Sera Voss had a theory.
She shared it with him on a night when the salvage run had gone badly a cascade collapse in Quantum Layer Seven had destroyed two months of careful excavation, and they had returned to the institute grimy and exhausted and quietly furious, and she had spread her research across the table between them and started talking because she could not sleep.
Her theory was this: the Sundering had not been an accident.
Someone had caused it. Deliberately. And the evidence buried in corrupted data-layers, in fractured signal echoes, in the ghost-prints of information that should have been completely destroyed suggested that the someone had understood dimensional theory in a way that went so far beyond the civilization's collective knowledge that they had practically been operating from a future that had not existed yet.
Kael sat very still and drank very bad coffee and did not say anything.
"The interesting part," Sera said, leaning across the research, dark eyes lit with the specific brightness of a mind too engaged to be careful, "is the signal signature left behind. We keep finding it. Layer after layer. It pre-dates the Sundering by decades in some cases this same anomalous frequency showing up in data that should not have been able to carry it." She pushed a readout toward him. "Tell me what you see."
He looked at it.
He felt the floor of his reality shift underneath him in a way that had nothing to do with dimensional physics.
The signal signature was his. Not like his. Not similar to his. The exact frequency of the Echo mapped, recorded, and preserved in the collapsed ruins of a civilisation that had died two hundred years before he was born in a universe that was not even his universe of origin.
He took a careful breath.
An interesting anomaly,he said.
She studied his face for a moment with that disconcerting directness. 'You have seen it before.'
He met her eyes. 'No.'
It was the only time, in three years of working together, that he lied to her directly. And she knew it. He could see that she knew it, in the slight shift of her expression not anger, but a careful, patient noting. A flag placed in the map of him, to be returned to.
She returned to her research. He returned to his coffee. The signal frequency pulsed behind his sternum like it was trying to tell him something.
He was already beginning to understand that this world "this dimension" was not random. That nothing in the last eleven years had been random. That he had not stumbled through dimensions.
He had been guided.