Chapter 379: Project AION

The folder is still open in front of me.

Expected contact: Dryden Sands.

I’ve read that line too many times for it to still have any chance of being a misreading.

Rhayne stays seated beside me, looking at the same page while the café moves around us. Cups hit the counter. A coffee machine hisses a few yards behind us. Two people argue about transit near the entrance.

Nothing about this place matches the feeling that somebody just pulled another piece of the floor out from under us.

I turn the page.

I’m not looking for my name anymore.

I’m looking for hers.

Rhayne’s section is thicker than it looked when we opened it. Some of it is only copied records: civil documents, her parents’ history, orphanage data, first Dive, medical evaluations. Other pages carry Arthur’s handwritten notes.

It’s on a page near the middle that I find something different.

There’s a code in the upper right corner.

AION-02.

The word catches me again, immediately.

"AION."

Rhayne looks over.

"Does that mean something to you?"

"Let’s say the item that brought me back was called the Aion Codex."

I read it again.

There’s no explanation for the name. Only a short identifier at the top and, below it, a list that doesn’t look like it was made after Arthur met Rhayne.

It looks like a search profile.

PROJECT AION — SEARCH PARAMETERS

My eyes go down the page.

Female.

Estimated age range of fourteen to sixteen at first Dive.

Both parents registered as Divers.

Prolonged absence or confirmed death of guardians.

Institutional residence.

First Dive within a specific window of months.

Irregular OXI affinity.

Passive manifestation related to reduced presence or social perception.

Probable difficulty integrating with large groups.

My hand stops on the page.

Rhayne leans closer.

She reads in silence until she reaches the end.

"Den..."

"I know."

"That’s me."

"Almost."

She looks at me.

"Almost?"

I point at the sheet.

"There’s no name. No photo. This was written before anyone identified you."

Rhayne looks back at the document.

The list doesn’t describe a person in enough detail to be a portrait. There’s no hair color, no height, nothing particular that could only come from someone watching Rhayne directly.

They’re criteria.

Someone was looking for a specific type of girl, like they knew what to look for but not who.

And Rhayne fit that type completely.

I turn another page.

There’s a short table with several names crossed out.

Four girls.

Two fall outside the age range after a records update. One doesn’t manifest any OXI-related ability. Another has living, active guardians.

At the bottom of the page, in Arthur’s hand:

None compatible. Expand search to District 3.

Rhayne goes very quiet.

I move to the next sheet.

Another header.

CANDIDATE LOCATED — RHAYNE VESPER

My stomach tightens.

Below it, Arthur wrote:

Compatibility above expected threshold. Observe before contact.

Rhayne reads it, then reads it again.

"So he already knew who I was before he talked to me."

I don’t answer right away.

She turns the page. There are dates. Notes on routine. First months in Thirstfall. Behavior when she came back to safe facilities. People she spoke to. Habits over there.

"He followed me."

"Yes, but look. Only in Thirstfall. There’s nothing saying he followed you here."

Rhayne looks at me.

"Of course. How could he have followed me? I never came back after my first Dive."

"You’re right."

I run a finger along the first date.

Arthur tracked Rhayne for weeks before the contact she’s always described as if it had been accidental.

Until today, the story was simple. A girl alone. A man who noticed her potential. Someone who decided to teach her.

Now there’s an entire earlier phase Rhayne never knew happened.

"He was looking for someone like you before he knew you existed," I say.

The sentence seems to land harder than the rest.

Rhayne closes the folder for a few seconds, as if she needs to stop anything else from coming out of it.

"Why?"

"I don’t know."

"What did I have?"

"Something this Project AION wanted."

She looks at me.

"Damn it, Dryden."

"I’m as lost as you are."

I open the folder again, and in the corner of another page there’s a source reference.

ESM-921 — Institutional Archive.

I know that number. It’s the orphanage’s address.

Rhayne recognizes it too.

"They took this from there."

"Part of it, at least."

She frowns.

"Arthur never contacted me outside Thirstfall."

"That doesn’t mean he never went in there without you. Maybe he found all of this here on Earth after the two of you got close."

I take out my phone and photograph the main pages before organizing everything again.

One name catches my attention.

AION-03

S. CAMILLE — Project concluded.

My stomach goes cold, but after a quick read, nothing else in there describes any lead that would confirm my suspicions or the coincidence. It’s only a name with a project marked as concluded. I don’t stop thinking about the possibility either.

"Let’s go back."

Rhayne doesn’t ask where, as if she already knows.

