A planetless night cloaked the approach vector, save for the prickling blue haze of the Crystalbound Frontier. Mana had never liked this part of space. Even from orbit, the starlight looked sick. Her pod peeled away from the cold belly of the corvette, silent and invisible save for a brief speck on the enemy's hundredth decimal of passive sensors. No one would spot her. No one, unless they were already looking in all the wrong ways.
The drop lasted less than a minute. On reentry, a quick melt of the outer hull glazed her viewport with streaks of black glass, obscuring the sickly shimmer below. Her helmet's auto-polarize failed to filter it out. She blinked against the afterimage and did not reach for the Halo chip still zipped into her inner pocket. There were no checkpoints here, no clever lines for the next performance review—just the job, and the voice in her ear.
"The drop is within acceptable parameters, M-137," Fox said. His voice was steady in her ear, a metronome against the violent shuddering of the pod. If he felt any discomfort at her speed or altitude, he did not show it.
The surface approached with the usual violence. Gravity here was a memory at best, more gesture than law, so the final meters felt more like a slow fall and a sharp scrape than a crash. She kicked open the pod hatch and stepped onto the dry, high-iron crust, boots skidding as the impact dust settled around her.
"Nice landing," Fox said, his voice warming by a few degrees in her earpiece. "Four centimeters off the marker, but I doubt your hosts will mind."
Mana scanned the horizon. Flat, gray, featureless—until she toggled thermal and the world bloomed: faint veins of buried machinery, a cold spot that hinted at a centuries-dead reactor, and, dead ahead, the outpost itself—a skeletal pucker in the ground, outlined with the stuttering blue of what might have once been a forcefield.
"Abandoned Jäger outpost?" she said, checking the coordinates. "You sure?"
"Visual overlays from three different recon satellites confirm it," Fox replied. "Intel says the base was lost to internal sabotage three weeks ago. No signals traffic since."
Mana started down the slope, her suit's claws gripping the metallic soil with reassuring bite. The sky above flickered—no stars, only the refracted glare from the crystal drift that ringed the whole sector. Once or twice, she thought she glimpsed movement in the haze, but the sensors were clear, and she knew better than to trust her own eyes after a month of forced quarantine.
Mana tapped her helmet mic. "Fox, talk to me," she said, out loud. Not because she needed the words, but because the silence had grown too close, pressing against her suit like the metallic soil beneath her boots.
Fox obliged, no hesitation. "You're looking for anomaly signatures. If the Jäger have started integrating Kollektiven tech, it will show as a low-level resonance—audio, or more likely RF. Standard sweeps on entry. If you see anything…weird, use the helmet's scan-and-push. And do not, under any circumstances, let a foreign node touch your Core."
"I like my Core as it is," Mana said. The joke rang hollow.
The approach trench was narrower than expected, the sides caked with half-melted slag. Her HUD painted routes in green and yellow: best path, least risk, minimum exposure. As she moved, the overlays built a structural schematic. She ducked under a collapsed archway, into the first antechamber.
The walls were gone, replaced by frozen ribs of composite and torn reinforcement mesh. Most outposts looked like this by the end—hacked up, torn open by their own automated defenses, then abandoned for the next inevitable recon. At least a dozen corpses lined the entryway, some still in half-melted armor, others stripped clean by fire or acid.
Mana swept her gaze across the twisted metal. "Why would they strip their own dead? Jäger don't salvage tech from the fallen," she asked, flicking her own scanner to wideband.
Fox: "Running a sweep. Hold a sec."
Mana crouched by a corpse, pushing aside the armor with a boot. The helmet was fused shut, but the signature on the neckplate read: OBERJÄGER K-239, SQUADRON 5. She logged the data and moved on. In the next room, she found the first of the blue growths.
The crystal pulsed faintly in the dark, like a heart murmur. The growth emerged from a crack in the wall, extending in fractal splinters across the floor and ceiling. At first glance it looked like glass, but when she tapped it with her gauntlet, the crystal responded—a low, tremulous hum that set her teeth on edge. She scanned it, sent the result to Fox.
"Confirmed," he said, a note of awe in his tone. "That's Kollektiven architecture. But it's interfaced to a Jäger neural substrate. See the filaments? It's not even a patchwork. More like…a seamless interface."
Mana's visor magnified the node. Inside, she saw minute traces of circuitry—bio-wetware, like her own, but wrong. The color was all off, electric blue and purple, even under false light.
