Day 30.
The Command Deck.
Sauget, Illinois.
01:30 Hours.
The execution of the mutineers had bought us order, but silence was expensive.
I stood by the reinforced glass window of the Command Deck office, looking down at the factory floor. The green light of Phase 2 washed over the concrete, turning the puddles of blood into pools of black oil.
Below, the crew was working. Ronnie moved with the calm, efficient gestures of a foreman, directing the new Nulls to scrub the stains left by the traitors. Paige was organizing the inventory of the scavenged weapons, her hands steady, her face a mask of grim determination.
They were stabilizing. They were accepting the new reality.
But Yana was vibrating.
She stood in the corner of the office, as far away from me as she could get without leaving the room. Her arms were crossed tight over her chest, fingers digging into the leather of her courier jacket. She hadn't looked me in the eye since the System Mercy wave had washed over us.
She looked like a trapped animal waiting for the cage door to open so she could bite the keeper.
"Clear the room," I said to Boyd.
Boyd looked up from his terminal. His blue LED eyes were unblinking, his fingers deep in the guts of a server tower. "I am calibrating the Phase 2 energy distribution. If I stop now, the efficiency rating drops by—"
"Get out," I said. My voice was low.
Boyd blinked once—a mechanical shuttering of his eyelids. "Understood. Privacy protocols engaged."
He unplugged himself from the console. He walked out, his movements stiff and jerky, and closed the heavy steel door behind him. The lock clicked shut.
The silence in the room was heavy. It pressed against my eardrums.
"Jack," Yana started, her voice tight and higher than usual. "We need to talk about the perimeter patrols. The new Nulls aren't ready for night watch. If the Hives spawn early—"
"Show me," I said.
She froze. The words died in her throat. "Show you what?"
"The System Mercy," I said, turning to face her. "It healed Travis's burns. It peeled the dead skin off his shoulder like a wrapper. It healed my leg. It fixed Helen's lungs. It reset every biological asset in this facility to 100%."
I stepped closer. The Cruelty trait kept my heart rate slow, my focus absolute.
"But it skipped you," I said. "I saw the light hit your stomach and recoil. It treated your midsection like a firewall. Like there was code there it didn't have permission to overwrite."
Yana backed up. She hit the wall. Her hand went to her belt, hovering near the hilt of her combat knife.
"Don't," I warned. "You're fast, Yana. You're a Shadow. But I'm the Architect. If I lock the door, you don't leave. And if you draw that knife, Travis comes through the wall."
"You'll cut it out," she whispered. Her eyes were wide, wet with a terror I had never seen in her. "If you see it... if you see what it is... you'll think it's a parasite. You'll optimize it. You'll say it's inefficient."
"I don't know what it is," I said. "That's why you're going to show me."
I pointed to the map table in the center of the room.
"Lie down."
She hesitated. For a second, I thought she was going to Shadow Step—dissolve into smoke and try to phase through the door. I tensed, ready to trigger a Regression Echo to catch her.
Then she slumped. The fight went out of her.
"Please, Jack," she said. "It's... it's mine."
"Table," I said.
She walked to the holographic table. She lay back on the glass surface. The map of the 5-State Region glowed beneath her, casting blue grid lines across her skin.
She pulled up her shirt.
Her stomach was flat. Hard muscle defined the abs, pale and scarred from a lifetime of running. Her skin was cold to the touch, almost grey from the User Chill.
But around her navel, there was a pattern.
It looked like a bruise, but it wasn't blue or black. It was violet. A starburst of dark veins radiating outward, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light that seemed to be synced with a heartbeat that wasn't hers.
"Helen," I called out.
The door opened immediately. Helen had been waiting in the hall. She came in, carrying her stethoscope and a portable ultrasound unit we had scavenged days ago. She didn't look surprised.
"You knew," I said.
"I suspected," Helen said, closing the door. "Since Day 25. The vomiting. The mood swings. The way she protected her abdomen during the breach."
She walked over and placed the stethoscope on Yana's stomach.
"It's still there," Helen whispered. "Stronger now. Faster."
I leaned over. I activated Decay Sight.
I didn't look at the skin. I looked through it.
The wireframe of Yana's body appeared in my vision. Grey bones. Blue organs slowing down due to the metabolic shift of her Shadow Class. Her heart was beating forty times a minute—slow, efficient, cold.
But in the uterus, there was a ball of fire.
It wasn't orange like a User. It wasn't red like the Root.
It was White.
It burned with an intensity that hurt my eyes. It wasn't just a biological signature; it was a data signature. Massive amounts of code were swirling around the fetus, shielding it, feeding it.
`[SCANNING...]`
`[TARGET: UNKNOWN BIOLOGICAL ENTITY.]`
`[GESTATION: 8 WEEKS.]`
`[ORIGIN: ANOMALOUS.]`
"Eight weeks," I said. "The world ended thirty days ago."
"I know," Yana said, staring at the ceiling, tears leaking from her eyes. "I wasn't pregnant before Day 1, Jack. I'm sure. I was on the pill. I took a test the week before the sky turned blue. It was negative."
"Time dilation?" Helen suggested, watching the ultrasound screen. "The Regression? Maybe the timeline isn't linear for... for whatever this is."
