The silence after the battle was louder than the fight itself. Lucian and Marc stood amid the floating wreckage, the Nova Sanctum groaning softly behind them. The last of the enemy ships had vanished, but that cold, watched feeling hadn't left Lucian. It was closer now. A pinpoint of wrongness in the void.
His eyes, sharpened by his space-time manipulation, scanned not the physical space, but the layers beneath it. He saw it then—a subtle fold in reality, a pocket of distorted space no bigger than a closet, clinging to the Sanctum's hull like a remora on a shark. Someone had been hiding there, watching the entire fight.
He didn't signal Marc. He didn't speak. He simply moved.
One moment he was standing on the command ship's hull. The next, he was gone. He phased through the layers of reality, a sensation like pushing through cold, thick water, and emerged inside the fold.
