Chapter 6: The Black Water Landing
Chapter 16: The War of Universes
The door buckled inward with a sound like breaking bone.
Metal shrieked against metal. The wedged cot skidded across the concrete, its legs screaming, sparks flashing where steel met stone. Wayne’s finger tightened on the trigger, his body dropping into a shooting stance, his eyes fixed on the gap that was widening with every push.
Rebecca’s hands flew across the controller.
Nothing.
The switches stayed dead. The screen stayed frozen. The portal stayed shut.
Behind her, Ash made a sound that wasn’t quite a whimper. A short, sharp exhale. The kind of sound a person made when they’d run out of room to run and hadn’t yet decided whether to fight or fold.
“Wayne.” Becky’s voice. Low. Tight. “How many?”
“Can’t tell yet.”
“Guess.”
“Four. Maybe five.”
“Armed?”
“Probably.”
The door gave way.
It didn’t fall. Didn’t shatter. Just swung open on its one remaining hinge and slammed against the wall with a crack that echoed through the room. The cot toppled sideways. Dust billowed. And in the doorway, silhouetted against the red emergency lights of the corridor, stood a man.
Silver hair. Cropped short. Neat.
Steel-grey eyes.
Rebecca’s stomach dropped.
Holt.
But not their Holt. Not Site 8’s Holt, the Director who’d slammed his hand on the console and ordered them sedated. This man wore a grey uniform, patched at the elbows and knees, the fabric faded and worn. No lab coat. No rumpled shirt. No look of a man who’d been losing control for eleven years. His hands were open, held slightly away from his body, palms facing forward. The gesture of a man who’d walked into a room full of guns and wanted everyone to know he wasn’t holding one.
Behind him, more figures. Soldiers in the same patched grey. Their rifles weren’t aimed at the group.
They were aimed past them. At the window. At the red sky. At whatever might be climbing through it.
Rourke moved.
He was already in the room, had been since before the door opened, his rifle tracking toward the gap. His finger found the trigger. His eye found Wayne.
“Don’t,” he said.
Wayne didn’t lower his gun.
“Don’t,” Rourke said again. “Put it down.”
“You first.”
“I’m not the one pointing at a friendly.”
“You’re not a friendly. You’re their dog.”
Rourke’s jaw tightened. His rifle didn’t waver. Neither did Wayne’s.
The soldiers behind Holt fanned out. Two moved left, two moved right, their boots silent on the concrete, their weapons still tracking the window. The red lights flickered. The alarm hummed below them, muffled by layers of concrete and steel.
Holt didn’t move.
He stood in the doorway, his grey eyes moving across the room. Counting. Cataloguing. He found Rebecca, his gaze lingering on the controller strapped to her arm. He found West, his expression flickering, just for a moment, into something that might have been recognition. He found Bex, and something behind his eyes hardened.
Then he raised one hand.
The soldiers behind him stopped.
They didn’t lower their weapons. Didn’t relax. Just stopped. Frozen in place, waiting, their eyes on Holt’s raised hand like it was the only thing keeping them tethered to the world.
Rebecca didn’t move.
She couldn’t. Her hands were still on the controller. Her fingers were still pressing switches that did nothing. Her body was coiled, ready, waiting for the moment when everything went to hell.
Bex shifted beside her.
The pilot had moved closer, her shoulder almost brushing Rebecca’s, her rifle still slung across her back. She hadn’t drawn it. Hadn’t reached for it. But her body was angled, ready, her hand loose at her side, her eyes fixed on Holt with an intensity that made the air feel thinner.
Rifles tracked them.
Not the soldiers’ rifles. Those were still aimed at the window. But Rourke’s rifle. Rourke’s finger. Rourke’s eye.
The standoff stretched.
Nobody breathed.
Holt didn’t move. He stood there, his hand still raised, his grey eyes still moving, and Rebecca could see something happening behind those eyes. Calculations. Decisions. The same kind of calculations she made when she was staring at an equation that wouldn’t balance.
Then Holt’s hand dropped.
He signaled to his soldiers.
Not a word. Not a gesture they could see. Just a shift in his body, a tilt of his head, a flick of his fingers. And the soldiers moved. Not toward the group. Not toward Rourke. Toward the door. They filed out of the room, one by one, their weapons still tracking the corridor, their boots silent on the concrete.
Rourke didn’t move.
His rifle was still up. Still aimed at Wayne. Still waiting for the order.
Holt looked at him.
“Stand down.”
His voice was quiet. Calm. Measured. The voice of a man who’d been giving orders for decades and had never once needed to shout to be heard.
Rourke hesitated.
“Sir.”
“Stand down, Commander. That’s an order.”
Rourke’s jaw worked. His finger tightened on the trigger. Then, slowly, deliberately, he lowered the rifle.
The silence stretched.
Nobody moved.
The red lights flickered above them, and the alarm hummed below them, and for a long, terrible moment, the room held its breath.
Then Holt stepped inside.
He moved past Rourke without looking at him, past Wayne without flinching, past the group without slowing. His boots were loud on the concrete, each step deliberate and measured, and he stopped in the center of the room, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes fixed on the window.
The red sky pressed against the glass.
“I know you have questions,” he said. “I’ll answer them. But first.”
He turned.
His gaze landed on Rebecca. On the controller. On the frozen screen, the dead switches, the countdown that wasn’t counting.
“You need to know that we’re not your enemy. That this place is not your prison. And that the longer you stay here, the more likely it is that none of us ever leave.”
Rebecca’s fingers stopped tapping.
Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper.
“Where are we?”
Holt’s expression didn’t change.
“You’re in the place where the end of everything began,” he said. “The last remaining fragment of a world that was swallowed whole by the collapse. Eleven years ago, above this facility, the first tear opened. We call what’s left of it the Annex Complex.”
Rebecca frowned.
“I don’t know that name.”
“No,” Holt said. “You wouldn’t. It’s not on your maps.”
The alarm died.
Not gradually. Not with a fade. Just stopped, cut off mid-wail, leaving behind a silence so absolute that Rebecca could hear her own heartbeat. Could hear the blood moving through her ears. Could hear the tiny, involuntary sounds her body made just by existing.
Holt stood in the center of the room, his hands still clasped behind his back. The soldiers were gone. Filed out into the corridor with their weapons still tracking the red sky. Rourke was still there, but his rifle was slung across his back now, his hands empty, his eyes fixed on Holt with something that might have been resentment or might have been trust.