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe the System doesn't care about biology."
I reached out. I placed my hand on the violet bruise.
Yana flinched. "Jack, please."
My hand was cold. Her skin was cold.
But the thing inside was hot. Burning hot. I could feel the heat radiating through her abdominal wall, searing my palm. It felt like holding a hand over a reactor core.
And I felt it move.
It wasn't a kick. It was a pulse. A wave of energy that traveled up my arm, rattled my teeth, and vibrated the HUD in my vision.
`[SYSTEM ALERT: CONTACT ESTABLISHED.]`
`[ANALYZING GENETIC MARKERS...]`
The text scrolled fast. Too fast.
`[MARKER 1: MATERNAL (YANA / SHADOW CLASS).]`
`[MARKER 2: PATERNAL...]`
I froze.
The code stopped scrolling. It flashed, blinking in urgent, bright blue letters.
`[PATERNAL MATCH FOUND.]`
`[SOURCE: SUBJECT ZERO (JACK MONROE).]`
`[TIMELINE SIGNATURE: PRE-REGRESSION / LOOP RESIDUAL.]`
I stared at the text. The air left my lungs.
"Jack?" Helen asked. "What do you see?"
I looked at Yana. She looked back at me, terrified, confused. She didn't know. She couldn't know.
"It's..." I swallowed. My mouth tasted like copper. "It's mine."
Yana sat up, scrambling backward on the table. "What?"
"The System matched the DNA," I whispered. "It's my DNA. But... we haven't..."
"We haven't touched," Yana said. "Jack, I haven't slept with anyone in six months. How is that possible?"
"The loop," I said. "The Regression."
I looked at the text again. `[TIMELINE SIGNATURE: PRE-REGRESSION.]`
"In the first timeline," I said, my mind racing, trying to reconstruct the memories of the dead future. "We were together. On Day 28. Before the wall fell. Before the end."
Yana stared at me. "I don't remember that."
"You wouldn't," I said. "You died. The timeline was erased. But the data... the data survived."
I looked at her stomach.
"The System carried it over," I realized. "When I regressed, I brought my memories. But something else came back with me. A fragment. And it attached to you."
"It's a ghost," Yana whispered, horrified. "I'm pregnant with a ghost."
"No," I said. I reached out again, touching the violet starburst. The heat was real. The life was real. "It's not a ghost. It's an Asset."
`[ADMINISTRATOR: VALUABLE ASSET DETECTED. PRIORITY: PROTECT.]`
`[ROOT: A HYBRID. BORN OF TIME AND DEATH. LET IT GROW. LET IT EAT.]`
"It's an anomaly," I said. "A paradox made flesh. That's why the System Mercy couldn't heal it. It's not damage. It's... it's a feature."
"Is it safe?" Helen asked. "Jack, her body temp is eighty-one degrees. A baby can't survive that."
"It's not a human baby," I said. "Humans can't survive in a User's body. The cold would kill a fetus in minutes. That thing is adapting. It's feeding on the System energy. It's feeding on the mana."
Yana wrapped her arms around herself. "So what do we do?"
I looked at the map. The red dots of the enemy territories. The Tier 4 Hive pulsing in the south.
I looked at the child that shouldn't exist. My child. A child conceived in a dead timeline and born into a war zone.
The Cruelty trait flickered. It tried to calculate the efficiency. Asset. Liability. Resource drain.
But another feeling overrode it. A fierce, possessive heat that started in my gut and spread to my hands.
Legacy.
"We protect it," I said.
I looked at Yana.
"If the Enclave finds out... if Eclipse finds out... they won't just kill you. They'll vivisect you. They'll tear you apart to see how it ticks."
"So we hide it," Yana said.
"We hide it," I agreed. "You wear baggy clothes. You stay off the front lines. If anyone asks, you have a parasitic infection from the sewers. A tapeworm."
"A tapeworm?" Yana scowled, but her hands relaxed slightly.
"Better than a miracle," I said. "Miracles get people crucified."
I turned to Helen.
"Monitor her. Every hour. If that thing starts eating her... if it starts hurting her... you tell me."
"And then what?" Helen asked.
"And then we figure it out," I said. "But we don't cut it out. Not unless we have to."
I walked to the window. I looked out at the green sky of Phase 2.
Thirty days ago, I died screaming. I came back to build a fortress. I came back to win.
But I hadn't expected to bring anything back with me.
"Jack," Yana whispered.
I turned. She was sliding off the table. She looked at me, searching my face for the monster she knew was in there.
"Is it really yours?" she asked.
I looked at the glowing blue text that only I could see.
`[PATERNAL MATCH: CONFIRMED.]`
"Yeah," I said. "It's mine."
I checked the timer.
`[PHASE 2 PREP: 00:25:00.]`
"Twenty-five minutes," I said. "Phase 2 starts. The walls drop."
I opened the door.
"Get ready," I said. "We have a family to feed."
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 30
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) █████████░ 9/10 Nodes
SECRET: The Time-Loop Child
STATUS: HIDDEN
DNA Match: Confirmed (Jack Monroe)
Time Remaining: 25 Minutes
Next Event: The Map Expands / Phase 2 Start