26.0

ACT YoE 4,181 / LT October 25, 2000
Earth Bet → Local Spatial Reality
Northern Arctic Ice Pack

Once, this corner of the Arctic had been a dead plateau of white. A wind-scoured expanse where ice fractured under its own weight, and the horizon never shifted, only repeating itself like a frozen echo. Now, that blankness was gone.

Where glaciers had groaned and nothing else had stirred, something impossible had taken root.

A massive enclave rose from the ice, breaking the monotony with jagged silhouettes. Skyscraper-sized thorns jutted at uneven angles, each one the pale green of deep-water kelp, sheened with frost. Their surfaces weren’t smooth — they spiraled with living ridges, patterned with bark-like scars where they’d flexed against storms. Thick vines, each wide enough to swallow a subway car whole, coiled up and around them in slow, muscular arcs.

From a distance, the whole structure looked less like a garden and more like a continent-sized organism mid-turn, caught halfway through some ponderous movement.

Snow hissed as it hit the surfaces. The impact didn’t melt it — the vines’ outer layers drank the flakes in, pulling meltwater down through hair-thin veins to feed whatever insane engine ran beneath. Here and there, flowers the size of apartment balconies had unfurled, heavy with pollen despite the killing cold. Their colors — deep maroon, bruise-violet, an oily, metallic silver — bled strange light back into the grey-white surroundings.

From within that living barricade, the hum of life was constant. Not the fragile rustle of tundra moss or the rare beat of migrating wings, but a dense, layered soundscape: vascular pumps moving sap in syncopated thuds, cell-walls shifting like the cracking of ships’ hulls, slow clicks as thorned plates locked into new defensive positions.

At the center, scaffolding, both vine-grown and wrought of wood, held a platform that overlooked it all. There, Eve sat in casual combat clothing with Kudzu, no wind battering her form. Visibly, her breath didn’t condense in quick bursts, as the cold had no more effect than outer space. This entire structure was the work of Kudzu. A fortified biological outpost, anchored not in stone but in an ecosystem engineered to kill intruders before they knew they were trespassing. The vines had been coaxed into load-bearing arches that doubled as strangling traps. The thorns were hollow, each holding a payload — some venom, some acid, some volatile pollen — triggered by the correct pressure. Flesh-eating pollen, energy-draining arrays, alchemical puppets, and more guarded the ice.

“Five days,” the Kudzu murmured across from her, voice muffled by his breathing mask. Even as a wooden puppet bio-body, he didn’t yet have the same resistance to the elements. Golden eyes scanned the perimeter, where bulbous seed-pods swayed on their stems like patient sentries. “And it’ll be airtight. Nothing in, nothing out.”

Eve nodded at the words. She was listening — not to him, but to the mana pulse of the place. The low, thrumming heartbeat that synchronized like her own in odd ways.

The outpost wasn’t static — it never could be. This project was her answer to the Contract conditions that wouldn’t allow her to intervene directly. Kudzu’s innate talents ensured balance; without them, the whole thing collapsed inward, choking itself with tangled biomass. Without direction from the Green Alchemist, the entire place became brittle, slow, a corpse of what it could be.

Eve knew the balance like a second language. She rose and walked into space, floating down, wherever her fingers passed, the vines twitched minutely, adjusting their angle toward the sun’s anemic arc, soaking in every drop of light the Arctic would give before winter’s complete darkness arrived.

Below, the Kudzu had already teleported through the vine network and was elbow-deep in one of the root conduits, a hollow trunk running like a buried spine through the ice. The air shimmered around him, not from heat but from the slow churn of catalytic spores released at his touch. They clung to his coat, hissed faintly when the wind hit them.

“Root two’s drinking too deep,” he called up without looking. “She’s bleeding into the brine channels. I can block it, but we’ll lose the kelp-baffles on the west side.”

Eve knelt, letting her eyes unfocus. Her perception didn’t leave her body — it extended, like the fine spread of mycelial filaments. She could feel the west flank: heavy tendrils anchored to the ice shelf, wrapped in kelp growth that drank seawater and filtered it for nutrients. The brine seep was feeding them too fast, pushing the chemical balance toward toxicity. A few more hours, and they’d start digesting themselves.

“No,” she said finally, voice carrying just enough for him to hear. “Don’t cut it. Can you redirect it through the thorn-capsules? They should metabolize the excess.”

He grunted — approval or annoyance, she couldn’t tell. “Fine. But that’ll ripen them early, I’ll have to adjust the rest of the lineup.”

Eve shrugged as she finished descending to join him, boots biting into the ice-coated vine-skin. The air inside the root conduit was warmer, with enough humidity that it condensed into droplets around her.

They worked in silence for a time, the Green Alchemist’s hands drawing sigils in green-black sap, Eve threading silver light through the same lines until they hardened into living ridges. Outside, a cluster of vine-whips swayed as if agitated by wind — though the air was still.

Both of them knew precisely what the signaling whips meant.

Eve’s senses detected it first — a vibration through the surrounding mana network, too quick and erratic to be natural. She pressed her palm to the conduit wall, closing her eyes. There. South perimeter, three hundred meters. Small mass, rapid movement. The vines had already begun to lean toward it like wolves scenting prey.

She tapped the Green Alchemist’s shoulder while he worked. “Visitors.”

He didn’t ask what kind. Because the only type of visitors were birds, out here, anything moving that wasn’t part of the outpost was worth killing or capturing to feed the green machine. Kudzu reached for a pouch at his belt, withdrawing a vial that pulsed faintly from within, like it contained some caged heartbeat.