The group watched him.
Nine people. Exhausted. Terrified. Armed. Trapped.
Same faces. Rebecca had seen versions of her own on three other women in this room; Wayne had a counterpart standing two feet from him. But watching Holt, she understood, for the first time, how little that meant. The face was Holt’s. The man wearing it was not.
Holt didn’t seem to notice.
He moved to the window. His boots were loud on the concrete, each step slow and deliberate, and when he stopped, his breath fogged the glass. He looked out at the red sky, at the haze that hung over everything, at the world that had ended eleven years ago and never stopped ending.
“The Annex Complex,” he said again. “That’s what we call it. Not because it’s empty. Not because it’s dead. Because it’s where the collapse originated. Where the first portal opened. Where reality broke.”
He turned. His grey eyes found Rebecca, held her.
“I don’t know what you call the place you came from. I don’t need to. It isn’t this one.”
West moved first.
He stepped forward, his long hair tied back, his beard thick and wild, his cracked tablet still strapped to his forearm. His eyes were hard, calculating, the eyes of a man who’d seen too much to trust anything at face value.
“You said dozens of timelines. How do you know that?”
“I don’t know your world,” Holt said. “Not specifically. But I know there are others. I know there are infinite versions of this base, scattered across infinite timelines, each one dealing with the same catastrophe in different ways.”
“How?”
“Because I’ve seen them.”
Rebecca’s blood went cold.
“What?”
Holt turned from the window. His expression hadn’t changed, but something behind his eyes had shifted. Something that might have been grief or might have been hope or might have been nothing at all.
“I’ve been here for eleven years,” he said. “Eleven years in the place where the collapse started. Eleven years watching the same moment play out over and over, in a thousand different versions of reality. This base. This room. This window.”
He gestured at the glass.
“I’ve watched a thousand timelines. I’ve watched versions of this base where the collapse was stopped, versions where it was accelerated, versions where it never happened at all. All of it, playing out beyond that window like a television with a thousand channels and no remote.”
“That’s impossible,” Becky said. “You can’t see other timelines through a window.”
“No. You can’t. But I can.”
Holt reached into his uniform. He pulled out a controller.
Not a tablet. Not a scavenged device. Something older. Something built. A black polymer shell, etched with fine warning glyphs, titanium brackets flush with the chassis, ribbon wires braided and color-coded and sheathed in silver mesh. The screen was lit, glowing faintly, and on it, Rebecca could see data.
Frequencies. Coordinates. Countdowns.
And in the top left corner, unmoving, the number she’d memorized.
43:19:37.
Bex’s controller.
The artifact.
The one they’d seen in the archive, sealed in its containment case, humming with a frequency that shouldn’t exist.
“That’s not yours,” Bex said.
“No.” Holt didn’t look at her. “It’s Captain Collins’s. The original. The one she carried into the vortex eleven years ago. It came back through. It’s been here ever since.”
He held it out.
Rebecca stared at it.
The same controller. The same countdown. The same impossible, humming thing that had been waiting in an archive for eleven years, and now here it was, in the hands of a man who called himself Holt but wasn’t the Holt they’d left behind.
“This is how I’ve survived,” Holt said. “This is how I’ve watched. The artifact doesn’t just count down to the collapse. It taps into the resonance of every timeline that formed after it. Every reality that branched off from the moment of fracture. I can see them. All of them.”
He paused.
“I can see the world you came from. The world you left. The world you’re trying to get back to.”
Wayne’s voice was rough.
“You can see our world?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“The same way you see into a house through a window. You press your face against the glass and you look. The artifact is the glass. My will is the face.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Holt’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“It’s the only one I have.”
Ash had moved.
Rebecca didn’t notice at first. She was too focused on Holt, on the artifact, on the impossible things he was saying. But when she heard the small, soft sound of footsteps on concrete, she turned.
Ash was standing by the cot. The one Wayne had wedged against the door before everything went sideways. She had the handgun in her hands. The one Rebecca had given her back in the swamp. She was holding it wrong, her fingers too high on the grip, her thumb wrapped around the back of the slide.
She was staring at Holt.
Not at his mouth. Not at his eyes. At his hands. At the controller. At the thing that hummed in his grip like a living creature.
“Ash,” Rebecca said softly. “Ash, put it down.”
The girl didn’t move.
Her hollow eyes were fixed on the controller, and something in her expression had shifted. Something that might have been fear or might have been recognition or might have been nothing at all.
“That’s mine,” Ash said.
The room went silent.
Holt looked at her. Really looked. His eyes moved across her thin frame, her matted hair, her cracked lips, her bare feet wrapped in boots that were too big. And something in his expression cracked.
“No,” he said gently. “No, it’s not. It’s a version of you, but not.”
“It’s mine.”
“Ash.”
“It’s mine!”
Her voice cracked on the last word. Bubbled and broke and splintered into something that wasn’t a word at all. The handgun shook in her grip. Her finger found the trigger.
Rebecca moved.
She didn’t think. Didn’t plan. Just moved, crossing the distance between them in three quick steps, her hand closing over Ash’s wrist, pushing the gun down, pulling the girl against her.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Look at me.”
Ash looked at her. Her hollow eyes were wet. Her breath was coming in short, sharp gasps.
“That’s not yours,” Rebecca said. “That’s a piece of a world that ended. A piece of a you that died. It’s not yours. You’re here. You’re alive. You’re with us.”
“You’re here.”
The gun clattered to the floor.
Ash collapsed against her. Not crying. Not sobbing. Just shaking. Her thin body trembled against Rebecca’s chest, and her breath came in short, sharp gasps, and her fingers found Rebecca’s jacket and held on like she was drowning.
Rebecca held her.
She didn’t know what else to do.
Holt watched.
His steel-grey eyes moved across the room, from Rebecca to Ash to Wayne to West, and something behind them shifted. Softened. Became something that might have been recognition.
“You’re not from the same timeline,” he said. “None of you are. You’ve been jumping. Collecting each other. Building a team out of fragments of the same shattered thing.”
West’s jaw tightened.
“What if we have?”
“Nothing. It’s brilliant, actually. The only way to survive a multiverse that’s falling apart is to gather people who are already broken. People who understand loss. People who know how to keep moving when there’s nothing left to move toward.”
