Celeste’s first clear thought was that the air felt wrong.

  Not the way it had felt near the gate, packed so dense with mana that the world tasted like lightning and hot stone. This wrongness carried no pressure from power, no electric bite at the edge of the tongue. It carried metal, fuel, scorched dust, and something colder than any wind she had ever shaped.

  The sound came next.

  Boots. Shouted words in a harsh, clipped rhythm. The constant thrum of blades in the sky, the heavy beating of rotary wings cutting the air apart above them. Somewhere close, something mechanical clacked and rattled, the language of tools and weapons being handled by people who did not trust what they were seeing.

  Celeste stood with her shoulders squared, chin lifted, eyes pinned on the ring of soldiers around them. The rifles were leveled. The muzzles tracked her movement with patient precision. Men and women in hard armor held their stances as if their bodies had been welded into place, fingers close to triggers, eyes trained on every breath she took.

  Michelle’s hand hovered near Celeste’s elbow, close enough to catch her if she lurched, close enough to restrain her if she decided to do something reckless. Mike stood on the other side, posture tense beneath the exhaustion, one hand still hovering unconsciously near his ribs as if his body remembered pain even after it had been forced to heal.

  Inaria held herself a few steps back, expression set in a guarded scowl. Her gaze moved from the soldiers to the ruined bowl carved into the earth behind them, and then to the empty space where the gate had been. She carried herself like she expected a second wave to appear out of thin air.

  Celeste’s eyes kept drifting toward the basin.

  Toward the bottom.

  Toward the figure lying alone there.

  Oryx.

  Her throat tightened around the name. It existed in her mind like a splinter, painful and constant. She had watched him tear himself apart to shut the gate down. She had watched power consume him from the inside out. She had felt the moment the void snapped away like a cord being severed.

  She had not been allowed to move.

  They had not been allowed to move.

  The soldiers had arrived fast, voices rising over the roar of distant aircraft, the ring tightening with every second. Weapons had come up in unison, and Caldwell had stepped forward with the kind of authority that did not need to shout to be obeyed.

  “Put your hands where I can see them,” he had said.

  The words still hung in the air, even now, as if they had soaked into the dust.

  Celeste looked at Michelle, eyes narrowing.

  “What’s under arrest?” she asked.

  The phrasing came out strange in her mouth, the translator turning it into something smooth and clean when her intent carried sharper edges. She meant the concept more than the exact words. She meant the weight of it. The implication of being claimed.

  Michelle’s jaw tightened, and she did not look away.

  “It means they’re going to detain us,” Michelle said. “Hold us. Keep us locked up until they decide what we are and whether it’s safe to let us go.”

  Celeste stared at her.

  The word translated into something she understood too easily. Detained. Held against will. Contained.

  She breathed once, slow, steady, and the air tasted like fuel and fear.

  “So,” Celeste said, voice flattening, “they’re taking us prisoner.”

  Michelle hesitated, then nodded.

  “Essentially, yeah.”

  Celeste’s shoulders rose and fell. Her eyes flicked to the rifles. To the men and women behind them. To the way their weight was distributed, how their feet were planted, how their stance formed a wedge between them and the crater where Eric lay.

  It was not a circle for negotiation.

  It was a circle for control.

  Celeste took one step forward.

  The response was immediate.

  Metal rose in a synchronized wave. Rifles tightened against shoulders. Several soldiers shifted their stance, widening their base. A line of safeties clicked off with a crisp, disciplined sound that carried even through the thrum of the helicopter overhead. The muzzles tracked her chest, then her head, then steadied at center mass as if someone had made the choice for efficiency.

  The entire world narrowed to a single point.

  Celeste felt the wind answer her without being asked.

  It gathered at her back in a tightening coil, the pressure building in an instinctive spiral. Her body remembered what power felt like. It remembered what it meant to refuse.

  Her eyes sharpened.

  “Oh absolutely not,” she said.

