Splintered Gates, page 12
My mother’s testimony in the investigation was clinical and devastating. Dr. Lang’s refusal to accept the mathematical realities of convergent gateway stress made him a danger to himself and others. His obsession with proving his theories correct overrode all safety considerations. I formally recommend his immediate termination and permanent restriction from boundary-related research.
Three people dead because Lang wouldn’t listen. My mother had tried to stop him, and when he’d refused, she’d destroyed his career to protect others. The woman I barely remembered had stood against someone she’d worked with closely, someone she’d built something revolutionary with, because she’d seen what he was becoming.
I felt something unfamiliar—pride, mixed with grief for a mother I’d never really known. She’d made the hard choice. She’d done the right thing.
The final document in the file was a notation from 1995—two years after the incident, shortly before my mother’s death.
Subject LANG has disappeared from surveillance. Last known location: accessing archived boundary research materials at [REDACTED]. Considered high risk for revenge-motivated incidents. All personnel associated with his termination advised to maintain enhanced personal security.
My mother had been on that list. And less than a year later, she was dead—officially from a car accident, and unofficially from an Unseelie Hunter attack, but the timing was too convenient. Had Lang been involved? Had he eliminated the person who’d destroyed his research and career?
But what if it hadn’t been random? What if Lang had arranged it?
My hands shook as I continued photographing. Not from fear of being caught anymore, but from rage I could barely contain.
A folder tucked behind the main case file caught my attention. It was labeled Drexler, E. - Personal Effects / Seized Materials.
Inside were items cataloged after my mother’s death: research notes, personal journals, and several documents marked RETAIN - POTENTIAL EVIDENTIARY VALUE.
One journal entry, dated October 1994, stopped me cold.
I worry that destroying the research was the right decision but the wrong solution. The convergent gateway theory itself isn’t flawed—my calculations show it could work under the right conditions. The problem was his refusal to accept the limitations.
What troubles me most is the question I can’t answer: What happens if someone discovers a weak point that already exists? If a boundary scar appears naturally, could convergent principles be applied without the catastrophic creation process?
The mathematics suggest it’s possible. That terrifies me. Because if he ever learned of such a scar, he would absolutely attempt to use it. And I wouldn’t be there to stop him.
My mother had predicted exactly what was happening now. She’d foreseen the Scar. She’d understood that Lang would exploit any weakness he found.
And I—her son, carrying her morphic abilities—had created exactly what she’d feared most.
The irony was devastating. Everything she’d done to stop Lang, all her sacrifice and moral courage, and her own child had handed him the key. Not through malice or carelessness, but simply by existing, by being what I was and doing what I thought was right at City Plaza.
I’d completed what she’d tried to prevent.
I photographed the journal entry with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling, then carefully returned everything to the folder. At the back of the personal effects was a sealed envelope marked FOR DIRECTOR ONLY - OPEN IN EVENT OF SUSPECTED LANG ACTIVITY.
The seal had never been broken. Whatever my mother had left for the Agency’s director, it had been filed away and forgotten.
I should have left it sealed. Taking it would cross a line even farther than the one I’d already crossed. But if my mother had information about stopping Lang...
I slipped the envelope into my jacket.
Then I heard it—voices from the main archive entrance, one of them unmistakably Agent Smith’s.
“I’m telling you, the access logs show someone entering the historical archives at 2:17 a.m. using consultant-level credentials. Who else would that be?”
My heart stopped. They’d noticed far faster than I’d anticipated.
I moved immediately toward the maintenance access I’d spotted on earlier visits—a door beside the restricted archives that would let me bypass the main security desk. My EMF disruptor got me through the electronic lock, and I slipped into a narrow corridor of pipes and bare concrete, emergency lighting casting everything in dim red.
Smith’s voice echoed behind me, organizing a systematic search. I kept moving, navigating the building’s layout by memory, putting distance between myself and the archives.
The corridor brought me past several doors before one made me pause: Director’s Archives - Authorized Access Only.
Mercer’s private archive room. Where she would store materials too classified even for the main archives.
The door featured a card reader and biometric scanner, plus a magical authentication component keyed to Mercer’s signature. But beside the frame, I noticed a maintenance override panel—one that had been modified, standard Agency markings partially obscured by newer components.
Someone had created a private back door into what should be one of the most secure rooms in the facility.
The modification raised questions I didn’t have time to consider. But if Mercer was hiding information about my mother and Lang—information crucial to stopping the convergent gateway—I needed to know.
I examined the panel, noting wear patterns that suggested frequent use. Based on those patterns, I guessed at the sequence and applied pressure to the corresponding points.
A barely audible click. The door opened.
The room was small and meticulously organized, filled with filing cabinets labeled with cryptic codes. One near the back made my heart skip: ED Project Materials - Classified Level 5.
ED. Elizabeth Drexler.
