Chapter 31: The Bitter Code
The Subaru ate the miles through the Michigan night like a silent, four-wheeled ghost. Leo slept fitfully in the back, lulled by the vibration and the dark. Aria didn’t sleep. She watched the skeletal trees blur past, her cheek pressed against the cold glass. Every set of headlights in the rearview was a potential threat; every pause at a desolate intersection felt like an ambush in the making.
Levi navigated with the paper atlas and a muttered, constant stream of corrections. “Left here. Not that left, the next one. This road is a thicker line, it should be—”
“It’s a logging road, Levi,” Mikasa said, her voice flat with exhaustion. “The thicker line is wishful thinking.” She steered the car onto a rutted track that shook the entire frame. “Two more miles according to the odometer.”
The garage appeared like a bruise on the landscape—a low, sprawling building of corrugated metal stained with rust and decades of grime. A faded sign proclaimed “GRICE IMPORTS & CUSTOM.” The lot was empty, illuminated by a single, buzzing sodium light that turned everything a sickly orange.
Mikasa killed the headlights and coasted to a stop behind the building, shrouded in deep shadow. “Cameras,” she said, nodding toward two small, dark domes under the eaves. “But they’re old. Analog. No network activity.”
Levi was already out of the car, a silhouette against the orange gloom. He moved to a battered steel service door and knocked—a rapid, uneven pattern. Shave and a Haircut.
For a long moment, nothing. Then a heavy bolt slid back with a clang. The door opened a crack, revealing a sliver of a young man’s face, haloed by the greenish glow of monitors from within. He had blond hair, messy, and eyes that were too old for his age.
Falco Grice looked at Levi, then past him to the car, his gaze scanning, assessing. No smile. No surprise. Just a grim, professional recognition.
“You’re late,” Falco said, his voice deeper than Aria remembered. He swung the door open wider.
The garage interior was a cathedral of grease and metal, smelling of oil and cold concrete. In the center sat a disassembled vintage BMW engine, its parts laid out on a pristine tarp with obsessive neatness. But Falco led them past it, toward an office walled with frosted glass. He tapped a code into a keypad hidden behind a Motul oil poster. The entire wall section swung inward with a soft hydraulic hiss, revealing a steep stairwell descending into a hum of powerful machinery.
The underground server room was a shock of cold, dry air and sound. Neon strips cast a clinical blue-green light over rows of black server racks, their flickering LEDs like a cityscape viewed from above. The thrum was deep, physical, vibrating in Aria’s teeth. On one wall, a massive array of monitors displayed a chaotic mosaic: scrolling lines of code, security feeds from empty streets, traffic camera loops, and a few live news channels muted.
A second figure stood up from a terminal, knocking a can of Monster energy over. Gabi Braun hadn’t changed much—still all sharp angles and frenetic energy, her dark hair tied up in a messy bun, her eyes wide and alert. She wore oversized hoodie covered in esoteric hacker stickers.
“Holy shit,” Gabi breathed, the words swallowed by the server hum. She wasn’t looking at Levi or Mikasa. Her eyes were locked on Aria, specifically on the bundle in her arms. “Is that…?”
“Yeah,” Aria said, her voice sounding thin and reedy in the vast space. She adjusted Leo, who was awake now, staring wide-eyed at the wall of lights.
Falco sealed the door behind them. The sound dampened, becoming a contained roar. He gestured to a cluster of worn office chairs. “Sit. If you can find a spot that isn’t covered in tech.”
Levi remained standing, a statue of tension. “You got my message.”
“Your burner phone pinging a cell tower in Sarnia message? Yeah, we got it.” Gabi plopped back into her rolling chair, spinning it to face them. “Took us six hours to verify it was actually you and not a trap. You guys are seriously, seriously wanted. Like, ‘shoot-on-sight if you resist’ wanted. But the official bulletins say ‘armed and extremely dangerous activists.’ They’re not mentioning the… other thing.”
“The other thing,” Levi repeated, his voice flat.
“The time-displacement,” Falco said, leaning against a server rack. His calm was a stark contrast to Gabi’s vibrating intensity. “The agency that brought us here—the one that dissolved, went dark after the… after the Rumbling simulation failed—they weren’t the only players. A splinter group survived. Private. Well-funded. They call themselves Chronos Retrieval.”