They emerged into the open. Snow was falling now, thick and silent. The southern expanse of the outpost was a jagged maze of growth — twisting paths that seemed navigable until a tendril shifted to close them. Somewhere inside, something darted between the vines, leaving faint trails of disturbed snow.

“Could be scavengers,” Kudzu said, his golden eyes scanning the shifting canopy even as his senses were being fed information directly. It helped appear to need eyes when one did not. “Could be scouts. Possibly those PRT or magical humans you mentioned.”

“Either way,” Eve murmured, her grin spilling out before tightening, “it’s not leaving. If you're lucky, it is something to start experiments with.”

She raised her hand, and Witch’s Dust obeyed — subtly at first, then with intent. The dust rippled out like a hunting cloud of mosquitoes, forming a funnel that guided the intruder deeper into a choke point lined with thorn pods the size of small cars.

Kudzu moved with an economy of motion born from years of tending to things that could kill lesser mortals. He slung the vial into a socket grown in his bracer; tiny rootlets wrapped around the glass, holding it in place while a hairline crack appeared along the stopper. Wisps of green vapor curled upward, drawn into the air like a predator scenting blood.

“Keep it in the funnel, please,” he said, voice flat through the mask. “I’ll handle the extraction.”

Eve nodded once, her gaze fixed on the writhing silhouette ahead. The snow hid its full shape, but she caught glimpses — a gaunt frame, low to the ground, movement that was too precise to be random. Every time the vines leaned closer, they shifted just enough to avoid their reach. It knew the danger.

Her fingers splayed, silver light rippling between them. Witch’s Dust created threads lanced outward, fine as spider silk, sinking into the nearest vine-trunks. They stiffened, their outer layers shifting into plates with a faint metallic sheen. The funnel became a corridor.

The intruder froze. For one breathless instant, it stood perfectly still.

Then it bolted — toward the narrowing end of the corridor, exactly where she wanted it.

“Now, please,” Eve said.

Kudzu struck the conduit wall with his palm. A bloom of spores erupted from the bracer’s socket, riding the windless air down the corridor in a visible, shimmering wave. Where they touched, frost bloomed — not frost, but crystalline tissue that rooted itself instantly, seizing up joints and locking motion in place.

The intruder leapt, clearing one vine-arch entirely, but its rear leg caught the edge of the spore cloud. The limb went rigid mid-air, and it landed badly, followed by a twist of motion and a hiss of pain.

Eve closed her hand.

The corridor collapsed inward. Not a slow constriction, but a sudden, crushing knot of biomass. Thorn-pods split open along the fold, spilling a fine spray of iridescent liquid that hissed on contact with the snow. The smell hit an instant later — sharp, metallic, laced with something like citrus and rot.

When the vines eased back, the thing was pinned.

It wasn’t human. Not at all. The proportions were wrong — limbs too long, spine segmented in a way that suggested arthropod heritage, though the skin was pale and hairless. Its eyes were triple-lidded, darting between Eve and Kudzu with sharp, assessing movements.

It opened its mouth to speak, but a vine coiled around its throat before the first sound emerged.

“You built this here,” it rasped anyway, voice strained. “In the ice. The Masters will find you.”

Eve crouched, her silver-thread gloves gleaming faintly. Up close, the creature’s breath carried a tang of copper and sea-brine.

“So?” she said evenly, “I have broken no rules. However, it wouldn’t concern you even if I had.”

Kudzu knelt opposite her, examining the creature’s joints with clinical detachment. “Muscle density’s wrong for a scout. This is a messenger. Someone sent it here with orders to make contact.” He looked at Eve. “You know what I do with messenger birds.”

Eve didn’t answer right away. She was watching the frost creep along the vine where the creature’s skin touched it—subtle chemical exchange, uninvited. From the looks of the reaction, it was trying to poison the outpost. Ridiculous, but logical for a first attempt.

She reached out, placing her palm against the vine — and through the network, she felt the spread. Tiny, efficient. Dangerous.

“Kudzu, handle it,” she replied, her voice a blade in the cold air.

The vines didn’t crush it. They absorbed it. Layers of fibrous tissue flowed over its form like poured concrete, sealing it inside a living sarcophagus. Within seconds, there was nothing left but a faint bulge in the vine, already pulling nutrients inward. The poison was consumed completely, already on its way to creating a new iteration of lethality.

Kudzu stood before sighing through his mask. “That’s going to change the growth pattern. I hate aberrant growth.”

“It happens,” Eve said, turning to look up toward the central platform. “The effort now will result in multiple productive outcomes at a later point.” She glanced at her ally, “At least that’s what you spouted last time.”

Above them, a pod the size of a shuttle unfurled, spilling a shower of seeds into the wind. The outpost shivered, almost in anticipation. With a wicked grin, Eve shifted completely off-world.

ACT YoE 4,182 / LT January 26, 2073, at 0000
Hypogeal
Pre-DataKrash Vault

Reality reassembled around Eve in a slow, deliberate sweep of sensation — like surfacing through liquid glass. One moment, there was the pressure and darkness of the Summoning’s transit; the next, she stood once more in the vault’s lightless depths and endless distance from Kudzu’s growing fortress.

A quick query on the Net returned her answer in streams of data across her vision. The time differential between Earth Bet’s spatial reality and the Cyber Depths datasphere was mercifully straightforward this time: one month here equaled one year there. She had been gone for what felt like years, but in the Cyber Depths, only a few months had passed, and her years of existence had barely ticked upward.

Eve exhaled, and with that breath, her presence shifted. Flesh-and-blood dissolved into the perfected, impossible avatar Silver— the persona she wore in the Net: tall, gleaming, strands of liquid argent hair spilling across her shoulders, eyes like twin moons over black glass seas—a digital goddess, sculpted for dominance in cyberspace and corporate boardrooms alike.

The vault in front of her pinged with an Arasaka Security AI at her sudden reappearance. A few graceful gestures, invisible in meatspace, silenced the alarms before they could escalate. The AI subsided like a watchdog recognizing its master’s scent.

A spatial hop carried her to the top of Arasaka Tower. The night sky above the spire burned with neon haze, but inside the penthouse meeting floor, the air was still. Michiko raised a brow — a subtle flicker of recognition, curiosity, and calculation. Kei’s reaction was less subtle: the faintest stillness, as if a predator had walked into the room.

Eve ignored both reactions at first, eyes flicking to check her mana-tether to Crystal Moss, her blood elemental of choice. Satisfied the link remained stable, she turned to her corporate counterparts.

“I accepted a Summoning to a new world in the Depths,” she announced, voice cool but edged with the satisfaction of one revealing a successful gamble.

Michiko leaned back in her chair, cybernetic eyes catching the ambient light and refracting it into a glint that was half amusement, half appraisal. “Abandoned already, for a new shiny toy?” she asked.

Eve’s smirk was slow, deliberate. “If you can’t manage to place this world beneath your feet in a decade or less, I’d be shocked.” Her tone made it less a challenge than a reminder of capability. “The blood-bound ring I’ve provided should make the work easier — immunity to physical assault and most forms of magic. It won’t make you immortal, but outside of a few rare cases, outliving a sun is a difficult thing for a purely mortal race to match.”

Michiko tilted her head, expression unchanging save for the faint narrowing of her eyes. “Then tell me,” the corporate overlord said, “why so much pure silver from Arasaka-owned mines has been delivered to my warehouses?”

Eve’s gaze sharpened, the swirling silver in her irises catching the room’s ambient glow like molten metal stirred by a hidden current. “The new world has… an interesting pair of native entities. Creatures the locals call, or would call if they knew, ‘gods.’ As a result of a competitive Contract I’ve entered with them, neither they nor I can intervene directly in certain matters.”

Michiko’s brow furrowed briefly — then smoothed as realization clicked into place. “So, the silver is a weapon,” she said slowly, “a way for your chosen piece to carry a fragment of your power? Or a way to upgrade your chosen one?”

“Exactly.” The witch’s smirk deepened. “The contract explicitly forbids me from acquiring or mining resources directly from the contested planet — or any of its alternate parallels.”

“Which,” Michiko said, voice turning silk-smooth, “makes the industrial output of an advanced cybernetic society — located on a planet, or should I say place, outside that jurisdiction — an ideal loophole.” She leaned forward slightly. “You’re circumventing the restriction without technically breaking it.”

“Did you think,” Eve asked, her voice lilting into quiet mockery, “that I’d leave and sever all contact? I’m invested in your success, literally.”

For a moment, the only sound was the muted hum of the tower’s environmental systems, and the city sprawled around them like a circuit board under glass.

Kei finally stirred, the movement so small it was almost an illusion — a slow focusing of his eyes toward Eve. His eyes were not augmented like Michiko’s, but the weight of his gaze carried a precision no implant could mimic.

“You accepted this Summoning,” he said, voice low and without inflection, “then knowing the Contract would bind your hands, still enacted it. Why?”

The question was not idle. Kei had the kind of mind that never wasted breath, the kind that treated every word like a knife to be placed, not thrown.

Eve met his gaze without flinching. “Because the constraints are part of the game. They shape the battlefield. Without them, it would just be slaughter — theirs or mine. This way, it's war, and war has patterns I can work with.”

Kei’s eyes narrowed, faint lines etching at their corners. “War in a place where you can’t step on the soil, where you can’t draw on its resources.”

“Directly,” Eve corrected, the word soft as silk but barbed. “I can’t touch the ground, but I can shape one who can. I can’t mine their ore, but I can drop silver into the hands of someone who can turn it into weapons they can’t defend against. Do you doubt my success, even standing where you do now?”

Michiko’s lips curved, not into a smile but something sharper. “You're chosen. Whoever they are, they’ll have the advantage of your mind, your materials, and none of your restrictions.”

“And,” Eve added, “the target painted on my back won’t be painted on theirs. The creatures will watch me, because they don’t yet understand how binding a Contract is. They’ll overlook what they think is only a mortal. They are too used to treating mortal races like insects, but to be fair, they live longer than some suns.”

“You will win,” Kei said. His voice remained calm, but there was an edge now — a subtle warning, the kind he rarely bothered with.

Eve inclined her head slightly. “I won’t lose; that’s for sure.” She let the words hang, then shifted the conversation without warning. “The vault assets I left in your care — status?”

Michiko’s expression didn’t change, but Eve caught the slight delay before she answered. “Intact. Profitable, even. We’ve leveraged several into expansion beyond our original projections. But… there have been movements in the shadows. Someone is probing our systems. Subtle. Persistent. I suspect it is Grandfather. After all, Uncle had a tragic accident. All that hatred, dust in the wind.”

Eve’s silver eyes brightened, a ripple of light passing through them like quicksilver stirred. “Feed him noise. Give fragments of something dangerous, but wrong. Let the old fogie burn resources chasing it while we grow the roots deeper. America is your territory now. Not that of an ancient old man, without my blessing.”

Kei spoke again, this time to Michiko without looking at her. “When they take the bait?” Because there was no doubt they would.