He stepped closer.
“But you’re running out of time.”
Rebecca’s blood ran cold. She kept her arm around Ash, but her free hand rose, the controller on her forearm catching the red light, its frozen screen glaring.
“What do you mean we’re running out of time?”
Holt looked at her. At Wayne. At the others. His expression was unreadable.
“The collapse isn’t just spreading. It’s accelerating. Whatever triggered the original event, the one that opened the gate beneath this facility, it’s not done. It’s still active. Still growing. And the more timelines that fracture, the faster the fracture spreads.”
He paused.
The rifles didn’t move.
Not at first. Not when Holt said stand down. Not when Rourke’s shoulders finally dropped and his muzzle drifted toward the floor like a man setting down something that had been holding him upright for too long. The soldiers in the corridor were still braced, still tracking the window, still waiting for the sky to crack open and spill something worse than red light into the room.
Wayne’s rifle hadn’t moved either.
He stood with his back to the far wall, the cracked tablet bolted to his forearm catching the emergency glow, his finger still inside the trigger guard. His eyes were on Holt. On Rourke. On the doorway and the shadows moving beyond it. He wasn’t going to be the first to lower his weapon. Rebecca knew that. She’d known it before he’d ever raised it.
Her own hands were still frozen on the controller. Switches dead. Screen dead. Countdown dead. The silence was worse than the alarm.
Then the door behind the soldiers banged open again.
A woman rushed through, nearly colliding with the rear rank. Lab coat, split at the seam and patched with grey tape. A tablet clutched against her chest like a prayer book. A pen jammed behind her ear, chewed to splinters at the cap.
She was old. Older than anyone in the room. Dark hair gone grey at the temples and pulled back so tight it looked painful. Sharp green eyes behind wire-frame glasses that sat slightly crooked on her nose. She moved like the floor was on fire and she’d been waiting years for the chance to run across it.
She stopped two steps into the room.
Her eyes found Professor Vance.
Vance had been standing near Arthur, close to the wall, his tweed jacket stained and his hair, once combed back so neatly, now half-collapsed across his forehead. He’d kept his rifle low through the whole standoff, barrel angled at the floor, but his knuckles had gone white on the forend grip and hadn’t let up.
The woman stared at him.
Vance stared back.
Her breath caught. Audible. Sharp. A small, involuntary sound that she tried to swallow half a second too late.
Rebecca watched it happen. The way the old woman’s fingers tightened on her tablet until the casing creaked. The way her mouth opened and then closed and then opened again, shaping words that never made it out. The way she looked at Vance’s face like she was reading a page she’d memorized a long time ago and never expected to see printed again.
Rebecca had seen that look before. In the mirror. In Becca’s face. In the small, tired lines around Becky’s eyes.
Recognition.
“Is it,” the woman’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat, straightened her glasses, tried again. Clinical. Controlled. Whatever she was feeling, she buried it fast. “You’re Robert.”
Vance frowned.
“I’m sorry. Do I.”
“You are. I’d know that face anywhere. That’s my daughter’s jaw. My daughter’s eyes. Her stubbornness, too. You’ve got it in the shoulders.”
The room went very quiet.
Arthur’s rifle dipped another inch. Becca’s tablet hand dropped to her side. Becky’s eyes narrowed, tracking the old woman like a threat she hadn’t yet categorized.
Vance’s mouth moved. Nothing came out the first time.
“Who are you?”
The woman drew a breath. When she spoke, her voice was steady, but it was the kind of steady you built on purpose.
“Helena Vance.”
Vance’s hand tightened on his rifle. The silence stretched until it hurt.
“Doctor Helena Vance,” she continued. “Field research lead, threshold dynamics, classified annex six. I ran the original gateway study eleven years ago.” She paused. Her jaw flexed. “And unless my arithmetic’s wrong, which it isn’t, I’m your grandmother.”
Nobody spoke.
Arthur made a sound like a kettle deciding whether to whistle.
“Your grandmother,” Vance repeated flatly.
“Yes.”
“My grandmother vanished when I was twelve.”
“In your timeline.” Helena’s voice didn’t waver. “I was sixty-nine when it happened. One moment in my lab, the next gone, no body, no trace. For a long time I assumed I was as good as dead myself. That’s the problem with reading the same page from two different books. You start remembering things that only happened to you in one of them.”
Vance exhaled slowly through his nose. His fingers eased off the rifle. Not much. Just a fraction.
“I don’t,” he stopped. Tried again. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
“I don’t either,” Helena said. “So I’m going to stand here and try not to cry, and you’re going to try not to look at me like I’ve come to take something from you, and we’ll both get back to work. Deal?”
Vance’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Almost.
“Deal.”
Helena took two more steps in. She stopped beside Holt, her shoulder nearly brushing his. When she looked at him, something passed between them. Brief. Wordless. Familiar. They’d done this before. Stood in the same room and stared down the same ending.
Holt’s eyes moved across the group. He counted them the way a man counted ammunition. Nine travelers. Five worlds. It took him less than a minute and he didn’t need to ask.
“You’re Collins,” he said, looking at Rebecca. “The experimental lead. Your tablet’s the newest.”
“How do you.”
“The chassis. It’s factory-clean in three places and reinforced in four. Somebody’s been drilling and mounting and running ribbons through steel brackets that don’t belong on a commercial model. That’s a builder’s tablet, not a soldier’s.” He tilted his head toward Becca. “Yours is the same line, but older hands. Leather patch. Marker markings transferred across. You’ve been doing this the longest of the three.”
Becca didn’t blink.
Holt looked at Becky. “Yours was never civilian.”
“Military surplus,” Becky said. Flat. Guarded. “What of it?”
“Nothing. Just that I know a field patch job when I see one. You didn’t buy that sleeve. You scavenged it.”
Becky’s hand drifted an inch toward the blade at her hip.
Holt didn’t react. He looked at West next. At the cracked screen bolted to the side of a new one like a scar someone refused to let heal.
“Three years on the run,” Holt said quietly.
“Five,” West corrected.
“Five. And you lost her in the third.”
West’s jaw turned to stone. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Nobody moved for several seconds. The red light from the window pulsed through the observation chamber, painting everything in the color of a slow heartbeat. Rebecca’s controller hummed against her forearm, warm and useless.