  Her voice was quiet, which made it worse.

  Michelle’s hand shot out, not to strike, not to threaten, but to anchor. Her fingers closed around Celeste’s forearm, grip firm, pleading and urgent all at once.

  “Celeste—”

  Celeste’s gaze flicked sideways.

  The muscles in her jaw flexed.

  Behind the weapons line, Caldwell’s posture shifted, almost imperceptibly. His hand rose a few inches, palm open, the silent signal of someone trying to keep his people from firing too early. His eyes were steady, assessing, calculating in a way that did not feel like hatred. It felt like triage.

  Mike moved.

  He stepped into Celeste’s space with a blunt decisiveness, his hand settling on her shoulder with more weight than force. The contact was deliberate. Human. Familiar in a way nothing else in this scene was.

  “Hey,” Mike said.

  His voice cut through the tension with a steadiness that did not match the way his face looked pale beneath grime and sweat.

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “Follow their instructions.”

  Celeste’s eyes snapped to him.

  Mike met her stare without flinching.

  “It’s not as bad as you’re thinking it might be,” he added.

  Celeste held still.

  The wind behind her tightened, a gathering storm in miniature. Her instincts screamed at her to take control of the air, to shove every rifle into the dirt, to scatter the circle and sprint down to the basin and drag Eric out with her own hands.

  Her body leaned toward the choice.

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  Her mind reached for it.

  Then she saw Michelle’s expression.

  Not fear of the soldiers.

  Fear of what would happen if Celeste forced their hand.

  Michelle’s eyes were wide and bright, caught between duty and desperation, and Celeste recognized something sharp in that look. Experience. The knowledge of what weapons did when people panicked. The knowledge of how quickly a mistake became a body on the ground.

  Celeste’s gaze locked onto hers.

  Michelle nodded once.

  Small. Certain.

  A silent affirmation that said Trust me without ever forming the words.

  Celeste’s breath left her slowly.

  The wind loosened.

  The pressure at her back unraveled into nothing, a coil released without snapping.

  Her shoulders lowered by a fraction. Her hands spread slightly, fingers open, empty, visible.

  The rifles did not lower.

  The safeties stayed off.

  The soldiers’ eyes did not blink.

  Caldwell stepped forward one pace, boots grinding on grit at the crater’s rim. His gaze moved across the group—Celeste, Michelle, Mike, Inaria—then briefly past them, toward the basin below, toward the still figure at the bottom.

  His mouth tightened.

  He looked back to them.

  “Hands up,” Caldwell repeated, voice carrying across the space like a command given in a room designed to echo.

  Mike lifted his hands first.

  Michelle followed.

  Inaria hesitated, eyes narrowed, then raised her hands with a stiff, reluctant motion that looked more like defiance than compliance.

  Celeste lifted hers last.

  She did it slowly, eyes never leaving Caldwell.

  For a moment, she watched him like she was weighing whether he was prey or obstacle, whether he could be moved by force or by understanding. She did not see cruelty.

  She saw responsibility.

  That did not make it better.

  It made it harder.

  Caldwell’s jaw worked as if he had bitten down on words he did not want to say.

  Then he spoke anyway.

  “You are under arrest,” he said.

  The phrase landed heavy.

  It was a chain made out of sound.

  Celeste stood with her hands raised, breathing through the taste of fuel and dust, and the only thing keeping her from tearing the world apart was the weight of Mike’s hand on her shoulder and the quiet certainty in Michelle’s eyes.

  Caldwell took another step.

  His gaze shifted, narrowing.

  He looked at Mike again, really looked, like something had finally connected.

  The lines around his eyes tightened.

  Disbelief flickered across his face.

  “Growler?” Caldwell said.

  The word came out like it had been dragged from a memory buried under years of sand.

  Mike’s posture stiffened.

  Caldwell stepped closer, ignoring the way his own soldiers watched him for cues.

