Soft snowflakes drifted from a sky of impossible blue — clear, cloudless, so bright it felt wrong. They spiraled in slow, weightless arcs, catching the sun as they fell, their crystalline edges glinting like ash from some shattered world above. Rowan lay still beneath them, half-buried in the growing drift, motionless as they settled across his chest and shoulders. He blinked up into the light, eyes unfocused, watching the dance of frozen particles with a strange detachment.
The air was cool. Not biting, not bitter. Almost gentle. He let it move across his skin for a moment, let it fill his lungs in quiet, even breaths. But the stillness wasn’t peace. It felt suspended, artificial. And somewhere beneath that calm, something in his chest tightened.
The silence was too deep. The air too thin. Something was wrong.
He rolled to his side with effort, teeth clenched as the motion pulled nausea to the surface. A high ringing filled his ears, dull at first, then sharper. His vision swam, light blooming at the edges. His memory reached for context and came up empty. There was no pain, not yet — only numbness and disorientation. But it was the snow that caught him. The snow that didn’t make sense. Snow on sand?
His palm sank into the ground beside him. Beneath the soft dusting of white, the grit was coarse and dry. Desert soil. Heat-etched and unfamiliar. He pushed himself upright, slowly, arms shaking beneath his weight, legs trembling as they straightened beneath him. The flakes kept falling, but they melted as they touched the dunes — vanishing in tiny curls of steam. The ground resisted the cold like a living thing, unwilling to yield.
He turned in a slow circle, scanning the barren horizon. The landscape stretched outward in all directions — dry ridges, low hills, and the skeletons of man-made structures, half-sunk into the sand. Some were scorched and broken, walls collapsed inward. Others stood askew, twisted at impossible angles, as if warped by forces that bent more than steel.
A harsh wind curled past him, dragging the scent of scorched stone and molten metal. Something deep beneath it smelled wrong. Familiar, maybe — but out of place. Like blood on machinery.
He frowned, lifting a hand to his forehead, half-expecting it to come away slick. But there was no wound. No blood. His fingers came back clean. He stared at them for a moment, then looked up again.
The snow continued to fall, silent and steady, but none of it settled. Not for long. It shouldn’t be here, not in this place. Parts of the snow melted on impact as the ground still held some of the day’s heat.
But his attention turned from the snow as he noticed the way his shadow faded. The sharp edge of it — clear and defined in the white dust — began to soften, then bled into the sand like spilled ink. He followed the change upward.
The golden disc that hung above him had dimmed. Not eclipsed or masked by cloud. But veiled — wrapped in a dark shell that seemed to pulse with its own slow gravity. A perfect shielding of murk, as if the light had been smothered from the inside. There was no corona or heat now, just an expanding blur, and his eyes didn’t burn as he stared.
The breath caught in his throat. Something was wrong with the shape — not just the glow, but the boundaries. The orb was stretching now, flattening slightly at the sides, pushing outward as if straining against the sky itself.
“I must’ve hit my head,” he muttered, but even the sound of his voice felt wrong. Thin. Weightless. The silence around him didn’t break. It absorbed everything. And he couldn’t look away.
A fracture split across the center of the sun — a hairline crack that shimmered like stress in glass. Then another. The surface distorted, not flickering, but splitting. Something deep in his ears shifted, a rising pressure like altitude sickness cresting into pain.
He staggered backward. Above him, the shell broke.
It split open in absolute silence, peeling apart like glass under stress, and from within it came arcs of fire — slow at first, reaching out in spiraling limbs that stretched into the upper atmosphere. Segments of the sun peeled off like burning petals, curling inwards, others flared downward, streaking toward the horizon in fiery trails. The sky rippled.
Wind hit him a moment later, screaming in from the edges of the world, cold and hot all at once. It tore through the dunes, lifting sand in violent bursts, and still the arcs above him twisted and burned. And then — the west ignited.
