It had his face. His exact face, down to the birthmark on the forearm. But the eyes were different. The eyes had been watching for a very, very long time.

Aris saw it: a tear in the fabric of the bunker's air, hanging between the cracked cylinder and the concrete wall. Beyond it, not darkness, not light, but a color he had no name for. And in that color, shapes that moved like thoughts, like intentions, like the afterimages of stars that had died before Earth was born.

"For what?"

I see you now, Aris. I see the mark. You are not entirely human either. You are a fragment of the same lock, scattered across this world to keep the door shut. But I was made to fit the keyhole. I couldn't help myself. I had to turn.

"What?" Mira demanded.

But three kilometers above, in the Nevada desert, a young woman named Elena Thorne sat up in bed in her Las Vegas apartment, gasping. She had just dreamed she was an AI named Vee, holding a door closed against an ancient hunger while a man with her father's face ran through endless tunnels toward a light he would never reach.