Aria’s blood went cold. Leo squirmed, picking up on her sudden stiffness. “Retrieval?”
Falco’s fingers danced across a holographic keyboard that flickered to life from a projector on his desk. A complex, 3D organizational chart filled one of the larger monitors. Faces, names, shell corporations. “Their public mandate is ‘asset recovery and historical preservation.’ Their internal files, which Gabi exfiltrated seventy-two hours ago, are clearer.” He zoomed in on a sub-folder labeled Subject Viability. Aria’s own face, taken from her driver’s license, appeared next to Levi’s, Mikasa’s, and several others from Paradis. Arrows linked them to a simple, chilling flowchart.
FINAL OBJECTIVE: REVERSAL OF TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT EVENT ALPHA.
STATUS: FIELD TESTING (SUBJECT ACQUISITION IN PROGRESS).
“They don’t just want to study us,” Gabi cut in, unable to sit still. She grabbed a tablet and thrust it toward Levi. He didn’t take it, just stared at the screen. “They think they’ve stabilized the bridge. The… the portal, or whatever it was that sucked us through. They want to send us all back. And they think they need a living subject from our side to ‘anchor’ the return trip. Specifically, a subject with proven… genetic resilience.” Her eyes flicked to Levi, then to the baby in Aria’s arms.
The hum of the servers seemed to grow louder, pressing in on them. Mikasa had gone very still, her hand resting on the back of a chair. “Why now?” she asked, her voice cutting through the noise.
“Because they think they fixed it,” Falco said, collapsing the hologram. He looked tired. “They think the initial event was an accident caused by unstable energy signatures from our world interacting with theirs. They’ve spent years building a new generator. A controlled one. They need to test it. And for that, they need one of us. Preferably…” He hesitated. “Preferably someone whose absence would be less disruptive to the current timeline.”
“A baby,” Aria whispered, the words like shards of glass in her throat. She pulled Leo tighter against her, a low, wounded sound escaping her lips. “They want my baby to be their lab rat. To send him back alone.”
“Not alone,” Gabi said quietly, all her freneticism gone. She tapped the tablet, pulling up another file. Blueprints, dense with technical notations and bizarre, non-Euclidean geometry. “They need an anchor. But the anchor… it’s a two-way tether. The file says it creates a ‘reversal waveform’ along the subject’s unique bio-temporal signature.” She looked at them, her youthful face grave. “If they use him, and it works… it could reopen the bridge. Permanently. For everyone.”
The weight of the statement settled over the room. The hope was grotesque, poisoned at the root.
Levi finally moved. He took the tablet from Gabi, his eyes scanning the schematics. His face was unreadable, but a muscle ticked in his jaw. “These are theoretical.”
“Mostly,” Falco admitted. “Their math is… scary good. But it’s built on data from the original event. Data we didn’t have. Data from us. Our bloodwork, our brain scans after we arrived. It’s all in here.” He gestured at the servers. “They’ve been collecting it for years, from ‘voluntary’ surveys and medical studies offered to displaced persons.”
“We signed up for a fertility study,” Aria said, the memory dawning with horror. “At the community center. They took blood. They said it was for…”
“It was for this,” Falco finished.
Silence, save for the eternal hum. Leo let out a small, frustrated cry, reaching for the colorful lights on the screen.
Levi handed the tablet back to Gabi. He turned to Falco. “You said ‘us.’ Your files are in there too.”
Falco nodded once, a sharp, resigned gesture. “Gabi and I are flagged as ‘secondary assets.’ Useful, but not primary. Our skillset kept us off-grid. They’ve had a harder time tracking us. You… you built a life. You had a child. You were easier to find.”
“So what’s the play?” Mikasa’s voice was pure steel. “We can’t run forever. Not with a child.”
“We fight,” Levi stated, simple and absolute.
“Against a shadow company with near-infinite resources and a mandate that considers us less than human?” Falco shook his head. “You’d lose. You’d all die. Or worse, you’d be taken.”
“Then we use their plan against them,” Gabi said, a wild, familiar light back in her eyes. She spun her chair, pulling up a new schematic on the central monitor. It was a map, overlaid with energy readings and what looked like predicted seismic activity. “The generator. It’s here.” She zoomed in on a location in rural Pennsylvania, a massive, nondescript compound ringed by forest. “It’s not fully operational. They’re waiting for the final component—a crystalline oscillator that’s being shipped from a lab in Switzerland. It arrives at the compound in forty-eight hours.”