  “Michael Growler,” Caldwell said again, slower now, voice lower. “Is that you?”

  The wind moved faintly over the crater’s edge.

  Somewhere below, Eric lay unmoving in the bowl of broken earth.

  And above, the world shifted into a new kind of war.

  The world did not so much change as it rearranged itself around them.

  Time folded.

  Orders were barked. Boots moved in coordinated lines. The tight circle of weapons never quite vanished, but it loosened just enough to allow them to be separated, searched, tagged, and guided away from the crater’s edge. Celeste felt hands on her arms, firm but controlled, not rough, not gentle either—hands that knew how to move a person who might become a problem.

  She did not fight them.

  Not because she could not.

  Because Oryx lay unconscious at the bottom of the world behind her, and if she made a single wrong move, he would be left there alone.

  The airship blades beat overhead like a heartbeat for a dying giant.

  The soldiers moved with practiced efficiency, calling positions, confirming restraints, scanning for threats that no longer existed. Voices blurred into one another. Medical teams appeared, then disappeared again. A hazmat unit approached the basin, paused at the edge, and then retreated while someone shouted into a headset. Celeste caught fragments of language—unknown contamination, biological hazard, possible hostile manifestation—before she was guided away and the words were swallowed by distance.

  They did not let her look back.

  The next clear moment arrived hours later.

  The room was white.

  Not the sterile white of polished stone or polished glass. This was the kind of white designed to erase shadows, to leave nowhere for the mind to rest. Light poured from the ceiling in long, even bands, washing every surface into uniform brightness.

  The air hummed faintly.

  Celeste stood inside a transparent enclosure the size of a small vehicle—walls of reinforced glass, seams lined with thick metal bands. Vents ran along the upper corners, quietly pushing in fresh air. A low mechanical thrum vibrated beneath her feet, constant and deliberate.

  She recognized the structure immediately.

  Containment.

  Across the room, Mike, Michelle, and Inaria occupied steel retention cages on heavy wheels. Thick bars enclosed each of them, reinforced at the corners, with locking mechanisms that looked more like vault doors than prison hardware. They had been spaced evenly apart, forming a rough semicircle facing the center of the room.

  Celeste was the only one not behind metal.

  She was behind glass.

  Inaria had been brought in last.

  Celeste had watched from her enclosure as the guards guided her inside, hands never leaving their weapons. Inaria had moved stiffly, eyes sharp, muscles tight beneath her skin like a coiled blade. She had not tried to fight them, but every step she took radiated the tension of someone waiting for the moment they would be forced to choose violence.

  The moment never came.

  Now, hours later, food trays had been delivered.

  Mike sat on a narrow bench inside his cage, shoulders slumped, exhaustion finally settling into his bones. Michelle leaned against one of the bars, arms crossed, gaze flicking between the doors and Celeste’s enclosure with the restless vigilance of someone who refused to relax.

  Inaria was eating.

  Not cautiously.

  Not politely.

  She had torn open the MRE packaging with her teeth after a short, baffled look at it. Mike had shown her how to activate the heating element, how to knead the pouch, how to wait. The first time steam had risen from the bag, she had stared at it as if it were magic.

  Now she was devouring the contents with single-minded focus.

  Celeste watched her with something like quiet disbelief.

  Inaria did not eat like someone enjoying a meal.

  She ate like someone reclaiming a resource.

  The sound of plastic crinkling echoed faintly in the bright room.

  “What… is this place?” Celeste asked quietly.

  Michelle looked over.

  “Detention,” she said. “Temporary holding. They’re trying to figure out what we are, what happened out there, and whether we’re a threat.”

  Celeste’s eyes drifted to the glass surrounding her.

  “And this?” she asked.

  Michelle exhaled.

  “That’s because you’re the biggest question mark in the room.”

  Celeste said nothing.

  Mike shifted on his bench, rubbing one hand over his face.

