Excerpt from Book One: Children of The Link

Ilya Saenz had always trusted data more than intuition.

It had grounded her—through university nights unraveling quantum sensor noise, through bio-genome mapping missions near Titan, even during the orbital quarantine after the Mars outbreak. Numbers made sense. Thoughts stayed in their lanes. Reality behaved.

Until the Rift.

She sat alone in the aft lab of Harken, backlit by the cold blue flicker of telemetry. The neural scan was redrawing itself for the fifth time. Delta-wave harmonics had spiked again. Nothing local. Nothing physical. And yet the presence she felt wasn’t gone.

It hovered at the edge of her mind—curious, quiet.

Ilya leaned closer to the console, watching the waveform distort like ripples in glass. Her breath fogged the edge of her visor. She tapped the interface, voice low.

“Run it again. Full spectrum.”

The system chirped in response, but the results were the same. No quantum particles. No EM bursts. Just the same impossible pattern.

Her commander had dismissed the incident as stress. Her crewmates whispered about “the pulse,” but had no data to support it. Only Ilya knew the truth.

She wasn’t just thinking anymore.

She was listening.

And somewhere, someone was listening back.

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