Softer than before, but distinct: "You're fine. It can't interface with your Core without physical contact. But it's..." Fox trailed off. His bandwidth flickered with the subtle static that always came when he was running parallel analyses. "Command's gonna lose their minds. This isn't just adaptation—it's evolution. The crystal's restructuring the Jäger neural architecture at the quantum level."
The air grew heavier, as if the whole outpost was exhaling through a pinched throat. Static sizzled along the walls, the ionization picking up with every step. By the time she reached the first security door, her HUD was almost unreadable, so thick was the overlay with Fox's streaming analysis and her own scan results.
She palmed the door open. No traps, just more carnage: what must have once been a security checkpoint now packed wall-to-wall with the frozen dead, many of them Jäger, but some—her stomach turned—augmented humans in heavy black.
Fox: "Mana, that's a dead Internal Security team. I'm reading their ciphers. They weren't here when the outpost fell. They came after."
Mana recognized the tactical patches. "They sent in a clean-up. Didn't go well."
"Looks like the Jäger rigged the whole entry with cryo charges. There's no heat left. No sign of any living network."
Mana navigated the bodies, stepping carefully to avoid contaminating the scene. She counted two, maybe three survivors—judging by the blood trails leading deeper. She followed, passing through a corridor where the crystal growths began to multiply. They weren't random, she realized. Each sprouting followed the lines of the architecture, as if the outpost itself were being rewired, from the inside out.
"Still want to bet this is just a random spike?" Mana asked, her voice low.
"No bet," Fox replied. "Updating mission parameters. If the Kollektiven are reanimating Jäger tech, we need a sample. Find the source, and get out clean. I want you back in one piece."
She could have laughed, but didn't. Fox's version of tenderness always came laced with new horrors.
The outpost curved downward, the air thickening with each meter. She moved in silence, save for the crunch of glassy dust under her boots. On the next landing, her HUD flagged movement ahead.
Mana dropped to a knee, drawing her sidearm and toggling helmet optics to active scan. The corridor was empty, but her sensors disagreed.
She waited, slow-breathing the tension out. Then, from the far end, a ripple—a shadow, something bipedal but not human, flanked by two smaller forms. They glided rather than walked, every movement exact, rehearsed.
She recognized the silhouette instantly: Jäger. Three of them, moving in a wedge formation.
But these were not the standard breed. Their armor was partially peeled away, replaced by exoskeletal plating of the same blue-purple crystal, veins of it snaking up their limbs and across the exposed skulls. They moved with a unity that the old Jäger never had, and as they advanced, the crystals pulsed—alive, responsive, beating in time with their steps.
Mana froze, not out of fear, but because there was nothing in the training, nothing in any database, for this. She let her helmet record, focusing in on the leader. Even at this distance, she could see the micro-movements, the way its head cocked and eyes glinted, the subtle shudder through its shoulder plates when it tasted the air.
Fox whispered, "Mana…record everything. Full data dump. Do not engage unless necessary."
She flicked her helmet cam to live feed, set the suit to passive EM, and waited for instructions.
The Jäger stopped, less than twenty meters from her. The two in the rear spread out, flanking. The leader advanced, then paused—directly in the cone of her scan.
For a long moment, nothing moved.
Mana's mind counted out the ways this could end. None of them were good.
Fox: "Mana, if it moves, drop it. But if it signals, observe. This may be an attempt at—"
The Jäger leader did something she'd never seen: it raised its right arm, palm out, and slowly rotated it, exposing the inside of the forearm. There, fused into the flesh and armor, was a cluster of the blue crystals—pulsing, arranged in a spiral, not unlike a neural port.
Mana's Core prickled at the sight, a pressure behind her eyes.
She raised her own arm, mimicked the gesture.
The Jäger didn't attack. Instead, it lowered its arm, turned, and with a sharp, birdlike nod, signaled to the others. They vanished down the side corridor, smooth as water on glass.
Mana waited until the threat overlay faded, then exhaled, her breath fogging the inside of her visor.
Fox came through, voice urgent and low. "I've seen the feed. This is above P0. We need a sample of the node. Proceed with caution, and if you get a chance to snag a fragment—"
"Copy," Mana said. She was already moving.
She followed the corridor the Jäger had taken, careful to step only where the pressure plates registered safe. The walls here were more crystal than metal; it was like walking through the inside of a frozen thundercloud. Sometimes she thought she heard voices, but when she paused, there was only silence and the faint tick of her own heartbeat.
She found a stairwell leading deeper. The temperature dropped. Ahead, she could see the faint blue halo of what was probably a generator, or maybe a control center, running on Kollektiven power.
At the base of the stairs, she found a chunk of the crystal, freshly torn from a wall. She scanned it, then, with a gloved hand, snapped it free. It pulsed in her palm, warm and almost…alive.
Fox: "Bring it home, Mana."
As she tucked the crystal into her sample pouch, she felt the faintest flicker of motion behind her. She spun, weapon ready.
Nothing.
But when she looked up the stairs, the walls were crawling with the blue light, pulsing just a little faster now, as if excited.
Mana's jaw tightened a fraction, the only outward sign of the calculation happening behind her eyes. "Assessment: they are aware of my presence," she said, voice flat but precise.
Fox: "Then make it worth their while. Secondary objective: reach the command node. If the hybrid is running a network, we need to map it."
"Understood," Mana said.
She turned and moved, each step crisp, assured. She had lived in battlefields her whole life, but this was something else: a chess match played at the speed of thought, with pieces made of muscle and memory and blue fire.
The control center was closer than she expected. When she entered, she found it deserted, save for a single figure slumped over a console.
A Jäger, fused to the chair by loops of blue crystal. Its eyes were gone, sockets filled with a glowing mesh that writhed even as she watched.
Mana hesitated, then stepped closer, weapon trained on the thing's heart. The display panel flickered to life, running a script in a language she didn't recognize.
Fox: "If you can, plug into the console. I'll filter the connection—should keep your Core safe. Be ready to cut instantly if anything pings back."
She holstered her sidearm, removed a line from her suit, and jacked it into the port. The world rushed sideways as the helmet streamed the console data into a quarantined cache.
For a moment, Mana saw everything: the history of the outpost, the moment of sabotage, the Jäger's last stand. And then, the blue light—everywhere, spreading in fractal pulses, devouring the base from the inside out.
She broke the link, gasping. The dead Jäger's head lolled, a single shard of crystal tumbling from its mouth to land at her boot.
Mana pocketed the shard, sent the data to Fox, and braced herself for the sprint out.
The walls around her pulsed in sync with her heartbeat.
It was time to go.
She ran the return protocol, double-checking the sample pouches, her boots making careful, deliberate contact with the spindly, dust-clogged mesh of the command center floor. It was never wise to assume the dead stayed put—especially not here.
The main terminal still pulsed weakly in the dark, a dying eye caked with the debris of a thousand hurried log-ins. Mana swept a gloved hand across the panel, pushing aside the fusion-burnt residue, and found the port. The Jäger fused to the chair had not decomposed; the flesh was mummified, the skull still upright, fused to the shell with a filigree of blue crystal.
Fox's signal came through faintly, the usual undertones of static now a surface buzz. "Reading you at 12%—local interference off the charts. I'm patching through using relay from the drop pod. The further you go, the more this place chews up signal."
Mana knelt, her knees scraping the mesh. "Beginning uplink now," she said. She routed her helmet's interface line into the terminal. The expected authentication prompts appeared, first in Jäger text, then—after a flicker—replaced by a haze of layered scripts. She let the helmet's linguistics do its work.
First log: a video snippet, timestamped eighty-two hours prior, showing a small room like this one, only the blue growths were smaller, less invasive. Three Jäger—two baseline, one officer—stood facing the camera, their visors down. The officer spoke, its voice rendered in glitching translation:
"Integration proceeds. Growth rate: seventy-two percent above expectation. Losses…acceptable. All units at readiness."
The officer reached forward, its gauntlet hovering over something just out of frame. The Jäger's hand trembled—barely noticeable, except at this resolution. The crystal at the back of its skull pulsed, and the room's blue light spiked.
Mana's hands didn't shake, but her heartbeat was crawling up her neck now, audible in her ears.
She skipped through the logs, letting the helmet filter for high-priority tags. The pattern repeated: brief, clipped check-ins, each time more crystal in the shot, each time the Jäger less…organic. Their bodies turned rigid; their movements smoothed into a unity that made her queasy. By the last video, the original crew was gone. The room was empty save for a single, unmoving form in the background, so overgrown it was difficult to tell if it had ever been alive.
The last log was not a video. Just a string of code, scrolling at a pace too fast for human reading. The helmet highlighted blocks of it—most matching Kollektiven handshakes, but layered atop Jäger tactical schemas. No reason this should work. No universe where it did.
