The sky was too blue. Nolan drifted through it, half a body and half a thought, watching the clouds spread like mountains above him. One moment he could feel skin, muscle, breath; the next he was nothing but mist. His left hand wavered into bone, then light, then absence. His chest throbbed hollow, trying to remember lungs that weren’t there. Each flicker was a reminder: he was unfinished, unraveling, and yet—still here.

  Twilight, though the word had never been spoken, echoed through his mind for what felt like eternity. It was the space between. The collapse he had fallen into after HIVE, after the fight that broke him open. Now he hurdled backward through time as if tethered to history itself, an observer caught in a dream.

  He almost missed the familiar sound of war. A rising hum, faint at first, then swelling into a scream that tore across the sky. The skies were alive with the hammering of machine gun firing. Nolan tilted—if a spirit could tilt—and saw them. Two aircraft twisting through the clouds, wings flashing in sunlight. It was a dance of modern dragons, each wailing and moaning, as they pitched and yawed through the heavens.

  One was long-nosed, silver, with shark teeth painted along its engine cowl. The other was darker, rounder, its silhouette crueler. Recognition came from some half-buried memory: P-51 Mustang. A6M Zero. His history classes, diagrams studied late at night, rushed back now in a single instant. The Pacific Theater, 1944. How much time had passed? How much further did he have to go?

  The Mustang dove, guns spitting fire, tracers cutting the air. The Zero answered with its own burst, streaks of orange trailing smoke. They crossed paths like predators, banking hard, spiraling downward.

  The Mustang jerked violently. Smoke belched from its engine, black and furious as the nose dipped, the aircraft wobbling. Nolan’s gut clenched. He could almost feel the pilot’s panic, though he wasn’t in the cockpit. No parachute burst free, no canopy flew open; the plane dropped lower. Nolan longed to understand why the pilot didn't bail, finding him in disbelief when he received an answer; from inside the aircraft.

  Utter chaos, the cockpit roared with fire and metal. Gauges rattled, glass cracked and drifted suspended in the plane’s free fall. Repeatedly, batting away smoke and debris, the pilot pulled on the ejection lever again and again, but the hinge was jammed, the canopy refusing. His face was that of a young man, lined with sweat, fear, and desperation.

  Recognition struck Nolan harder than the boys’ emotions. Walsh. Logan Walsh. Younger than the commander Nolan knew from the files. Not the steely face in black-and-white photographs labeled CSS, Commander. Here he was barely more than a boy, eyes wide and frantic, trapped inside his dying aircraft. Was this going to be the boys’ tomb? He struggled to remember what Walsh’s fate was, as the man cried to God for mercy. Twilight.

  Nolan reached forward without thinking, running on pure impulse. His hand flickered in and out of existence, ghostly fingers brushing the canopy. He expected nothing but, instead, a spark leapt. Bolts screamed loose as the canopy tore free with a violent crack; the seat fired upward in a concussive blast. Walsh shot into the sky, parachute snapping wide against the blue.

  Nolan froze as the skeletal remains of the Mustang washed around him. His half-body trembled, more and less real than before, the ghost-flesh of his hand tingling with leftover fire. He looked down at the fingers — combination fading machinery, bone, and light — and whispered to himself: Was that me?

  Below, the Mustang spiraled. It struck one of the islands dotting the Pacific, erupting in a column of dust and smoke. Walsh, drifting under his chute, fell toward the same island, carried by a current into the trees. Nolan felt the pull of inevitability. He had read about this: Walsh, shot down in the Pacific, believed lost, only to be discovered later, alive. It was a redacted file, made available only to him and a select other few. The details had always been vague, the story too convenient. Now he knew why.

  Smoke rose from the island. Nolan drifted down to the beach, skimming the sand until he found himself in a lush forest. In a clearing, the down vessel came into view, Nolan’s spectral body slipping into the wreckage. Flames licked the torn fuselage, burning nearby shrubbery. The cockpit was a tangled heap of glass and steel as he reached again, his hand brushing a blackened panel. Sounds, the wiring of electronics, the sputtering of what was remaining of the engine, came to life if only to die moments later. The transponder lit, pulsing through cracked and smoking panels. Around him, the slain beast attempted to wake and choked, circuits humming and crackling, but it was enough for a faint signal to pulse into the endless sky.