A wall of flame rose from the horizon, higher than mountains, wider than storm fronts. It came without sound at first — just light — a radiant tidal wave swallowing the land in a single, merciless breath. Rowan turned to run, but his body failed him. His limbs locked, rooted in place. Heat crashed into him like a physical force. The buildings nearby had already vanished, melted to shadows. The dunes fractured, then turned to glass. The ground beneath him glowed.
He dropped to his knees. His skin should have blistered. His lungs should have failed. But there was no sensation, only the pressure in his chest — rising, unbearable — and then the smoke. Thick and acrid, crawling down his throat in a dry, suffocating burn. He tried to scream, but there was no air left.
Rowan coughed hard, lungs seizing as smoke hit his lungs. His chest convulsed. Instinct clawed him upward, but his limbs felt trapped beneath something cold and heavy. He blinked into a haze of gray light, his hands scrabbling against wet stone and shattered ice. The air was thick with chemicals — scorched wiring, melted plastic, the bitter edge of rocket fuel laced with steam. Everything burned behind his eyes.
He groaned, pushing himself upright one trembling arm at a time. Ice cracked beneath his weight. Blood roared in his ears, that same relentless ringing from before, sharper now, more insistent.
The tunnel behind him was gone — buried, collapsed, or burning somewhere deeper inside the ice. Whatever had hit them hadn’t spared him. It had simply launched him out of reach of the worst.
He shifted, wincing as pain bloomed across his shoulder. He rolled it once, jaw clenched against the motion. “Must’ve been what I landed on,” he muttered, breath short. “At least it’s not broken.”
He staggered forward, clearing the edge of the debris field, and stepped out into the room. Or what was left of it.
The space was nearly unrecognizable. The ceiling — once reinforced with crossbeams and layered glass — had been torn apart. Huge chunks of ice dangled overhead like jagged teeth, dripping in slow, steady rhythm. A massive breach gaped above, sunlight pouring through the torn glacier in fractured rays, turning the rising smoke into gold-laced fog. The rest was in ruin.
Metal support beams lay bent and twisted across the floor, some half-submerged in meltwater, others jutting out like splintered ribs. The beds, the table, the walls — all gone. Blown apart, burned, or buried.
A long, blackened gash cut straight through the middle of the room, angled from east to west — a clear trajectory of destruction. The missile had come from the far side, arcing downward. It had torn straight through the glacial ice and reinforced glass, carving a tunnel of obliteration in its wake.
Rowan scanned the pattern. He’d been thrown against the eastern wall, near the tunnel entrance — far enough from the center to survive. Barely. The blast had buried him in ice and debris, but he could feel it now — the direction, the force, the way the pressure had curved around him and launched him clear of the direct line.
He wiped soot from his face, breath still ragged, and looked for a way out. The glacier above hadn’t fully collapsed, but chunks of ice still slid and fell through the new opening. Steam curled from the walls. Water dripped steadily from the fractured ceiling. Flickers of flame danced around and cast shadows like a conductor to a silent orchestra.
He turned toward the only exit that remained — the old door along the west wall. It had collapsed under the blast, buried beneath a steel beam and a spill of ice. He made his way to it, boots crunching through slush and debris, and dropped to one knee beside the wreckage.
He started clearing the larger chunks by hand, straining against the cold weight of them. Ice cracked loose in thick slabs, revealing scorched stone and charred fragments beneath.
“Why did they have to do this…” he muttered, teeth gritted. “There were other ways.” As he pulled one jagged piece aside, he froze. Boots.
A body, half-buried beneath the rubble, face obscured by soot and blood. The figure was unrecognizable — the blast had stripped away everything but shape. Rowan stared for a long moment, then lowered his head and kept moving.
He worked in silence. The only sounds were dripping water, the distant hiss of fire, and the occasional creak of stressed metal overhead. The explosions outside had ceased. Every few seconds, the whole space seemed to shift — the lingering tension in the structure groaning in protest.
Eventually, he carved a narrow gap wide enough to squeeze through. He tested the overhead weight, crouched low, and slipped past the beam. On the other side, the hallway had collapsed in places, but there was enough space to move.