Michiko smiled — not the polite curve she gave in boardrooms, but the slow, predatory one she wore in private. “Then they’ll bleed themselves dry before I ever have to lift a finger.”

ACT YoE 4,182 / LT January 26, 2001, 0130
Earth Bet
Akashic Record-Chosen’s Dream

The sky was the color of molten bronze, clouds dragging low enough to scrape the jagged ridges that marked the horizon. Heat shimmered off the earth in ghostly veils, warping the shapes of things until they seemed half-real.

Through the mirage walked the one Eve had chosen.

The chosen was short. Very, very, very short.

They moved like someone born in armor, and the gleaming plates they wore were newly forged. Not steel. Not iron. Silver — polished to a mirror sheen, chased with fine runes that caught the ugly light and refracted it into flashes of cool moonlight. The air bent subtly around them; even the drifting motes of ash from some distant fire-dream refused to touch the surface of their skin.

The ring, the Contract between Eve and the Chosen, was there, on the right gauntlet-covered hand, plain, save for the faint pulse of red deep inside the band. It sat against bare flesh, blood-bound in the old way, drinking just enough to maintain the protections Eve had promised her Chosen.

The silver figure paused at the crest of a rise, eyes scanning the basin below through a faceless mask that did nothing to impair sight. The ruins below had been a city once — or something like it. The bones of towers jutted out of the cracked earth, sheared at odd angles as if some vast, careless hand had raked through them. Here and there, movement flickered — figures darting between the ruins, too fast to be human.

The chosen was hard-eyed, with the stillness of a predator — she rested her hand on the hilt of a curved blade that phased in and out of the dreamworld. The weapon was silver, of course, though darkened along the edge with some oily enchantment that made the air hiss and spit.

Eve watched as the girl spoke without turning her head. “Two dozen, maybe more. All armed. They’ve seen me.”

From behind a cluster of half-collapsed columns, a voice answered — a low male baritone, smooth but edged with strain. “And you’re thinking of walking straight in? This one would recommend a retreat.”

The silver figure smiled faintly. “Why?”

The voice’s owner emerged — a lean man in a patchwork of leather and chitin, weapons strapped across his back. He eyed her armor with a mix of wariness and disbelief. “That much silver in one place… you’ll be a beacon, honored one.”

“Good,” she said. The girl’s gaze never left the basin. “Let them come to me.”

Down in the ruins, the flickers of movement were coalescing into shapes now — tall, jointed creatures with armor like beetle shells, weapons grown rather than forged. They moved in perfect synchrony, each step mirrored by half a dozen others.

The man shifted uneasily. “You think you can take them all?”

“I’ve fought an endless war,” she said, stepping forward. “I know, I just need one to survive long enough to send a message. The rest will feed my hunger.”

The silver along her arms caught the bronze light and flared bright enough to hurt the eyes. Below, the creatures hesitated — just for a moment — as if something old and half-forgotten had stirred in their memory.

And then she moved, the basin echoing with the first clash of silver against chitin.

The first strike wasn’t clean — it was perfect.

Perfection that had been honed in a thousand thousand dreams.

Her silver blade slid between the plates of the nearest creature’s thorax as though the armor were made of wet paper. There was no spray of ichor, no scream — just a sudden collapse, as if the thing’s body had forgotten how to hold itself upright. The runes along the weapon’s length flared briefly, drinking in whatever passed for life inside that shell.

The others reacted instantly. They fanned out in an arc, the basin’s cracked earth shuddering under their synchronized steps. Their weapons were grown from the same organic matter as their armor — thorned spears, ridged blades that glistened with some venomous secretion.

Eve’s chosen didn’t retreat; that had been forged out of her.

The second creature came in low, spear stabbing for her knees. She pivoted, the silver plates of her greaves hissing as the tip scraped along them, the enchantment eating away the spearhead in seconds. Her return stroke was a blur, severing the limb entirely. The creature staggered back, fluid boiling away where it touched her armor.

Above them, the sky thickened. Clouds churned like something alive, light dimming to a deep copper twilight. The air pressed heavy on the enemy shoulders — not from heat, but from attention.

The third and fourth attackers came together, one feinting high while the other lunged for her exposed flank. She met the first with a clash of silver, redirecting the blow into the second. Chitin cracked. A hiss of pain, sharp and insectile, escaped.

Behind her, the man with the leather-and-chitin armor swore under his breath. “You’re making it look too easy. That’s going to draw—”

He didn’t finish. A sound cut him off — low at first, then building — a clicking rhythm that echoed across the basin. The remaining creatures had fallen back, forming a loose perimeter. Between them, the cracked earth split, chunks of stone lifting as something vast forced its way up.

Eve’s eyes narrowed as she watched.

The thing that rose was taller than any of the surrounding towers’ remains. Its armor was black, not the muted brown of the others, and ridged with spines that seemed to drink in the light. Two eyes burned like coals set deep in its skull, fixed on her champion.

“That,” her champion’s companion said grimly, “isn’t a scout.”

She rolled her shoulders, the ring on her finger pulsing once in time with her heartbeat. “If it bleeds, I can kill it. If it doesn’t bleed…”

“You can still kill it. Yes, I remember the motto.’ The chosen’s companion said with an eyeroll.

The giant moved with impossible speed, closing the distance in three strides that shattered the ground beneath him. Its weapon — a blade grown from some monstrous limb — came down in a diagonal arc that would have split an opponent from shoulder to hip.

The silver armor caught it. The impact rang through the basin like a bell tolling underwater, shockwaves rippling through the earth. For an instant, they were locked there, silver against black, each refusing to yield.

