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Lyra stared at the laptop screen until her vision blurred.
She'd typed "Tartarian Empire" into the search bar three times, as if the results might change if she just asked the question differently. As if the internet might suddenly remember what it had spent the last hour pretending never existed.
But the results came back the same. Sterile. Dismissive. Unified in their contempt.
"Tartary was simply a name used by Europeans to refer to Central Asia."
"The so-called 'Tartarian Empire' is a modern conspiracy theory with no historical basis."
"Claims of advanced technology in Tartaria are unfounded and lack credible sources."
She clicked through page after page, watching the language shift from dismissal to condescension to something uglier, articles that called believers in Tartaria "delusional," "anti-scientific," "dangerous." Think pieces that suggested people who researched it were one step away from domestic terrorism.
The consistency was what got her. Every single source, news sites, academic papers, Wikipedia, history blogs, all told the exact same story with the exact same language, as if they'd been copied from a single script and distributed to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection.
Too consistent.
Too careful.
Too complete.
Lyra's chest felt like someone had wrapped steel bands around it and was tightening them one notch at a time.
She closed the browser and pulled up her email, her hands moving on autopilot, already knowing what she'd find.
Or what she wouldn't find.
She scrolled back through her sent folder, looking for the confirmation from the retreat center in Brazil. The one she'd read a dozen times before she left, memorizing the details, the address, the what-to-bring list that told her not to wear perfume or bring her phone into the ceremony.
It wasn't there.
She checked her spam folder, though she knew it wouldn't be there either. Checked her trash. Her archive. Every subfolder she'd ever created.
Nothing.
Like she'd never sent it. Like she'd never received it. Like the entire exchange had been lifted out of reality and replaced with blank space.
"It's gone," she said, and her voice sounded wrong in her own ears. Hollow. Like she was speaking from the bottom of a well. "The booking confirmation. The correspondence with the center. All of it."
Yosef was sitting on the couch, watching her with that steady attention he had, the kind that made you feel seen even when you didn't want to be.
She opened her bank statements next, scrolling back to the week before she'd left for Brazil.
The charge for the retreat, the non-refundable deposit that had made her wince when she'd authorized it, wasn't there.
No charge for the flight. No ATM withdrawal for the cash. No record of the two hundred dollars she'd spent at the airport on bottled water and a book she'd never finished.
Nothing.
Like she'd never gone.
Like she'd spent that week in Michigan, living her normal life, never boarding a plane, never drinking the medicine, never meeting Don César.
Never meeting Yosef.
Except he was sitting right there, solid and real, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt that were too big for him, clothes Lyra had found in a box in her basement, left behind by a previous tenant or a forgotten boyfriend, she didn't know which. They hung loose on his frame, the sleeves rolled up to keep them from covering his hands. He looked out of place in them, like he was wearing a costume. But at least he didn't look like he'd stepped out of 1812.
Lyra's hands started shaking so hard she had to set them flat on the desk.
"How is this possible?" she whispered.
Yosef was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful, measured, like he was trying to figure out the answer as he said it.
"I don't know."
Two words that somehow made it worse. Because Yosef knew things. He understood frequencies and resonance and how reality bent around intention. He'd lived a hundred years in a civilization that had mastered technologies her world had forgotten existed.
And he didn't know.
Lyra's stomach dropped, not the metaphorical kind, but the physical sensation of freefall, of standing on solid ground that suddenly wasn't there anymore.
She thought about the mushroom clouds they'd seen on the horizon in Egypt. Three of them, rising like obscene flowers, beautiful and horrifying in their symmetry. The war consuming Tartaria.
What if it had worked?
What if the French allies had succeeded? What if they hadn't just destroyed the cities, but erased them? Removed them from history so thoroughly that even the memory of them was suspect, dangerous, a symptom of mental illness rather than truth? She could feel that old un-quiet trying to force its way back into her life like an abusive ex that just would not stay gone.
"I need to go back," Lyra said suddenly, the words coming out before she'd fully formed the thought.
Yosef looked at her. "Back where?"
"Brazil. The retreat center." She was talking faster now, the idea taking shape as she spoke. "If I can get there, if I can drink the medicine again, maybe I can find my way back to Tartaria. Maybe the doorway is still there, just... waiting. Maybe—"
"Lyra."
Yosef's voice was gentle, but it stopped her like a hand against her chest.
"What if it's gone?"
The words hung in the air between them, and Lyra felt something crack inside her chest. Not break, not yet, but crack, like ice under weight, warning her that if she pushed any harder, everything would shatter.
She felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes, hot and unwelcome, and she blinked hard against them.
"Then I need to know," she said, and her voice came out rough, scraped raw. "I need to see for myself."