Another body lay near the doorway — slumped at an angle, a pool of blood spread beneath it. The person had been crushed when the ceiling gave way. There was no breath. No chance. And then—another shape. Farther ahead.
A limp arm extended from behind a torn panel of wall, blood trailing from the fingertips. Rowan stepped closer and felt his stomach twist. Lianna.
She was sprawled on her side, one leg bent beneath her, hair soaked with blood. A long gash traced across her temple. Her bandana had slipped down, half-draped over her shoulder, stained crimson.
He stepped over the debris and knelt beside her. Her chest rose — shallow, unsteady — but she was breathing. “How many others were killed?” he asked softly, the words escaping before he could stop them.
There was no answer. Only the brittle echo of fire crackling somewhere behind him. He rose, scanning the ruined corridor. What had once led deeper into the facility was now a jagged ruin of broken walls and half-collapsed beams. But to the right side — a sliver of space where the wall hadn’t fully given way. A path, it looked narrow and unstable, but passable.
He looked back at Lianna, still unconscious in the debris.
“You weren’t even part of this,” he murmured, voice low and hoarse.
He shut his eyes. And in the dark, the faces returned—Miranda, turning away without a word. Bryan, outlining the plan with that same steady calm, like they were brokering a deal instead of handing out death.
A loud clatter echoed behind him—another piece of metal collapsing from the ceiling. Rowan flinched slightly but didn’t turn. He didn’t know who had made it out, how many had died, or how bad the fallout really was. But he knew one thing: he had to move. They couldn’t stay here.
“I’ll come back,” he said to her, though she likely heard none of it—probably wasn’t even aware of her own name right now.
He turned away and began weaving through the tangled corridor. The fallen beams made each step uncertain; he tested them carefully, shifting his weight before pressing forward. It wasn’t far—maybe ten meters—and soon the worst of the debris gave way. The corridor beyond was more intact, though the air still tasted of ash.
Ahead, the main entrance loomed. The exterior doors had been blown inward from the outside, warped and jammed, just barely cracked open. Cold light spilled through the narrow gap.
Rowan stepped forward and wedged his fingers into the opening, muscles straining. The steel didn’t budge. He let go, hands trembling, shoulder pulsing with pain.
He paused, listening. Faintly—shouts. The lift of engines. The mechanical whine of machinery still in motion. “The hangar lift?” he thought. “I need to make contact.”
He turned, eyes sweeping the other corridors. The one that led to their old holding room was heavily damaged, twisted nearly beyond recognition. But the other halls remained mostly intact. Chunks of paneling and broken fixtures hung from the ceiling like torn fabric, but there were no major breaches that he could see.
Then the memories came—unbidden and sharp. Echoes of screams. Splintered flashes of panic. His chest tightened, breath catching. And her face. Taryn.
He squeezed his eyes shut, jaw clenched. He couldn’t let himself fall into that pit again—not now. He didn’t have the luxury of grief. He forced the thought away and turned back the way he’d come.
Another rumble shook the structure as something collapsed nearby. He didn’t flinch. He just kept moving.
When he reached her, Lianna had shifted slightly—rolled onto her side—but lay motionless. He knelt beside her, watching closely. Her chest still rose, faint and shallow. That was enough.
He reached down and slid an arm beneath hers. His shoulder flared with pain, nerves screaming in protest. He gritted his teeth and pulled, raising her into a seated position before wrapping both arms beneath hers. He clasped his hands together across her chest and began to drag her backward.
Her boots scraped through the debris. Slush, glass, and melted plastic gave way beneath them. She was dead weight in his arms, but something primal pushed him forward. Step by step, he pulled her toward the damaged exit.
The effort left him shaking. With one final burst, he heaved her through the narrow gap and lowered her against the wall beside the twisted door. He collapsed beside her, breath ragged, shoulder ablaze.
His fingers pressed instinctively against the joint—and stopped. It felt wrong. It was swollen and loose. Then the spasm hit. His arm jerked violently, nerves alight. “It’s dislocated,” he growled through gritted teeth.
