I was still minutes behind when the first building split.
Not a collapse. A clean hole punched straight through. Then another. Then another. Twelve of them in a line across the industrial lot and into the edge of the city. Sirens rose in waves. I pushed harder, violet light shearing off me, and still arrived as the rift was already narrowing.
Katulu stood at the edge of it with a girl beside him.
Not a baby. A girl of about twelve. Dark hair. Eyes that caught the gold-black light the same way his did. Simple clothes that were not from Earth. She stood close to him, calm, watching the ruined street like it was a lesson.
Elena was in the crater at the end of the line of holes.
Coat torn. Blood at her mouth. Purple light flickering and dying around her hands. She had been thrown. Twelve buildings. She was trying to stand and not managing it when I landed.
The girl looked at her once, then at the closing rift, then at me.
I knew her.
Not by memory. By the pull. The same pull that had made me say Nova into empty rooms for three months. My daughter. Ours. Already half-grown. Already turning away.
Elena's voice cracked across the lot.
"Wait—please. Just look at me. I'm—"
The girl did not stop. She did not turn. She walked into the light beside Katulu as if Elena's voice was wind.
Katulu glanced back, almost amused.
"She does not know you," he said. "Why would she? We raised her. The first thirty years of our kind pass quickly. She has already lived more of them than you have known her. After that, the years slow. She will outlast you both. She has already exceeded every expectation we set. She will be the strongest of us."
He laughed once, low.
"You may keep speaking. She will not answer. She does not know your faces. She does not know your names. She knows ours."
The rift sealed.
Katulu and the girl were gone. The gold-black light vanished. The street was suddenly just a street full of holes and sirens.
Elena got to her feet without my help. She swayed. She wiped blood from her lip with the back of her hand and stared at the place the portal had been.
"I tried to talk to her," she said. Flat. Raw. "I told her my name. I told her she was ours. She looked through me. Then she threw me. Like I was nothing. Like I was in the way. She doesn't know us, Alex. She doesn't know we're her parents."
"We'll get her back."
"She threw me through twelve buildings and didn't even hesitate." Elena finally looked at me. Her eyes were wet and furious and empty at the same time. "What are we going to get back? A girl who thinks Katulu is her world?"
I reached for her. She stepped out of range.
"Don't touch me. Don't talk to me like this is something we can fix in a conversation. I flew here in a coat. I tried to speak to her. She answered with power. You arrived after it was done. Same as London. Same as always."
"That's not fair."
"Nothing about this is fair." She lifted off the ground, thin purple light around her, still bleeding. "I'm going home. Don't follow me."
She flew.
I stood in the crater she had left and watched the sky until the sirens got too close. Then I flew the other way.
The house was dark when I landed.
I did not go to Elena's side. I went to mine. The sofa still smelled like nothing. The fridge had beer and nothing else. I opened three of them before I sat down. The television came on because the silence was worse. I left the news running with the sound off. London. The lab. Twelve new holes in the city. My face in an old clip from better days. I turned it over.
Porn filled the screen because my hands knew the path and my head did not want to be in the room. Bodies. Sounds. None of them hers. None of them the girl who had looked through her mother and walked into another world. I watched it the way you watch traffic. Drink in one hand. The other useless. Three months of no intimacy turned into a bad substitute that did not even pretend to be enough.
I was halfway through the fourth beer when the back door opened.
Elena stood in the doorway. Coat still on. Blood dried at the corner of her mouth. She looked at the screen, then at me, then at the bottles.
"Disgusting," she said.
I did not turn it off fast enough.
"Elena—"
"Don't. I just watched our daughter throw me through a building and not know my face. And you're in here drinking and watching that." Her voice shook. She hated that it shook. "Is this what you do when I'm not looking? Is this what three months of 'I'm trying' looks like?"
"I didn't know what else to do with my hands."
"You could have followed me. You could have stayed. You could have done anything except this."
"You told me not to follow you."
"And you listened for once. Congratulations." She laughed once, ugly. "We're being tested. Both of us. And we're failing. You with a screen. Me with a daughter who thinks Katulu is her world. Neither of us is winning."
She turned.
"Elena, wait."
"I'm going to bed. In my house. Alone. If you come over tonight I will put you through a wall too. And I won't apologise after."
The door slammed.
I sat in the dark with the television still muttering and the beer going warm. Twelve buildings. A girl who looked like both of us and none of us. A wife who had called me disgusting and was not wrong enough for me to argue.
Outside, the city counted new holes.
Inside, I finished the beer and did not turn the screen off, because turning it off would have meant sitting with the silence, and the silence had our daughter's face in it.
We were being tested.
So far, we were both losing.