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Alex came back to consciousness the way he always did—fast, controlled, and already assessing. He did not open his eyes immediately. There was no point wasting the advantage. Instead, he let his awareness expand outward in careful increments, building a picture of his surroundings before committing to movement. The surface beneath him was hard and smooth, not concrete but something cleaner, more precise. The temperature was cool without being uncomfortable, the air dry and filtered, stripped of the chemical tang he had come to associate with laboratories. There were no nearby footsteps, no voices, only a low, constant hum that suggested machinery operating at a level just beneath conscious notice.
He ran through a quick inventory of his own condition: no restraints, no immediate pain beyond a dull ache along his left shoulder, which suggested he had landed badly at some point, and no residual heaviness in his limbs that would indicate sedation. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t involved drugs, and that alone made this different from most of the situations he’d woken up in.
Alex opened his eyes.
The ceiling curved.
It took a moment for his brain to accept that, not because it was impossible, but because it was wrong in a way that resisted immediate classification. Rooms had corners, edges that met at predictable angles. This one didn’t. The surface above him was seamless, pale, and faintly reflective, broken only by strips of recessed light that followed gentle arcs instead of straight lines, creating an effect that was subtle but persistent, like something designed according to rules he didn’t recognize.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow and then into a sitting position, ignoring the brief protest from his shoulder, and let the rest of the room resolve around him. The walls met the floor without visible seams, panels were set flush into the structure as if they had grown there rather than been installed, and there was nothing so ordinary as a handle or hinge anywhere in sight. He had seen expensive facilities before and secret ones hidden behind layers of bureaucracy and deliberate misdirection, but this was neither. It was too exact, too deliberate, as though whoever had designed it had started from first principles and decided that conventional architecture was unnecessary.
Alex got to his feet, noting how the floor gave slightly under his weight before holding, responsive rather than passive, and even that small detail reinforced the sense that this place operated on a different level from anything he was used to. He moved slowly across the room, eyes tracking without appearing to linger, counting potential exits and identifying irregularities: one large panel that might be a door, two smaller interfaces embedded in the wall, and no visible cameras, which meant there were cameras, simply placed well enough that he wouldn’t find them without time he didn’t have.
That, more than anything else, told him he was being observed.
“Hello?” he said, the word feeling thin in the air, absorbed rather than carried.
No one answered.
He stopped in front of the largest panel and studied it. Up close, faint patterns revealed themselves beneath the surface, shifting slightly depending on the angle of the light, like circuitry buried under glass. There was no seam, no obvious mechanism, nothing to suggest how it might open. He reached out, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and pressed his palm flat against it.
Nothing happened.
“Of course,” Alex murmured, stepping back and forcing himself to slow down.
The last clear thing he remembered was movement—real movement, grounded, familiar. A mission. Not a lab, not a controlled environment, but something active, something that had required attention elsewhere, followed by disruption that wasn’t pain or impact so much as a break in continuity sharp enough that his mind had never had the chance to process it properly.
And then this.
No transport he knew worked like that, and no technology MI6 had ever hinted at could do this, which left one possibility that Alex did not particularly like.
He exhaled slowly and turned away from the wall, walking to the far side of the room. There, set at shoulder height, was a wide panel that at first looked like a mirror, reflecting him back in muted tones that seemed slightly off, as if the lighting were imperfect rather than the surface itself. He took a step closer, more out of instinct than intention, and watched as the image shifted.
Not correctly.
Not in a way that a reflection should.
There was a delay, subtle but undeniable, as if the surface needed time to catch up to him.
Alex stilled as the image sharpened, resolving into something else entirely.
It wasn’t a mirror.
It was a window.
And beyond it, there was nothing that belonged to Earth.
Stars.
They stretched out in every direction, sharp and cold against a depth that felt almost too large to comprehend, with no horizon, no point of reference, nothing to anchor the eye except the distant geometry of something vast and artificial extending beyond the frame—lines of light tracing its structure, sections rotating with slow, deliberate precision.
For a long moment, Alex did not move. He had been in planes, in submarines, in places where the world narrowed to a single line of sight and everything else fell away, but this was the opposite. This was everything, all at once, and none of it where it should be.
He stepped closer to the glass, picking out the structure in more detail.
A station.
The thought came fully formed, accompanied by something colder that settled in behind it—not just a station, but a constructed environment operating at a level of technology far beyond anything he had seen, hidden or otherwise.
Alex let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. “Okay,” he said softly. “That’s new.”