He rolled onto his knees beside her, sucking in sharp, uneven breaths. The pressure in his ears built to a roar, louder than the dying wail of distant klaxons. His right arm hung useless at his side, a pulsing knot of fire and heat. Every shift sent lightning up his spine.
He scanned the corridor. A twisted steel strut jutted from the left wall like a broken rib—sharp, angled, sturdy. It would have to do.
Rowan forced himself upright, braced his knees, and leaned against the wall. Gritting his teeth, he squared his stance, angled his body, and took a breath. Just one. He slammed his shoulder into the metal. A shockwave of pain exploded through him. Nothing.
He tried again—harder. A sickening crack rang through his bones. He dropped to his knees with a strangled cry, the world spinning in blurred fragments. For a moment, the ground seemed to tilt beneath him. Then stillness returned.
His arm moved. Not cleanly. Not without pain. But it moved. He could live with that. Behind him, Lianna stirred. A low groan escaped her lips, and he turned. Her eyes fluttered open, glassy and unfocused, her gaze distant—like she was seeing something far beyond the ruined hall around them.
She didn’t move, but he could tell: concussion. Bad one. “What time is it?” she asked, voice slurred, soft. Rowan stepped toward her. She propped herself up on one elbow, looking around slowly. “Why is my house on fire?” she asked in the same calm, detached tone.
Rowan looked around the corridor, the quiet pressing in against the edges of his focus. Smoke drifted through broken beams and half-lit passageways, but the worst of the collapse was behind them. They needed to move—fast—and not alone.
He turned to Lianna, still seated against the wall, her eyes unfocused but open. “We were attacked,” he said gently. “Do you think you can stand? I could use the help.”
He knelt beside her, careful to rest most of his weight on his left knee. His right arm hung oddly—twisted slightly inward, stiff from the reset. She didn’t seem to notice. “Am I late for something?” she asked, blinking up at him with mild confusion.
Rowan hesitated, then offered a faint smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here to get you there. But I need you to walk.” Lianna nodded absently and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her head dipped slightly, turning in slow, unsteady circles as if she were watching something drift just out of view.
“Are you hurt anywhere besides your head?” he asked, pointing to the gash along her temple. Blood still traced the side of her face, seeping down through her hair.
She looked around, distracted, then frowned as if considering it seriously. “I feel fine,” she said at last, the words almost too steady. She rolled to one knee, wavered, and forced herself upright with quiet determination. Rowan rose with her, staying close.
Her balance gave out almost instantly—she swayed sideways and fell into him. He caught her easily, her weight lighter now that she was attempting to move under her own power, albeit clumsily.
“Can you tell the neighbors to stop being so loud?” she murmured. Rowan gave a dry chuckle and wrapped her arm around his neck. “Let’s go tell them together. Just follow my lead.” She nodded with a dazed smile. One of her knees buckled, but she caught herself before he had to lift her fully. He kept her steady, guiding her into motion.
“I won’t let you fall, as long as you keep moving forward,” he said. She leaned forward to walk, but her legs lagged behind—slow, misfiring. Delayed, but responsive. That gave him hope. No sign of spinal damage. Her head he was less sure about.
Together, they shuffled down the main hall, heading toward the command center. Lianna’s steps were jerky at first, but she began to match his rhythm, leaning into the cadence of his stride.
They passed a few intersecting corridors before she stiffened suddenly and slowed. “Report—update,” she said, voice sharp, eyes locking onto something Rowan couldn’t see. He followed her gaze but saw only empty hallway. “Rex… Viktor…”
She was listening to something. He could see it in the tilt of her head, the tension in her jaw. Rowan wasn’t sure what kind of tech her team used—maybe an implant, something semi-permanent. But she was receiving a signal.
“Kendra? Anyone?” she called out, scanning the corridor. “We need to protect the package.” Her brow creased in confusion. Rowan gently shifted out from under her arm, ready to catch her if she faltered again. “Can they hear you?” he asked, tapping near his ear.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she unfastened the top buttons of her jacket with trembling fingers, revealing the embedded insignia beneath—positioned just over her heart. After a moment’s fumbling, she reached in and pulled out a small, flat metal disc.