Then the girl’s smirk returned.

The runes along her blade flared white-hot. The black armor beneath the giant’s weapon began to warp, softening like wax under a flame. With a twist and a kick, she forced the blow aside, carving a deep groove through its forearm. The ichor that spilled sizzled on the earth, eating through stone, but never touching her flesh.

From somewhere far above — or far beyond — came a sound like a distant horn, impossibly deep.

Eve’s chosen champion glanced skyward, knowing precisely who was listening.

“Message received,” the silver figure murmured, her green eyes flashing.

The giant reeled, its wounded arm hanging at an unnatural angle. The ichor kept pouring, each drop hissing into vapor as it hit the ground. The perimeter of lesser creatures shifted uneasily, their perfect synchronization fraying as instinct warred with whatever command bound them.

Without pause, Eve’s champion advanced. One step, then another, the silver of her armor burning brighter with each heartbeat. The air itself seemed to recoil from her, carrying the smell of molten metal and ozone. The giant raised its other arm, weapon still massive enough to split her in two — but slower now, clumsy from the pain lancing through its body. She ducked under the swing, closing the last of the distance. Both hands on the hilt, she drove the blade upward between the armor plates under its sternum.

The runes flared, but this time they didn’t just drink — they consumed. Silver light surged up through the wound, racing along the giant’s frame like veins of liquid fire. Its eyes widened, the coals inside flaring to white. It made a sound then — not a roar, not a scream, but a harsh, metallic rattle that vibrated in the bones.

The perimeter broke. The smaller creatures scattered, vanishing into the ruins, leaving their master alone.

The champion twisted the blade.

The light erupted outward, silver fire bursting from every seam in the giant’s armor. Cracks raced along its limbs, across its chest, up its neck. For an instant, it looked like a statue being carved from the inside out. Then it collapsed, the armor splitting into shards that clanged against the stone before melting into nothing.

The sky above rippled. No clouds moved, but the bronze tint deepened until it was almost black. Eve knew her champion could feel it — her gaze, vast and ancient, fixed upon the battle. The horn-sound came again, closer this time, laced with something like approval.

She pulled the blade free, the ichor burning away before it could drip to the ground.

“I’ll be ready.” The girl stated.

The ring pulsed once, and somewhere far away, deep in another layer of the Depths, Eve smiled.

ACT YoE 4,186 / LT April 01, 2005, 0730

Earth Bet

Brockton Bay

The dream wouldn’t let go.

Melissa Byron woke in the middle of the night with her heart hammering; her bedsheets twisted around her legs. The images clung like they were burned into the backs of her eyes: bronze skies, black-armored giants, and a silver blade that felt both alien and familiar in her hands.

The room was dark, except for the faint glow of the streetlight bleeding through the blinds. The shadows on her walls were the same as always — the bookshelf leaning just slightly, the pile of laundry she hadn’t bothered with — but they felt… wrong, as if they’d been rearranged while she wasn’t looking.

She pushed herself upright, trying to shake it off. Normal dreams faded fast. This one had weight, like a bruise that lingered after a hit. She could still smell something faint and metallic, taste it in the back of her throat, like she’d bitten into a coin.

Her desk chair creaked when she shifted her legs out of bed. She froze, listening. The house was quiet — Mom and Dad’s muffled snores through the wall, the fridge kicking on in the kitchen—all ordinary. And yet…

She swallowed and told herself it was nothing. She’d just been overdoing it lately, cramming for midterms, reading late into the night. Her teachers always said she had an “overactive imagination.” That’s all this was. The other possibility was horrifying.

Except—She could still remember the way the creatures had moved in the dream, perfect and synchronized, the way they’d hesitated when she — not her, but someone wearing her hands like gloves — had stepped forward in that silver armor. And the moment before the killing blow, when she’d been certain something else was watching.

She crossed to her window, pressing her forehead to the cool glass. Brockton Bay’s streets stretched out under the orange haze of the lamps, wet from a late-night rain—no bronze sky. No monsters. Just the usual.

Her reflection in the glass stared back at her. In the streetlight’s glow, for a heartbeat, her eyes seemed to catch the light in a way they shouldn’t have — a flicker of silver. She blinked, and it was gone.

“Get over it,” she whispered to herself, backing away.

Her phone was on the nightstand—no new messages, except for one. The sender field was blank. No number, no name. Just a single image: a silver ring on a bare hand, the metal catching the light like it was alive. If this was a Tinker screwing with her, she was going to hunt them down and do something very unpleasant to them.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. She should delete it.

Instead, she set the phone face down and climbed back into bed, pulling the covers up tightly.

Sleep didn’t come easily, and when it did, she half-expected the dream to pick up exactly where it left off.

The dream didn’t just fade over the next few days — it bled.

Little things started to feel wrong. Distances, mostly. The hallway to the kitchen sometimes felt like it took more steps to cross, or fewer. The corner of her bedroom seemed farther away than it had the night before. Once, she reached for her toothbrush on the counter and her arm came up short, even though she’d grabbed it a thousand times before.

She didn’t tell anyone. Who could she tell? Her friends would laugh, her parents would worry, and her teachers would roll their eyes. “Too much reading before bed,” they’d say. Assuming they didn’t just start a screaming match over it.

The text with the silver ring had stayed on her phone. She hadn’t deleted it. Every so often, she’d find herself pulling it up, staring at the faint red glow deep inside the metal band. She never remembered deciding to look at it — she’d just realized she was already there, thumb hovering over the image like she might unlock something if she pressed just right.

