"I hate it here," Sonata said.

Colorless. Weightless.

Full of the afterimage of a promise that had just been dragged out into the light and then taken away.

I swallowed around the taste of old miso and dust that wasn't there anymore.

"Yeah," I said. "Starting to get the feeling it hates us back."

Sonata huffed once, almost a laugh. Mayari shifted behind us; I heard the faint click of something hard in her hand as she fiddled with one of the charms on her dress.

The Corridor chose that exact moment to shudder.

Not a big, dramatic earthquake. More like a server rack somewhere deep in reality hiccuped and all the cables buzzed for half a second.

The empty grey stretched out in all directions, but my skin prickled like something was staring at us from very close by.

"I didn't do anything," I said reflexively.

"Yet," Sonata said.

The next blink, the apartment was back.

It popped into place around us like a frame slamming down over a picture. Hallway, shoes, cheap rug, everything - but wronger than before. The light was too bright. The colors oversaturated. Edges jittered, like somebody had taken a low-res JPEG of my childhood and kept zooming in.

The calendar on the wall tried to become a spreadsheet between one breath and the next.

The maneki-neko on the shelf stuttered, its raised paw flickering up and down like a glitched, pixelated GIF.

"Ikki—" Mayari started.

The walls tore.

Not in a satisfying ripping noise. More like pixels separating. Hairline fractures spiderwebbed across the plaster, and where they spread, the white of the wall peeled back into… windows.

No, not windows. Mirrors, turned inside-out.

Behind one crack I saw New York, pre-Fall. Crowded sidewalk, steam from subway grates, a slice of sky between buildings.

Behind another, Singapore highrises and tangled power lines, heat-glare haloing every edge.

Dozens of cities, Earth and Terra, overlapping like someone had dropped a stack of postcards and they'd jammed halfway through each other.

And in the biggest fracture, taking up most of the living room wall:

Shoreline City.

Not the memory of the small apartment we'd just watched. The real thing, right now.

Rifts hanging over the bay like burst capillaries in the sky. The NCS Dauntless fighting grimly to keep its orbit. The Beast of Desolation like a void-chewed wound tearing through clouds, red lightning dripping off its hide.

The 'window' wasn't glass. It was like a skin of the Gossamer Echo itself, stretched thin until reality on the other side pressed right up against us.

My stomach flipped.

"What is that?" Sonata demanded, already moving to put herself between me and it. "Mayari—"

"I didn't make that," Mayari said sharply. The mirrors in her hands buzzed in sympathy with the spiderweb cracks.

"Something is...!"

The world over Shoreline trembled.

A shadow crawled along the underside of the Dauntless, too smooth, too angular to be weather. For a split second I thought it was just one more aberration, another inkblot monster hauled up through a rift.

Then it moved against nothing.

The shadow peeled off the Dauntless and streaked down. No, not down, sideways — at an angle across the torn skin between us and the sky.

It hit the Corridor like a thrown spear.

The air turned to static.

Orange-black tendrils erupted through the widening cracks in the walls, not so much breaking them as replacing them. They were made of pixels and teeth and noise. Shadowy, blocky, their edges crawling like corrupted video, studded with tiny, flickering symbols that made my head hurt to look at.

They came in fast.

One went through the kitchen door, through the table, through Aleksei's blurred outline in the resurrected Echo, shredding the memory as it passed.

Another punched straight through the Shoreline "mirror," dragging reality with it, the nice safe distinction between there and here turning into torn rubber.

The Corridor reacted like a living thing.

The floor dropped six inches. The air pressure spiked. The toddler fort that had just dissolved came back as a half-rendered wireframe and then imploded in on itself, blocks sucking into a vanishing point as the room expanded fivefold.

"Ikki!" Sonata cried out, reaching for me as the space between us suddenly expanded fivefold, then tenfold. A hundredfold.

My vision doubled, tripled. The tendrils left afterimages, geometry carved into the murky void as Mayari and Celestial Sonata were simply stretched away from me.

One of the tendrils came straight for me.

Time did the slow-down thing it sometimes does when something with "you die now" written on it is incoming.

The Corridor—the Echo, whatever this layer technically was—blurred around the edges. The feel of not-floor under my shoes, the flicker of Shoreline outside, the burned-in ghost of Mom's living room; all of it slid sideways, replaced by the infinitely weird sensation of being yanked inward.

For a heartbeat, "up" and "down" were concepts someone else owned.

Then my back hit something that might have been a wall.

Then, a girl in an orange sundress appeared in a flash of blue light, her arm wrapping around one of my elbows.

"HEY!" Rai-chan shouted next to my face, so loudly my ears rang. "This blockhead isn't for you! He tastes awful!"