The drawer contained files from the early 1990s. I located a thick file labeled Convergent Gateway Theory - Final Reports - CLASSIFIED and a smaller folder, Lang, E. - Ongoing Threat Assessment / Surveillance Failure.
Time was critical—Smith might still be searching. I photographed everything as fast as I could turn pages.
My mother’s convergent gateway report confirmed what I’d already learned, but added crucial detail.
CRITICAL ADDENDUM (E. Drexler, personal notation):
Recent calculations suggest an alternative pathway to convergent gateway creation that circumvents the catastrophic initialization process. If a preexisting boundary scar could be located—a weak point created by natural phenomena, failed magical workings, or other compromising events—convergent principles could potentially be applied without the dangerous synchronous activation.
Such a scar would need specific properties: sufficient energy signature to serve as an anchoring point, existing connection to multiple realm boundaries, and structural integrity weak enough to be manipulated but strong enough to prevent immediate collapse.
I am formally recommending that Agency detection protocols be enhanced to identify and monitor any potential boundary scars meeting these criteria. Early identification is essential to prevent exploitation.
My mother had written that recommendation. The Agency had apparently ignored it—because they hadn’t identified the Scar I’d created until Lang’s circles started exploiting it.
Lang’s threat assessment file documented his activities since termination: attempts to access restricted research, association with underground practitioners, suspected involvement in unauthorized summonings, and most recently, complete disappearance eight months ago.
A handwritten note from Mercer, dated three months ago, said,
Lang’s disappearance followed by the City Plaza incident cannot be coincidental. If he learned about the seal Drexler created—the boundary scar Elizabeth predicted could enable safe convergent gateway creation—he would absolutely attempt to exploit it. We must locate him before he can organize a full convergent network.
However, revealing the Drexler connection to the consultant would be... complicated. He doesn’t know about his mother’s work with Lang. He doesn’t know she predicted exactly the situation his morphic abilities created. That knowledge could compromise his effectiveness or, worse, make him a target for recruitment by Lang’s organization.
For now, we keep the connection classified. Better he works the case without the additional psychological burden of knowing he’s inadvertently fulfilled his mother’s worst fears.
I stared at the note, anger and betrayal burning through me. Mercer had known. She’d known everything—about my mother’s collaboration with Lang, about the convergent gateway theory, about how the Scar I’d created was exactly what they’d predicted could enable the working.
And she’d deliberately kept it from me.
How much easier would this investigation have been if I’d known from the start? How many connections might I have made sooner?
But beneath the anger was a colder realization: Mercer was right about one thing. Lang absolutely wanted to recruit me. As the morph who’d created the Scar, I was the key to stabilizing whatever gateway he planned to tear open. That’s why his circles kept resonating with my morphic signature—they were trying to attune to the energy I’d used to create the Scar.
In the back of the drawer was one final document—a sealed envelope marked FOR CAL DREXLER - IN EVENT OF CONVERGENT GATEWAY THREAT.
My mother had left messages for both the Agency director and for me. Personal instructions for the situation she’d feared most.
This one, I didn’t hesitate to take. Whatever my mother had wanted me to know, I deserved to read it directly.
I exited through an emergency door on the far side of the building, emerging into predawn darkness. The photographs on my phone felt weighted with terrible knowledge.
Lang wasn’t just a rogue practitioner. He was my mother’s former colleague, a man she’d destroyed professionally by exposing his dangerous research. A man who’d possibly had a hand in her death. And now he was using their shared research to exploit the very vulnerability she had predicted—the Scar I’d inadvertently created.
This was personal for Lang in ways I hadn’t understood. He wasn’t just trying to complete his life’s work. He was using Elizabeth Drexler’s own son to finish what she’d died trying to prevent.
The symmetry was too perfect to be coincidence. It was calculation, decades in the making.
By the time I reached my apartment, dawn was lightening the eastern sky. I had only a few hours before the regular investigation briefing—where Mercer would once again pretend she didn’t know about the convergent gateway connection, about Lang’s history with my mother, about the Scar being exactly what my mother had feared.
A few hours to read whatever messages my mother had left me. To understand what she’d seen coming. And to decide how to confront Mercer about keeping me in the dark about my own family’s role in everything.
The sealed envelopes seemed to burn against my chest, holding answers I desperately needed about how to stop Lang from completing what he and my mother had started—and how to protect the Scar without letting it become the foundation for everything my mother had tried to prevent.
CHAPTER 9
“Patterns reveal themselves to those patient enough to look beyond the obvious. In magic, the most dangerous designs are those hidden in plain sight.”—From “Observational Techniques in Magical Analysis,” by Elizabeth Drexler (Agency restricted publication)
CHAPTER 10
“Tell me again why we’re spreading potentially classified Agency photographs and convergent gateway theory all over your living room floor at seven in the morning?” Marcus asked, setting down two large coffees on the kitchen counter before joining me in the paper-strewn chaos I’d created.