Fox: "It's running simulations on how to fuse their networks. I'm running pattern analysis, but this is way outside doctrine."
Mana said nothing, just watched as the code scrolled and, every so often, paused—as if waiting for a response.
She left the feed running and began a sweep of the room. The blue crystal had taken over almost every surface. In places, it seemed to glow with its own internal light, casting her shadow in multiple directions at once. She scraped a second, smaller sample and dropped it in the pouch.
A hiss of static made her flinch. For a split second, her helmet's display flickered, and Fox's voice cut out. What replaced it was not silence, but a layered, toneless voice, the cadence not quite right:
"We-see-you-bridge-entity."
"You-carry-fragments-within."
"You-are-incomplete."
The words seared through her consciousness, a hot wire threaded from optic nerve to brain stem. Without thinking, her fingers performed the emergency disconnect sequence along her chestplate seam—three precise touches right, three left—then tore the helmet cable free with a single, violent motion.
She backed away from the terminal, hand already on her pistol, but nothing moved.
Then Fox was back, but not really: "Mana—" his voice fractured, spliced with something else "—the—" static hissed between each word "—readings. It's in the—" another voice layered beneath his, speaking in perfect unison "—neural pathway. Cut connection. Now."
Mana took a breath, forced her blood pressure down. "Copy," she said. She had never felt the Core this hot, not even during a full-system reset. Her hands moved, but the movement was clumsy, as if her bones were made of lead. She tried to recall the training for electrical shock, the checklist for heatstroke, but the only thing that came to mind was the color blue—everywhere, in every corner of her HUD.
The terminal flashed, once. Symbols rolled across the screen, none that belonged to either side. It was as if the Jäger code and the Kollektiven code had started speaking in a third, secret language.
Mana tore off the uplink and triggered the helmet's hard-reboot. For a few seconds, she was blind, the black inside her visor absolute, and in that darkness she felt the crystals all around her—watching, waiting. Her spine twitched as the Core sent pulses of heat up and down her vertebrae, each spike timed perfectly with the rhythm of the glowing walls.
When her vision came back, the room was the same, but the light was different: the blue now beat in time with her own pulse. She made a fist and unclenched it. The movement felt delayed, a half-second behind her intent.
"Fox, I think it's mapped my Core signature."
No response. Not even static.
She reached for the sample pouch, the movement harder than it should have been. The fabric on her gloves was damp; the air in the room now pressed against her with a subtle but definite force. The blue light followed her, as if the crystals themselves wanted to record her movements.
The Jäger corpse in the chair had not moved. But the network it had joined was not dead.
Mana cycled her helmet comms to open air, transmitting at max power. "Fox. If you read, confirm. I'm prepping for exit."
Still nothing.
She moved to the door, but it had closed behind her. When she tried the manual release, the wall seemed to absorb her touch. The crystal around the edge of the door pulsed, a single line growing brighter and brighter.
Mana holstered her sidearm and pulled out the emergency breach tool—a palm-sized charge meant for a hundred other situations, but not this. She set it to full yield and pressed it against the seam.
As she retreated, she watched the blue veins crawl along the wall, converging on the device.
The breach went off with a muffled pop and a shower of glassy dust. The door blew open, and Mana dove through, rolling to her feet on the other side. She sprinted for the stairwell.
The further she ran, the brighter the blue light behind her. Every corridor, every room she passed, was now alive with crystal, some of it branching out in long, jagged spears.
Her lungs burned with cold, the taste of ozone filling her mouth. She ducked under a low arch and found the stairwell choked with blue roots. She drew her knife, cut at the largest one—it bled, briefly, a burst of phosphorescent liquid that steamed and ate at her blade.
Mana tossed the blade aside, and went at it bare-handed. She punched, pulled, and snapped the crystal until she could wedge her shoulder through. As she did, her Core fired a fresh spike of heat, like a fever erupting inside her spine.
She stumbled up the stairs. Her HUD was now 90% warning overlays, the borders of her vision a pulsing frame of blue. She forced herself to move, hand over hand, until the next landing.
At the top, the passage to the surface was a narrow chute, half-collapsed. The blue light here was less intense, as if it had not yet infected the outer layers of the outpost. She squeezed through, scraping her armor on the stone.
When she reached open air, the world snapped back to its old gray. The only blue now was the faint shimmer on her suit, and the sky above—rippling with the distant glow of the Crystalbound.
