The shimmer flared.
Reality hiccuped.
Then Rus entered the Rift.
It didn't feel like walking through a doorway. It felt like falling through a skipped frame of existence, one breath in the Ridge, the next in a different kind of silence. A denser one. Sound didn't just vanish here; it failed to apply.
The air was viscous. Like wading through honey and static. Light had no source, just ambient bruises of color bleeding into the sky. If you could call it that.
The land was wrong. Fractured platforms of dirt and stone floated midair, circling invisible axes. Trees bent like they were wilting from gravity, roots pulsing, bark bleeding thin streams of violet sap. Veins of solid light stretched across the horizon like cracks in glass—threaded through clouds that weren't clouds, just pale gas shaped like wings or teeth.
Corpses littered the landscape.
Not fresh. Not decomposed. Preserved, like wax museum displays left in a desert too long. Deer, birds, a twisted canine thing he didn't recognize just frozen mid-motion, mid-death. As if the Rift couldn't finish digesting them. Couldn't decide what moment they should die in.
Rus didn't look long.
QTEs. Inside his head, Hestarted the cycle. Every thirty seconds. Three-second breathing. "Still me. Still Rus. Still now." Rus didn't fight the madness. Nothing could. But it spaced it out. Give it somewhere else to go.
The drone's signal pulsed steady.
Navigation tether stable. Distance to core: 50 meters.
They were close. The terrain began to buckle inward like a funnel, dragging geometry toward a dark center, a pit lined with arcs of frozen fire and something beating underneath. Not metaphorically. Literally beating. A pulse, like a muscle. The Rift's heart.
The readouts spiked.
Radiation climbed past operable limits. The temperature dropped, then surged. The drone's shell vibrated with electromagnetic stress, but it held. Its voice modulator barked out with mechanical finality.
"ADR Core: Armed. Final sync achieved. Release window—3 minutes."
That was it.
The Rift wanted Rus to stop. He could feel it. