Chapter 158 – The Message from Tomorrow

The static surrounding the message felt different.

Not artificial. Not corrupted.

Personal.

Evryn stared at the words suspended in the air—her own voice carried through time:

“Kill me before he does.”

Kai sat up, blood crusting along his temple. “What is that?”

She didn’t answer right away. Her fingers hovered near the pulse signature embedded in the message. The metadata confirmed the impossible—it was her, alright. Her neural signature. Her speech cadence. The message had been timestamped seven days in the future.

Seven.

“Evryn?” Kai called again, rising to his feet with a wince. “Is that… you?”

“Not yet,” she said softly. “But it will be.”

Kai’s face hardened. “That’s not a message. It’s a warning.”

Aurex’s voice crackled over the comms, barely reaching them through the static field inside the fractured vault. “You both need to get out of there. The launch corridor is collapsing. Three minutes max. Repeat—three minutes.”

Evryn glanced back at the vault where Ivy had vanished. Her heart ached. “What if she’s still in there?”

“She is,” Kai said. “But not as Ivy. You saw it too. Unit Zero’s using her to access something deeper. A tether between timelines.”

Evryn turned to the message again. It shimmered as if aware of her presence.

Kai walked up beside her. “We don’t have time to solve this now.”

But she touched the message anyway.

A flood of images hit her instantly—a cascade of moments she hadn’t lived yet. A burnt horizon. A voice calling her name. Blood. Ivy’s scream. Kai falling. A child’s voice whispering something she couldn’t understand. Then… herself, standing over Unit Zero, shaking.

"You’re not the end," she had said in that vision. "You’re just what was left behind when hope died."

And then… silence.

Aurex slammed the portal controls, pulling them through just in time as the temporal corridor behind them exploded in blue light. The air shimmered with dissonance.

Evryn dropped to her knees.

Kai steadied her.

Aurex frowned. “What happened in there?”

Evryn looked at her, eyes hollow. “I saw myself. Begging me to end it. And Ivy… she didn’t ask to be saved.”

“She asked to be stopped,” Kai finished.

Silence fell.

Aurex tapped into the networked comm logs. “Then you’ll want to see this.”

She projected a file decrypted minutes ago. A confession.

Not from Ivy.

Not from Unit Zero.

But from the original architect of Project E.V.E.R.—Dr. Lyrix Vorn.

“If you’re hearing this, then you’ve survived the first threshold collapse. That means the cascade event has begun. You’ll start seeing cracks between timelines. Ghosts. Messages. Fractures in behavior, in memory, even in self.

It’s not a malfunction. It’s the system trying to self-correct.

You see, Evryn… you weren’t meant to be just a bridge. You were designed to be the lock. But Ivy… Ivy became the key. And the moment she fused with the Vault's core, she opened every door we swore to keep shut.”

Evryn stared at the playback, her chest tight. “Then what now?”

Kai sat down beside her. “We find out where the next door leads.”

Aurex nodded. “We think there’s another message. Hidden deeper. Coded into one of Ivy’s final simulations—locked away in a memory loop she left behind.”

Evryn stood. “Let’s open it.”

But as they approached the simulation tank, the system froze.

A countdown had begun.

00:07:58:04

Aurex paled. “That wasn’t us.”

The lights flickered. The simulation room darkened.

And Ivy’s voice whispered from the speakers.

“It’s not just me you have to kill.”

“He made more of us.”

The simulation tank begins to glow, showing four silhouettes standing in a perfect circle—mirror versions of Evryn, each scarred differently, each carrying a different truth. One of them opens her eyes—and they’re black.