By the end of the week, the headaches started. Sharp little spikes behind her eyes whenever she walked into certain places — the alley behind the corner store, the path through the park near her house, the stairwell up to her school’s second floor. And in those moments, she would feel close. Not to anything she could name, but to somewhere. The bronze sky. The heat shimmer. The silver armor.

It was raining the night it happened.

She’d gone out without telling her parents, since they were having another argument over some inane adult thing, walking the streets to try and clear her head. The city was quiet except for the rain and the occasional hiss of car tires on wet pavement.

Halfway down an empty block, she stopped.

At the far end of the street, the world shifted. Not in any way she could see — the buildings were still there, the streetlights still burning — but in a way her bones felt. The distance between her and the corner stretched like taffy, the sidewalk warping under her feet without moving at all.

She knew she should turn around. Instead, she stepped forward.

The space around her kept stretching. Her heart hammered, her breath coming quick and shallow. Rain fell more slowly now, the drops hanging in the air just a little too long before hitting the ground. Her vision tunneled, and for a moment she was standing in the basin again — silver in her hands, creatures closing in, the horn sounding from above.

The sound didn’t fade this time. It grew.

Pain stabbed through her skull, sharp enough to take her knees out from under her. She hit the pavement hard, clutching her head as the world folded in on itself. The streetlights bent closer, the sidewalk rippled like water, and the air pressed down on her chest.

Omygod. Omygod. I’m triggering! Melissa thought her pulse was racing like an ox-cart running downhill.

Move, something whispered — not in words, but in a pressure that wasn’t hers. Make space.

And she did.

She didn’t know how, but the distance between her and the nearest building jumped, stretching thirty feet in an instant. The rain froze in midair before snapping back into motion, scattering in wild arcs. The street itself seemed to recoil, twisting just enough to send a parked car skidding sideways into a lamp post.

Her breath came in ragged gasps. The pain eased, but the world didn’t quite go back to normal. Distances still swayed faintly, like she was looking through warped glass.

Somewhere behind her, a window shattered. Someone was shouting. She didn’t move.

She knew, with the same certainty she’d had in the dream, that she’d done this. That the line between here and there had thinned — and something on the other side had noticed.

She slowly sat there in the rain, her knees pressed into the cold asphalt, her breath coming fast.

Everything around her felt wrong in a way she couldn’t name. The warped glass effect hadn’t faded — if anything, it was sharper now. The buildings leaned in too close. The lampposts stretched away. The street under her knees wasn’t flat anymore; it curved, like the world itself was bending to match a shape in her head.

She could still hear the echo of the horn from the dream. Not with her ears — with whatever part of her the trigger had cracked open. She needed help before she shattered into a thousand pieces that could never be put back together again.

And then she wasn’t alone.

The wrongness shifted, focusing, like the beam of a flashlight pinning her in place. Her head came up without her meaning to. The rain blurred the far end of the street, but the distortion pulled, sharpening the space between them until it was too straight, too clear.

Through the stretch of impossible geometry, she saw [Her].

Silver armor. White fire running along the curve of a blade. Eyes bright with something between challenge and recognition. It wasn’t the same as a photograph, wasn’t even a perfect picture — more like an afterimage burned directly onto the part of her brain that handled distance and direction.

The armored woman tilted her head, as if she could see Melissa just as clearly through whatever gap had opened.

Melissa’s chest tightened. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even tell if her mouth would work here. The rain between them slowed, stopped, and then began falling sideways, sucked toward the place where their worlds touched.

The woman’s voice — or maybe just the idea of it — pressed into Melissa’s mind. I’ve been waiting for you—my champion.

Melissa's stomach flipped. “Who are you?” she thought — or maybe said.

The armored woman didn’t answer. She lifted her sword in a small, deliberate motion, the way someone might offer a hand across a gap. Silver light ran from hilt to tip. The space between them thinned even more — and Vista felt the wet pavement under her knees slide toward her, the world rearranging itself to bring her closer.

Something deeper, colder, stirred in the air behind the woman. The bronze sky of the dream boiled with dark shapes. Whatever had been watching in that other place had noticed the contact.

The woman’s voice pressed in again, sharper this time. Not yet. Not here. Hold the line. Hold until I can reach you. Do this for me, and I will grant you the power that gods would murder unborn worlds to possess.

And then [She] was gone.

The warped geometry snapped back like a rubber band, throwing her backward onto the sidewalk. The rain was just rain again. The street looked normal, except for the bent lamppost and the crushed car.

But the connection hadn’t vanished completely.

Melissa could still feel the faint silver thread tugging at the edge of her perception, like a line running taut between her and somewhere far beyond the city. Somewhere with a bronze sky, broken towers, and a war she had agreed to join in a dream in return for payment gods would kill for.

ACT YoE 4,191 / LT October 26, 2009, 0831

PRT Headquarters

Brockton Bay

The lobby smelled like fresh paint and disinfectant, the kind of “new building” scent that clung to the air no matter how many people passed through. The flag hung behind the reception desk, starched to perfection, and a steady trickle of uniformed staff moved through the secure doors. Vista — Melissa, to people who still knew her that way — kept her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and her expression neutral.

She’d been here before, of course. School trips, public tours, even a “meet the heroes” event once. But never like this. Never with her name in their files for what she could do.

The receptionist smiled, polite but practiced. “You’re here for the power testing?”

Melissa nodded. “Yeah.” Her voice was calm, but her gaze flicked around the lobby in tiny, involuntary arcs — measuring, constantly measuring. Doorways were too close together, the ceiling higher than it looked, and the desk a little farther from the front doors than most people would guess. She filed it all away without a second thought.

