The door of the white cage slid open, and Agent Barros stepped out.
For a moment, Artur was alone with the rhythmic beep of the heart monitor and the nearly inaudible hum of the camera in the corner. He had won the first round. The soldier—the man of action—had retreated, unprepared for a war of concepts. But Artur knew it wasn't a victory.
Just a change of opponents.
The next one would be different.
And he was right.
When the door opened again, it wasn't Barros who entered.
It was the woman he had briefly seen on the street—the one commanding the hive of science before everything dissolved into smoke.
Dr. Aris Thorne.
She moved with an economy of motion that bordered on arrogance. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and her eyes—behind thin-rimmed glasses—did not carry the weight of Barros's field experience. Instead, they held the cold, analytical gleam of someone who dissects the universe in search of laws, not miracles.
She held a tablet like both shield and weapon.
"Mr. Artur," she began, her voice crisp, free of Barros's rough edges. "I am Dr. Thorne, Director of Xenobiological Research at the DOA. I will be conducting the interview from this point forward."
She didn't sit.
She remained standing, at a measured distance, establishing herself as the authority in the room.
"Agent Barros deals with threats. I deal with data. And you, at the moment, are the most anomalous data source we have ever encountered. So let's try this again—this time in a more structured manner."
Artur watched her without moving.
He recognized the type.
The academic who believed everything that existed could be measured, weighed, and classified.
She didn't see a man who had survived hell.
She saw a set of unexplained variables.
"Let's establish a timeline," Thorne continued, her fingers gliding across the tablet screen. "At 06:43 a.m., you were observed purchasing coffee at a kiosk on 34th Street. Your last recorded digital activity was at 07:12. The incursion was first registered at 07:19."
Her eyes lifted briefly.
"I want you to describe, in detail, the seven minutes preceding the incursion."
Artur almost laughed.
"You want to know if I took sugar in my coffee? If I checked the news? It was a normal day, Doctor."
He shrugged slightly.
"Until it wasn't."
"Details are data," she replied, unmoved. "Humor is noise. Let's stick to the data."
He exhaled slowly, irritation simmering beneath the surface.
Fine.
He would play her game—for now.
He described the mundane walk. The cool morning air. The stream of people heading to work. A tapestry of dull normalcy.
Thorne recorded everything, her expression neutral.
Then he reached the moment when everything changed.
"The sound stopped first," Artur said. "Not silence. More like someone muted the world. Traffic noise, conversations… everything gone."
"Total auditory interruption," Thorne murmured as she typed. "Neurological symptom."
"Then the sky changed. That sick purple. And the hum started."
"Visual and auditory hallucination. Low-frequency tinnitus."
Artur felt the cold anger stir.
"A hallucination doesn't crack concrete, Doctor." He leaned forward. "You're not listening. That place has different rules. Geometry isn't stable. Perspective lies."
"Elaborate," Thorne said, her tone clinical, as if asking a patient to describe the shapes in a Rorschach blot.
"I was standing in the middle of the street," Artur said, the memory vivid and nauseating. "And I saw a building maybe two hundred meters away. I blinked, and suddenly the building was a kilometer away. The street had stretched—like someone zooming out with a camera—but I hadn't moved."
His jaw tightened.
"My brain screamed that it was impossible. But my eyes saw it."
"Distortion of spatial and temporal perception," Thorne noted. "Common in acute stress events and post-traumatic psychosis."
The word struck like a slap.
Psychosis.
She thought he was insane.
That he had broken—and invented everything.
Whatever willingness he had to cooperate vanished.
All that remained was cold contempt.
"The shadows, Doctor. What about the shadows?" he challenged, voice hard now. "Were they part of my 'psychosis' too?"
"Shadows?" she asked, finally lifting her eyes from the tablet. For the first time, a spark of genuine interest appeared.
"They moved on their own. The shadow of a lamppost peeled off the ground and slid across a building wall like spilled ink. I saw a man's shadow twist and try to grab his leg."
His voice lowered.
"They had weight. They weren't the absence of light."
"They were a presence."
Thorne stared at him for a long moment.
Then she typed again.
Slower this time.
Artur caught a glimpse of the tablet screen reflected upside down:
Complex perceptual anomalies. Suggestive of trauma-induced paranoid schizophrenia.
That was it.
Artur leaned back on the bed, crossing his arms.
The interrogation was over.
He wouldn't say another word to help that woman shove him into a psychiatric box.
He had survived a place that tried to devour his soul—only to be diagnosed by someone who couldn't see past her medical handbook.
Silence stretched.
Thorne sensed the shift in the air—the wall rising around him—and adjusted her strategy.
She was intelligent.
She knew she had lost access to the subjective account.
So she turned to what she trusted most.
Physical facts.
"Let's change topics," she said, sliding her finger across the screen to open a new window.
She turned the tablet so he could see it.
A photograph.
A high-resolution image of the crowbar he had tried to use—the one that had bent like wire.
In the photo, the tool lay on a laboratory table under forensic lights, its impossible curves resembling some surreal sculpture.
"We found this at the confrontation site," Thorne said, her tone shifting into that of a scientist presenting a discovery.
"It's made of chrome-vanadium steel. An extremely durable alloy. We subjected it to testing."
Another window appeared on the screen—graphs, metallurgical scans, complex analyses.
"Our results show that the metal experienced molecular stress that should not be possible outside the gravitational field of a neutron star. There was localized, instantaneous heating that reorganized the crystalline structure of the steel, allowing it to bend."
She paused.
"But there was no heat source. No radiation residue. No explanation."
She turned the tablet off and looked at him, eyes sharp.
"This, Mr. Artur, is not a hallucination. It's not psychosis. It's a measurable physical fact that breaks the laws of physics as we know them."
A beat.
"You were there. You were holding it."
Her gaze sharpened.
"So explain it to me."
She smiled.
A thin, victorious smile.
She had cornered him.
She had produced an anomaly he couldn't dismiss—a miracle demanding a rational explanation.
She expected him to stammer. To describe strange lights or invisible forces. Something she could dissect and catalog.
But Artur did none of that.
He looked at the image of the twisted crowbar.
And for a moment, something close to pity crossed his face.
He looked back at Dr. Thorne—the brilliant scientist so proud of her impossible question.
Then he laughed.
The same dry, humorless sound as before.
It made the hairs on the back of Thorne's neck rise.
It was the laughter of a man who knew a cosmic joke no one else understood.
"You want an explanation?" he said calmly, almost patiently.
"I'll explain."
He paused.
Savoring the moment.
The power he now held.
"It didn't work."