She found her voice.
“You said the collapse is accelerating.”
Holt turned.
“Show me.”
Rebecca crossed the room. She shouldered past Arthur, who stepped aside with the fussy politeness of a man who’d been told to stand next to a wall and had decided to be excellent at it. She lifted her forearm and turned the tablet screen toward Holt.
The energy wave scrolled across the display. .0009911 Hz. The danger signature, the baseline of the world they’d escaped, still rendering on a processor that could finally keep up with it.
Holt didn’t blink. He read it the way she read it. Fast.
“That’s not native to this place,” he said.
“No. It’s ours.”
“Different Annex. Different author. Same handwriting.” He turned to Helena. “Show her the residue panel.”
Helena had already pulled her tablet from her chest. She navigated with a pen, thumb tight on the edge, swiping through screens until she found what she wanted. Then she offered the device to Rebecca with both hands, like a woman handing off a loaded weapon.
Rebecca took it.
The residue panel filled the screen. Spectral lines in thin, sharp strokes. Dust signatures. Molecular weight clusters. Every one of them singing in the same key.
Her breath stalled.
“That’s.”
“The same pattern.” Vance had appeared at her shoulder. He’d drifted over without anyone noticing, the way academics do when data appears. His journal was open against his forearm, and he leaned in, adjusting his spectacles. “That is our residue. The same threshold signature we recorded at the original breach site. Down to the aberration in the third cluster.”
Holt’s jaw set.
“We found it eleven years ago. Every collapse opens with that signature. Every one. It’s the fingerprint of the original tear. The one that started all of this.”
Becca stepped forward, her own tablet already lit. Her screen carried the jagged red threshold line she’d stared at for eight years of failing tests.
“So it’s a chain reaction,” she said. “One tear makes the next. Each world that collapses seeds the next world’s collapse.”
“That’s what we believe.”
The residue panel glowed in Rebecca’s hands.
She turned the tablet slightly, angling it away from the red wash of the window. The spectral lines sharpened. Dust signatures. Molecular weight clusters. Every one of them singing in the same key.
“It’s identical,” she said.
Her voice came out flat. Clinical. The voice she used when she was three steps away from a breakthrough and two steps away from a breakdown and couldn’t afford to let anyone see which one was winning.
“Down to the third cluster aberration,” Vance said. He’d found the matching page in his journal, was already cross-referencing, his spectacles sliding down his nose. “The same anomaly we recorded at the original breach. The same one I spent six months trying to explain away as instrument error.”
“You couldn’t explain it away.”
“No. I couldn’t.”
Helena nodded. Slow. Deliberate. The gesture of a woman who’d been waiting eleven years for someone else to see what she’d seen.
“Every collapse opens with that signature,” she said. “Every one. It’s the fingerprint of the original tear. The one that started all of this.”
Rebecca stared at the screen.
The pattern repeated. Unbroken. A frequency that shouldn’t exist, a molecular weight that shouldn’t cluster, an aberration that shouldn’t be there. And yet it was. In her data. In Becca’s data. In Becky’s, in West’s, in the artifact’s. Every reading they’d ever taken. Every world they’d ever visited. Every tear they’d ever traced.
The same.
Becca traced the threshold line with her finger, the red flag at .0009911 Hz stark against the clean render. Her jaw was tight. Her eyes were moving too fast, reading and re-reading the same numbers.
“It’s not random,” she said.
“No.”
“It’s not even a chain reaction. Not really. It’s.”
“A cascade.” Holt’s voice cut through. “One tear seeds the next. Each world that falls becomes a beacon for the one after it. The collapse doesn’t spread. It propagates. Like a fire jumping from tree to tree.”
Becky checked her own reading. The .0008124 Hz signature on her screen. The decay monitor climbing. The power draw that finally accounted for the full load.
“Then why are we still alive?”
The question landed hard.
Holt looked at her. His grey eyes were steady, but something behind them flickered. Recognition, maybe. Or grief. Or the memory of asking the same question eleven years ago and getting an answer he hadn’t wanted.
“Because the collapse is selective,” he said. “It doesn’t consume everything at once. It takes what it needs to seed the next tear, and it leaves the rest. The survivors. The stragglers. The people like us.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“No. It isn’t.”
West stayed silent. He’d moved to the back of the room, his long hair tied back, his beard thick and unkempt, his cracked tablet bolted to his forearm catching the red light. His eyes were on Holt. On Rourke. On the soldiers in the corridor. He hadn’t said a word since Helena walked in, and that silence was louder than anything he could have shouted.
Bex had moved to the artifact.
She stood close to Holt, close enough to see the screen, close enough to touch the thing if she wanted to. Her hazel eyes, the same hazel every version of Rebecca carried, were fixed on the countdown.
43:19:37.
Unmoving. And yet, somehow, alive, the numbers humming faintly beneath the glass like something breathing.
“Eleven years,” she said.
Holt didn’t look at her.
“Eleven years and it hasn’t moved.”
“It hasn’t moved. Not once, not by a second.”
“Then how is it still running?”
“It isn’t running.” Holt’s voice was quiet. “It’s holding. Eleven years, the same number, and somehow the thing still feels alive under your hand. I don’t have a better word for it than that.”
Bex’s jaw tightened.
“What happens when it reaches zero?”
Nobody answered.
Rebecca’s fingers found the edge of her controller and tapped. Once. Twice. Three times. A rhythm without meaning. A tic without purpose. Something to do with her hands while her brain ran calculations she couldn’t stop.
“Where’d you find it?” she asked.
“Here.” Holt gestured at the room. “This base. This room. It came through with the first wave. Landed in the rubble three days after the collapse. We found it in a crater where the observation deck used to be.”
“That’s not possible.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Then how.”
“I don’t know.” Holt’s voice was flat. “I’ve been asking that question for eleven years. I’ve run every test. Every simulation. Every model Helena could build. It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t be here. But it is.”
Helena had moved to Vance’s side. She was showing him something on her tablet. Older data. Scrolling text. A timeline of failed containments.
“Eleven years of failure,” she said. “Every attempt to seal the tear. Every attempt to reverse the collapse. Every attempt to build something that could fight back. All of it failed. Because we were treating the symptom, not the cause.”
Vance cross-referenced the numbers against his own journal entries. His frown deepened.