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  Hours or moments later — Twilight has no clocks — dark silhouettes broke the horizon. Ships prowling the ocean crept toward the signal, radar catching the beacon as a glitch; rogue blips from the ocean. Smaller boats rowed ashore to investigate. Men in khaki and helmets cut through jungle brush until they found him: Logan Walsh, bruised, burned, alive. They hauled him upright, shouting disbelief, and carried him back toward the surf.

  Nolan lingered, half-formed, watching. The thought seared through him: I saved him. I changed this. And with that came dread. If he could act, even by accident, then he was no longer just a witness. History wasn’t fixed in stone anymore. It was clay beneath his ghostly fingertips.

  Walsh turned once, looking back toward the jungle. His eyes swept the trees, pausing for a heartbeat, and Nolan knew the gaze pierced him, as if the young pilot saw him all along. Then the vision dissolved into mist. The island decayed. The ocean pulled away. Twilight dragged him on.

  He drifted through Europe next, though he never knew how he arrived. One moment waves rolled beneath him, the next he was hanging over ruined cities, the smell of ash and wet stone filling the air. The war was ending, or had ended, but Nolan could not pin down the year. Snow clung to the rooftops. Soldiers moved like shadows through alleyways. There—another man. Dark coat, heavy boots, eyes always searching the horizon. Nolan felt recognition stir. A Soviet once, but no longer. The man ducked into a warehouse, hands raised as if surrendering to unseen captors. Outside, the walls shook with the echo of gunfire.

  A shot rang. The man fell. Papers fluttered from his coat pocket, scattering across stone. Dead, the world would record. But Nolan saw the truth: figures in American uniforms lifting the body, carrying it through a door that closed too tightly to be a coincidence. A defection rewritten as death. Nolan drifted onward.

  In another place, a man in British kit crouched against a frozen hillside, mud painting his face. Voices barked through the storm. Nolan saw him rise, rifle raised, before the explosion caught him, tearing snow into the sky. His body crumpled.

  Later, under a tent’s glow, Nolan glimpsed the same man seated across from officers, bandaged but breathing, his name erased from the ledger. Lost in action, they would say.

  The scenes came like shattered glass. A woman in Germany, her hair tucked beneath a helmet, laughing in a photograph with men who would never return. Then smoke, rubble, a stretcher. Her tag hung on a nail, a death marked cleanly in ink. Yet Nolan drifted further, and there she was again, uniform gone, sitting quietly in a jeep beside strangers who spoke in whispers. Always the same pattern: a death recorded, a life hidden.

  Nolan’s half-body trembled. He reached out once, instinctive, when a bullet arced too close to the British man’s head. His ghost-hand brushed the air, and the bullet seemed to wobble, just enough to miss. The soldier never noticed. Nolan yanked his hand back, horror filling him. He could act. Again. But he didn’t know the cost. The years blurred. 1945 became 1946, and then 1947.

  A room. Dark wood paneling, smoke curling toward the ceiling. Men in suits spoke quietly, their voices echoing as though through water. Nolan drifted near the long table, watching mouths move, hands tapping ash from cigarettes. One word pierced through the haze: COPS Act. Another: Truman.

  Nolan leaned closer, catching fragments—protection, covert authority, Cold War inevitability. The words tangled like webs. At the head of the table, a man in uniform sat straight-backed, face unreadable. Walsh.

  Older now, his boyish fear hardened into stone. The Pacific island was far behind him. The men around the table addressed him with respect, even deference. He did not smile. This was the birth of something new, Nolan realized. The gathering of those who were supposed to be dead, now resurrected into secrecy. Nearly a hundred of them. Soldiers, spies, defectors, all folded into shadow. This is The 100.

  Nolan felt his stomach twist. He had lit the spark that kept Walsh alive. And here Walsh was, seated at the head of a machine that would shape the world. His hand trembled, flickering between flesh and light. If he reached again—if he tried—could he stop it? He didn’t.

  The room dissolved, and Nolan was alone with only thought. He was only supposed to witness. That was what Twilight had been—an endless reel of history played backward for him alone. But the truth was undeniable now. He could act. He had acted. Walsh lived because of him. A hundred hidden lives unfolded because of him. The past was listening. And Nolan’s fingerprints were already pressed deep into it.