space that stole her breath as surely as it challenged her senses.

Before her stretched an enormous chamber, a colossal interior that spiralled downward in concentric circles, like a cathedral carved into the earth, or the fossil of some divine machine. The architecture was curved, elegant, and unsettling in its scale. It reminded her, in shape and flow, of something ancient and hauntingly beautiful, like the ribcage of a long-dead colossus, fossilized in steel and glass. But where that had been white, this was obsidian and blue; where that had been bright, this was shrouded in shadow and trembling light.

Above her, the domed ceiling flickered with ghostly Aether veins, like constellations trapped beneath glass. Below, each tier of the descending spiral held segments of labs, sealed chambers, shattered glass, rusted metal walkways, and equipment so advanced it looked abandoned by time itself. Robotic limbs hung dormant. Display panels pulsed weakly. The heart of the chamber, far below, was bathed in soft bioluminescent mist, as if the room itself exhaled thought.

She stood in silence.

It didn’t feel like she had entered a room.

It felt like she had been expected.

Step by step, she descended deeper. The walls were made of an unusual black composite, smoothed to polish by time and machines. Pulsing veins of blue Aether ran through them like lines of light, though in places they were severed, like scars. As if something had broken free from within.

Halfway down the spiralling descent, the corridor levelled briefly and passed a row of laboratories, each one sealed behind thick protective glass, dark and silent like forgotten mausoleums. Vesper slowed, curiosity tugging at her. She stepped toward one of the windows.

Inside, overturned chairs and scattered instruments hinted at chaos. In the corner, barely illuminated by the ambient pulse of the Aether-threaded walls, lay the crumpled skeleton of a human figure, still clad in a decayed lab coat. One bony hand reached toward the door.

She stared, transfixed, until six pinpricks of green light flared deep within the chamber.

They blinked in formation. Then moved.

Something shot forward from the back of the lab, fast, four-legged, a blur of twitching limbs and mechanical tendrils. It collided with the inside of the protective glass with a deafening thud.

Vesper staggered back, her breath catching. The thing, a grotesque hybrid, roughly the size of a dog, with twitching appendages and glowing green eyes, snarled, mouthless yet furious. It slammed its limbs against the barrier again and again, clawing, striking, relentless, each movement charged with an unnatural rhythm, powered by pulsing veins of Green Aether that glowed beneath its synthetic flesh.

But the glass held.

Still shaken, Vesper backed away, her heart pounding in her chest. Alone now, she cast one last glance at the writhing thing behind the glass, its limbs still hammering uselessly at the barrier, before turning away.

“Stay in your cage,” she whispered under her breath, more to herself than anything else.

She pressed on, hugging the opposite side of the corridor, putting distance between herself and the thing that should never have been built.

The further she moved, the more labs she passed, sealed off, dormant, filled with unsettling shadows.

Until she found one where the glass wasn’t intact.

The panel had been shattered from within. Razor-edged shards lay strewn across the floor, their fracture lines catching the faint light. Whatever had been inside was no longer here.

But from the dust, the rust, the stillness, it had escaped long ago.

Or so it seemed.

Vesper stared into the shattered enclosure, her reflection faint in the remaining glass. Whatever had broken out could still be in here, somewhere, hiding in ducts or shadowed vents, or perhaps far gone.

She had no way to know. Only one choice: proceed. Cautiously. Quietly.

Her heart beat calmly. Too calmly. As if her body knew that panic would be a waste, but awareness would be everything.

She kept to the wall and moved on, eyes sweeping every corner, every flicker of movement, every shadow that breathed wrong.

She had reached the bottom.

The corridor widened into a final, vast threshold. A low archway opened into a chamber unlike the others, a grand laboratory carved into the foundation of the complex, towering yet buried, silent yet trembling with restrained memory.

Dim lights traced the ceiling like nerves, flickering between states of rest and reawakening. Along the walls, arrays of strange machinery, sleek, rust-streaked, or half-dismantled, rose like relics of forgotten genius. Cables hung from above like the roots of a mechanical tree, some twitching faintly, others fused to control stations or diagnostic pods that blinked with residual code.

The air shimmered with scattered pulses of blue light, leaking from the walls in slender tendrils, Aether that hadn’t fully died. Its rhythm was slow, distant, like breath from a sleeping colossus.

And in the center of it all, on a raised circular platform, encased within a transparent protective chamber framed in titanium and brass, she saw it.

She stopped. Stared.

There, resting like a dormant heart, was something she knew better than anything in this world. A shape etched into her memory not by time, but by purpose.

Her own invention.

It was the prototype of her tracking device. The very first version, the one she had built in her Victorian workshop, years before she had any name for the strange energy that responded to her touch.

She moved closer, step by step until the transparent barrier reflected her stunned expression. She couldn’t look away.

It had been found.

It had been studied.

And someone had built an empire around what she had once held in her hands.

It rested on a raised platform, surrounded by the dead arms of machines that had once connected to it. It seemed smaller than she remembered. But that was a lie. It wasn’t smaller. Just lifeless.