“Listen,” she said simply, and extended it toward him. Rowan hesitated, then took it from her.
The moment his skin touched the device, the signal surged into him—quiet at first, then rising in clarity. The sound wasn’t like audio. It vibrated straight into his bones. Voices flowed through his jaw and skull in strange, immersive cadence. A chorus of overlapping urgency.
He stared at the device. Skin-conductive tech. Military-grade. He’d read about these—heard rumors. But the system was supposed to need more infrastructure to function. Repeaters. Relays. This one clearly didn’t.
He let that realization slide. “How does it work?” he asked, turning the device in his hand. “I don’t see a mic.”
“It’s buried,” Lianna said. “You can’t reach it. You can only hear.” She tapped the side of her neck. Rowan didn’t press further. He just listened.
The chatter poured through the connection—fragmented conversations, tense commands, rising stress. Mentions of evac. They were launching the last two aircraft. Someone was pushing back—arguing about leaving anyone behind.
He didn’t recognize the names.
“I think they’re going to leave us,” he said finally, the words heavy in his mouth. Lianna didn’t look shocked. Didn’t even flinch. “Good,” she said, exhaling the word like it was a relief. Rowan frowned. Her reaction was too calm. He wasn’t sure if it had been her call—or if she’d simply accepted it before the blast. Maybe both.
He took a breath, weighed the silence, then slipped her arm back over his shoulder and helped her to her feet. He handed the comm device back. They kept moving.
Rowan felt a flicker of relief as they passed through the last corridor. Much of the facility appeared intact—scorched, shaken, but structurally sound. Most of the damage had been contained to non-critical areas. The room they’d been kept in, that had taken the brunt of it.
If the collider itself was untouched—and he suspected it was—the damage had been carefully limited. That meant whoever did this knew exactly where to hit. But it also meant their odds of being found were higher. If anyone was still looking. With the early snowstorms sweeping in harder than usual this year, survival outside would be a gamble.
They reached the command center. Lianna was walking more on her own now—still unsteady, but improving with each step. The door stood ajar, bent and half-warped. Rowan couldn’t tell if it had been forced open or simply twisted during the blast. Either way, it was open now.
He led her inside. The central table was dark—no projections, no system light. Just the dead weight of silence. Rowan grabbed a nearby chair, wheeled it over, and helped her ease down beside it. She gripped the edge of the table for balance, breathing heavily, eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance.
Rowan crossed the room and approached the main console—Albert’s station. He pressed a few keys. The screen flickered, then came to life. A jagged crack split the display from corner to corner, but the touch interface still responded.
He brought up the diagnostics overlay. System health maps rippled across the fractured screen. Pockets of damage. Outer breaches. Some heat spikes. But no major infrastructure loss. They’d hit the facility hard, but not hard enough to stop it. “How many did you kill to do nothing?” Rowan said under his breath.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lianna lower her head to the table, eyes half-lidded, exhausted. He watched her for a second, then turned back to the screen and opened the comms layer.
The interface loaded slowly. He scrolled through the available frequencies—what was left of them. Not many. Whoever had pulled out, they’d likely encrypted or burned their channels behind them.
Her team wasn’t coming back. Not while the mission was still live. And his own people—well, they were part of the reason this place was in ruins.
“Who…?” he whispered, tapping his fingers across the console. His thoughts drifted. If he called for help, who would even respond? Government response teams? Military patrols? No matter who came, they’d want answers—about the explosion, the breach, about him.
And officially, he wasn’t supposed to be here. The console blinked. “They can’t hear you, Rowan.” The message appeared without warning, printed cleanly across the comms window. Rowan froze.
He looked around the room instinctively, eyes scanning the ceiling, the corners, the cracked glass of the surveillance wall. Nothing. He turned back to the console. “The communications array was damaged.” He stared at the message. No command entered. No prompt. Just a quiet presence waiting behind the glass.
