When the world came back into focus, Sam gasped for air. She was no longer in 2285 and no longer even in the future. She found herself standing on the edge of a vast desert, the sun beating mercilessly down on the cracked, barren ground.
She gazed around herself, baffled. There was no horizon; she could only see miles and miles of unlimited canvas in every direction, nothing in the way of civilization, nothing like a landmark at all. It was no time she had ever known. She seemed to have been tossed outside time itself.
Her chronometer blinked feebly, the display warped and unfathomable. She tapped at it, but it did not react. Whatever Cairn had done, it cut her loose from the Nexus and from the timestream. She was alone.
Panic welled up in her chest, but she pushed it back. Panicking wouldn't help now. She needed to think. She needed to find a way to regain control of the situation.
"Okay, Sam," she whispered to herself. "You've been in worse spots than this. You just have to figure out where—that is, when—you are."
She began walking, her mind racing with what might be going on. Cairn had hurled her through time like a rag doll, but he hadn't killed her. Why? What was his game? If he was as powerful as he proclaimed himself to be, why not just erase her from existence?
She didn't have the answers yet, but she knew one thing: she couldn't let him win. No matter what his endgame was, it involved destroying the timeline; that wasn't happening.
It seemed hours under the blistering sun, but Sam saw something in the distance - a structure, small but distinct against the endless desert. She picked up speed as her hope flared once more.
As she walked closer, she saw it was no ordinary building. It was a stone temple ancient and so weathered by the passage of time. But it stood still. On its surface were strange symbols etched on to it. She vaguely recognized them from her studies at the Nexus. This was no ordinary place.
It was a relic of an ancient lost civilization. A civilization which had been erased from the passage of history centuries, nay millennia before recorded time.
But here she stood.
Sam's chest throbbed with excitement. If such a place was even real, outside the bounds of time itself, then maybe she would find the way to stop Cairn. Or at least how to get back to the Nexus.
Breathing deeply, she squared her shoulders and stepped across the threshold into the darkness of this old temple, her shadow swallowed by the shades.
Inside, the air was cool and heavy, lined with faintly glowing crystals of strange origin and casting an eerie light across the chamber. The deeper she went, the more Sam realised that this temple was no ordinary ruin; the symbols on the walls were not merely decorative but part of an intricate and ancient mechanism, dormant with power.
Something deep in the back of her mind snapped into place as she studied the carvings. This was a location of temporal import—a nexus point, a crossroads where disparate timelines intersected. It was like the Nexus she worked for, but much older, much more enigmatic.
She walked toward the middle of the room where a great stone pedestal loomed. Across it lay an object—a glowing, crystalline artifact humming with energy.
Sam stepped forward, her heart racing with a hope that pounded in her chest like a piston. Was this it? A way back for her?
As she stretched forward to grab hold of the artifact, a voice boomed from the shadows of the chamber.
"You are out of time, Sam Baxter. And now, you will see the truth."
Sam spun around to be greeted with the shock of ice in her blood. Cairn was standing at the entrance of the temple, his dark shape cut out against the faint light of entry.
And this time, he was not alone.