She looked… more solid than usual.

Not just a hologram or a floating avatar.

A girl my age, kind of, made of hardlight and UI elements, medium length hair flickering between black and white like the system couldn't decide which version to render. Her hoodie was full of scrolling error codes. One eye was its usual orange.

The other had a thin, faint, wrong blue ring around the iris.

I didn't have time to process that.

The tendril was still coming. Only, from here, it was less "shadowy worm" and more "impossible column of compressed data and teeth." Strings of glyphs unspooled along its length, digging into the fabric of the Corridor.

It was reaching for the center of my chest.

Rai-chan shoved me behind her.

"I told you. You don't get to touch the wiring!" she snarled, thrusting both hands out.

A barrier bloomed between us and the tendril.

It wasn't pretty. It didn't look like a graceful mage's ward or a magical girl's glittering forcefield. It looked like what it was: a patch, slammed into production five minutes before a critical deploy.

Hexagonal plates of light snapped into existence, rough around the edges, overlapping at ugly angles. Magitech formulas crawled along them in tight, cramped script. They locked together into a jagged mesh right as the tendril hit.

The sound didn't have anywhere to go in a place that wasn't technically space, so my skull took it.

A crack like a transformer blowing, then a low, grinding roar as orange-black pushed against white-blue.

The barrier held. For exactly one-half second.

Hairline fractures raced through the hexes. Error messages piled up in my peripheral vision like falling snow.

[FIREWALL OVERLOAD]

[FILTER INTEGRITY COMPROMISED]

[WHO AUTHORIZED THIS TRAFFIC?!]

"Yeah, yeah, I know—" Rai-chan hissed, fingers dancing and digging into the invisible controls she could see and I couldn't. "It's not your regular ol' Aberration, it's—"

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The tendril punched through.

Not all of it. Just the tip. Just a single, jagged spike of orange static that slipped through a fault line in the mesh like water through badly stacked tiles.

It didn't hit me.

Rai-chan immediately pivoted me and stepped into it.

I watched it go through her.

Her body jerked as the spear of not-light punched into her chest and out between her shoulder blades. Her sundress, the error text on it smearing into nonsense. The orange ring around her right iris flared, glyphs spilling outward like a firewall rule set on fire.

For a second, her silhouette wasn't a girl. It was a cross-section.

Behind her, past the torn barrier, I saw something huge and cold and crystalline. A structure made of lines and plates and rotating, nested shapes, all humming at a pitch so low it made my teeth hurt.

Rai-chan grabbed onto the tendril with both hands.

"Not. Him"" she grated out, voice breaking over each word. "You want override that badly? You go through the admin account."

Heat hit my face like I'd opened an oven door.

Or maybe it was cold. It was hard to tell. It was a temperature beyond anything my nerves had language for.

The tendril shuddered, then split.

One branch slid sideways, through Rai-chan's chest, anchoring itself into the crystalline engine behind her.

The other scraped along through her. I did my best to dodge, ducking the instant I saw it move.

But it still grazed me.

It grazed something that wasn't quite my shoulder, wasn't quite my soul, leaving a burning, icy line across me.

I screamed.

It didn't sound like my voice. It sounded like distorted audio through a blown-out speaker, little digital pops at the edges.

Somewhere outside my personal little nightmare, I heard Sonata shout.

"—telle!" she whispered.

A chord tore through the air.

It started somewhere behind my left ear, a sweet, chiming note that made my vision sharpen for half a heartbeat, then crashed head-on into the tendrils trying to muscle their way through the Corridor.

Symphonie Estelle in full 'absolutely not' mode.

Invisible shockwaves rippled out from her position, each one cutting swathes through the orange-black intrusion. Where the waves touched, tendrils shredded into pixel dust and dissolved.

For all of two seconds, Sonata held back a god's reaching hand with sheer stubbornness and sound.

"Move!" she screamed, somewhere past the roaring in my head. "You, get back—"

I couldn't tell whether she was yelling at me or Mayari.

Something else flickered hard at the edge of my perception.

"Salaming Takipsilim — Duskline Mirrors!"

A sharp violet-gold line snapped into existence along one of the cracks in the "wall," freezing it—turning the jagged tear into an impossibly straight seam of crystal dusk. Then another. And another.

Where those lines appeared, reality stopped crumbling quite as fast.

The biggest of the rifts - right where the Shoreline "mirror" had been — gaped wider anyway, resisting the crystallizing seams. Through it, the Dauntless loomed far too close, its underside an ugly patchwork of armor and glowing runes.

The tendril that had speared through Rai-chan kept going.

It extended outward, through the torn Gossamer, straight toward the Dauntless's belly. From here, both near and impossibly far away, I watched it hit the warship like a harpoon.

