---
░░░ Kael ░░░
The crater didn't feel like death. It felt like memory.
Kael stepped carefully over the melted remnants of the former highway, boots crunching on warped steel and tar-crusted glass. The Timefall had passed, but its signature lingered in the air—static-choked and cold, like breathing through broken comms.
Mire hovered silently beside him. Her glow was dim, pulsing faintly in rhythm with the pod's heartbeat. The little girl inside was awake now. Eyes closed, but aware. Kael could feel her pulse without touching the shell. Not fear. Not urgency.
Recognition.
He descended deeper into the scarred zone. Central Knot was nothing but scorched fragments and charred bone beneath black soil. BTs had come and gone since the blast, leaving streaks of tar like claw marks across the hillsides. The earth sagged here, like it was still grieving.
Then he saw it.
Near a toppled bridge support beam, half-buried under ash and broken ceramic plate, was a delivery case. He moved toward it quickly, Mire trailing close behind.
Kael knelt beside the case and brushed away the debris.
The UCA logo had been scratched off violently, but the serial number remained. And underneath it—etched into the steel by hand—were seven words:
> "Not all connections can be wired."
He didn't breathe for several seconds.
The handwriting was familiar. Tight, slanted. Efficient.
It was hers.
Samantha.
He held the case gently, like it might shatter if he blinked too hard. Mire stood across from him, her glow rising. The pod pulsed once.
Somewhere above, thunder echoed.
Kael looked up—just in time to see a silhouette moving along the distant ridge. A person. Cloaked in black. Rifle strapped across their back. Hood pulled low, braid hanging over one shoulder.
He stood, mouth open.
But she was already turning away.
---
░░░ Samantha ░░░
The ground had collapsed beneath her feet the moment the corpse hit critical.
She remembered the weightless fall.
The roar of something ancient rising from the tar.
The sky folding in on itself.
She remembered reaching for a hand that wasn't there.
The next thing she knew, she was on the edge of the crater, soaked in rain and tar, the world behind her gone. Her suit was damaged. Her back ached from the shockwave. Her rifle was jammed. But she was alive.
Somehow, impossibly, she was alive.
Samantha Bridges stood alone above the ruins of Central Knot City, watching the smoke curl like black vines into the clouds. The BTs were still here, but they were distant, feeding on the remains of the event. She didn't move for a long time. Just stood there, as still as the statues that once marked the city's arrival terminal.
Eventually, she walked away.
She didn't go back to Bridges. Didn't call for evac. Didn't check in with anyone still on the UCA link.
What would be the point?
Everything she had believed in had just been erased in a single failure. Not by war. Not by sabotage.
By inevitability.
Samantha moved through the ghost-zone, a silent courier with no destination. She passed wreckage she recognized. A billboard she'd seen lit just days before. A ruined checkpoint where she'd spoken to a mechanic with bright eyes and dirt-stained gloves.
Gone.
All gone.
And then… she felt it.
Like a pull in her chest. DOOMS response, maybe. Or something older. Not a BT warning. Not quite.
Something alive.
She climbed the next ridge, boots aching, muscles sore. The air was thinner here, laced with chiral density. It caught in her throat. Made her eyes sting.
And down below—cutting across the crater's western flank—she saw him.
A lone figure.
Dark coat, hunched under the weight of something on his back. Walking steadily. Deliberately.
She knew who it was before her brain accepted it.
Kael.
The man she'd only heard whispers of. The one who talked to ghosts. Who walked with a girl no one else could see. Who had once stared down a BT and made it kneel.
And there he was, below her, moving through the same ash she had escaped.
Samantha didn't call out.
Didn't move.
She watched him find the case she had left.
Watched him kneel and read her words.
Her throat tightened.
She could've gone to him.
Could've spoken.
But the weight of the Voidout still sat on her shoulders like a dying star.
She wasn't ready.
Neither was he.
> "If he's still alive," she thought, "he'll find me again."
She turned and walked away, boots carving new paths through the ruin.
But she left behind one thing—deliberately.
A beacon tag, half-buried in a tree stump.
Its signal was subtle. Not UCA-registered. No coordinates.
Just a ping.
Meant only for him.
---
░░░ Kael ░░░
The beacon pulsed once on Kael's scanner.
Not strong. Not urgent.
Just… steady.
He turned toward the signal, standing on the ridge she had stood upon minutes earlier.
He stared into the fog where she had vanished.
"You're real," he whispered.
Mire hovered close, her glow soft now.
Kael didn't move for a long time.
Not because he didn't want to chase her.
But because—for the first time in years—he believed she'd left the trail on purpose.
She wanted to be found.
But only by someone who could carry the silence with her.
---
> Two porters walk the same ruined world.
Each carrying something the other needs.
And the distance between them is no longer fate—
It's just time.