He rested his hand lightly against the glass, feeling no vibration, no sense of movement. If the station was in orbit—or wherever it was—it was stable enough that the human body did not register the motion, which implied a level of stabilization technology he didn’t want to think too hard about just yet.
Because that led directly to the real problem.
Time.
There were only two ways he could be standing here, looking out at something like this: either someone had built a space station far beyond known capability and neglected to mention it to every government on Earth, or—
He was no longer in his own time.
Alex closed his eyes briefly, more to steady the thought than to avoid it, and when he opened them again, the stars were still there.
“Right,” he said, more quietly this time.
He turned away from the window just as the wall behind him slid open without a sound.
Alex pivoted immediately, already moving, already calculating distance and positioning.
Three people stood in the doorway. Two wore uniforms that marked them as military in posture if not in any insignia he recognized. The third stood slightly behind them, dressed in something more clinical—dark, precise, functional in a way that suggested a technician or medical role rather than anything civilian.
None of them looked surprised to see him on his feet.
“Subject is conscious,” the technician said, glancing down at a thin handheld device.
Alex straightened, his expression neutral. “‘Subject’ usually means I’m not going to like what comes next.”
One of the uniformed figures stepped into the room. “You will come with us.”
Alex didn’t move. “Before or after you explain where I am?”
“That is not required at this stage.”
He tilted his head slightly, studying them, noting the lack of insignia, the standardized accents, and the absence of any identifying detail that might tie them to a specific country or organization he recognized. The data points were adding up, but not in a way he liked.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said. “Last time someone told me that, I ended up on an island with a man who liked feeding people to sharks.”
The technician looked up, interest sharpening in a way that suggested this was the reaction they had expected, or perhaps hoped for.
“Your file indicates a tendency toward resistance.”
“My file’s not wrong.”
A brief pause followed, then, unexpectedly, the technician said, “You have been brought here for evaluation by the International Fleet.”
Alex didn’t react outwardly. The name meant nothing on its own, sounding like something pulled from a briefing designed to make a military organization seem larger than it was, but the structure around it—the facility, the retrieval, the lack of explanation—told him everything he needed to know. He hadn’t been sent here. They had taken him. And whatever this place was, it wasn’t part of anything he knew.
He considered his options in the same calm, measured way he always did: fight, and he would be contained; run, and he would discover very quickly how large this place was and how little he understood it; cooperate, and he might learn enough to make a better decision later. Alex had survived this long by choosing his battles carefully, so he took a step forward.
“Fine,” he said. “Lead the way.”
The corridor outside curved in the same seamless way as the room, brightly lit and deliberately uniform. As they walked, Alex let his gaze move without appearing to focus on anything in particular, mapping what he could from reflection, spacing, and rhythm. There were no windows at first, only smooth surfaces and recessed panels, until farther along the corridor widened slightly and a viewing section revealed the same impossible expanse of stars he had seen before. That, more than anything else, told him how secure they believed themselves to be; if the environment itself was not considered a liability, then escape was either impossible or so tightly controlled that it did not matter.
They passed another group in the corridor, and Alex did not slow, though he noticed everything. There were five of them, all younger than him by several years, none older than ten. They wore identical uniforms—grey, functional, deliberately stripped of anything that might distinguish one from another—and moved together without quite acknowledging that they were doing so. There was no talking, no careless movement, none of the restless energy that usually defined children left to themselves.
That absence stood out more than anything else, and set Alex on edge.
Children made noise. They tested limits simply because they existed. These didn’t. They carried themselves with a kind of contained awareness that suggested they had already learned, very quickly, that attention could be dangerous.
One of them glanced up as Alex passed. He was small, dark-haired, his expression composed in a way that didn’t quite fit his age. Most children wore their thoughts openly; this one didn’t. His gaze fixed on Alex with a level of focus that felt less like curiosity and more like analysis, as though he were trying to understand something that didn’t fit into the pattern he had been given.
Alex met his eyes for a fraction of a second.
It was enough.
There was no confusion there, no obvious fear. If anything, the boy seemed to be assessing him, breaking him down into parts and fitting them into something that made sense. Alex looked away first, not out of discomfort but because he had already learned what he needed to, and they continued on without interruption.
He adjusted his pace without thinking, matching the escort’s stride beside him, keeping his posture loose enough to suggest compliance while maintaining full awareness. The corridor’s design remained consistent—no variation in lighting, no blind spots, nothing that felt accidental—and he filed each detail away as it came: the uniforms, the age range, the controlled movement, the absence of visible supervision paired with the certainty of constant observation, and the station itself, sealed and isolated in a way that made departure dependent on systems he didn’t yet understand.