“Who is doing this?” he asked aloud, still watching the screen. Lianna stirred beside him without lifting her head. “The ghosts,” she said quietly, her voice soft and strange. “I see the ghosts.”
Rowan frowned. She hadn’t moved. She wasn’t even looking at the console. Her tone carried no sarcasm, no explanation. Just tired certainty. “Who is this?” he typed into the comm window.
For a long moment, nothing changed.
The screen stayed silent, blank. He waited, half-expecting the flicker of a glitch or the cold return of static. But then—
A new message appeared.
“A friend.”
Rowan frowned. “What’s your name?”
Another flicker. Then: “ We don’t have time for introductions. You need to get her out of here. I’m monitoring vitals—she’s unstable. Don’t let her fall asleep.”
Rowan turned toward Lianna. She’d slumped lower in the chair, lips moving faintly in a soundless murmur. He looked back at the console. “There’s no way out. I can’t carry her the whole way—my shoulder was dislocated.” The screen pulsed once. Then something behind him hissed. A soft mechanical pop.
Rowan spun—one of the wall panels had opened on its own. Inside, rows of sealed canisters, labeled in military shorthand.
“Ammonium carbonate. Field use. Smelling salts. Use them if she starts to fade.”
He hesitated. This was too coordinated. Too precise. Whoever this was—they knew the layout, the lockers, their injuries. And they were watching.
Lianna let out a groan, low and strained. It made the choice for him. Rowan crossed the room, tore open the packet, and waved it beneath her nose. In an instant, she jolted upright—gasping like she’d broken the surface of deep water. Her eyes bulged, unfocused.
“I don’t know why… there’s mushrooms… ice boarding…” she mumbled. Her gaze wandered the room in a dazed circle, glassy but alert. Rowan nodded grimly. Crude, but effective.
He returned to the console. A new message was waiting: “Good. Follow the path on this map—it’s the safest route to the hangar. Structural damage is minimal. Move quickly.”
The map overlaid the facility layout, pulsing with a clean blue path. Rowan studied it—narrow, efficient, direct. But before he could step away, another screen lit up. Not text this time,a video. And what it showed made him freeze.
A high-resolution view of the sun—real-time flare activity, marked X32 in the upper corner. Rowan leaned closer. He remembered this one. Everyone did. The flare had been widely reported. But the grid failures—those weren’t supposed to happen.
He watched as the video overlaid atmospheric data: charged particles striking the upper ionosphere, deforming the magnetic field in visible waves. Plasma bands raced through the exosphere. Then—They pierced it.
Thin lines—almost imperceptible—breached the atmosphere and tunneled down. Not just surface-level ionization. These were directed, grounding deep. The video zoomed in, pinpointing one of the pulses striking the Gulf of Mexico, right off the Texas coast. The energy followed the ancient fault lines north, tracing a violent, invisible seam through the continent.
Cities flickered. Power grids failed. He saw the moment Phoenix darkened, the second parts of Michigan flickered like a dying lightbulb. But the energy didn’t just descend—it traveled up from the crust.
The footage highlighted rows of tall micro-grid pillars across the landscape. There, the plasma curled upward through the pillars, lancing through them and into the grid, shorting out wide swathes.
Rowan’s brow furrowed. “That makes no sense…” The screen paused over the Great Lakes. Sparse outages. Inconsistent. “It’s what we’re trying to work out.” The message appeared without fanfare, directly beside the video.
“The data you pulled years ago was only half the story. Taryn had a theory—but she died before she could prove it.” Rowan stiffened. That name slammed through him like a pulse. He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Taryn.
His fingers hovered over the keys, shaking. “Who are you?” he typed, hard. No answer. Just silence. Then—”Get her out of here. We’ll talk again.” And the screen went dark.
Rowan stared at his own reflection in the blackened console. The ghosts of memory rising behind his eyes. Taryn knew something about this? Why hadn’t she told him? Had she tried?