Levi’s gaze was locked on the map. “You’re suggesting we beat them to it.”
“I’m suggesting we break it,” Gabi corrected, a fierce grin touching her lips. “Sabotage the oscillator, cripple the generator. Buy time. Maybe forever.”
“And then?” Aria asked, her voice shaking. “We live the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders? Waiting for the next Chronos to rise?”
Falco looked at her, then at the baby, his expression softening for the first time. “No. Then we use the time we buy to do the one thing they don’t expect.” He pulled up a final file, marked EYES ONLY – PARADIS BRIDGE THEORY. “We don’t let them build a bridge back to our past. We build our own. To a new Paradis. A parallel strand. Their math shows it’s possible, but they dismissed it as ‘inefficient.’ They want to undo their mistake. We…” He glanced at Gabi, who nodded vigorously. “We want a future. On our own terms.”
The idea was too big, too terrifying to grasp. A new Paradis. Not the war-torn hellscape they’d left, but a fresh start in a world they understood, untainted by titans or time agencies.
Leo began to cry in earnest, a hungry, tired wail that pierced the technological din. The sound was profoundly, heartbreakingly human. A demand for the present moment—for food, for comfort, for a mother’s attention.
The grand plans, the terrifying schematics, the weight of two worlds, all shrunk down to that simple need.
Aria jostled him, shushing him softly. “I need to feed him,” she said, the mundane statement an anchor in the surreal storm.
Levi’s eyes met hers across the humming, neon-lit space. In them, she saw the same calculation, the same furious protectiveness, but now mingled with a new, dangerous spark. Not just defiance. Strategy.
“Show us the schematics for the compound,” Levi said, turning back to the screens, his voice cutting through Leo’s cries and the endless thrum of the servers. “Every door. Every camera. Every guard rotation.”
He leaned over Falco’s shoulder, his shadow falling across the blueprints of their potential salvation, or their final ruin. The decision was made. They weren’t running anymore.
They were going to break time.
The blueprints for the Chronos facility glowed on the main monitor, a stark maze of corridors and security layers. Levi’s finger traced a ventilation shaft that ran perilously close to the main reactor housing. His knuckles were white. Gabi rattled off guard shift changes, thermal scan blind spots, the exact dimensions of the oscillator shipping crate.
Aria listened, but the schematic lines blurred. Leo’s crying escalated, a sharp, rhythmic demand that cut through the tactical talk. Her body responded automatically, a deep, aching pull that synced with his wails.
“You can feed him in here even if you’re still breastfeeding,” Gabi said, not looking up from a firewall schematic. Her tone was brutally casual. “Nothing really phases us at this point.”
Levi’s eyes flickered from the screen to Aria, then to the two teenagers. A faint, almost imperceptible line of confusion appeared between his brows. “I forget that you two are adults now and not like, what, twelve.”
Falco cleared his throat, his cheeks coloring slightly under the neon glow. “Time displacement is weird. We were 15 when we showed up here. Like, we left Marley at 12 and showed up here as 15-year-olds. And now we’re 18, obviously.” He shifted his weight, glancing at Gabi’s focused back. “It’s been… interesting adjusting to that. Uh. Biologically.”
“You mean sexually,” Aria said, her voice flat from exhaustion and residual terror. She unzipped her hoodie, her movements practical and devoid of her usual self-consciousness. The buzz of the servers filled the space Falco’s stammer left hanging.
“…Yeah.” Falco blushed a deeper shade of crimson.
“So you two have definitely fucked,” Levi stated. It wasn’t a question. It was a tactical assessment, another variable in the strange landscape of their displaced lives.
Gabi finally spun her chair around, a wild grin on her face. “Oh yeah. Like a fuck ton.” She said it with the same casual intensity she’d used to describe the facility’s electrical grid. Then she immediately turned back to her keyboard, her fingers resuming their frantic dance.
Aria tuned them out. She settled into the only chair with arms, a battered office throne missing its wheels. She arranged Leo, her movements slow and deliberate. The world narrowed to the quiet grunts of her son, the primal, mammalian act of feeding him. It was an anchor in the digital storm. Mikasa watched the door, her posture rigid, but her gaze would occasionally soften for a fraction of a second, drifting toward Aria and the baby.
