Location: Container Ship — Main Deck — Night
---
The ocean was a black mirror under a bruised sky.
Elijah stood at the railing, his hands wrapped around a tin cup that had once held coffee and now held only the memory of warmth. The caffeine had done nothing. His eyes still burned. His bones still ached. The Severance had taken something from him that sleep could not restore.
Behind him, the ship pulsed with life.
Not the tense, waiting life of the hijacking. Something else. Something that sounded almost like celebration.
Five hours, he thought. Five hours since the bodies hit the deck. Five hours since Erickson became something I didn't know he could be. Five hours since I punched a woman into mist.
The horizon was changing.
At first, it was just a difference in the darkness—a place where the black of the ocean met the black of the sky and failed to blend. Then came the lights. Pinpricks at first, then clusters, then a sprawl of orange and yellow that smeared across the water like an oil spill on fire.
The Portside industrial stretch.
They were almost home.
---
The singing started somewhere near the bow.
Elijah turned. His cup swung from his fingers as he walked toward the sound—not because he wanted to join, but because his body needed movement. Stillness had become unbearable.
The crew had gathered around a hatch cover that had been converted into an improvised table. Bottles stood in a row—not the captain's private stock, but something cheaper. Something that burned going down and left a pleasant numbness behind.
Wilder was at the center.
His coverall was still torn. His glasses were still cracked. But he had acquired a bottle of his own, and he was holding it like a trophy.
"Come on!" he shouted. "You know this one! Everyone knows this one!"
The crew laughed. A woman with braided hair and calloused hands raised her bottle. A young man with a thin mustache—the same one who had walked in on Wilder's "sus" gesture—raised his.
Wilder began to sing.
His voice was not good. It was not meant to be good. It was meant to be loud.
"There was a great balls of fire all a-bouncing in the sky!"
The crew joined on the second line.
"They bounced and bounced and bounced some more, the folks all wondered why!"
Wilder's free hand traced the air—miming a ball bouncing, then exploding. His body swayed. His hips moved. The crew mimicked him, forming a loose line, their shoulders touching.
"The balls came down, the heads went up, the folks all looked around,"
"Wondering if the top was coming down, a-falling to the ground!"
The captain appeared at the edge of the group. His weathered face was unreadable, but he did not stop them.
"Then a gigantic behemoth came running with an axe,"
"And with one heavy swing, the balls went cold, and that was all the facts!"
The crew clapped. Wilder spun, his bottle held high.
"But then he swung the other way, he tossed them like a ball,"
"And people's eyes tore wide and screamed, 'Who saved us from the fall?'"
One of the crew—the woman with braided hair—stepped forward. She raised her bottle like a microphone.
"One asked, 'Who are you, fine sir, who came to save the day?'"
Wilder answered, his voice dropping into something lower, something theatrical.
"The behemoth did not speak. He just performed one fine swoop of his axe to the top, and nearly tore a rift in it—"
He paused.
"—it it it weren't for its tears coming down, we could have had more great adventures of this fine sir."
The crew erupted.
They raised their bottles. They cheered. They put their arms around each other's shoulders and swayed like a chorus line of drunken sailors. The woman with braided hair leaned into Wilder. The thin-mustached young man patted his back.
Wilder grinned.
He looked, for a moment, like he belonged.
---
Elijah leaned against a container.
The coffee in his cup was cold. He drank it anyway.
I'll learn later, he thought, that the song wasn't just a shanty. That it was a fragment of a sixteenth-century poem by a man named Frank Es De Rex. A prince, once. Of the Bel Empire—now a small sovereign country called Valdoria, somewhere in the mountains of eastern Europe.
The poem was called "The Behemoth's Ballad." And it was about Gilgamesh.
His internal voice was tired. Wry. The voice of someone who had stopped being surprised by the world's strangeness and had moved on to a kind of weary acceptance.
The Rex family. Four hundred years of history. But not the kind written in textbooks.
Elijah's fingers tightened around the cup.
On paper, their operations are top classified. Mysterium clan experiments. The kind of research that happens in laboratories without windows, in facilities that don't appear on any map. Dr. Whar Rex is the current head—a genius, yes, but also something else. Something colder.
The Mysterium clan. Nothing good ever comes from them.
They fund projects that sound noble on the surface. Cures for neurodegenerative diseases. Prosthetics that interface directly with the nervous system. Breakthroughs in cognitive integration.
But underneath—always underneath—there is something else. Something that uses people as raw material.
Elijah's jaw tightened.
I know their work. I've felt it. The Epsilon program shared their methodology. The orrhion chips share their design philosophy. Control. Integration. The erasure of boundaries between the self and the machine.
Dr. Whar Rex is one of the leading researchers into that field. He writes treatises on the nature of reality—on the idea that matter is a projection of the internal mind. Some call him a philosopher. Some call him a visionary.
I call him someone who should never be trusted.
He took a long sip of cold coffee.
I tried asking Wonko about the Rex family. About their connection to the Mysterium. About whether they knew about the Epsilon program, or the chips, or the seeds.
The old bastard didn't answer. Just silence. The kind of silence that means he knows something and isn't going to share.
Typical.
---
Wilder broke away from the crew.
He was still holding his bottle. His cheeks were flushed. His cracked glasses had fogged from the heat of his own breath.