Mana crouched, waiting for the next pulse from her Core, but it never came. The sensation ebbed, and she felt control return to her limbs.
Fox's voice was so faint she almost missed it.
"I'm here," she said, fighting for calm.
"I'm out. The base is active—alive, I think." She took a deep breath, the cold air burning her lungs clean. "It tried to reach me, Fox. Not just through the terminal. Through the Core."
Mana forced herself to her feet. The pain was real, but not disabling. She limped back toward the drop pod, scanning every meter for sign of pursuit.
She looked back once. The outpost entrance was awash in blue, the veins of light now so bright they cast shadows even at this distance.
Mana shuddered, not from cold, but from the certainty that whatever watched her from the depths was still learning.
She set the pod's burn protocol, triggered the remote detonation.
The blue light flickered, spasmed, then vanished in the thermal bloom of the blast.
She slumped into the crash-couch, eyes closed, Core still hot against her spine.
But even as the pod lifted, she swore she could still see it, behind her eyelids and at the edge of every thought.
Silence, again.
She slapped the emergency comms, felt the channel open, then shatter in a waterfall of static. A rush of signals, then one clean voice:
Mana's helmet flickered, HUD warping at the edges. The voice was not Fox's. It was guttural, heavy, with a reverb that filled the pod. She toggled the universal translator. The phrase returned, rendered: "They are searching for you."
A shadow loomed in the viewport.
The Kommandant was bigger than any Jäger she'd seen, head and shoulders clear. Where the others had been infested, he was rebuilt: lines of blue and purple crystal plated his spine, curling up across the helmet like a crown. His right arm was sheathed in crystal from shoulder to claw, each finger tipped in a dagger of shimmering light. His left arm was bare, the muscle and metal beneath pitted by a hundred old wounds.
His visor flashed once, as if reading her thoughts. Then, with slow, perfect care, he peeled the pod's hatch back, wrenching the durasteel like a toy. Air hissed, but the pressure stabilized; the Kommandant was careful, almost gentle.
Mana drew her pistol, thumbed it to full charge, but the Kommandant ignored the threat. He reached inside, his body blocking out all light but the blue from his own crystalline growths. The crystals pulsed—not wild, but measured, as if waiting for a signal. Mana watched, transfixed, as the Kommandant opened his bare hand, palm up, and held it out to her.
Resting in the palm was a fragment of data crystal, a perfect twin to the sample she had collected inside.
The Kommandant's voice thrummed in archaic Hochdeutsch—the language few still spoke, preserved only in old archives and military databases. The language she and Fox used when they needed privacy: "Die Erben wissen, was du bist."
Mana's breath caught. Her fingers tightened on her weapon. How? The dialect was precise, perfect—the cadence exactly as Fox would speak it. The voice was alien, inhuman, yet it had reached into the most intimate corner of her existence and extracted something that belonged only to her and Fox.
She reached, slow, and took the crystal. The moment her fingers closed around it, a jolt ran through her arm and up her spine, so strong her back arched and her teeth clamped shut.
Her HUD died. Every overlay vanished, the helmet suddenly nothing but dead glass.
The Kommandant withdrew, then stepped away from her.
Mana fought to restore the suit interface, but all she saw was a black void, shot through with the afterimage of the crystal. She was aware of her body, but her senses were wrong, lagged, as if the world had decoupled from time.
She called for Fox, but the neural link was gone. Not jammed or static—just absent, as if the other end of the line had never existed. Mana reached for him in her mind, probing the void where his presence should be, like a tongue searching for a missing tooth. Nothing answered. She existed in a void of her own consciousness, untethered from Fox's presence for the first time since activation. Her fingers found the familiar ridge along her armor's hip seam, tapping out their ritual—three right, three left—but the motion felt hollow, like knocking on a door she knew stood abandoned.
She tried to move, and found she could. She pushed herself upright, climbed out of the pod's ruined shell, boots crunching on the crystallized ground. The Kommandant did not move, except to turn, slow, and indicate—follow
They reached the edge of the crater, where the Jäger corpses still lay frozen. The Kommandant stopped there, turned to face her. The blue light pulsed up the length of his arm, coalescing at the tip of a single crystal blade.
He pointed it at her.
Mana braced for attack. Instead, the Kommandant ran the blade along his own forearm, slicing a line through crystal and flesh. He bent the arm to drip a bead of blue blood onto the ground at her feet.
A sacrament, not a threat.