-------------

[67:32:04]

We spend three hours traveling to our next destination. The old orphanage looks smaller when we come back.

Maybe because now we know more about what happened there.

The Halcyon Civic Development sign is still fixed outside and there are still no workers on site. The building remains in the same state of abandonment we found the letter in yesterday.

Halcyon.

Stardeep.

Valerius.

The temptation to put all of it on the same line is strong, but the chronology won’t allow it.

Arthur started looking for Rhayne a year ago in Earth time.

Halcyon took the building months ago.

The company could have bought a property holding old traces without even knowing about them. Or it could have bought it precisely because it knew.

I still have no way to separate the two possibilities.

We go in through the same side opening.

Rhayne takes the lead this time. She doesn’t look at the old dormitories or at the room where she found the letter.

She goes straight to the administrative corridor.

"The director kept the files in here."

The door is closed, but the lock has already been forced. The metal around the latch has recent marks.

"That was definitely broken into."

"Halcyon?"

"Or someone before them."

I push and the door opens.

The office is small. Two desks, a metal cabinet, an empty shelf, and an old terminal with no visible connection to any external network. Part of the furniture was removed, but the papers weren’t.

There are boxes left near the wall, some open and others still carrying orphanage labels.

Rhayne starts with those.

I turn on the terminal.

Nothing.

Even with power, the screen doesn’t respond.

I open the back panel and find the memory removed.

"Somebody didn’t want this to turn on."

Rhayne looks over her shoulder.

"Or they took them because they’re worth money."

"That’s the less interesting version."

"It also tends to be the correct one, especially in an abandoned building, Den."

"Killjoy."

She goes back to the boxes, and then we search by hand.

It doesn’t take long to find the old filing system.

Each child had a physical folder in addition to the electronic records. The documents follow a numbered sequence, with an index stapled to the cover.

Rhayne finds hers before I do.

She stands there holding the folder.

"Found it."

I come closer.

VESPER, RHAYNE.

The file is thinner than the one from Arthur’s post office box.

I open it.

Intake record. Parents’ details. School. Medical evaluations. First Dive.

Everything we’ve already seen.

Rhayne checks the index.

Her finger moves down slowly.

"Den."

I look.

There are twenty-two entries listed.

The folder has twenty-one.

Rhayne points.

20 — External data request / authorized copy.

The page isn’t there.

"Who authorized it?"

"That’s what I was going to ask."

The index line carries no name. Only a date and an internal number.

I compare it with the material from the post office box.

The date matches one of the earliest Project AION notes.

Almost exactly.

"Four days," I say.

Rhayne understands.

"Between this and Arthur marking me as a candidate?"

"Between this and him writing that he’d located you."

She looks at the file again.

"So he got my data from here."

"Or someone got it for him."

I photograph the index.

Then I look for the request number among the general records.

There’s a control log in the last box.

It takes me a few minutes to find the right period.

The number shows up.

Requester: private organization.

The name was covered with dark ink.

Not crossed out.

Covered deliberately.

"Lovely."

Rhayne comes closer.

"Can it be recovered?"

"Maybe with equipment."

I run a finger over the surface. The ink used to censor it is old, but not old enough to have fully bonded into the paper.

I think about Link.

Then I drop the idea.

Link reads the item as it exists now. I have no guarantee it would rebuild ink hidden under ink.

Rescue might pull some memory out of the paper, but using that in a room full of documents without knowing what kind of mark is in there could hand me a useless sequence, or so much information that it would leave me drunk on it.

"We don’t need the name yet."

Rhayne raises an eyebrow.

"We’re in the middle of an investigation and you just said we don’t need the name?"

"We have the order of events."

I point at the dates.

"Someone started a search. Four days later the orphanage records were accessed. Shortly after, Arthur identified you. The name sitting there barely matters. The evidence already exists."

She closes the log.

"So it wasn’t a coincidence."

"No."

The word stays between us.

Arthur didn’t find her.

Arthur ran a search.

----

[63:22:04]

We get home late in the afternoon and I dump the contents of the post office box onto the bed. All of the material.

My mother asks whether we found anything, looking at that mountain of documents.

I only say:

"We found more questions. They’re things that belonged to Dad somehow, but we have to understand them first."

She doesn’t push.

I throw myself headfirst into the pile of documents while my thoughts wander.

My father was feeding Arthur information. But that still doesn’t prove Project AION came from him. It could have been Arthur’s own investigation. It could have been someone else’s. It could have been something from the Lancaster family.

