CHAPTER 7 — “Thresholds”

Chapter 7 is the point where the investigation stops being about traces and becomes a direct step into the space the anomaly has shaped. The sealed sector isn’t abandoned — it feels negotiated with, bent and re-formed by something testing its limits against the station’s walls.Riven and Calyx enter with different aims, but they leave aligned by what they experience, not by what they argue. Their tension — curiosity against caution, instinct against protocol — becomes part of the environment itself. The station reflects their divide through conflicting readouts and impossible physical signs, as if mirroring their uncertainty back at them.The concave metal surface is the hinge of the chapter. It’s the first moment the anomaly’s behavior feels deliberately communicative — not intrusion, not malfunction, but acknowledgment. A shaped response rather than a symptom.From here on, the question isn’t whether it exists. It’s what it remembers — and why Riven fits inside that memory.