“This pattern predates this facility.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“By decades. Maybe centuries. The oldest residue signatures we’ve found don’t match any facility on record. They don’t match any known source. They’re older than the collapse. Older than the gate. Older than anything we’ve catalogued.”
Rebecca’s breath caught sharply.
“Wait.”
She turned. Her controller clattered against the wall as she forgot she was holding it. Her eyes found Holt.
“You’re saying the collapse wasn’t the first tear.”
“I’m saying the collapse was a tear. But not the first one. There was another. Somewhere. Somewhen. A tear that opened and never closed. A wound that festered. And everything since, every collapse, every gate, every world that’s fallen, has been the same wound spreading.”
Holt confirmed her suspicion with a slow nod.
“First tear started it all,” he said. “The collapse traces back. Every reading. Every signature. Every residue pattern we’ve ever found. They all point to the same place.”
He turned.
The glass stared back at him. Red sky. Endless wasteland. The dead world beyond the window.
“Here,” he said. “The first tear opened here. And it never closed.”
The silence stretched.
Arthur had lowered his rifle fully. It hung at his side now, barrel pointed at the floor, his finger outside the trigger guard. He looked like a man who’d walked into an office expecting a meeting and found a war zone instead. His tie was still askew. His shoes were still scuffed. His hair was still parted precisely to one side.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
His voice was small. Polite. The voice of a man who’d spent his entire career in conference rooms and had no idea how to exist in a room where people carried guns.
“I don’t understand any of this. I was supposed to be delivering a subpoena. I had a meeting at three o’clock. I had.”
He stopped.
His hands were shaking.
“I had a life,” he said. “I had a life and now I’m standing in a dead world with a rifle I don’t know how to use and people who keep talking about tears in reality and I don’t.”
“Arthur.”
Becca’s voice.
She’d crossed to him without being noticed. Her hand found his shoulder. Steady. Firm. The hand of someone who’d spent eight years alone in an apartment lab, talking to herself, and had learned exactly how to keep her voice level when everything around her was falling apart.
“You’re alive,” she said. “That’s what matters. Everything else is just.”
“Just what?”
“Just the next problem.”
Arthur looked at her. His eyes were wet. The kind of wet that meant exhaustion more than tears. The kind of wet that meant a person had been holding it together for hours and was finally, quietly, coming apart.
“I don’t know how to solve problems like this,” he said.
“Neither do I.” Becca smiled. Small. Tired. Real. “But I’ve been faking it for eight years. I can teach you.”
Arthur laughed.
It wasn’t a real laugh. It was the sound a person made when they had nothing else left. A short, sharp exhale. A release valve.
“Alright,” he said. “Alright.”
Ash stayed close to Rebecca.
She hadn’t moved since the standoff. Hadn’t spoken since she’d said the artifact was hers. She was still pressed against Rebecca’s side, her thin body trembling, her hollow eyes fixed on the room but not seeing it. Watching mouths. Not eyes. The way she always did.
Rebecca kept her arm around her.
She didn’t know what else to do.
“Hey,” she said softly.
Ash didn’t respond.
“Hey. Look at me.”
Ash’s head tilted. Slowly. Her hollow eyes found Rebecca’s face. Found her mouth.
“We’re going to figure this out,” Rebecca said. “All of it. The tear. The collapse. The countdown. Everything. We’re going to figure it out and we’re going to fix it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
Ash stared at her. Then, slowly, she nodded. Just once. A small, fragile movement. The kind of movement a person made when they’d decided, against all evidence, to trust someone.
Rebecca squeezed her shoulder.
Holt tapped the glass.
Once. Twice. Three times. His reflection stared back at him. An old man. Grey hair. Grey eyes. The weight of eleven years pressing down on his shoulders.
“We’ve been watching the cascade for a decade,” he said. “Mapping it. Tracking it. Trying to find the edge of it. The place where it stops. The point where we can push back.”
He turned.
“There isn’t one.”
Helena pulled up older data. Her tablet screen was a mess of timestamps and coordinates, lines of text scrolling too fast to read, charts and graphs and spectral analyses bleeding into each other.
“Eleven years of failed containment,” she said. “Every strategy. Every countermeasure. Every desperate, stupid, half-baked idea we could come up with at three in the morning.”
She stopped scrolling.
“This is the part where I tell you we failed,” she said. “The part where I admit we don’t have a solution. The part where I say we’ve been running in circles for a decade and we’re no closer to fixing this than we were on day one.”
Vance looked at her.
“But?”
“But.” Helena’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “But we’re not the only ones running.”
She turned her tablet around.
The screen showed a map. Not of this facility. Not of any world they’d visited. A map of frequencies. A three-dimensional grid of resonance signatures, each one a different world, each one a different timeline, each one bleeding into the next.
“That’s the cascade,” she said.
Rebecca leaned in.
The map was massive. Hundreds of points. Thousands. A sprawling, tangled web of collapse signatures, each one connected to the next, each one feeding into the next.
“That’s.”
“Every world that’s fallen,” Helena said. “Every tear that’s opened. Every collapse that’s propagated since the first one.”
She tapped a point at the center.
“This is us.”
The point glowed red.
“And this,” She tapped another point, far from the center, isolated from the rest. “is the edge.”
Rebecca stared.
The edge wasn’t connected to the cascade. It wasn’t feeding into anything. It was separate. Alone. A single point of light in a sea of darkness.
“What is that?”
“We don’t know.” Helena’s voice was quiet. “We’ve been watching it for years. It doesn’t move. Doesn’t propagate. Doesn’t collapse. It just, sits there. A world that hasn’t fallen.”
Vance leaned closer, journal open, pen hovering.
“Have you tried to reach it?”
“Every attempt failed. The resonance doesn’t match anything we’ve ever seen. It’s not part of the cascade. It’s not connected to the tear. It’s just, there. Waiting.”
“For what?”
Nobody answered.
Becca traced the threshold line on her tablet again.
“It’s a door,” she said.
Everyone looked at her.
“What?”
“The edge. The isolated point. It’s not part of the cascade because it’s not a collapse signature. It’s a threshold. A way out.”
Holt’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s not possible.”