Because the alternative was worse. The alternative was sitting here in her house in Sterling Heights, watching the world tell her that everything she'd experienced was a delusion, that Yosef was, what? A hallucination? A breakdown? A symptom of something broken in her brain that needed medication and therapy and concerned looks from people who'd never felt the hum of a city built on resonance?
She couldn't do that.
She wouldn't.
Yosef studied her face for a long moment, and she saw something shift in his expression. Not agreement, exactly. But understanding. Recognition of the fact that she was going to do this whether he came with her or not.
"Okay," he said. "Then we go."
Lyra sat at her laptop and checked her bank account.
The balance was higher than she remembered, by several hundred dollars. The money she'd spent on the first Brazil trip. Still there. Never spent.
She felt a chill run through her.
Even the money proved it. That trip had been erased.
She looked at Yosef, sitting on the couch in clothes that didn't quite fit him, jeans and a flannel shirt that were too big, left behind by someone who'd lived here before. A man from 1812 trying to exist in 2026.
She could afford two tickets to Brazil. But first, he needed to exist in this world.
No social security number. No passport. No birth certificate. Nothing that would get him through airport security.
Paperhangers, she thought. Professional forgers. But who was she going to call? She didn't know anyone who did this kind of thing. Didn't know where to even start looking.
She sat at her laptop, the cursor blinking at her like an accusation, and typed the words she'd never imagined typing.
How to get fake passport
The results came back sanitized, sterile, government warnings about the penalties for document fraud, articles written in the careful language of people who'd never broken a law in their lives. Scare tactics. Nothing that actually helped.
She tried again. Document forgery services. Identity creation underground.
Nothing.
And then, buried six pages deep in the search results, she found it. A Reddit thread from three years ago, the comments mostly deleted, but one remained:
Dark web. That's the only place you'll find what you're looking for. More reliable than anything you'll find up here. Real consequences for scammers down there, reputation is everything.
Lyra stared at those two words until they stopped looking like words at all.
Dark web.
"What can I do?" Yosef's voice came from behind her.
She turned. He was standing in the doorway, watching her with that quiet intensity he had.
"What do you mean?"
"To help," he said. "I can't just sit while you do this alone. I need—" He stopped, his jaw tightening. "I need to work toward something. Some goal. It's how I maintain what harmony I have left in this place."
Lyra looked at him, and something in her chest softened.
"The clothes in the basement," she said. "The ones you're wearing. They don't fit right. Can you go through the boxes down there? See if there's anything else that might work better? I'll need to know what to get you tomorrow."
It wasn't much. But Yosef nodded, and she saw some of the tension ease from his shoulders.
"I can do that," he said.
After he left, Lyra turned back to the screen.
She spent the rest of the day and long into the night learning how to master dark web crypto exchanges to get the documents.
The next morning, Lyra drove to the bank.
She needed cash. Not a lot, just enough to buy a laptop without leaving a trail. If she used her debit card, the purchase would be linked to her. The laptop needed to be air-gapped, clean, something that existed outside the normal grid of transactions and other mindless distractions that the internet, post 2016 has fallen into. Maybe designed into?
The teller barely looked at her when she requested a thousand dollars in twenties. Just counted out the bills, slid them across the counter, and called for the next customer.
The flights to Brazil she could just put on her credit card like any normal jag off.
From there, she drove to Target.
She grabbed a cart. Electronics first, a basic air-gapped laptop for $299. Cash. No trail.
Then men's clothing. Two pairs of jeans. Three t-shirts. A hoodie. Socks. Underwear.
Toiletries, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo.
The cashier rang it up. Four hundred and seventy-three dollars.
Lyra paid in cash and left.
She drove straight to the Sterling Heights Public Library on Dodge Park Road.
The laptop stayed in the box until she got there. She couldn't risk connecting it at home, the moment it touched her wifi, it would be linked to her. Useless.
Inside the library, she found a corner table away from cameras and opened the laptop for the first time.
Brand new. Clean. No history. No connection to her life.
She connected to the library's public wifi and installed Tor from a USB drive she'd prepared on her regular computer the night before.
Her hands shook as she launched Tor.
The browser loaded slowly, routing through Russia, Romania, Iceland. Each hop adding another layer of anonymity. She even made special effort to go through France and Italy finding small satisfaction in the mocking irony.
The dark web looked nothing like she'd expected.
No sleek interfaces. No corporate polish. Just walls of text in forums, addresses that were strings of random characters. You couldn't stumble onto anything by accident, you needed the exact address to get anywhere.
She found a marketplace directory. Clean. Professional. Eerily normal except for what it was selling.
Identities.
Row after row of them. Passports, driver's licenses, birth certificates. Each listing had a vendor name, a rating, reviews written in the careful language of people who'd used these documents to cross borders, open bank accounts, start new lives.