The pattern formed gradually, not as a sudden realization but as a series of confirmations that aligned too cleanly to ignore.
It wasn’t unfamiliar.
Alex had seen versions of it before, stripped down and disguised under different names. You removed a subject from anything stable, controlled the environment, limited their choices, and applied pressure in measured ways until adaptation became the only viable response. People called it training when they wanted it to sound acceptable. It rarely was.
He kept his expression neutral as they turned another corner, revealing a stretch of identical doors set at even intervals along the wall. There were no names, no markings, nothing to distinguish one from another, and the lack of variation was deliberate. If nothing stood out, nothing could be chosen. If nothing could be chosen, then control remained entirely with the people who had designed the system.
Alex exhaled slowly, not enough to draw attention, just enough to steady the line of thought as it completed itself. The details did not need to be stated out loud. They arranged themselves whether he acknowledged them or not: children taken from somewhere else, placed into a controlled environment, stripped of individuality, and shaped according to a structure that did not require their consent.
He had been fourteen when MI6 had first decided he was useful. They had not needed a space station to do it. They had used schools, safe houses, training exercises that blurred into operations until the distinction stopped mattering. They had used language that framed it as necessary, temporary, and controlled.
It had been none of those things.
Alex glanced once at the uniformed figure on his right. There was no reaction, no indication that his internal conclusions had been noticed or anticipated.
Good.
He looked forward again. Nothing about this place suggested carelessness; every element pointed toward intention layered carefully over time, design refined until it removed as many variables as possible. That meant the children were here for a reason, and that reason extended beyond simple training. It also meant his presence wasn’t accidental.
He said nothing. There was no advantage in it.
Instead, he let his shoulders loosen slightly, adopting the posture he had learned early on—non-threatening, cooperative, easy to direct. It was a useful mask, one that encouraged underestimation without requiring actual compliance.
He had no intention of being easy to manage.
The corridor opened into a larger chamber, and the shift in scale was immediate. The ceiling rose higher, the curved walls broken by screens displaying shifting patterns—trajectories, formations, data streams that carried structure even if their purpose wasn’t immediately clear. The center of the room was open, marked by faint grid lines that caught the light at certain angles. There was no furniture, no obvious equipment, only space designed for use rather than observation.
Alex stopped just inside the threshold.
The escorts did not prompt him forward, which told him as much as anything else in the room. They were watching, waiting to see how he would respond, what he would focus on, how quickly he would begin to understand. He let his gaze move across the room once, unhurried, taking in the details without appearing to linger on any one point—the screens, the grid, the absence of distraction, the sense of repetition built into the design. Whatever happened here happened often, under controlled conditions, with outcomes tracked and refined.
Not a classroom, then. Not in any meaningful sense.
He had seen training facilities before—military, intelligence, places designed to break people down and rebuild them into something more useful. This shared the same underlying structure, but it had been stripped of excess, refined into something cleaner and more efficient.
More honest, in a way.
Alex shifted his weight slightly, letting the thought settle without letting it show.
This wasn’t a prison, not exactly.
It was a system.
He could feel it even without seeing all of it yet, the invisible framework pressing in from all sides, shaping behavior, limiting choices, guiding outcomes. Rules existed here, even if they had not been explained. Expectations had been built into the space itself.
He had walked into systems like this before.
The difference then had been that he had known the rules going in.
This time, he didn’t.
Alex tilted his head slightly, acknowledging the room without revealing what he was thinking. “A lot of effort was put into this,” he said, his tone light, almost conversational.
It wasn’t an observation. It was a probe.
The technician glanced at him. “Yes.”
Alex nodded once, as if that confirmed something minor rather than something fundamental. “That figures.”
He stepped further into the room.
If they were watching—and they were—then they would be looking for specific reactions: confusion, fear, resistance, compliance. He gave them none of those entirely, only enough curiosity to be believable and enough ease to be unsettling.
Behind that, the conclusion had already settled into place: they had taken children and placed them somewhere they could not leave, constructing an environment that would shape them whether they wanted it to or not, refining them into something useful according to a standard they did not get to define.
And for reasons that were becoming clearer by the second, they had decided Alex belonged here too.
His mouth curved slightly, not quite a smile.
That, more than anything else, told him they had made a mistake.