I look for everything dated before Rhayne was located.

Rhayne sits beside me on the bed.

"What are you looking for?"

"The first instruction."

"The order from whoever sent him to find someone like me?"

"Exactly."

She takes another pile, and then we work in silence for a while. This time nobody jokes.

The pages start forming a strange logic.

Arthur didn’t seem to know exactly who he was looking for.

In some notes he questioned the criteria.

In others he updated the search like someone carrying out a task he’d been given.

I find a note in the margin of a discarded sheet:

A.S. insists the candidate must be prepared before contact.

I stare at it.

Rhayne notices.

"Did you find something?"

I slide the page over.

She reads it.

"A.S."

"My father."

Rhayne keeps her eyes on the line.

"’Prepared before contact.’"

"Yes."

"Contact here is you, right?"

"I believe so."

She leans back.

For the first time since we started this investigation, Rhayne looks uncomfortable. Not with Arthur. With Alden.

"So it was your father."

"I still don’t know how much."

"But he was involved."

"That part I can’t deny anymore."

Rhayne looks back at the page.

"What does prepared mean?"

"Arthur decided on espionage."

"Maybe he didn’t decide alone."

She folds her arms.

"Den, he taught me to survive. To get money. To watch people. To get into places without being noticed. Then he said I had to reach Azure Prime."

I know the next words before she says them.

"If I became a good enough spy and got into the Academy within two years, I’d find someone who would take care of me."

The same account as the day she told me about Arthur. Except now the sentence means something else. Back then it sounded like a mentor’s promise. An attempt to leave Rhayne with someone after he was gone.

I look at the Project AION document.

At the search parameters.

At my father’s note.

"He wasn’t preparing you to survive until you found someone."

Rhayne stares at me.

"He was taking me to you."

I don’t say anything else, and I don’t need to.

She looks back down at the bed.

"That’s..."

"Strange?"

"I was going to say disturbing."

"I’m sorry about that."

She stays still for a few seconds.

"So all of this was planned?"

The question comes out quieter.

This is where I have to be careful.

"No."

Rhayne looks at me.

"Arthur planned your training. Maybe my father told him to find someone like you. They probably planned to put you at Azure Prime inside my route."

I point between us.

"But not this."

She doesn’t answer.

"Arthur didn’t make you trust me. He didn’t make you stay. He didn’t make you tell me about Void Monarch. He didn’t make you save Veric. He didn’t make you show me that letter after he asked you to do exactly the opposite."

Her face changes a little.

I keep going.

"And he definitely didn’t plan half the arguments you’ve picked with me. He didn’t plan me helping you from the start either."

"Wait. I picked them?"

"All of them."

"Den!"

"Fine. Some of them."

She gives a faint smile.

"They may have put two people on the same path," I say. "The rest was ours."

Rhayne holds that small smile for a few seconds.

Then she goes back to the pages.

"Why me?"

That’s the question that matters.

I look at the parameters again.

Anomalous OXI affinity.

Unusual passive.

Diver parents.

First Dive inside a specific window.

Isolation.

Nothing there answers it.

"I don’t know."

"Maybe Void Monarch."

"You didn’t have Void Monarch when that search started."

"But maybe they knew I would."

"Then we’re back to the problem of someone knowing things they shouldn’t, at a time they shouldn’t."

She props her arms on her knees.

"What was I supposed to do for you?"

The question catches me differently.

"Nothing."

"Den."

"I’m serious. There’s no function written here. No order saying you should protect me, work for me, or do anything specific after the contact."

I pick up the sheet.

"Only find a candidate, prepare her, and put her in my path."

Rhayne looks at her own name.

"That’s worse."

"A little."

If someone were preparing a contingency for a son, I’d expect money. A hidden account. A weapon. A safe house. Maybe contacts.

My father seems to have chosen something else.

A person.

Rhayne.

The idea bothers me more the longer it stays in my head.

Not because it diminishes who she is.

Because it turns Alden into a man who already expected some situation where I’d need to find exactly someone like her.

Either he knew about my new future, or something very wrong is happening.

Long before I died and opened my eyes in the past.

For months I thought my choices were deforming the future.

Now I’m finding out that someone started moving pieces before I was even back on the board.

And Alden Sands was among those people, and he looks like the main one.

I lean back and keep looking at the authorization.

PROJECT AION — AUTHORIZATION GRANTED. — A.S.

My father didn’t start preparing my future after something went wrong.

He started before he walked out of this house for his last dive.