She scrolled through them, reading descriptions that promised quality, guaranteed authenticity, swore the documents would pass "basic verification," a phrase that carried so much weight it made her hands shake.
Most of the vendors had decent ratings. The reputation system here was brutal, scammers got exposed fast, their ratings tanked, and they disappeared. What survived were the professionals.
One vendor stood out.
Full identity package. US passport, SSN, birth certificate, state ID. Guaranteed to pass government inspection. Professional quality. 10-14 day turnaround. Monero only. No refunds. No exceptions.
The vendor, username PALINGINE_DOCS, had forty-seven reviews spanning two years. People vouched for them the way you vouch for a surgeon. Saved my life. Flawless work. Passed TSA, FBI background check, no questions.
The price: 2.8 XMR (approximately $12,000 USD)
Lyra's stomach dropped. Twelve thousand dollars.
She'd withdrawn a thousand from the bank this morning. Spent almost five hundred at Target. She had maybe five-fifty left in her wallet.
She'd need to make more withdrawals over the next few days. A lot more. Smaller amounts, spread out. Three hundred here. Five hundred there. Nothing that would trigger flags.
But what choice did she have?
She glanced around the library. The teenager was still bent over his homework. The librarian had moved to a different section. No one was paying attention to her.
She clicked the contact button.
A form appeared. Stark. Efficient. No wasted words.
She filled it out with hands that wouldn't stay steady.
Name: Yosef Kain DOB: June 15, 1996 POB: Traverse City, Michigan
She uploaded the photo she'd taken of him that morning, his face serious, his eyes looking directly at the camera with an intensity that made him look more real than half the people she passed on the street.
For the delivery address, she typed in her home address in Sterling Heights.
If this was a trap, she'd find out when the package arrived. Or when federal agents knocked on her door. But nothing before the payment mattered, you could browse the dark web, look at vendors, even fill out order forms all day long. What made it a crime was paying for it. The commitment of intent.
Better to keep it simple.
Then came the payment information.
Payment: 2.8 XMR (approximately $12,000 USD)
Monero. She'd figure out how to get it.
But first, she needed to submit the order.
She took a breath and clicked submit.
The screen showed a simple message:
Order received. Payment must be completed within 24 hours or order will be cancelled. Monero address: [long string of characters]
Lyra copied the Monero address to a text file, closed Tor, disabled the wifi, and shut down the laptop.
If she accidentally opened it at home, it couldn't connect. Couldn't link itself to her.
Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.
She'd just ordered a fake identity for a man from a dead civilization, using the dark web in a public library, and now she had twenty-four hours to figure out how to come up with twelve thousand dollars in untraceable cryptocurrency.
She packed up the laptop, walked out of the library, and sat in her car for a full five minutes before she trusted herself to drive.
Over the next few days, Lyra pulled cash from different ATMs and bought prepaid cards at convenience stores across three cities. Twenty-four cards. Twelve thousand dollars in untraceable plastic.
She converted them to Bitcoin through a sketchy exchange that didn't ask questions.
Then Bitcoin to Monero through a decentralized platform.
By the time she was done, the money had passed through so many hands and systems that it couldn't be traced back to her.
That night, she sat at the kitchen table, staring at the closed laptop.
Tomorrow she'd go back to the library and send the payment. Twelve thousand dollars to a stranger for fake documents. The moment she clicked send, she'd be committing a federal crime.
"What can I do?" Yosef's voice came from the doorway.
She looked up. He was standing there, his posture tense. Not anxious, just contained. Like he was holding himself still through effort.
"What do you mean?"
"To help," he said. "I can't just sit while you do this alone. I need—" He stopped, his jaw tightening. "I need to work toward something. Some goal. It's how I maintain what harmony I have left in this place."
Lyra felt something in her chest tighten, then release.
"Tomorrow," she said. "When I go to the library. Come with me. Wait in the car. I just, I need to know you're there. That I'm not doing this alone."
Yosef nodded, and she saw some of the tension ease from his shoulders.
"I can do that," he said.
The next morning, she drove back to the library with Yosef in the passenger seat. He didn't ask questions. Just sat with her in the parking lot for a moment, his hand covering hers on the steering wheel.
"I'll be right here," he said.
She nodded, grabbed the laptop, and went inside.
Found the corner table. Opened the laptop. Launched Tor.
Sent the Monero to the address PALINGINE_DOCS had provided.
The transaction took forty minutes to confirm, each minute stretching like an hour.
When it finally went through, the marketplace updated:
Payment received. Estimated delivery: 10-14 days. You will receive tracking information when shipment is ready.
Lyra closed the laptop and sat in the library parking lot, staring at nothing.
She'd just paid twelve thousand dollars to a stranger on the dark web for fake documents.
For all she knew, she'd never see the money again. Never get the documents. Never hear from the vendor.
But it was the only option she had.
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