“Neither is any of this.” Becca’s voice was sharp. Tired. The voice of someone who’d been told something was impossible one too many times. “Neither is the artifact. Neither is the countdown. Neither is the fact that we’re standing in a dead world talking to versions of ourselves who shouldn’t exist. But we are. So maybe the impossible thing is the answer.”
The silence stretched.
Then Bex spoke.
“Forty-three hours.”
Everyone turned.
She was still standing by Holt, still staring at the artifact, still watching the countdown that hadn’t moved.
“Forty-three hours, nineteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” she said. “That’s what it says. That’s what it’s always said. Eleven years and it hasn’t changed. But we’ve been assuming it’s counting down to something.”
She looked up.
“What if it’s counting down to a window?”
Holt’s face went pale.
“A window.”
“An opportunity. A chance. A moment when the cascade opens up and something can get through.” She tapped the artifact’s screen. “This thing came back through the tear. It’s connected to the first collapse. It knows things we don’t. And it’s been waiting since the moment it arrived.”
She looked at Rebecca.
“To what?”
Rebecca’s fingers stopped tapping.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Then we’d better figure it out.”
Bex turned to Holt.
“You said there’s no way out. You said the lockdown sealed us in. You said we’re trapped.”
“I did.”
“Were you telling the truth?”
Holt met her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Then we need to find a lie.”
She walked past him. Past Rourke. Past the soldiers in the corridor. Her boots were loud on the concrete, each step deliberate and measured, and she stopped at the window, her reflection staring back at her from the cracked glass.
“Forty-three hours,” she said. “That’s how long we have. Maybe it means something. Maybe it doesn’t. But I’m not going to stand here and wait for the end of the world.”
The corridor swallowed them whole.
Steel walls, ribbed and riveted, stretched ahead in a long grey throat that curved gently left before vanishing into darkness. Emergency lights pulsed along the ceiling in slow, rhythmic intervals, red, dark, red, dark, painting the floor in alternating bands of blood and shadow. The air tasted like old pennies and wet concrete. Somewhere deep in the complex, machinery hummed. Not the steady thrum of a working reactor. Something irregular. Labored. Like a heartbeat that had forgotten how to keep time.
Holt walked point.
He didn’t look back. Didn’t check to see if they were following. Just moved forward with that same measured stride, his boots striking the deck plates in a rhythm that hadn’t changed since he’d stepped through the door. His hands were clasped behind his back. His shoulders were square. He moved like a man who’d walked this corridor ten thousand times and could do it blind.
Rourke walked behind.
Not behind the group. Behind everyone. His rifle was slung now, but his hand hadn’t left the stock. He moved with his weight forward, his eyes cutting left and right, checking corners and doorways and shadows. He hadn’t said a word since the observation chamber. Hadn’t acknowledged anyone. Just fell into step at the rear and stayed there.
Wayne counted exits.
The first door they passed was sealed. Not locked, sealed. Welded shut, the seams reinforced with steel plate, the original handle removed and replaced with a flat plate of bolted metal. He ran his fingers across it as they passed. Cold. Dead. No vibration. No sound on the other side.
The second door was the same.
The third.
The fourth.
By the fifth, Wayne had stopped expecting anything different. The complex wasn’t a building. It was a tomb. A place designed to keep things out. Or keep things in.
Vance walked near the front, close enough to Holt that their shoulders nearly brushed. His journal was open against his forearm, pages curling from age, and he studied the walls as he walked, the rivets, the weld seams, the cables running along the ceiling in bundled arteries, scratching a note in the margin without looking down. His spectacles had fogged at the edges. He didn’t bother wiping them.
“This architecture,” he said quietly. “It’s not military standard.”
Holt didn’t turn.
“No.”
“The reinforcement pattern. The seal composition. This is threshold containment design. Anyone with the right instrumentation could.”
“Could what, Professor?”
Vance was quiet for a step.
“Could tear it open.”
Holt’s pace didn’t change.
“We know.”
Helena moved like she’d memorized the floor. She walked ahead of Vance, ahead of Wayne, almost matching Holt’s stride. Her tablet was clutched against her chest again, the pen behind her ear, her lab coat brushing the wall as she passed. She didn’t look at the sealed doors. Didn’t study the architecture. Just walked. Like she’d done it a thousand times and had stopped seeing the walls years ago.
Arthur walked in the middle.
He’d slung his rifle across his back, wrong, upside down, the barrel pointing skyward, and was clutching the strap with both hands like a man holding onto a railing in a storm. His shoes squeaked on the deck plates. His tie had come completely undone at some point and was now hanging loose around his neck, the silk creased and twisted. He kept looking back over his shoulder.
Not at Rourke.
At the corridor behind them. The darkness they’d left behind.
Becca walked beside him. Her tablet was dark, strapped to her forearm, her hands shoved in the pockets of her patched jacket. She watched the walls with the same flat, unimpressed expression she’d worn since they’d stepped into the underground. Like she’d seen worse. Like she was waiting to see something that actually surprised her.
Becky walked behind Wayne.
Close. Closer than she needed to. Her shoulder kept brushing his arm, a hair’s breadth of contact that she didn’t pull away from. Her rifle was slung, her blade secure at her hip, her boots silent on the deck. Every few seconds, her eyes would cut to Wayne’s face, checking, cataloguing, filing him away.
Wayne didn’t look at her.
But he didn’t move away, either.
Ash walked between Rebecca and Bex.
She’d tucked herself into the middle of the group without being asked, her thin frame swallowed by her oversized jacket, her bare feet wrapped in boots too big for her. She moved like a shadow, quick, light, weight always shifted toward the nearest escape route. Her handgun was tucked into her waistband now, the grip visible against her hip. She hadn’t let go of it since the observation chamber. Probably wouldn’t.
Rebecca walked with her.
Close enough to touch. Close enough to grab if the girl bolted. Her fingers were tapping against the edge of her controller, a rhythm without meaning, a tic she couldn’t stop. Her eyes moved constantly. Doorways. Ceiling. Floor. The seams between the deck plates. Looking for anything. Finding nothing.
Bex walked last.
Not last, exactly. Last of the group, in front of Rourke, behind everyone else. Her rifle was in her hands now, not slung, not stowed, but held low and ready, barrel angled at the floor. Her hazel eyes tracked the corridor ahead with the same calm intensity she’d worn since the chamber. Since before the chamber. Since the first moment Rebecca had seen her in the observation deck with the artifact humming in her hands.
