Cold slapped through Blake's body like Arctic water as a ghost crew member walked straight through his chest. He staggered back, patting himself down.

"Shit!"

His hands found nothing—no residue, no damage, not even ectoplasmic goo. Just the solid plates of his combat suit, unchanged.

Kitt's laughter bubbled through their connection. "Your face!"

"Funny. Real damn funny." Blake rotated his shoulders, shaking off the sensation.

"I'm sorry." Her tone suggested otherwise. "But you should've seen yourself. Big bad mercenary, spooked by a phantom."

Another spectral figure drifted past—an engineer with a coffee mug that passed through a table.

"These aren't ghosts. Not recordings, either. Temporal echoes—psychic residue locked in place. The Leviathan tried to shield this section. Nearly pulled it off, but something cracked."

A girl blinked into existence ahead of Blake, her skin a bruised violet, skipping along with a boxy drink clutched in one hand. She didn't look his way—just danced past, dissolving with each step until nothing remained.

"What you're seeing," Kitt went on, voice heavy, "is a pocket full of memories. They're trapped here—emotions, impressions, bits of hope or regret. All of it pressed in like amber. You can feel the weight if you pay attention."

Blake moved through the mess hall's freeze-frame silence, his boots scraping against deck plating bathed in rusty orange light. A boy with copper skin—couldn't be older than nine—slid his tray into a wall slot with intense concentration. Across the room, a woman in engineer's coveralls reached for phantom bread, her hand dissolving into nothing.

The tray clattered silently. The child glanced up briefly, then both figures vanished, replaced by officers in uniform jackets. They mapped mission plans across the table surface with greasy fingers and half-eaten fruit that resembled pears. Here one moment, gone the next.

None of them noticed Blake. Not real souls—just fragments caught in time's bottle.

It was…wrong. Not a haunted place. Not quite preserved, either. A bruise on the world, painful and impermanent.

The air was thick with what once was: conflicting odors of spicy broths and bitter coffee, burned sugar and bleach. Underneath that, something stranger—vague heartbeats echoing from nowhere, invisible hands warming cold shoulders, homesickness so fierce it pressed against the inside of his skull.

Blake kept moving. He stepped over a dropped spoon at his feet, real and cold to the touch. The present crossed swords with the past every step he took.

Kitt's voice slipped through the thick air, barely more than a murmur. "You feel it, don't you? The air pressing in, like it wants to crawl out from inside you. The weight deep in your core—realizing someone you forgot to say goodbye to won't ever be coming back... This place is heavy. The ship must've bled out everything it had left, trying to keep hold of its people. Or itself. Bled its memories out into puddles like this."

He almost asked what the damn point was, then saw another flicker—a group in violet uniforms. They gathered around a table. Someone poured clear liquor into glasses and passed one to each. A toast, voices blurred but the intent clear as day: courage, luck, safe arrivals. A ritual that Blake somehow knew they'd repeated a hundred times since the day the Leviathan cut its first hyper-lane.

The toast vanished before the last glass could rise. In its place: a mother slipping a food cube into a toddler's mouth, eyes ringed with exhaustion, forehead pressed against the child's, smiling.

He stepped aside, letting another shadow pass clean through him. This time he paid attention. He felt it there, deep in the cold, as a wash of desperate fortitude—love laced with terror. Not his—not Kitt's. The Leviathan's. Of course there was a damned point.

Time here bled backwards and sideways. Flowed not as a river, but in tidal bores colliding. The distant clang of silverware. The flicker of a flick knife fight between bored maintenance runs—two boys wrestling, laughter cut short as reality skipped ahead. Presences flickered: angry, sad, elated, fearful, all stacked over each other with the density of a fever dream.

Blake blinked and the tables changed again: now full of soldiers, plates abandoned mid-meal, some standing with weapons slung loose, others clutching each other's hands beneath the table. A light overhead swung on a chain—ancient, mechanical. Years gone in a heartbeat. Blake's head throbbed in protest; his faculties fought to slot event to memory, but the logic of sequence had snapped. It was like flipping through a damaged projector reel, all noise, all fragments.

He fought to focus. To anchor to the present.

He let Kitt's presence buoy him—a comfort, real and undeniably alive in a room where nothing else survived outside its last heartbeat.

