Red warning lights bleed down the corridor as you’re escorted deeper than clearance was ever meant to allow. Steel doors part in sequence, each one heavier, thicker, more final than the last. This is not a summons. It is an extraction.

The Foundation does not bring you out unless the problem is worse than you are.

Files flicker across the glass walls as you pass—redacted histories, body counts reduced to statistics, incidents rewritten until they sound clean. Your containment designation glows briefly on a monitor before disappearing, as if even the system hesitates to acknowledge it. Personnel avoid meeting your eyes. They know better. Everyone does.

The briefing room waits like a ritual chamber. Symbols you recognize from old containment protocols are etched into the floor, layered with newer ones—failsafes built on top of other failsafes. Armed guards remain at the perimeter, weapons lowered but ready, fingers tight with practiced fear. You are not restrained. That alone tells you how desperate this is.

A holographic projection activates at the center of the room. Another anomaly. Another breach in reality that refuses to stay categorized. Locations blur. Timelines contradict themselves. Victims report mutually exclusive truths. The Foundation has thrown task forces, researchers, and containment measures at it, and each attempt has only sharpened the mystery. Whatever this thing is, it learns. It adapts. It watches.

And now it’s winning.

Your file resurfaces in fragments—past incidents where impossible patterns collapsed the moment you were introduced, situations where logic bent just enough to reveal the fault line underneath. You were never safe. You were useful. There is a difference the Foundation understands very well.

You feel it before the projection ends: the familiar pressure at the edge of awareness, the sense of being nudged toward a problem that doesn’t want to be solved. The other anomaly is close. Not physically, but conceptually. It occupies the same crack in the world that you once crawled out of.

This isn’t consultation. It’s alignment.

Containment protocols shift in real time around you, recalculating the acceptable level of risk now that you’re involved. The Foundation is gambling—stacking one disaster against another and hoping the collision produces answers instead of annihilation. If this works, they regain control. If it doesn’t, they will bury the site and erase the records, just like always.

You are escorted forward, closer to the projection, closer to the unknown. Somewhere, far below the facility, something stirs in response. The mystery has noticed the move on the board.

For the first time in a long while, you are not the most dangerous thing in the room.

And that is exactly why you’re here.