Michelle hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from her lungs.

  She rolled, came up on one knee, and found Mike immediately. He lay on his back against broken concrete, one arm slack, the other pressed hard to his ribs. Blood soaked through his shirt and vest in slow, heavy pulses that tracked his breathing.

  Her stomach dropped.

  “Mike.”

  “I’m here,” he said. The words came thin, stretched tight around pain. “Still here.”

  She was already moving. Boots slid on grit as she dropped beside him and pulled back the vest.

  The dagger was still there.

  It sat buried between his right ribs, driven in at a shallow inward angle. Blood welled around the hilt, dark and steady.

  “Don’t pull it,” Mike said quickly.

  Michelle nodded, because every instinct she had screamed the same thing. Her hands hovered uselessly for half a second as training clashed with reality.

  A scraping sound ripped her attention sideways.

  Inaria lay several yards away, pinned beneath the last goblin. One claw braced on her shoulder, the other forced a dagger downward by inches at a time. The blade hovered just above her throat, shaking with effort.

  Michelle spun, gun already coming up—

  —and froze.

  The barrel sagged.

  Heat rippled along the metal, warping it visibly. The muzzle had curled inward, edges glowing dull red as something unseen gnawed at it. Molten drops hissed when they struck the ground.

  If she fired, it would rupture in her hand.

  The goblin snarled and drove the blade lower.

  Mike’s voice came tight from behind her. “Help her.”

  Michelle dropped the gun and charged.

  She seized the ruined weapon by the grip and slammed the jagged, half-melted barrel into the goblin’s neck. The impact jolted up her arm. The goblin shrieked and thrashed, claws raking wildly.

  One of them caught her left forearm.

  Pain flared hot and immediate as talons tore shallow lines through skin and fabric. Blood spilled fast, slicking her sleeve.

  Michelle screamed and drove the weapon in again.

  Chaos took hold slowly, viciously. Blackened veins spidered outward from the wound as the goblin convulsed, claws scrabbling uselessly at the ground. Smoke poured from its mouth, thick and oily, as its body collapsed inward in stages—first muscle, then bone, then shape itself failing.

  It died thrashing.

  When it finally stilled, nothing remained but scorched ground and drifting residue.

  Michelle stumbled back, chest heaving, blood dripping from her arm. She didn’t look at it. She turned immediately.

  Mike was where she’d left him, but his color had faded further. His breathing had gone shallow, careful.

  She dropped beside him again, hands shaking now as she pulled the vest open just enough to reassess.

  “We wait,” she said. “We don’t touch it.”

  Pressure brushed the edge of her awareness—tight, sudden, wrong.

  The air above them changed.

  Void lines snapped into existence overhead, spreading at impossible speed. They stitched across shattered buildings and broken terrain, forming a vast, unnatural web.

  One tether tightened.

  The world inhaled.

  Eric and Celeste arrived in a hard, sliding skid that sprayed dust and gravel. No flourish. No pause.

  Eric was moving before the dust settled.

  He crossed the distance and dropped to his knees beside Mike, eyes locking instantly on the dagger. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at anyone else. His gaze tracked angle, depth, blood loss. His mind worked in fragments—no plan, just urgency and narrowing options.

  “Hey,” Mike said, breath thin. “You look like hell.”

  Eric exhaled sharply, then leaned closer, studying the wound like he could solve it by staring hard enough.

  Celeste stepped in behind him and leaned over his shoulder.

  She saw it all at once.

  The angle. The depth. The way the bleeding behaved.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Eric glanced up at her.

  “We can fix this,” Celeste said. “You’re not going to like it.”

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  Mike huffed weakly. “That tracks.”

  Celeste tapped the thigh plate of her armor. A faint shimmer rippled as the dim store opened. She withdrew two rolls of gauze and set them down beside Michelle.

  “From Oryx’s home,” she said. “For after.”

  Her hand went back in. This time she drew out folded runic paper etched with precise symbols, then small vials of reagents. She laid the paper flat on the ground and placed the vials onto marked circles.

  The runes ignited softly, lines glowing as the reagents warmed and activated, like glass set over invisible heat.

  She spoke as she worked.

  “That wound would take months to heal properly on its own,” Celeste said. “Eight, give or take.”

  Mike swallowed. “Okay.”

  “This potion will compress that time,” she continued. “Which means every bit of healing you would have experienced over those eight months will happen at once.”

  Michelle’s breath caught.

  Celeste didn’t soften her tone. “It will fix the wound. But you will feel all of it.”

  Mike closed his eyes for a second, then opened them. “Do it.”

  Celeste turned to Eric. “Oryx. You devour the dagger. Slowly. Clean everything out. Then you hold the wound open.”

  Eric stared at her. “Hold it open.”

  “Yes,” she said. “If you don’t, the tissue collapses before the potion can work.”

  She set another vial down. The runes flared brighter.

  “Get started,” Celeste said. “I need seconds.”

  Eric moved.

  Void gathered around his hand in uneven threads, tension visible in the way his fingers shook. This wasn’t control. This was force. He pressed his palm to the dagger and pushed the void through it, inch by inch.

  The metal vanished in stages.

  Mike gasped as invasive pressure slid into him, something wrong and cold moving where nothing should move. The dagger dissolved, erased cleanly from existence. The void followed, stripping away residue, corruption, the beginnings of infection.

  It hurt.

  But it wasn’t everything yet.

  Eric gritted his teeth, breath coming sharp as he spread the void and held the wound open, bracing it against collapse. Sweat broke across his brow as he fought to maintain it.

  Celeste lifted the prepared vial.

  “This is it,” she said.

  She poured.

  The potion hit the open wound, and the world exploded.

  Eight months of healing slammed into Mike all at once. Every nerve lit. Every fiber screamed. Pain tore out of him in a raw, continuous sound that ripped across the ruined street.

  Eric locked up as the mirrored strain hammered through him, shoulders shaking as he held the void steady through sheer will. Michelle felt the echo like a spike behind her eyes and staggered.

  Celeste stayed planted, eyes fixed, hands steady.

  Above them, rotors thundered closer, chopping the air as helicopters screamed in overhead.

  And Mike screamed with them.

  The helicopter vibrated around Caldwell like a living thing under strain.

  Rotor wash battered the airframe, a steady, bone-deep thrum that came up through the deck and into his boots. The cabin lights were dimmed to operational red, instrument panels throwing cold reflections across faces drawn tight with focus. Outside the open side door, the desert slid past in a blur of dark ridges and broken light.

  Elaine sat beside him, posture composed, headset on, eyes bright with a fevered kind of attention. She leaned forward slightly, hands folded now that her phone was away, and spoke as if the world below were already a solved equation.

  “Do you understand what this represents?” she said, voice cutting cleanly through the intercom. “The data alone will redefine multiple fields. Energy generation. Materials science. Medicine. Entire branches of physics will have to be rewritten.”

  Caldwell didn’t answer right away.

  He watched the terrain scroll beneath them on the forward display. Roads. Structures. Heat blooms where people clustered. Cold gaps where they didn’t. His mind cataloged damage without conscious effort—collapsed roofs, overturned vehicles, infrastructure shredded by forces that hadn’t bothered to ask permission.

  “How many civilians on site?” he asked into his mic.

  A voice crackled back from the lead bird already on station. “Current count puts five to six hundred displaced or requiring immediate assistance. Triage teams moving in now. Perimeter is forming.”

  “And fatalities?”

  A pause. Short. Heavy. “Three to five hundred probable, sir. Search and recovery ongoing.”

  Caldwell closed his eyes for half a second.

  “Secure the civilians first,” he said. “Get them clear. Water, blankets, medical attention. Keep them away from the anomaly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Elaine made a small, impatient sound. “We cannot let this opportunity scatter,” she said. “This gate—this interface—is unprecedented. We need controlled access. Instrumentation. Samples.”

  “People first,” Caldwell said. His tone didn’t rise, but it hardened. “Everything else waits.”

  Elaine turned her head toward him, lips parting as if to argue.

  Rachel spoke before she could.

  “What happens next?” Rachel asked quietly.

  She sat opposite them, harnessed in, hands resting loosely on her knees. She’d been silent since takeoff, eyes tracking the flow of information across the displays without comment. When she spoke now, it wasn’t to challenge authority or pitch a theory.

  It was to ask the only question that mattered.

  Caldwell met her gaze. “We stabilize,” he said. “We secure. We keep this from spreading.”

  Rachel nodded slowly. Her eyes flicked back to the forward display, where a vertical distortion shimmered against the desert night.

  “And after that?” she asked.

  Caldwell didn’t answer.

  The helicopter banked, and Primm came into view.

  The gate dominated the right side of the horizon, a towering wound in reality that bent light and color around itself. It pulsed faintly, edges rippling as if the air resented being forced into that shape.

  To the left, clusters of civilians gathered under harsh portable lighting. Military vehicles formed widening rings around them, soldiers moving with practiced urgency, weapons slung low, hands guiding people instead of pointing guns. Medics knelt in the dust. Stretchers appeared and vanished.

  Order clawed its way back into the world, inch by inch.

  Elaine leaned forward, breath catching. “Magnificent,” she murmured. “It’s the most significant discovery in human history.”

  Rachel stared at the gate, eyes wide not with hunger, but awe stripped raw. “It’s… beautiful,” she said softly. “The most marvelous thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Caldwell felt the words land wrong in his chest.

  The helicopter dropped altitude.

  That was when he saw the man.

  A single figure stood directly in front of the gate, arms outstretched, body braced as if pushing against something no one else could see. Even from the air, Caldwell could tell he was alone.

  Then the ground around the man distorted.

  Void tendrils erupted outward, violent and sudden, spearing into the structure of the gate itself. They didn’t slide through it. They stabbed into its ridges, hooked, anchored. The gate flared in response, light surging in sharp, multicolored bands that fed directly into the tendrils and vanished into the man’s body.

  The wind shifted.

  Not a breeze. A pressure wave. The air thickened, pushing outward from the gate as if reality itself had flinched.

  Elaine’s voice died in her throat.

  Caldwell leaned forward, one hand braced against the bulkhead as the helicopter shuddered. “What the hell is he doing?” he demanded.

  Before anyone could answer, the scream came.

  It tore across the desert in a sound that was not bound to air or distance. It reached into the helicopter through metal and glass, through headsets and insulation, vibrating bones and rattling teeth.

  It was human.

  And it was something far older.

  The sound carried pain so vast it felt structural, reinforced by something deeper than lungs or muscle. It reverberated through Caldwell’s chest, through Elaine’s frozen stare, through Rachel’s widening eyes. Civilians below dropped to their knees. Soldiers froze mid-step. Even the rotors seemed to falter for a heartbeat, the scream cutting through their thunder like a blade.

  Caldwell felt it in his soul.

  The man below screamed as multicolored energies continued to pour into him, the void answering back in jagged, impossible lines. The gate flashed brighter, resisting, straining, and the wind howled harder as if the world itself were screaming with him.

  Caldwell’s hand clenched into a fist.

  Whatever that man was doing, it was tearing him apart.

  And everyone—everyone—could hear it.