  “They’re not wrong to be cautious,” he said. “From their point of view, we just walked out of a crater that shouldn’t exist, after something they can’t explain tore the landscape apart. They’re gonna want answers before they let anybody go.”

  Celeste studied his expression.

  She had seen fear on him before. Shock. Pain. Anger.

  What she saw now was something else.

  Familiarity.

  “You’ve been in places like this,” she said.

  Mike hesitated.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Different walls. Same idea.”

  Michelle nodded.

  “When something breaks reality,” she said, “you don’t let the people involved just… walk away. You contain first. You investigate. You decide what’s safe later.”

  Celeste considered that.

  She had used the same logic herself more times than she could count.

  She folded her arms slowly, the glass reflecting her movement back at her from every angle.

  “I understand the tactic,” she said. “I’ve used it.”

  Her gaze shifted, searching the room.

  “Where is Oryx?”

  The question landed heavier than anything else she had said.

  Mike’s jaw tightened.

  “I haven’t seen him since they put him on the gurney,” he said. “After they pulled him out of the basin.”

  Celeste’s chest tightened.

  “They took him away?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “Medical team. Full protective gear. They spent ten minutes just arguing about how to touch him without getting eaten.”

  A faint, humorless huff escaped Michelle.

  “They were briefed that giant black… things might come out of him,” she said. “Didn’t want to be wrong about that.”

  Celeste closed her eyes for a fraction of a second.

  “They used poles,” Mike continued. “Rolled him onto the gurney without direct contact. Airlifted him out.”

  His voice dropped.

  “No one’s told us where they took him. Or what condition he’s in.”

  The room seemed smaller.

  Inaria kept eating, eyes lowered to her tray. She did not speak. She did not look at them. The tension in her posture suggested she was listening to every word anyway.

  Celeste pressed a hand to the glass at her side.

  “He survived the gate,” she said softly. “He has to survive this.”

  No one argued.

  The door at the far end of the room opened with a smooth, mechanical hiss.

  Celeste straightened instantly.

  Boots entered first.

  Then uniforms.

  Thomas Caldwell stepped in at the front of the group, posture rigid, expression carved into something composed and unyielding. Elaine followed at his side, eyes already scanning the room with a clinical sharpness. Rachel walked just behind them, quiet, observant, her gaze flicking between each of the four detainees with intense, calculating focus.

  Behind them came two more figures.

  Elena Cruz.

  Raj Patel.

  Recognition sparked immediately in Celeste’s mind.

  Elena’s expression tightened when she saw them. Raj stopped outright for half a second, eyes locking onto the glass enclosure.

  “Celeste,” he breathed.

  She met his gaze.

  He took a step forward before catching himself, glancing at Caldwell and then back at her.

  “You’re… you’re really here.”

  Elaine’s eyes cut toward him.

  “Confirm the identities,” she said.

  Elena nodded once, professional even in shock.

  “That’s them,” she said. “They were at the extraction point. She—” her gaze flicked to Celeste, “—told us to get the civilians out. Said it wasn’t safe to stay.”

  Raj swallowed.

  “She helped people,” he said. “She kept the wind up so we could move. She didn’t leave anyone behind.”

  Elaine’s gaze sharpened.

  “Then why,” Raj asked, unable to stop himself, “is she in a glass box?”

  One of the soldiers near the door answered flatly.

  “This woman generated an F1-scale tornado.”

  Raj stared at him.

  “…Oh.”

  Silence fell over the room.

  Caldwell stepped forward, folding his hands behind his back.

  “Which one of you,” he said, “is going to start explaining what actually happened out there?”

  Celeste lifted her chin.

  “Oryx did what only he could do,” she said. “He closed gate.”

  Caldwell’s eyes narrowed.

  “The man in the crater?”

  Celeste did not hesitate.

  “Yes.”

  Caldwell exhaled slowly through his nose.

  “Then,” he said, “we need to talk about him.”

  The air in the room felt suddenly very thin.