She stood before the transparent casing for a long moment, then placed her hand against its surface. It was sealed tight, cold to the touch and humming faintly with containment protocols. A narrow console blinked beside the platform.

Vesper reached for it, instinct guiding her fingers through a brief sequence of commands. The system recognized something in her touch, her energy, perhaps, and the protective shell hissed as it disengaged, lifting slowly with a mechanical sigh.

The air stirred inside for the first time in years.

She stepped forward and placed her hands on the curved brass housing of the tracking device, now faded and layered in dust. There was no warmth, no whisper of energy. Just silence.

But it was her work. Her design. Her secret.

And someone had unearthed it, studied it, built around it.

Then she noticed that the room had another door. Discreet, built flush into the wall at the back of the hall. And beside it, a panel.

Vesper touched the panel. A soft release of the lock sounded, and the door began to open, but only partially. The mechanisms groaned, halting halfway with a grinding jolt. Years of disuse had taken their toll. The passage beyond remained dark, lit only by the thin spill of blue light from the wall veins.

It was just enough.

Vesper pressed her shoulder against the narrow gap and slipped through, careful not to let her suit catch on the jagged edge of exposed metal. The Lab had not fully welcomed her. But it had let her in.

She entered.

The office was compact, dark, and cold. The air didn’t move. A faint glow emanated from the desk in the corner, residual power pulsing through cables like the last breath of a forgotten system, casting a thin light across the surface where an old terminal rested. As she approached, the device flickered, then hummed faintly. The screen came to life on its own, without a single key pressed. For a moment, it was static and scrambled data, and then it shifted.

An icon appeared: a skull with a crown.

“Moriarty…” she whispered. “That’s his mark.”

Vesper froze. Not from fear, but from recognition.

At the same moment, her nanosuit stirred. Blue threads beneath her skin glowed brighter, tracing up her arms, responding to something, no, someone, within the system. The terminal pulsed once, then stabilized. The encryption was not standard, it wasn’t meant to be broken, only recognized. These files weren’t locked by passwords or keys, but by something more elusive: a signature of energy. Aether.

Not just any kind, something rare, something specific. The kind that lived in her.

Only when her nanosuit resonated with that same strange frequency did the system respond, its dormant fire stirred. Whatever Moriarty had encoded here, he had done so knowing only a singular anomaly, someone touched by that energy, could open it.

And it found her.

The files began to unfold. Not through commands, but through connection. As if they had been waiting for her all along.

She opened the first file. Much of the data was corrupted, burned through time, fragmented, or decayed past repair. But some fragments endured, flickering into coherence like messages scratched into fogged glass.

Labeled:

LOG: FRAGMENT 27

They found it by accident, beneath the ruins of Temple Core, what they now call the Ministry Spire, buried under centuries of ruin. A collapsed tunnel in the sublevels of Sector 19 revealed structural anomalies. What they unearthed was older than anything they had catalogued: brass fittings, hand-forged mechanics, analogue elegance, impossibly intact. It wasn’t just a relic.

It was a workshop. And it bore a name.

The brass plate on the side wall was tarnished, nearly unreadable, but the engraving remained: Vesper Fograven. A young noblewoman from a prominent lineage, was recorded missing near the end of the 19th century. A name long forgotten by history.

They thought it was myth. A survivor’s fantasy. But the devices were real. And one of them, one small brass device pulsing with foreign energy, was still partially active.

They didn’t understand it. Not then. So they built the lab around it. Sealed it. Wired it. Studied it. And slowly, through the tests and the failsafe and the sleepless theories, they realized they weren’t analyzing an artefact.

They were standing at the origin of something they weren’t meant to know.

Vesper stepped back from the terminal, her hands cold, her breath tight. They found the workshop. They found her name. Vesper Fograven. Engraved into brass, buried beneath the Ministry Spire, unearthed and examined like a myth made real.

She stood there, not as a phantom of the past, but as a woman displaced by centuries, watching the remnants of her life turn into puzzle pieces for minds who could never understand what they truly held.

They built a lab around her legacy. They stripped it bare. And they never even knew who she was. Until now.

She steadied herself, turned back to the terminal, and opened the next file.

LOG: FRAGMENT 41

I stole the blueprints from the original TimeShift lab, the ones they could never finish. I saw their flaws. I saw what they lacked. I saw what they would never dare build.

So I built it myself.

The machine is complete. Not here. Turnham Green. Old metro, where the lines rust and the ghosts don’t bother whispering anymore. No one goes there now. Except those who no longer belong above. It became the perfect place to vanish. To create.

Not yet used, not properly. A few simulations. No jumps. The systems are stable. The breach engine holds. But the next step? It waits. The coordinates are mine to enter. The question is when. And how long the door will remain open.

And I know it will work. Because they found the workshop. The old one. That means the timeline remains intact. The origin has held. My endgame is already in motion.