Mana's body shivered. She understood, and hated that she understood.
The Kommandant dropped to one knee, head bowed.
She could not speak, but she nodded, once.
The Kommandant stood, took three steps backward, and vanished into the tunnel from which the light first emerged.
"Mana?" Fox's voice crackled suddenly in her ear, so faint she thought she'd imagined it. "I lost sight of you. Complete blackout. Are you—"
"I'm here," she whispered, her throat tight. "How did you find me?"
"Orbital scan picked up your signature. I sent the shuttle as soon as we had coordinates." His voice faded in and out. "What happened down there? Your vitals are all over the place."
Her hand moved to the pouch at her hip, fingers pressing against the outline of what lay within. She remained silent for three full seconds before answering. "It's complicated."
Re-entry came with all the usual violence, the hull sloughing off old black as the shuttle hit atmosphere. The landing was ugly—her hands on the stick, mechanical, perfect, even though her fingers shook with the aftershock of whatever the crystal had done to her.
On touchdown, a pair of station security waited, full armor and blank faceplates. They saluted as she emerged from the shuttle, then fell in step as she limped across the tarmac. Not a word exchanged, not a glance, just the silent geometry of soldiers doing what was expected.
Mana made it through decontamination in record time. No one spoke to her, but everywhere she looked she saw the outlines of herself reflected in mirrored glass: thin, sharp, haunted. She moved through the checkpoints as if rehearsing a dance from a dream she no longer wanted to remember.
The base corridors had changed. Blue light now traced every edge, running beneath the floor tiles and up the seams of the ceiling. It was not the electric, living humming of the outpost, but a colder, institutional shade. The difference was important, though Mana doubted the decorators knew why.
She passed the labs, and the mess, and the sealed doors to the barracks. No one met her eyes, though a few heads turned, just long enough to confirm she was real, not ghost or rumor.
At the final checkpoint, the sentry scanned her helmet and frowned. "Your handler's gone dark," he said, not even trying to mask the worry. "You want to see medical?"
"No," Mana said. "Just quarters."
He waved her through, uncertain.
She had almost reached her block when the elevator doors hissed open. A thin woman in a black suit—Defense Director Harrow. Steel-gray eyes found Mana's through rimless glasses, calculating and cold. The scar at her temple, where the neural-graft had failed, caught the corridor light as her gaze dropped to the crystal bulge in Mana's sample pouch, then back to Mana's face with sudden, sharp interest.
Her smile was precise. "Welcome back, Sergeant Major. I see you brought us a souvenir."
Mana did not trust herself to reply. She dipped her head, a fraction, and kept walking.
Behind her, Harrow's shoes ticked on the tile—three steps, and then she was gone, or at least out of sight.
Mana entered her quarters. The lights flickered on, soft and blue, and for a long time she just stood there, helmet under her arm, crystal in her hand, the old hunger and fear finally catching up.
She unclipped her suit, set the helmet down, and stared at her reflection in the blank monitor screen. The data crystal glowed in her palm, flickering with an internal light she knew was not entirely physical.
For a moment, she considered smashing it—ending whatever weird communion the Kommandant had started. But something in her rebelled. She turned the crystal over, again and again, the warmth of it seeping into her fingers, traveling up her arm toward the familiar scar at the base of her skull. Die Erben. The Inheritors. The word echoed against something older in her memory – twin circles, three connecting lines, the nightmare-word: Eden.
She collapsed onto the cot, armor plates still half-fastened. Her hand drifted to the blanket's edge—tracing three traces right, three traces left—each movement echoed emptily through her mind.
In the silence, the voices grew bold, layering together until they resolved into words.
The title echoed, not from her ears, but from within. Her face remained neutral as she cataloged the sensation: familiar yet wrong, like a weapon's weight shifted by a millimeter. She let the word settle around her consciousness, a perimeter established in unknown territory.
There was a sound, sudden, sharp—a static burst in the dead air of the room.
Fox's voice, raw and wrong, but real.
She gasped, sat upright, and felt the Core surge with heat. She was not alone, not now, not ever.
"Fox?" she said, her voice shaking.
"I'm here, Chief," came the answer, his voice strained through what sounded like layers of interference. "Don't let go." But beneath his familiar cadence, a new chorus—quieter, but gaining strength.
Her face remained still, a soldier's mask, though something shifted behind her eyes. The crystal pulsed against her palm, matching the rhythm of her heartbeat.