Waffle's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Waffle's claws scrape against the wagon's wooden side. The hum rises from deep in the wood, climbing through frequencies she remembers too well. This is the same sound the portals made right before they came apart around her. She backs away from the wagon and drops her catalog onto the dirt. The device projects upward immediately, violet spheres blooming into a star map of documented worlds. Waffle scans the connections between them — thin lines showing portal routes she's already logged. Half the map pulses with amber warnings where portals have gone unstable. The other half shows gaps where connections used to be. She touches one sphere with her paw and watches the route data flicker. Three portals on that path collapsed yesterday. She didn't log the collapse. She logged the worlds before they cut themselves off. The wagon's hum shifts frequency. Waffle's fur stands up along her spine. She recognizes this part too — the moment right before the collapse locks in. Behind the wagon, air ripples in waves of indigo and violet. The distortion spreads outward in rings, each layer slightly offset from the last. Portal resonance. Not from the flea market entrance. From something inside the wagon itself. Waffle doesn't think. She lunges forward and tears the wagon's back panel open with both paws. Inside, mounted to the wagon bed, sits a door made of blue-violet thread woven into concentric rings. White light glows at its center. Her door. The one she built to escape the gap. Except she left that door behind when she crawled through it. Someone else found it. Someone else brought it here. The resonance spikes and the door's rings begin to separate. Waffle slams her paw against the center and floods it with the same compressed feeling she used to build it — the weight of being alone in a space that shouldn't exist. The rings lock back into place. The hum stops. She pulls her paw away and her pad burns cold. The door holds. But now she knows: someone didn't just harvest portal thread. They harvested her escape route. And that means they know exactly where she's been.