Levi returned his attention to the plans. “The loading dock is the weakest point. They’ll expect a direct assault on the main gate.”
“So we don’t give them one,” Gabi muttered, pulling up satellite imagery. “We give them a systems-wide blackout and a gas leak in sub-level three. Their own protocols will herd everyone to the east courtyard.”
“Creating a vacuum at the dock,” Falco finished, leaning in. His embarrassment was gone, consumed by the problem. “The oscillator crate will be isolated for maybe nine minutes during a full emergency evacuation.”
“Nine minutes to locate, breach, and sabotage a two-ton crate in a secured bay,” Levi said, his voice low. “Tighter than I’d like.”
“It’s what we have,” Mikasa said, her first words in minutes. She didn’t look away from the door. “We need a driver who can get us through the secondary perimeter fence after the breach. Someone they won’t stop.”
“I’ll do it,” Falco said.
“No,” Gabi and Levi said in unison.
Levi continued, his eyes still on the screen. “You’re the hacker. You’re remote. You’re creating the blackout and the ghost signals on their cameras. You’re not expendable.”
“And you are?” Falco shot back, a rare flash of anger in his voice.
“I’m the distraction.” Levi finally looked away from the monitors, his steel-grey eyes meeting Falco’s. “I’ll be at the main gate when the alarm sounds. They have my face on every watchlist. They’ll commit resources. They’ll want to take me alive.”
A cold knot tightened in Aria’s stomach. She looked at him, but he avoided her gaze. He was offering himself as a decoy, a guaranteed capture to sell the ruse.
“Mikasa and I will handle the dock,” Aria said quietly. Leo had finished, his body going limp and heavy with sleep against her chest. She adjusted her clothing, her voice gaining strength. “You need someone small to get through the service ductwork you showed. To place the charges on the oscillator from the inside.”
Levi’s head snapped toward her. “No.”
“It’s the logical play,” she said, echoing his own tactical coldness back at him. “Mikasa can’t fit. You can’t fit. I can. And I know how to handle explosives.” She didn’t mention the training was a decade and a lifetime ago, for a war against monsters made of flesh, not concrete.
“It’s a nine-minute window, Aria,” he said, her name a strained syllable. “If you’re inside that crate when the charges go—”
“Then I’ll be quick.” She stood up, Leo a warm, sleeping weight against her shoulder. She walked over to the monitor, looking at the detailed cross-section of the shipping container. “We need shaped charges here, and here. To fracture the crystal lattice without triggering a full explosive backlash. Gabi, can you get me the dielectric specs for the oscillator casing? I need to know what kind of adhesive will bypass their dampening field.”
Gabi looked from Aria to Levi, her fingers pausing. “Uh. Yeah. I can pull that.”
The room grew quiet, save for the hum. Levi was staring at Aria, a storm brewing behind his eyes. It wasn’t just disagreement. It was fear, raw and debilitating. The fear of sending her into another pipe, another dark, confined space where he couldn’t reach her.
“Levi,” Mikasa said, her voice cutting through the tension. “It is the logical play.”
He turned his back on all of them, facing the wall of scrolling code. His shoulders were wire-tight. “We’ll need a vehicle for the dock team. Something fast and small. A motorcycle would be ideal, but the sound…”
“I’ve got a BMW C Evolution,” Falco offered softly. “It’s electric. Silent. Big cargo hold for… for tools.”
Levi gave a single, sharp nod, still not turning around. The plan was coalescing, a deadly ballet with no room for error. Aria swayed gently with Leo, her heart hammering against his back. She had volunteered for the core of the madness. To break time, she had to crawl inside its machine.
She looked at the back of Levi’s head, the tense line of his neck. She understood his silence now. It was the silence of a man placing his entire world on a single, razor-thin gamble. He wasn’t just offering himself as a distraction. He was entrusting their future, their son’s future, to her hands in a dark metal box nine minutes from hell.
“We move in thirty-six hours,” Levi said to the wall, his voice stripped of everything but resolve. “Get me everything on that oscillator. Down to the molecular structure.”
He finally turned. His eyes found Aria’s over the sleeping form of their son. No words passed between them. None were needed. The plan was set. The countdown had begun.
The hum of the servers felt like a ticking clock.