She walked alone.
She always walked alone.
Holt stopped.
The corridor ended at a blast shutter. Not a door. Not a hatch. A massive slab of reinforced steel, ribbed and riveted, its surface scarred with old impact marks and newer weld seams. It filled the corridor from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, leaving no gap, no crack, no weakness. A red light pulsed above it. Slow. Rhythmic. Waiting.
Vance stepped forward.
“Observation deck,” he said. “The blast shutter’s rated for overpressure events. We’re going up.”
Holt reached into his coat. Pulled out a key card, worn, cracked, its magnetic strip visible through peeling laminate. He swiped it through a reader on the wall. The reader flashed green. Then red. Then green again.
The shutter groaned.
It rose slowly, inch by inch, the sound like something dying. Metal screeching against metal. Gears grinding. Dust and rust cascading from the ceiling in fine, glittering sheets. The red light above pulsed faster. Faster. Faster.
Then stopped.
The shutter locked into its housing with a boom that shook the floor.
And the sky opened up.
Rebecca’s breath caught.
She’d seen the observation chamber. She’d seen the red light through the cracked glass. She’d thought she understood what this place was. A dead world. A ruined world. A place where the collapse had started and never stopped.
She’d been wrong.
The observation deck was a platform of reinforced concrete, open to the air on three sides, ringed by a low wall of crumbling barriers. Beyond it, the world stretched in every direction, not the wasteland she’d glimpsed through the chamber window, but something worse. Something that had been alive once.
A city.
Or what had been a city.
Towers of steel and glass rose from the ground in jagged, broken fingers. Some were half-collapsed, their upper floors sheared off at impossible angles, their exposed skeletons of rebar and girder rusting in the blood-orange light. Others still stood whole, but their windows were dark, their surfaces choked with vines and creepers that had grown over every inch of glass and concrete. The vines were thick. Black. Moving faintly in a wind Rebecca couldn’t feel.
Between the towers, streets.
She could see them below, strips of cracked asphalt winding between the buildings like veins. Cars sat abandoned in the middle of them. Overturned. Burned. Fused to the ground by years of rust and neglect. Checkpoints dotted the intersections, shattered barricades, empty guard posts, the skeletal remains of military vehicles that had been stripped down to their frames.
And beyond the city, the horizon.
A bruise-colored sky. Red bleeding into black bleeding into something that wasn’t quite either. The sun, if there was a sun, was invisible. Just a faint, sickly glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The clouds hung low and heavy, their undersides lit from below by something Rebecca couldn’t see.
She stared.
Her fingers had stopped tapping.
Holt watched her.
He stood at the edge of the platform, his hands still clasped behind his back, his grey eyes moving between her face and the city below. He didn’t speak. Didn’t offer explanation. Just watched. Like he was waiting for something. Like he’d been waiting for something for eleven years and was finally, cautiously, allowing himself to hope.
Vance moved to the barrier.
His journal was open in his hands now, and he was scratching numbers into the margin as Helena called them out, the two of them falling into an old, practiced rhythm neither seemed to notice.
Helena set up a portable scanner with practiced efficiency, monitoring for threshold patterns. “Every collapse leaves a trace,” she said. “We’re standing in the origin point of the first tear.”
She pointed. Toward a tower.
The central spire was twice the height of anything around it, its peaks lost in the low-hanging clouds. Its surface was black, not rusted, not burned, but black. Absorbing. Like it had been dipped in oil and left to dry. Around its base, the ruins were thicker. The debris was piled higher. The vines that choked the other buildings seemed to avoid it.
“That’s where it opened,” Helena said. “The first tear. Eleven years ago, a threshold event opened at the top of that tower. We don’t know how. We don’t know why. But it never closed.”
Vance adjusted his spectacles.
“Never?”
“Never. It’s still there. Still active. The artifact’s countdown is tied to it. When the tower falls.”
“It won’t fall,” Holt said.
Everyone looked at him.
“It’s been standing for eleven years. The tear hasn’t expanded. Hasn’t contracted. It’s just there. Holding. But the cascade is spreading. The other worlds are falling. And the more that fall.”
“The closer we get to the end,” Rebecca finished.
Holt nodded.
“Yeah.”
Movement caught her eye.
Below. In the streets.
She leaned against the barrier, her eyes tracking the shapes that moved between the buildings. Small. Quick. Low to the ground. They moved in bursts, stillness, then violence, then stillness again. Like they couldn’t remember how to walk. Like they’d forgotten the rhythm of it.
One moment still, so still they looked like debris, like nothing at all, and then a violent flurry, a blur of motion that carried them ten, fifteen feet in a single heartbeat. Then stillness again. Then motion.
She flinched as one of them passed through a shaft of light and she could see it clearly for the first time. Grey skin stretched tight across bones that didn’t fit anymore. Rippling. Like something moved beneath it that wasn’t muscle. Eyes gone fully white, no pupil, no iris, burning with a light that seemed to come from inside the skull rather than reflect anything external. And its mouth, stretched too wide, even at rest. Jaws that could unhinge. Teeth that had grown in wrong. Overlapping. Too many for the space allotted.
It stopped.
It turned.
It looked up.
Not at them. At the platform. At the five controllers humming on their arms. Its head tilted, nostrils flaring, and Rebecca saw its mouth open, not to scream, but to taste the air.
Drawing it in. Like it was scenting something.
Then another shape joined it. Then another. Then another. They emerged from alleyways, from under overturned cars, from doorways that opened into darkness. Grey skin blinking in the red light. White eyes burning. Jaws opening and closing, opening and closing, like they were trying to speak but had forgotten how.
Helena stepped forward.
“The Changed,” she said. Her voice was flat, clinical, but her hands were shaking. “They’re drawn to the collapse’s signature. They hunt by resonance. The controllers on your arms, they’re a beacon.”
“How many people lived here?” Rebecca asked. “Before.”
“Millions.” Helena didn’t look away from the streets. “A quarter of them vanished the day the sky turned. Another quarter became what you’re looking at. The rest are still out there, somewhere. Enclaves. Militias. People who dug in and never came out. Half this world is still alive. It just doesn’t look like it from up here.”
“Can they get up here?” Rebecca asked.
“Not this high. The blast shutter will seal behind us. But they know we’re here. They’ll wait. They always wait.”
