Amy was awake.
Or at least she thought she was.
There was no ground under her feet, no sky above her head. Just a white stretch that felt endless and suffocating at the same time. Sound did not travel here. Time did not move properly either.
She tried to blink.
The world shifted.
For a moment she stood in a desert under a burning red sun. Towers of black metal rose behind her, ancient and broken. Symbols burned into the ground. Not alien. Not human. Something in between.
Then she was somewhere else.
A laboratory. Cold. Sterile. People screaming behind glass. Her hands were covered in blood that did not belong to her.
Then she was falling.
Again.
Amy grabbed her head and dropped to her knees even though there was nothing solid to kneel on.
"This is wrong," she whispered. Her voice echoed in fragments, as if spoken by multiple versions of herself at once. "This already happened. Or it hasn't yet."
A word crawled through her mind like an insect.
Lapse.
She remembered now.
Not clearly. Never clearly. But enough.
She had not meant to create it. The split. The delay. The tearing of cause and effect. She had tried to fix something long ago. Something broken by curiosity and fear.
Instead she made it worse.
She saw flashes again.
Xin running through fire.
Kaila smiling as a child.
Andy screaming with a body that no longer belonged to him.
The Black Bloom spreading like a disease with a memory.
Then another image forced its way in.
Two figures standing near a crater.
One was Xin. Older. Broken. Still moving forward.
The other carried a sword.
For a split second the second figure's shadow peeled away from his body. Something dark looked back at her from inside him. It smiled.
Amy recoiled.
"This is where it snaps," she whispered. "This is where the thread breaks."
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, she was alone.
The armored truck sat half hidden beneath a collapsed overpass. Tara crouched beside it, spreading a torn map across the hood while Alaric worked on a cracked data drive nearby. The air still smelled like rot from the dead creature in Bellmare.
"We do not rush in," Tara said. "Crater Valley is not a town. It's a grave."
Xin stood a few steps away, arms crossed, jaw tight. He did not argue. He barely spoke these days.
Alaric cleared his throat. "The drive confirms it. Dive ran deep experiments under the crater. Multiple levels. Energy signatures similar to Skate. Similar to the Bloom."
Rion leaned against the truck, sharpening his blade. He paused when the word Bloom came up.
"That place is old," he said. "Older than Dive."
Tara looked at him. "You been there?"
"No," Rion replied. "But whatever is under it is loud. My demon doesn't like it."
"That's comforting," Talla muttered.
Xin glanced at Rion. "You sure you want to walk into something like that?"
Rion met his eyes. "I'm already walking with something worse."
Tara folded the map and pointed toward the road leading east. "We move before dawn. Slow. Quiet. No hero shit."
Xin nodded once.
Later that night, Xin stood alone near the truck, striking a steel support beam again and again. Each punch was controlled. No screaming. No wasted motion. He stored the energy in his shoulders, released it clean, then reset.
Force Push. Again.
The beam bent slightly.
Tara watched from a distance without interrupting.
"You're going to break your hands doing that," she said finally.
Xin lowered his fists. "Better than breaking people."
She stepped closer. "You want to rush after him. I get that. But this isn't a straight fight. Andy isn't human anymore. The Dive isn't either."
"I know," Xin said. "That's why I'm listening."
Tara studied him. "You're angry. That makes you dangerous. To yourself."
Xin looked down. "I don't trust myself to plan. That's why you're doing it."
She didn't respond right away.
"That doesn't make you weak," Tara said eventually. "It makes you alive."
Rion stood apart, eyes closed. For a moment, the world around him dulled.
Kurai stirred.
Something ancient is stirring, the voice whispered inside him.
Rion opened his eyes and stared toward the distant outline of Crater Valley.
"Yeah," he murmured. "I know."
As the truck rolled out under the dying stars, far away in a place that was not a place, Amy felt the movement.
She opened her eyes again.
"They're getting closer," she whispered.
Her voice fractured into echoes.
"And one of them will not leave whole."
The white space swallowed her words.