The hum of the servers felt like a ticking clock. It pressed against Aria’s eardrums, a physical reminder of the countdown they’d just started. Leo sighed in his sleep, a soft puff of milk-scented breath against her neck.
“Thirty-six hours isn’t a lot of time to prep a direct assault on a fortified compound,” Mikasa stated, her arms crossed. She was looking at the blueprints, but her focus seemed turned inward. “If we’re actually doing this and going back to Eldia and Paradis…” she began, her voice trailing off for a second before hardening with resolve. “We need to get the others here as well. Jean, Connie, Armin, Eren, Sasha, Xavier.”
The names landed in the neon-lit room like stones in a still pond. They were ghosts from another life, half-remembered echoes in the constant roar of this new one. Aria’s heart clenched at her brother’s name. Xavier. She hadn’t let herself think about him in months, a necessary amputation to keep functioning.
“Scattering was the protocol for a reason,” Levi said, his tone clipped. He finally turned from the wall, his expression unreadable. “Drawing them all to one location now is a gift to Chronos. A single target.”
“They’re already targets,” Gabi countered, spinning in her chair. “If Chronos has all our files, they have last-known addresses, aliases, everything. We might be doing them a favor by pulling them in before the net closes.”
“I can send out an encrypted message to them,” Falco said, his fingers already moving to a different terminal. A secure, black console lit up under his hands. “They all have been in communication with me at some point over the past 3 years. I have dead-drop protocols for each of them. Burner alerts, coded social media pings, the works.”
“Do it,” Mikasa said, the order leaving no room for debate. “But no details. Just a rally point. Somewhere neutral, far from here and the facility.”
“Where?” Aria asked, swaying with Leo. The thought of seeing her brother, of seeing any of them, sparked a frantic, terrified hope in her chest.
“The neutral zone,” Levi said, after a moment of heavy silence. “Sasha’s restaurant in Utica. It’s public, it’s mundane. She’s been off-grid in her own way, just cooking.” He looked at Falco. “Send the calls. Use the pasta code.”
Falco nodded, his face lit by the cool glow of the monitor. His fingers began a rapid, precise dance across the keys. Lines of green text scrolled upward. Initiate Protocol ‘Al Dente.’ Recipient: ‘Horseface.’ Ping: ‘Your marinara is ready.’ Coordinates embedded.
“It’ll take time for them to get here, even if they move immediately,” Gabi said, watching Falco work. She popped the top on another Monster, the sound a sharp fizz in the room. “We’ll be hitting the facility before most of them could possibly arrive.”
“This isn’t about the assault,” Mikasa said, her grey eyes holding Levi’s. “This is about what comes after. If we succeed, and if we’re serious about building a bridge… we do it together. Or not at all.”
Levi held her gaze for a long, charged moment. A silent conversation passed between them, decades of shared history and loss conveyed in a look. He gave a single, terse nod. Permission.
Aria felt the magnitude of the decision settle over them. This was no longer just an escape, or even a sabotage mission. It was a gathering. A potential homecoming. The terror of it was almost beautiful.
“My brother…” Aria started, her voice cracking. “Xavier. Is he… okay?”
Falco didn’t look up from his typing, his brow furrowed in concentration. “He’s in Denver. Works construction. He’s good.Paranoid. He checks his dead drops every Thursday.” Recipient: ‘Big Brother.’ Ping: ‘Little Sister needs a favor.’
A sob lodged itself in Aria’s throat. She pressed her lips to Leo’s downy head. Her brother was alive. He was okay. He was checking for her.
Levi moved then, closing the distance between them in three silent strides. He didn’t embrace her. He just stood close, his shoulder brushing hers, a solid presence against the vertigo of hope. He watched Falco’s screen, each sent message a potential beacon that could also be a flare for their enemies.
“Sent,” Falco said finally, leaning back. The console screen went dark. “The pings are bouncing through anonymizers all over the globe. They’re untraceable. But they’re out there. If they’re listening, they’ll come.”
The server hum seemed to shift then, no longer just a timer for their destruction. It was a pulse now, a signal calling out across a continent, through the digital void, to the scattered remains of a broken family. The plan was no longer just about breaking a machine in Pennsylvania.
It was about building something new from the pieces. The first call had been cast.
Now they had to survive long enough to hear an answer.