"Hey," he said, stumbling toward Elijah. "Hey, hey, hey. You're missing the party."
"I'm observing the party."
"Observing? Who observes a party? You participate in a party. You engage. You—"
He took a long drink.
"—you let loose."
"I'm not good at letting loose."
"Yeah, I noticed." Wilder leaned against the container beside Elijah. His shoulder touched Elijah's arm. "You're always thinking. Always calculating. Always... what's the word..."
"Surviving."
"That's the one."
They stood in silence for a moment. The crew's singing continued in the background—a different song now, slower, sadder. Something about a girl who waited on a shore and a sailor who never came home.
"I've been trying to understand something," Elijah said.
"Yeah? What's that?"
"The Astraseal. The thing inside me. The thing that lets me do... what I did."
Wilder's expression flickered. The drunken looseness didn't disappear, but it dimmed.
"And you're asking me?"
"I'm asking everyone. You just happened to be nearby."
"Lucky me."
Elijah turned to face the ocean.
"Azaqor gave me a clue. Before all of this. He said the Earth has... nodes. Points where the fabric of reality is thin. Where something from outside can push through."
"Nodes," Wilder repeated.
"Spatial anchors. He called them. Dimensional zones. Separate spaces that are still connected to the Earth—like a satellite receiving a signal."
Wilder's bottle stopped halfway to his mouth.
"How many?"
"Seven. Seven exits. Each one receiving a signal from a different celestial body. Mars. Jupiter. Saturn. Venus. Mercury. The Moon. The Sun."
"Seven planets," Wilder said. "Seven threads. Seven tribes."
"You're catching on."
"I'm not stupid. I just act like it."
Elijah almost smiled.
"One of the locations," he said, "is the Hollow."
Wilder's hand tightened on the bottle.
"The Hollow? Where you—"
"Where Azaqor took me. Where I met Chloe. Where I first touched something I didn't understand."
"How do you know it's one of the nodes?"
"Because I asked Wonko. And because... something else."
Elijah looked at Wilder.
"You're going to think I'm crazy."
"I already think you're crazy. This is just confirming it."
"There's a game. A mobile game. Dungeons and quests and leveling up. People fight monsters, get stronger, unlock secret chests."
Wilder's eyebrow rose.
"And?"
"And there are seven chests. Seven keys. When you unlock one, it tears a barrier in space. It gives you access to unlimited energy from one of the planets."
"Sounds like a video game."
"It is. But there are messages in it. Subliminal. Coded." Elijah paused. "There are fourteen characters. Short names—Kira, Zane, Lys, Fen—and a dozen others."
"You memorized them?"
"I have a good memory."
"Creepy."
"There's a female lead. One of the quests has her walking through a deserted forest. Assassins attack. She fights them off. And on a tree—carved into the bark—there are coordinates."
Wilder was silent.
"Someone found those coordinates," Elijah continued. "Someone random. They searched them online. And funny enough—"
"They led to the Hollow."
"Yes."
Wilder stared at him.
"You're making this up."
"I'm not."
"You have to be making this up. A video game with coordinates that lead to a real place? That's—that's—"
"I thought so too. Then Wilder showed me the Vidflash video."
---
The memory surfaced.
Elijah had been sitting in the cabin, his phone in his hand, the cracked screen of the hijacker's phone lying beside him. Wilder had been sprawled on the bench, scrolling through his own device.
"Hey," Wilder had said. "Remember that game I was telling you about? The dungeon one?"
"Vaguely."
"Look at this."
He had handed over his phone.
The video was grainy—screen recording of someone playing the game. The character was female, with short dark hair and a leather tunic. She moved through a forest rendered in muted greens and browns. The trees were tall, their branches reaching toward a pixelated sky.
The assassins came from nowhere—four of them, their faces hidden by hoods. The combat was quick, brutal, over in seconds. The female character stood victorious over their bodies.
Then the camera panned.
A tree. Old, gnarled, its bark textured with age. And carved into the trunk, faint but legible, were numbers. Coordinates.
Elijah had recognized them immediately.
The Hollow.
He had watched the video three times. Four times. Each time, the coordinates remained the same. Each time, the camera lingered on them for just a moment—long enough to be seen, not long enough to be obvious.
Someone put this here, he had thought. Someone wanted it to be found.
---
Now, on the deck, with Wilder's shoulder against his and the crew's singing fading into the night, Elijah let the memory settle.
"It was real," he said. "The video. The coordinates. The Hollow."
"So the game is... what? A map? A message?"
"I don't know. But someone is trying to tell us something. Someone is trying to lead us somewhere."
Wilder was quiet for a long moment.
"And you think the Astraseal is connected to all of this? To the nodes? To the planets?"
"I think the Astraseal is the key."
"To what?"
"To everything."
Wilder took a long drink from his bottle.
"I need a new life," he said. "One where I don't know about interdimensional nodes and coded video games and ancient behemoths with axes."
"Good luck finding it."
"Yeah." Wilder pushed off from the container. "Good luck to us all."
He walked back toward the crew, his bottle held high, his voice already rising to join the next song.
Elijah stayed at the railing.
The Portside industrial stretch grew larger on the horizon. The cranes were visible now—skeletal shapes against the bruised sky. The lights of the warehouses blinked in patterns that might have been random and might have been a message.
Someone is trying to lead us somewhere, he thought.
I just hope we survive the journey.
---