Something flared orange along the hull.

Rai-chan jerked again, like someone had plugged her into a live wire.

"Nonononono," she gasped. "That's... that's not sandbox grade. That's root—"

The Corridor screamed.

Not in sound. In motion.

The walls -what passed for walls, flexed inward as the Echo tried to reassert itself and got overridden. The comically stretched out apartment flickered, Mom's kitchen and the living room and my father's pixelated, blurred shoulders snapping in and out of existence like bad TV signal.

The Shoreline "mirror" warped, stretching around the wound where the tendril pinned the Dauntless like a butterfly.

The floor tilted.

Sonata lost her footing.

One second she was standing with her bow half-raised, hair whipping around her like a flag in a gale. The next, the patch of not-floor under her had turned into slick, translucent nothing, and gravity remembered it hated us.

She fell toward the biggest tear.

"Sonata!" I shouted, or thought I did.

Mayari moved.

She didn't run. There was no time for running.

"Duskline Weave!

One of the cracks splitting the Corridor's "ground" lit up along its edge, 'twilight' flaring bright, sharp, violet-gold. For a heartbeat, it carved a rail through nothing.

Mayari stepped onto that line and—

Glitched.

She vanished from where she'd been and reappeared in front of Sonata, hand outstretched, heels skidding along the rail as if it were the only solid thing in the universe.

The apartment finally lost its fight and shattered, pieces of my not-childhood breaking up into tiny, sparkling polygons that fell inward toward an invisible center. The Corridor twisted, folding along lines I couldn't see.

I clutched at my chest.

Something under my ribs felt… wrong. Not broken exactly. Just misaligned. Like I'd taken a step on stairs that weren't actually there and my entire nervous system was still waiting for the impact.

"Okay," I gasped. "Okay, that's bad, that's—"

The girls turned into light.

Not metaphorically. One frame they were there—Sonata and Mayari, braced against a collapsing seam in the world, one singing the universe into behaving, the other drawing lines through it. The next, their outlines blurred into threads of color.

Lavender-white, gold-pink.

Those threads whipped upward, sucked along unseen paths toward the Dauntless, toward the Beast, toward something bigger and hungrier than any of us.

Then they were gone.

Just like that.

Silence slapped me harder than any sound.

The roaring stopped. The humming. The endless, awful grinding of tendrils through the Gossamer Echo.

For a few heartbeats, there was nothing at all.

No apartment. No walls. No Shoreline sky.

Just a monochrome, empty, sagging version of the Corridor, ragged around the edges, like someone had taken a bite out of the world and decided it was under-seasoned.

I was still standing.

Barely.

My knees felt like they'd forgotten how to exist.

I grabbed at the closest thing that looked stable, which turned out to be nothing, and ended up half-hunched, fingers digging into my own ribs, right over the burning line the tendril had left.

"Sonata?" I croaked.

No answer.

"Mayari?"

Nothing.

Panic hit in a slow, spreading wave.

"No, no, no—" I forced myself upright, vision swimming. "They were. Did they..."

"They're not dead."

Rai-chan's voice came from my left, small and thin and trying very hard to be flippant.

I turned.

She was slumped against a rapidly-forming wireframe wall opposite me, knees drawn up, head tipped back. The hole in her chest wasn't visible anymore. Neither was the tendril. But the sundress there flickered with ugly orange artifacts, like someone had smeared molten metal across the fabric and let it cool in the wrong pattern.

The bright orange glow around her right eye hadn't gone away.

It pulsed faintly, in time with… something.

"You sure?" I said. It came out harsher than I meant. "Because from where I'm standing, they just got turned into plot dust and sucked into a black hole during a God-versus-Ship death match."

"If they were gone," she said, "you'd know. Trust me. Your soul would be screaming in a very specific key. This is just… rerouting."

"Rerouting," I repeated. "Of people."

"You think Imaginary Space dives are tidy?" she asked. "They got yanked down different threads, that's all. Out of this mess. Lucky them."

She pushed herself up the wall, wobbling only slightly, and tried to smooth down her flickering sundress like it was just wrinkled.

I stared at her.

"You took that hit," I said.

"Better me than you," she said promptly.

Then, seeing my face, added, "Don't make that expression. I am literally rated for this. You're the one walking around in a biodegradable chassis, remember?"

"Rai—"

She waved me off with the hand that wasn't shaking.

"Sisters don't worry their brothers," she said, which would have landed better if her voice hadn't glitched on "sisters," turning it into a doubly voiced sis—sissster for a beat. "Besides, I am very mad at whoever pushed that patch through without QA. This is sloppy work."

The joke tried. It really did.