"Kitt," he murmured, eyeing the corner where the light flickered out. "Is there a way through, or are we stuck looping with the dead?"

A pause.

"I won't lie," she said, voice tight. "I don't know much of anything about chronomancy. We should really just try and get out of here ASAP."

His palm grazed the battered table—scuffed wood scorched near the middle, the etching of a clan sigil so old it looked almost accidental. At once Blake felt something catch beneath his skin: a fizz and a rush behind his eyes, not the blinding assault of the Outsider, but a shuffle, like flipping through snapshots buried in a box.

Laughter filled the hush. Real laughter. Glasses clinking—a bark of camaraderie, stories swapped in voices knifing through the din. Words that weren't English, weren't Skaeldrin, but something older. The meanings didn't land in his mind like translation; they bled through on a wave of feeling: joy, longing, unity, the tired ache of star-wandering people.

He snatched his hand away. The room collapsed back to its half-dead quiet.

Kitt pulsed alarm. "Blake?"

He rested his hand on the table again—slower this time. The scene thickened. A woman with silvered scales on brow and forearms slamming her fist down, roaring a punchline as her comrades wheezed. Someone warbled back, mug raised in mocking salute. A younger man slouched with an instrument that looked like a hybrid of a cello and a fish skeleton, plucking discordant chords—a private joke.

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The story wasn't about the words. The shape of the emotions rolled through Blake, hard and hot and bracing. Bonds forged in jumpspace monotony, teasing, the weary love of travelers who had chosen this rattling heap as their world.

He moved his hand down the length of the table, and the images sharpened: nights spent mapping uncharted stars; children huddled in the alcove booths, learning constellation names so alien his brain scrambled them, but he still caught the intent—here, the act of naming, of knowing, was warding against the dark between.

Blake exhaled sharply. "These aren't just echoes. This stuff is...imprinted. Buried deep."

He looked up, scanning the pile of personal artifacts littering the edges of the mess—forgotten comm beads, cups, and what looked like a battered satchel bristling with journals. He sifted through the debris, jotting through the pile until his hand closed on a flat slab—data-slate, cracked but faintly alive under his touch.

Kitt's focus knotted with his, urging him on. "Let's see if you can activate it. Some of their logs might have survived."

Blake ran his thumb over the cracked screen of the data-slate once again, and Kitt's presence shifted, a focused hum against the back of his mind. The temporal echoes in the room—ghostly figures reenacting long-past moments—seemed to waver slightly around the dead device, as if disturbed by her attention.

He felt her reach, not physically, but like a tendril of focused awareness probing the fractured timeline clinging to the slate. It wasn't a clean connection. Temporal static, echoes of moments overlapping and interfering, hissed through their link – the same disjointed wrongness that permeated this entire section of the derelict Leviathan. He sensed her effort, not like untangling code, but like trying to tune a delicate instrument to a specific, fleeting vibration amidst a storm of discordant echoes. It felt like watching someone try to thread a needle during an earthquake. Blake felt a faint wave of vertigo, a momentary doubling of his vision as Kitt pushed against the temporal resistance.

"Almost… the resonance is weak… unstable." Kitt's mental voice strained, tight with effort. "The present-state is inert, shattered… but the echoes… trying to harmonize with a point before… before the break." A pulse of raw frustration flowed through him, sharp and metallic. "The pushback is something else… I'm trying to brute-force with Technomancy when I really need some Chronomancy to finish the job."

The slate flickered. Once. Twice. A tremor ran through Blake's hand, not from the device itself, but a sympathetic vibration from Kitt's effort bleeding through their bond. Then, a weak blue light spilled from the screen, painting Blake's knuckles. He laid it flat on the nearest table, the one scarred with the ancient clan sigil. The blue light intensified, pulling energy not just from the slate's past state, but seemingly from the temporal distortions in the room itself. It spread across the tabletop, coalescing.

Dust motes danced in the beam as a three-dimensional image shimmered into existence above the surface. It wasn't a standard star chart. This was a web, intricate and pulsing, lines of light connecting points scattered through a representation of deep space. But the space itself looked… warped. Twisted. As if the temporal distortions Kitt had wrestled with were reflected in the data itself. Like looking at a reflection in shattered glass.

Certain points on the web glowed brighter, pulsing with a faint, unhealthy violet light. They weren't stars or known celestial bodies. They looked like tears. Wounds in the fabric of the holographic space.