One of them, the closest, stretched its neck. The movement was wrong. Too fluid. Too long. Its head tilted back, farther than any human neck should allow, and its mouth opened wide, wider, widest, until the jaw unhinged with a crack that echoed through the dead city. For a second, Rebecca thought it would scream.
West moved before it could.
He stepped back from the barrier, his boots scraping concrete, his face pale beneath his beard, his eyes fixed on the Changed below. His hand moved to his rifle.
“Close it.”
Holt turned.
“What?”
“The shutter. Close it. Now.”
Holt didn’t argue. He reached into his coat, pulled out the key card, and swiped it through the reader. The shutter began to descend, slow, mechanical, deliberate. Rebecca watched the city disappear behind the rising edge of steel. The towers, the streets, the shapes below. Gone. Swallowed. The red light above the shutter pulsed once. Twice. Then held steady.
Darkness returned.
Sealed. Safe.
West was breathing hard. His hands were shaking. Not fear. Something else.
Becca noticed.
She drifted closer to him, her patched jacket brushing his arm.
“Hey. You okay?”
“I’ve seen them before,” West said. His voice was quiet. Rough. “In my world. After the collapse. First the pain, then the collapse, then hollowing. That’s what happens. They don’t die. They just change. Become something else. Something that hunts.”
His jaw tightened.
Rebecca moved closer, her arm still around Ash, who was staring at the sealed shutter with wide, hollow eyes. “I’ve seen them too,” she said. “In the swamp. Not like this. But close.”
“You’ve seen the Changed?”
“Once. Through the rips. I thought it was a hallucination.” She swallowed. “It wasn’t.”
Wayne stepped forward.
His rifle was still slung, but his hand was loose at his side, ready.
“How many are down there?”
“Can’t tell,” Helena said. “Dozens. Maybe more. They’re drawn to the tower. Drawn to the tear. They’ve been gathering for years. We don’t know how many. We don’t know where they come from. We just know they’re here.”
“And they stay here?”
“They can’t leave. The tear holds them. Anchors them. If they try to cross.”
“They die?”
“No.” Helena’s voice was flat. “They change faster. Become something worse. Something that doesn’t even remember being human.”
Arthur made a sound.
Rebecca turned.
He was standing at the back of the group, his rifle still slung upside down, his tie still undone, his face pale and slick with sweat. He was staring at the sealed shutter. Not at the city. At the steel.
His lips were moving. Forming words she couldn’t hear.
“Arthur?”
He didn’t respond.
“Arthur,” she said again.
He turned.
His eyes were wet. Not the exhaustion-wet from before. Something else. Something worse.
“I thought I saw someone,” he said. “A reflection.”
Rebecca’s blood ran cold.
“What?”
“Arthur?” A woman’s voice, from behind him, small and disbelieving. “Is that you?”
Nobody spoke.
Arthur’s face twisted. Something between a laugh and a sob.
“My wife. I mean, my ex-wife. Karren.” His voice cracked. “Is that you, Karren? Is that really you?”
Becca stepped toward him.
“Arthur. That’s not.”
“I know.”
Karren didn’t care. She crossed the platform and kissed him anyway.
She pulled back first. Her hand stayed on his jaw, her eyes searching his face the way Helena had searched Vance’s, the way a person searches for something they’d already decided couldn’t be there.
“I’m not your Arthur,” she said quietly. “But you’re not my Karren’s Arthur either. Are you.”
It wasn’t a question.
The observation deck held its breath.
Karren’s hand was still on Arthur’s jaw. Her thumb hadn’t moved. Her eyes hadn’t blinked. She was staring at him like he might dissolve if she looked away, like he was a photograph left too long in the sun and she was trying to memorize the colors before they faded.
Arthur’s hands hung at his sides.
He didn’t touch her. Didn’t pull away. Just stood there with his tie undone and his shoes scuffed and his rifle slung upside down across his back, and let a woman who wasn’t his wife touch his face like he was something precious.
“I don’t,” His voice cracked. He tried again. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t.”
Karren’s voice was quiet. Steady. The voice of a woman who’d spent eleven years talking to a grave and had finally, impossibly, gotten an answer.
“Just stand there,” she said. “Just let me look at you.”
The red light from the sealed shutter pulsed behind them. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The Changed were still somewhere below, still waiting, still pressed against the walls of the dead city. But up here, on this platform of cracked concrete and crumbling barriers, time had stopped.
Wayne watched.
His rifle was still slung, but his hand hadn’t left the stock. His eyes moved between Karren and Arthur, between Rourke at the back of the group and the sealed shutter, between the two women standing at the far edge of the platform with their rifles low and their eyes scanning.
The first woman wore a flight suit.
Pressurized. Scuffed at the knees and elbows. A name patch above her breast pocket, stitched crooked by hand, reading COLLINS, R. Her dark hair was cropped short and practical, kept off her collar. Her hazel eyes, the same hazel every version of Rebecca carried, moved across the group with the calm, measured assessment of someone who’d been doing threat evaluations for a living.
Her hand rested on her rifle. Not gripping. Not ready. Just resting. Like she was comfortable with it. Like it was an extension of her arm.
The second woman stood beside her.
She was smaller. Sharper. Her dark blonde hair was cut short and rough, like she’d done it herself with a knife and no mirror. A pale scar ran down her left forearm, visible where her sleeve had ridden up. Her hazel eyes were harder than the others, watchful in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with survival.
She wasn’t holding a rifle.
She was holding a tablet.
Older than the others. Battered. Scorched. The screen was dark, but her thumb rested on the edge of it like she was ready to wake it up at any moment.
West saw her.
His body went rigid.
His breath stopped. His hand tightened on his rifle sling until his knuckles went white. His eyes, tired, hard, the eyes of a man who’d been running for five years, fixed on her face and didn’t move.
The woman saw him too.
Her thumb stopped on the tablet.
Her lips parted.
She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just stood there at the edge of the platform with her scarred arm and her battered tablet and her eyes that were the wrong shade, somehow, even though they were the same hazel he’d have sworn belonged to only one woman in any world.
“Wayne.”
Her voice was quiet. Rough. Careful, the way a person spoke a name they weren’t sure they had the right to use.
West shook his head.
No.
Not a refusal. Not a denial.
Just no.
“No.”
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.