The woman behind the desk tapped her keyboard. “Agent McKinnon will meet you in the testing wing. Just follow the green lights.”

“Got it.”

The hallway beyond was bright and sterile, but Missy noticed the trick — the way the lines of the floor tiles subtly narrowed to make the corridor seem longer. Probably for psychological effect, to slow down visitors and make them feel small. She adjusted unconsciously, her stride fitting the real distance instead of the false one.

Agent McKinnon was waiting in the observation booth, clipboard in hand, tall and broad-shouldered in a way that screamed ex-military. “Melissa Byron?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re going to run you through the standard battery of Shaker class spatial manipulation tests. We’ll start light, see where your upper limits are, then move into precision work.”

She gave a slight nod. “I understand.”

McKinnon’s brow furrowed faintly — just enough to suggest most kids her age didn’t answer like that. Too bad for them.

The first tests were simple: stretch a distance, shrink a distance, fold a hallway into itself. Melissa moved through them smoothly, without the hesitation most new capes had. She didn’t look like she was focusing — no furrowed brow, no clenched jaw — but every shift was clean.

In the observation booth, a pair of techs exchanged glances. One of them muttered, “She’s compensating for visual distortion without measurement tools.”

“Self-calibration?” the other asked.

McKinnon only wrote something on his clipboard.

The precision tests came next. Targets placed at varying ranges, some partially obscured, others moving. Melissa shifted the space between her and each one in quick, almost casual bursts, bringing them into reach or pushing them out of line of sight. Her aim didn’t falter.

When the moving targets came, she adjusted not just for speed, but for the trajectory change caused by her warping — something the testers didn’t expect her to manage on the first try. The foam dart hit the bullseye, dead center.

She didn’t react to the murmured surprise in the booth.

By the end of the session, McKinnon’s clipboard was a page heavier. “We’ll need to do some endurance runs, see how sustained use affects you,” he said. “But your control is… advanced. You’ve been practicing.”

Melissa allowed herself a faint smile. “Of course not, that would be illegal.”

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t tell them about the years of small, careful pushes and pulls in empty alleys, the way she’d mapped the streets of Brockton Bay in her head until she could walk them blindfolded, the moments when that silver-thread connection had tugged at her and she’d trained herself to ignore it — until she didn’t.

She didn’t tell them she already knew more about battlefield positioning than half the Wards on active duty.

Instead, she just followed McKinnon out of the testing room toward the administrative offices, her pace adjusting perfectly to the real, not the perceived, length of the hallway.

ACT YoE 4,191 / LT November 11, 2009, 1132

PRT Headquarters

Brockton Bay

Ward Dorms

The dream hadn’t come in weeks.

Melissa had told herself that was a good thing. No bronze sky, no horn-call, no shadow of a silver-armored stranger looking at her through impossible space. She’d been throwing herself into patrol rotations, training runs, schoolwork — anything to keep from wondering what it meant that the thread between them had gone quiet.

Until tonight.

She came back from the evening patrol damp from drizzle, boots tracking water onto the dorm’s cheap carpet. The place was empty — Gallant and Aegis were on late shift, Clockblocker had vanished somewhere with Kid Win, and the others were in their rooms.

Melissa shut her door and froze.

On her bed, laid neatly on the folded corner of her blanket, was a bar of silver.

It wasn’t polished — a rawer ingot than a finished ornament — but it caught the light from her desk lamp in a way that made the room seem dim around it. Lines ran along its surface, fine as hair, tracing strange curling patterns she didn’t recognize but somehow understood.

Her breath quickened. She rechecked the door lock, the window latch, even the vent. No one could have left it here. No one should have been able to.

The silver was warm when she picked it up. Not just from the air — it had its pulse, slow and steady, matching her heartbeat until she couldn’t tell which was which.

She should have called someone. Logged it, bagged it, handed it to the PRT science team. She should also have stated she was triggered years ago. Yet she did neither.

Instead, she sat on the bed, holding the ingot in both hands, and let it rest against her skin.

The warmth spread. It wasn’t heat precisely, more like the pressure of someone pushing gently from inside her chest outward. The walls of the room seemed to drift apart. The air shifted, thickening, stretching. She felt the edges of her reach — the invisible lines her power could tug and fold — and watched them swell outward like a tide rising to cover more ground.

The silver’s lines glowed faintly, that molten-argent light she remembered from the dream.

Her awareness skipped, just for an instant, across the thread. She saw the bronze sky again, the shattered towers, the distant glint of a sword’s edge. The armored woman stood on a high stone platform, her head tilted as if listening.

Melissa gripped the silver tighter. The glow sank into her skin, leaving nothing in her hands but a cool, inert bar of metal. But inside — inside, her perception stretched farther than it ever had before. The dorm walls felt paper-thin, the space beyond them malleable, begging to be bent. She could sense the stairwell three floors down, the weight of the concrete slab between here and the garage. She could have reached it without having to move.

The thread across worlds thrummed once. Approval, or warning — she couldn’t tell.

Melissa set the silver bar on her desk, her pulse racing.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t from here. And it wasn’t done with her yet.

The following incident occurred during a patrol, of course.

Melissa had learned the rhythm of the streets quickly — the slow sweep of pedestrians, the little swells of traffic, the pulse of a city that was never really quiet. Tonight was supposed to be routine: walk the blocks with Gallant and Kid Win, keep eyes open, move on.

Then she felt it.