Everything is converging. Exactly as intended.

She lingered for a moment longer before opening the next file. Her mind wasn’t quiet.

If what she had just read was true, then Moriarty hadn’t come from her time at all.

He had gone back. Back to Victorian London. And that changed everything.

The man she had hunted was no longer just a fugitive. He was a manipulator of history, an architect of timelines. His presence in her past wasn’t an accident, it was a strategy.

But why? What did he hope to alter? Or preserve? Or build?

And more chilling still, had she already seen the effects of his interference and simply mistaken them for fate?

She set her jaw, steadied her breath, and reached again for the terminal.

Next file: ARCHITECT SOL INVICTUS

To be invisible isn’t about not being seen. It’s about being unimportant. Overlooked. Expected. The AI doesn’t hunt what it has already categorized as harmless. It scans for the strange, the deviant, the impossible. I made sure I was none of those.

I studied the blind spot until I understood it better than the Grid understood itself. I didn’t just hide inside it. I shaped myself to fit it. And once I did, I didn’t vanish, I became a function of its system. A silence it was built to ignore.

I wear invisibility like a crown.

Gaining a seat among the King’s elite was child’s play. I gave them what they craved: predictability, elegance, and obedience dressed in innovation. My persona? An architect of aesthetic harmonics, curator of neural symmetry, and master of ceremonial code.

And they adore me for it.

Because the most dangerous tool is not the weapon you fear. It’s the one you trust without question.

And they trust me entirely.

But soon, I will discard the name Sol Invictus like a mask that has served its purpose. When the time comes, they will not just fear me, they will know me. All of them. They will obey. They will fall at my feet, and they will call it reverence, but it will be fear. The name they forgot will be the one they kneel to.

Vesper clenched her jaw. So Moriarty was here, now, moving freely among the elite, playing the role of harmless visionary while orchestrating the collapse of every pillar around him. They adored him, but they didn’t know what he was.

She whispered, “He walks their halls like a ghost in silk… and none of them see the knife he carries.“

He wasn’t just hiding. He was building.

And he intended to rise. To sweep away their hollow codes and pristine facades. One day soon, he’d cast off his borrowed elegance and make the Crown kneel in ruin.

She pressed her fingers to her lips as if to trap the breath he had stolen.

She had to find out what he was planning. And she had to stop him. Before he could become more than a shadow. Before his name became the only one left.

She thought she had reached the end.

She leaned back slightly, eyes scanning the terminal’s dim screen one last time. Most of the files had unravelled into fragments, shattered records of a hidden war. And then, just as her fingers lifted from the interface, a flicker.

A new file appeared.

Not part of the previous index. Not listed. It hadn’t been there before.

FILE: VESPER

When she touched it, the terminal bathed the room in cold blue light. It opened only for her. The Aether in her blood was the key.

The screen changed to black with a single message:

I knew you would come.

You couldn’t do otherwise. Nor could I. The trail was set. You followed me here as I knew you would. That is the elegance of inevitability.

Some call it fate. I call it precision. Every variable accounted for. Every pattern was observed. Every outcome is plotted. I designed the puzzle, and left just enough space in it for you to believe it was yours to solve.

You were never outside the plan. You are the plan. Not its subject, not its solver, its fulcrum.

And yes, I’m fascinated, but not with you, not entirely. It’s what resides within you that captivates me. That glimmer of anomaly. The strange harmony that defies rule and pattern. The reason this entire construct exists.

I orchestrated centuries so this moment would arrive, so you would arrive, following the trail I left through time like a breadcrumb path across forgotten maps. Every iteration tested the theory. Every variable aligned. And here you are.

Everything is unfolding precisely as it must. I’m pleased. But not surprised.

You were never merely a piece, my dear. You were the axis.

Make your choice. I await the moment you step where I’ve already prepared the next stone. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Perhaps I already shaped the shadow you cast. Or perhaps… I never left the moment you’re in.

The game is afoot.

The screen went dark.

Vesper stood for a while. Then slowly inhaled. His voice hadn’t sounded, but every word echoed in her mind like the breath of a ghost.

His game was perfect. But she had her own moves to make.

And now, she stood before three.

The idea of returning to the place they called the Origin, the forgotten workshop beneath the ruins, pulled at her with something between grief and hunger. If the devices truly came from her hand, perhaps the echoes of that space still held her imprint. Perhaps the past had not forgotten her.

But Turnham Green waited too. The site of the secret machine. If what she read was true, then Moriarty had built a functioning TimeShift engine. A window to elsewhere, perhaps to undo what had been twisted. Or to see what should never be seen.

Then there was the most dangerous path of all: to climb into the lion’s mouth and dance. To infiltrate the Court. To don elegance and obedience like a mask. There, among gilded algorithms and synthetic nobility, the Architect known as Sol Invictus moved like a phantom. And somewhere behind that name… the mind she now knew too well.

She breathed in deeply.

All three paths were blades.

And she would have to choose which one to bleed on first.