Doubt does not arrive loudly.
It slips in wearing someone else’s certainty.
⸻
Jason feels it before anyone speaks it aloud.
The lattice hasn’t fractured. It hasn’t narrowed or reweighted probabilities. It has done something far more insidious.
It has begun to fork memory.
He stares at the arrays, heart pounding, watching identical events resolve into subtly different internal records depending on where he traces them from.
“That’s not possible,” he whispers.
Zane looks up from where he sits on the sanctum steps, the heir awake in his arms, quiet and observant.
“What isn’t.”
Jason swallows. “They’re not changing the story.”
Zane’s jaw tightens. “They’re changing confidence in it.”
⸻
The first crack appears at breakfast.
Two sentinels argue quietly near the fire, voices low but