He’d watched her die—helpless, unable to stop it. Now someone else was speaking for her. Claiming her theory. Claiming to know more than he ever did. And he hated it.
Lianna stirred and slowly stood, bracing against the table. Her movements were slow but deliberate, her eyes still distant. “I’m ready for dinner,” she said quietly. “Can we go out?”
Rowan blinked. The screen still glowed faintly behind him, but her voice pulled him back from the dark spiral of data and ghosts.
He looked at her, then at the screen. Whoever had contacted them knew more than they should. The data disturbed him. But they’d helped—and that was something.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said gently. “We can do that. I’ll guide you.” He stepped beside her and placed her arm around his waist. She leaned into him—heavier now, less stable than before. “We’ll be there soon,” he murmured.
They moved slowly into the corridor, following the path that had been marked. Rowan’s thoughts raced, but his steps were steady. He wasn’t sure if he could trust whoever had helped them, but Lianna needed more care than he could give. And she was fading.
As they passed through a dark junction, her head rested against his shoulder. She mumbled, “Do you think the stars will shine?”
Rowan hesitated, then answered instinctively. “Always.”
The last door hissed open, slow on reserve power. Red emergency lights bathed the hangar in eerie glow. The cavernous space was nearly empty—just one VTOL lit up on the platform, its engines spooling quietly as it rolled into position.
The rear hatch dropped open. A young man sprinted out to meet them, eyes wide with relief and confusion. “You did make it!” he said, breathless. Rowan didn’t recognize him at first, then saw the name stitched beneath his rank. Aldin.
Aldin rushed forward, slipping Lianna’s other arm over his shoulder to help guide her toward the waiting craft.
“Aldi…” Lianna slurred faintly. She sounded distant. Drained.
“What happened?” Aldin asked, glancing at Rowan as they walked. “A lot,” Rowan said, his tone dry. “She was bleeding out when I found her. Concussed. Maybe worse.”
Aldin winced. “I’ll get you both out of here. System unlocked and booted a few minutes ago—the ship’s ready.”
They brought her to one of the rear seats, strapping her in securely. Rowan double-checked the belts himself, tightening them until she was upright and safe.
“You can sit next to me up front,” Aldin offered, already turning toward the cockpit. But Rowan didn’t move. He stood staring at Lianna—her pale face in the red light, the way her breathing steadied. Flashes of Taryn’s face blurred across his vision like heat distortion.
Aldin strapped in, adjusting the headset. “We’ll be to the mainland in a few hours.” Rowan stepped toward the ramp, then turned. “No.” Aldin froze. “What do you mean, no? There’s no backup transport. If you stay, you’re stranded.”
Rowan just shook his head. “So be it.” He looked out across the hangar, then back at the young pilot. “I’ve run from this place for years. Warned people off. Tried to bury it. And here I am—right back where it started.”
Aldin opened his mouth, but Rowan had already stepped backward and hit the ramp controls. The platform began to rise as he moved away. Through the narrowing gap, he saw Aldin still staring at him—shaking his head.
But Rowan’s decision was made. He walked to the hangar lift controls. Pressed the button. The lifte slowly moved upwards and then the doors sealed shut, casting the chamber in silence. The only light left came from the low red glow of the emergency striplights.
Somewhere above, the VTOL’s engines roared to life, then faded as it lifted into the snow-choked skies. Silence followed—cold, absolute. It pressed into every corner like pressure from a deep ocean.
Rowan stood for a moment, listening to the pulse of blood in his shoulder, the quiet throb of old pain. Then he turned and walked the corridor alone, back toward the command center. His boots echoed softly, steady and slow.
He’d left solitude in Alaska, only to find it again here—carved into frost and steel. But maybe this time, something could be done.
He sat at the console. For a moment, the screens stayed black. Then, a message blinked to life in the top-right corner. “Trust no one.”
Rowan stared at it. Something about the phrasing, the way it appeared—
This wasn’t the same presence as before. He couldn’t explain how he knew.
But he did. Then another message appeared beneath it. “Taryn knew the truth. That’s why she had to die.”