I’d called him as soon as I’d returned from the Agency archives, too wired from my discoveries to sleep and needing a second perspective I could trust. Marcus had arrived bearing caffeine and his usual blend of skepticism and curiosity.
“Because Lang and my mother worked together on this exact type of gateway,” I replied, arranging the last of the photos in a rough geographical layout. “And the Agency has been hiding that connection from me.”
“Your mother and Lang were colleagues?” Marcus carefully stepped between photo clusters to hand me one of the coffees. “That’s... complicated.”
“Complicated doesn’t begin to cover it.” I gestured to the photographs I’d taken from Mercer’s private archives. “They co-developed convergent gateway theory in the early ‘90s. She tried to stop him when his experiments became too dangerous. He was fired, his career destroyed. And now he’s back, using their shared research to exploit the Scar I created at City Plaza.”
Marcus studied me for a moment. “You think he blames your mother for ruining him.”
“I think this is deeply personal for him. She ended his life’s work and he possibly had a hand in her death. And now her morph son has inadvertently created the exact vulnerability she predicted would make convergent gateways possible.” I took a long drink of coffee. “If that’s not revenge on a cosmic scale, I don’t know what is.”
“Does the Agency know?”
“Mercer knows; she’s known the whole time. There were notes in Lang’s file—she deliberately decided not to tell me about the connection because she thought it would be psychologically burdensome.”
“That’s...” Marcus paused, choosing his words carefully. “Actually pretty presumptuous of her.”
“That’s one word for it.”
The photographs fell into three groups: official Agency documentation of the Olban Pines and Westside Park circles; Marcus’s unofficial photos from our nighttime excursion; and the images I’d captured from Mercer’s private archives, showing the Drexler-Lang collaboration files and convergent gateway research.
Marcus began methodically examining the evidence, his analytical mind perfectly suited for pattern recognition. While I understood magical theory and energy dynamics, Marcus excelled at identifying relationships between things that didn’t look related—a skill that had served him well in both his corporate career and his unofficial role as my research assistant.
“Let’s start with the physical components,” he suggested, focusing on close-up images of the circle designs. “The Agency’s analysis treats each symbol as an isolated element, but what if they’re meant to be read in sequence, like a circuit diagram?”
I nodded, seeing where his thinking was headed. “Look for repeating elements that might serve as connectors or transfer points between circles.”
We worked in focused silence for several minutes, rearranging photos and making notes on the pad of paper Marcus had brought. Gradually, a pattern began to emerge—subtle at first, then harder to ignore as we identified key components.
“There,” Marcus said, pointing to the distinctive triangular configuration I’d recognized at both the Olban Pines and Westside Park circles. “That exact arrangement—three interlocking triangles with the script along the inner edges—it’s identical in both locations.”
“Not just identical,” I realized, examining the placement. “It’s oriented along the same directional axis in both circles, pointing northwest to southeast.”
We quickly identified other repeated elements—specific script combinations, geometric arrangements, and material components that appeared across multiple sites. These weren’t random similarities but deliberate duplications, positioned with precise intentionality.
“They’re keystones,” I realized. “Anchor points that connect the circles energetically even when physically separated. Like network nodes that maintain communication regardless of distance.”
Marcus nodded, already rearranging the site photographs into a geographic layout based on city maps. “Which means their physical placement isn’t arbitrary either. Let me try something.”
He pulled out his tablet and began plotting the circle locations, including the coordinates from Nadia’s origami crane that identified a future site. As the points appeared on the digital map, he added lines connecting the locations where we’d identified matching keystones.
“Look at this,” he said, turning the tablet so I could see the emerging pattern. “When you connect the sites based on their shared elements, they form a recognizable geometric shape.”
The lines created a complex but clear pattern—a seven-pointed star enclosed within a circle, with additional points marking what appeared to be secondary nodes in the network.
“A septagram,” I said, and went on when he looked confused. “A classical configuration for boundary magic, representing the seven primary realms in traditional cosmology.”
“And look where the center falls.” Marcus zoomed in on the map. “City Plaza—specifically, the location where you sealed the Seasonal Bridge. Where you created the Scar.”
The implication settled over me like a weight. “Lang is using the Scar as the central nexus. Everything points toward it.”
Marcus frowned at the tablet, making additional calculations. “Based on the current rate of circle creation and the moon phases referenced in the materials from Nadia, they’re building toward something happening within the next two weeks—possibly sooner.”
“Which means we need to alert the Agency immediately.” I reached for my phone, then hesitated. “Although if I do that, I’ll have to explain how I know about the convergent gateway connection. About Lang’s history with my mother.”
“And Mercer will know you broke into her private archives,” Marcus finished.
Before I could respond, a familiar tapping sound came from the window—rapid and agitated rather than the usual gentle rhythm. Thilly had returned, her tiny form darting back and forth outside the glass with unusual urgency.
