The route was supposed to be clear.
Riven stared at the navigation display, waiting for the confirmation line to stabilize. It didn't. The map flickered, recalculated, then shifted again, as if the system itself was unsure what it was looking at.
That alone was bad.
What made it worse was the silence.
No alerts.
No warnings.
No automated reroute.
Just a corridor of black space stretching forward, marked as passable by data that hadn't been updated in years.
"Say it again," Riven said.
Across the bridge, Vale didn't look up from her console. "Long-range scan confirms nothing solid in the next two million kilometers. No debris fields. No radiation spikes."
Riven waited.
"And?" he said.
"And the signal drop is still there," she added. "Right where the route narrows."
Of course it was.
Riven leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. The bridge lights were dimmed to power-saving levels, leaving the crew in a wash of muted blues and grays. Outside the forward viewport, space looked calm. Too calm. No stellar interference. No visible distortions.
It looked safe.
That was never a good sign.
"How old is the route data?" he asked.
Vale hesitated. Just long enough.
"Eighteen years," she said. "Last verified transit."
No one spoke after that.
Eighteen years meant a lot of things. It meant the route was legal once. It meant ships had passed through and survived. It also meant anything could have happened since—collapse, drift, expansion, things moving where they weren't supposed to be.
Riven tapped a finger against the armrest.
"What about alternatives?"
The pause this time came from the entire bridge.
Jax cleared his throat. "Fuel says no," he said. "We detour, we don't make the next station. Not even close."
"Maintenance?" Riven asked.
"Engines can handle a clean corridor," Jax replied. "They won't handle prolonged turbulence. Or repeated micro-adjustments."
Riven nodded. He already knew that. He just needed to hear it out loud.
"Comms?" he said.
Lena shook her head. "Still dead. Whatever's ahead of us, it's eating signal like it never existed."
That got a reaction. Not fear. Not panic. Just a tightening around the eyes. Small shifts in posture. Hands resting closer to controls.
Survival crews didn't overreact. They adjusted.
Riven looked back at the display. The route pulsed faintly, a thin line through a region marked only with a single designation:
UNCLASSIFIED ANOMALY ZONE
No notes.
No explanations.
Someone had named it and moved on.
"Remind me," Riven said, "why we didn't stop at the last outpost."
Jax didn't smile. "Because it was empty. And the fuel cells were cracked."
"And?"
"And the people who used to live there left in a hurry."
Riven exhaled slowly.
"Alright," he said. "Prep for approach. Minimum thrust. No sudden corrections unless I call it."
Vale turned in her chair. "You're taking us through?"
Riven met her eyes.
"We don't have another option."
That was the truth. No theatrics. No speeches. Just math.
The ship responded as the engines adjusted, a low vibration passing through the deck. Somewhere below, something rattled—loose equipment that hadn't been secured properly. Riven made a mental note to deal with that later, assuming there was a later.
The first kilometer passed without incident.
Then the display shifted again.
"Riven," Vale said quietly. "The corridor width just changed."
"How?"
"Narrower. By thirty percent."
"Physical or distortion?"
Vale frowned. "I… don't know. The readings don't match either model."
That wasn't possible. Everything matched something. Even bad data had a pattern.
"Confirm visually," Riven said.
The external cameras adjusted, pulling in tighter feeds. The forward view warped slightly, edges bending inward, like space itself was being compressed.
No alarms sounded.
No systems failed.
Space simply… disagreed.
"Helm," Riven said. "Hold speed."
Jax's hands hovered over the controls. "Holding."
The ship moved forward another hundred meters.
The distortion deepened.
It wasn't violent. It wasn't dramatic. It was subtle, creeping, the kind of change that didn't demand attention until it was already too late.
"Signal just dropped again," Lena said. "Short-range this time."
"How short?" Riven asked.
"Within the ship."
That got everyone's attention.
Riven straightened. "Explain."
Lena swallowed. "Internal relay between sections three and four just went quiet. It came back a second later, but…"
"But," Riven prompted.
"But it shouldn't have dropped at all."
Riven stood.
"Engineering," he said into the comm. "Status check. Anything feel off?"
Static answered him.
Then a voice. "We're here," Tomas said. "Power levels stable. Structural integrity unchanged."
"Did you feel anything?" Riven asked.
A pause. Longer this time.
"…maybe," Tomas said. "Like pressure. Not physical. More like—"
"Like what?"
"Like the ship didn't agree with where it was."
Riven closed his eyes for a moment.
"Alright," he said. "All stations, listen up. We're inside something that doesn't behave like normal space. Assume all readings are half a step behind reality."
No one argued.
That was worse than panic. Panic could be managed. Acceptance meant they understood exactly how bad this could get.
Another kilometer passed.
Then the wake hit them.
Not from the front.
From behind.
The ship lurched forward as if something had grabbed the space they'd just occupied and pulled it backward. Riven stumbled, catching himself on the console as warning lights flared for the first time.
"Compensating!" Jax shouted.
The engines roared, fighting against nothing visible. The wake stretched across the rear cameras—a twisting distortion that looked like a scar dragged through space.
It followed them.
"Riven," Vale said. "That's not turbulence. That's… a trail."
"A wake," Lena whispered.
The word settled heavily over the bridge.
Not a storm.
Not an anomaly.
A consequence.
"Can we slow down?" Riven asked.
Jax shook his head. "If we drop speed now, we risk stalling inside it."
"Can we speed up?"
Jax hesitated. "Maybe. But we don't know what's ahead."
Riven looked at the wake again. It pulsed faintly, reacting to the ship's movement, tightening every time they adjusted thrust.
They weren't passing through it.
They were creating it.
"Riven," Vale said softly. "This route wasn't just unverified."
He nodded. "It was abandoned."
The realization came with a strange calm.
People hadn't stopped using this route because it was dangerous.
They stopped because once you entered, you couldn't leave without leaving something behind.
"Options," Riven said.
Silence.
Then, quietly, "We keep moving," Lena said.
Riven met her gaze.
"If we stop," she continued, "whatever this is will catch up."
Riven turned back to the forward view. The corridor ahead twisted, narrowing again, space folding into shapes his mind resisted categorizing.
He took a breath.
"Alright," he said. "All hands. We stay on course. No sudden moves. No hero corrections."
He paused, then added, "If something breaks, we fix it while moving."
The engines strained as the ship pushed forward, the wake tightening behind them like a closing door.
For the first time since entering the route, Riven allowed himself a single thought he didn't voice.
If this path had a name, it wasn't a route.
It was a warning.
And they were already too deep to turn back.