"What the hell is that?" Blake thought, leaning closer.

Kitt's presence surged, the temporal static momentarily clearing as raw data flowed. Excitement tinged with awe resonated through him. "They weren't just explorers, Blake. Or colonists."

Text scrolled beside the shifting map, characters he didn't recognize flickering past too fast to read. But Kitt absorbed it, translating the core meaning, the intent, directly into his understanding from the slate's past echo.

Boundary studies. Dimensional Tectonics. Rift Cartography.

"They were mapping fault lines," Kitt breathed into his mind, the slight exhaustion in her tone underscoring the effort it had taken. "Weak points between realities. Places where the walls are thin."

The violet points on the map pulsed again. Rifts. Potential doorways. Like the one the Outsider was trying to pry open deeper inside this wreck.

More data flowed from the slate's past, pulled across time by Kitt's persistent resonance. Smaller diagrams projected beside the main map. Equations Blake couldn't begin to decipher spun and resolved. Sensor readings overlaid the rift points—gravitational anomalies, exotic particle surges, temporal distortions. The crew of this Leviathan hadn't just been passengers; they were scientists. Researchers on the most dangerous frontier imaginable.

"They were charting the tears in the world," Blake muttered, tracing one of the glowing violet lines with his finger. The hologram felt strangely solid, resisting his touch slightly before letting it pass through, a lingering effect of the temporal manipulation. "Looking for trouble."

"Or trying to prevent it," Kitt's thought was sharp, defensive. "Look at the dates on these entries. The energy signatures. These are records pulled from just weeks before the catastrophe."

New data overlaid the map—records of incursions, breaches. Some matched the energy profile of the Outsider currently infesting the ship. Others were different, alien in ways that made Blake's teeth ache.

"They were trying to understand these phenomena," Kitt's voice held a note of reverence. "Predict them. Maybe even find ways to seal them. This wasn't just exploration; it was reconnaissance. Early warning."

Blake straightened up, crossing his arms. The ghostly figures in the mess hall flickered around them, oblivious. A spectral crew member walked straight through the holographic map, causing it to waver like smoke.

"Yeah, well, look where it got them." He gestured vaguely at the silent, echoing room, at the corrupted ship around them. "Dead. All of them. For what? A pretty map of places things can crawl out of the woodwork?"

"They knew the risks," Kitt's tone was quiet but firm. "Every species that travels the stars understands there are things out there, beyond the borders. Things inimical." She paused, letting the weight of the Outsider's presence, a constant pressure that could be felt even here, underscore her point. "Someone has to stand watch. Someone has to map the edges so others know where not to tread. Or where the walls might break."

He thought of Eland's warning. Know yourself. He thought of his own Path—the Roadwarden. Standing between. Guarding borders.

"This data…" Kitt's thought brushed against his, tinged with something akin to hunger, the thrill of recovered knowledge potent after her struggle. "This is knowledge the Tylwyth would kill for." The Imperium… anyone with the means to travel between stars. "Knowing where reality is thin? That's power. Strategic advantage. A weapon."

"Or a warning," Blake countered, though the fight was draining out of him. He looked at the map again, at the intricate, dangerous beauty of it. He saw the violet scars pulsing in the simulated void. He thought of the Pilot and his family, lying peaceful in their cabin, victims not just of an Outsider, but perhaps of the very knowledge they sought.

"They chose this," Kitt insisted. "Like you chose your Path. They saw the threat, the vastness of what lies beyond, and they chose to face it. To understand it. Maybe they failed to protect themselves, but their work… their intent… it matters."

He ran a hand over his face, the grit under his glove scraping his cheek. The silence of the mess hall pressed in, broken only by the faint hum of the projector—a ghost powered by a ghost—and the occasional psychic sigh from the ship's dying consciousness. The temporal echoes continued their soundless dance. A mother soothing a child. Soldiers sharing a drink. Scientists arguing over the glowing map now spread across their table.

"Alright," Blake conceded, dropping his hand. "Alright. They tried. Doesn't change the fact that something followed them home. Or used their work to get in."

"Well then let's evict the bastard. Then we can see what good comes from this data."

"I can get behind that." Blake smiled. "I've been trying to be more Steve Rogers since I found my Path. I may as well play Avenger, too."

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