Not dangerous. Not exactly. Just… potential. A place in the city’s geometry where the lines didn’t quite match up, where she could push and have something happen. Her awareness had been sharper since the silver bar appeared; her reach had widened. This… this was different.

Gallant was talking to a shop owner, while Kid Win was distracted by some chatter from a tinkerer in his comms. Melissa hung back, eyes on a narrow alley between two apartment blocks.

She reached.

The space in the alley elongated, the walls bending away from each other. She could feel the expansion rippling outward, searching for a shape to settle into — but this time, it didn’t stop at brick and mortar.

It slid through.

Her breath caught. The lines under her fingertips weren’t Brockton Bay anymore. The air on the other side felt hot, dry, heavy with dust. Somewhere far off, a horn sounded — so deep it vibrated in her bones. She felt eyes on her.

The connection widened without her meaning to.

ACT YoE 4,191 / LT September 11, 2073, at 1132

The Cyber Depths

Southern Convergence

Eve turned her head before the ripple even finished forming.

Her blade was in her hand without conscious thought, silver fire running along its edge. She stood on the crest of a shattered wall, the basin below crawling with movement — chitin-armored scouts spreading out, searching. But her gaze was fixed not on them, but on the air itself, forty paces ahead.

A crack in space. Thin as a blade at first, widening just enough to show something beyond.

Through it, she caught the smell of wet asphalt. Neon glimmered at the edges, and somewhere behind it all, the roar of a city’s traffic. And someone — her chosen!

Eve’s eyes narrowed. The figure was small, armored in the bright colors of another world’s defenders, her posture halfway between surprise and stubborn resolve—a child, but not just a child. The silver thread between them was faint but undeniable.

The scouts noticed the crack a second later. Several turned toward it, clicking in alarm. They had been hunting at the edge of the still sizable Wasteland, searching for a way through.

Eve lifted her blade in warning.

Not yet, she sent, the thought riding the tether like lightning. Close it. Now.

The girl flinched but didn’t look away. Eve saw recognition in her eyes — the same kind she’d seen in her chosen the day they first met.

The scouts began to close in.

Eve’s grip tightened. She couldn’t cross the gap, not under the Contract’s terms. But she didn’t need to, she was not any army, she was inevitability. She swept the blade in a wide arc, silver light spilling into the air like a curtain between the girl and the enemies. Runes wove themselves into existence, creating a film of light in countless tiny hexes. The insectoid creatures hissed, stopping just shy of the light’s edge.

The connection thinned, flickering. The curtain held until the last thread snapped and the crack sealed. Once her champion was no longer in danger, Eve turned to the insects.

It was gratifying that there were targets for her rage.

ACT YoE 4,191 / LT November 12, 2009, 2359

PRT Headquarters

Brockton Bay

Ward Dorms

By now, Melissa was used to being the smallest person in the room.

The Wards treated her like one of their own. Still, it didn’t matter if she’d outmaneuvered Clockblocker in a sparring simulation, or if she’d repositioned Aegis during a live operation so precisely that the after-action report read like choreography.

She was still five feet nothing in uniform boots, and the public still called her “adorable” more often than “dangerous.”

Tonight, though, the dorm halls were quiet. Aegis had drawn late patrol, Gallant was out with New Wave, and Kid Win was buried in the lab. Melissa padded back from the showers with damp hair under a towel, the hum of the ventilation system filling the silence.

She’d just stepped into her room when she froze.

The mirror above her desk wasn’t reflecting her.

It was, sort of — the same layout, the same lamp, the same stack of books — but her reflection’s stance was different, straighter. The hair wasn’t damp. And the eyes… the eyes gleamed silver, bright as moonlight on water.

The silver-armored figure from the dreams stood where her reflection should be. No sword in hand now, but the same poise, the same quiet pressure that filled the air in the moments before battle.

“Vista,” the figure said. The voice was even, but it wasn’t sound in the usual sense — it was in the glass, resonating just enough that Melissa could feel it in her teeth.

Melissa’s throat went dry. “You’re real.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” the figure replied. The silver in her eyes swirled faintly. “The Contract binds me. This—” she gestured to the mirror’s surface “—is one of the few ways left to reach across.”

Melissa stepped closer. She could see details now: the fine etching along the figure’s vambraces, the faint glow at the seams of the armor, as if molten silver were alive under the plates. “Why me?”

“Because you can see the lines, out of all the humans on your planet, you are the one able to handle one hundred percent of my gifts,” the figure said. “When the war spills over, I will need someone here who understands what is soon to arrive.”

Melissa’s heart thudded. “You’ve been in my dreams. Since before—” she stopped herself, jaw tightening. Before her trigger. Before she’d ever worn the Vista mask.

The figure inclined her head in a regal nod. “Dreams are the places the Contract’s wording cannot bind. But they fade too easily. Mirrors hold better. I am finally able to speak directly to you.”

Melissa swallowed. “What do you want me to do? Why do I have these powers? Was it a trigger? Because all triggers are a result of conflict, I’ve checked.” Her words spilled out faster and faster.

The silver light in the figure’s eyes intensified. “Relax. You’re a big girl. In order of your questions, get stronger, because you're best suited for them, no triggers are something different, my word on that, and you were in conflict for a long time in the Dreams.”

A knock sounded on Melissa’s door, sharp and sudden. “Vista? Debrief in ten,” Gallant’s voice called.

Melissa blinked, and the mirror was just a mirror again — her damp-haired reflection staring back, wide-eyed.

She grabbed her uniform jacket from the chair. But even as she left for debrief, she realized the comment that stuck with her the most was: You’re a big girl. Somehow, she couldn’t keep the smile off her face.