My chest still felt like someone had drawn a razor diagonally through my soul.

"What was that?" I asked. "That wasn't a normal Aberration. Elio said something about a Wraith? A divided Imperator?"

Her mouth twisted.

"Not my department to classify," she said. "But it wasn't supposed to be talking to you. That's the scary part."

I opened my mouth to ask what she meant.

The world lurched.

Not physically. In my head.

Somewhere beyond the tattered Corridor, the Dauntless groaned—a big, slow, terrible sound of metal remembering it had limits. The echo of it rolled through whatever connection I had to Shoreline like distant thunder.

Only this time, I saw it.

Not with my eyes.

The Corridor faded.

In its place, for one disorienting instant, I saw the Dauntless laid out in lines and numbers. A ghostly wireframe of the ship, all decks and conduits and engine housings, hovering in front of me. Power flowed through it as lines of light, little pulses racing along circuit paths that weren't technically electrical but apparently close enough.

Underneath that, fainter, a map of Shoreline's grid flickered into being. Streets as traces, substations as nodes. Entire neighborhoods reduced to neat rectangles and labels.

My breath caught.

Rai-chan swore under hers.

"…Okay," she said, with grim resignation. "That's new."

My heart was beating way too fast.

"Ikki?" she said carefully. "Can you hear me? See me? How many fingers?"

She held up three.

"Don't patronize me," I said automatically. "One Raiko, one too many mysteries, one imminent catastrophe. That's three."

"Good," she said. "Sarcasm levels nominal."

Her gaze flicked past me, to the schematics still burned into the air.

Not really there—but I couldn't quite pretend they weren't, either. If I didn't look straight at them, I could still see the Dauntless floating in my peripheral vision, transparent and perfect. Lines for decks.

Bright pulses where power fed from node to node. Shoreline's grid humming underneath like a second ghost.

"Still got it?" Rai-chan asked quietly.

I realized I'd been holding my breath and let it out in a shaky laugh.

"…Yeah," I said. "Don't love that I have a bonus HUD now."

"Good news," she said. "It's not native to my systems, so it's not my fault."

"Comforting," I muttered.

"Bad news," she went on, as if I hadn't spoken, "is that if you're seeing what I see, then whatever pushed that patch through is using you as more than a chew toy. You're part of the circuit."

My stomach twisted.

"Part of what... exactly?"

She didn't answer right away.

Her eyes tracked an invisible line from my chest to somewhere far above us, head tilting just slightly, like she was listening to server noise I couldn't quite hear. The orange glow around her right iris brightened, dimmed, brightened again, syncing to some rhythm that definitely wasn't my heartbeat.

"Question for later," she said finally. "Right now we need to figure out whether you can touch that view or if it's read-only."

"I'd like to vote for read-only," I said.

"Voting wasn't one of the options," she said. "Try… thinking about the engines again. Just the engines. Don't push. Just… look."

"That sounds like pushing."

"Congratulations," Rai-chan said dryly. "You're learning how to be a sys admin."

I swallowed, turned my head toward the murky void, and thought about the Dauntless's engines.

The wireframe snapped into focus so fast it made me dizzy.

Four big nodes at the front, each one a tight knot of glowing lines. Error colors crawled along the conduits feeding them, orange pulsing in sick little bursts that made my teeth itch. Overlaid labels I didn't recognize scrolled past. Foreign characters, machine language, qubit arrays, diagrams that meant nothing and everything at once.

One patch of lines flickered unstable.

"Over there," I blurted, pointing at nothing. "That cascade—if that goes, the whole thrust vectoring array eats itself."

Rai-chan's head snapped toward where I was pointing, even though there was nothing there.

"You can see the failure path?" she said.

"Okay," Rai-chan said slowly. "So you're not hallucinating. Or if you are, you're hallucinating in my language."

"Great," I said faintly. "I always wanted a degree in Cosmic War Crimes."

Something flickered at the edge of the schematic.

A new block of text slid into existence, crisp and bright and horribly calm.

[CORE//PARADOX INSTANCE: ONLINE]

[REMOTE AUTHORITY: LINKED]

[PERMISSION SYNC: PENDING…]

"Rai-chan," I said. "What is that?"

She stared at the hovering prompt, all the jokes draining out of her face.

[ACCEPT OVERRIDE? Y/N]

My throat went dry.

"Ikki," Rai-chan said, without looking away, "do not think about touching that."

I was suddenly, painfully aware of my own hands. Of how easy it would be, in this place, to answer a question just by wanting to.

Somewhere far away, metal groaned again. The Beast roared. The city crackled like static.

I swallowed.

"What," I asked, "do we do if it doesn't wait for my answer?"

Rai-chan didn't have a response to that one.

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