A slow, rhythmic beeping broke through the thick silence.
Mira stirred—barely. Her limbs felt heavy, submerged in something thicker than sleep. A rush of cool air filtered through the oxygen mask over her mouth, and even that simple breath felt foreign. Unfamiliar. Clinical.
Faint white light streamed through the narrow gaps in the curtain surrounding her bed. The ceiling above was sterile, blinding, and too quiet. Not a star in sight. No hum of thrusters. No distorted gravitational pull bending space around her.
Just white tiles. Just silence.
She blinked, her vision struggling to align. The cold touch of an IV drip trailed down her arm, sensors taped to her chest, beeping monitors surrounding her. Her hands twitched weakly—one of them reaching for a nearby table where her belongings had been set aside. Her phone sat atop it, powered off. And next to it, just faint—almost invisible—were hairline cracks in the air.
Fractures.
Not in the glass. Not on the table.
In reality.
A glimmer of movement—like a broken reflection in water—and then it was gone.
Her hand dropped. The heaviness returned, and the oxygen mask hissed in and out. Her eyes closed before she could fight the weight of unconsciousness.
***
Footsteps approached.
The clatter of shoes and the rustling of clipboard pages. A young resident adjusted his stethoscope as two doctors entered the room.
"Room 14B. Comatose admission from last week. Still no next of kin," one said.
"Vitals have been stable but odd. Her neural scans are showing... fluctuation patterns, almost like temporal lags. Like her consciousness is phasing."
The other doctor furrowed her brow. "Has the neurological unit been informed?"
"They ran tests. Said it could be a rare post-traumatic fugue state, but... honestly, I've never seen readings like this. It's like she's glitching."
Outside the curtain, the patient in the neighboring bed stirred. An older man with graying hair rubbed at his temple.
"Hey, doc," he croaked. "That girl... Her machine was beeping real fast a moment ago."
The resident glanced down at the monitor. Mira's pulse had spiked—up into dangerous territory. But just as quickly, it normalized.
"Strange," he muttered.
"She waking up?" the older man asked.
"Possibly," the resident replied, tapping the screen. "We'll keep her under observation."
But the data puzzled him. Not just the pulse. There were microbursts of electromagnetic energy pulsing from her—like something dormant, waiting to ignite again.
Unseen to the hospital staff, something deeper stirred beneath Mira's skin. Beneath the flesh and the quiet breath.
A memory. A distortion.
One that physics couldn't explain.
***
In the void between dimensions, the warp field had shattered. The drive, meant to fold spacetime neatly into a tunnel, had failed catastrophically. Mira and Caleb's perfect synchronization—Resonance meeting Gravity, two cosmic forces amplifying one another without any limiter—had bent reality too far.
Caleb's gravity had added uncontrollable curvature to the space within the warp corridor. Mira's Resonance had fed back into that field, fracturing every point of containment. The warp became a collapse—not inward, but outward. Spacetime tore.
A supernova of light exploded at the collapse point.
The result: fragmentation.
There was no path back. Only fragments of existence breaking apart like paper caught in a storm.
But somehow—some way—Mira had not been torn apart. She had been redirected, slingshot into a less-damaged part of the spacetime field. A thread still tethered to something. Or someone.
Maybe the remnants of Caleb's power—his signature, his presence—had pulled her into another timeline. A reconstruction. Or perhaps her original timeline, the one she'd long forgotten.
Her arrival into this world hadn't been gentle. She had collided with the boundary of a reality that didn't know her. And yet, it had made room.
Because deep within her, Caleb's energy remained—entangled with her own at the quantum level. Their connection hadn't broken. It had simply gone silent.
Waiting.
***
Back in the hospital room, her pulse ticked higher again.
On her hand, faintly, the crystal from her glitching exoskeleton flickered—just once—then dimmed and disappeared, leaving her in the hospital gown, her reality.
The fractures in the air whispered.
The silence wasn't peace.
It was the calm before something else.