Two days left.
Eleven rifts remaining.
I knew these numbers the way you know your own heartbeat, constant and inescapable, counting down to something that would either save reality or end it.
We were standing in what used to be a textile factory in Mumbai, the thirty-eighth rift pulsing angry and purple-black in the center of the production floor. Around us, fifteen coalition hunters from Seoul and Tokyo cells were fighting seventy enforcers while trying not to collapse from exhaustion.
They'd been here for four hours before we arrived.
Four hours of channeling their power at a rift they couldn't close, trying to weaken it enough that when we finally showed up, we'd have a chance. Four hours of fighting enforcers that kept materializing, holding the line, rotating positions when people got too tired to stand.
The rift looked fractionally less stable than usual, edges flickering in a way that suggested the hours of assault had done something.
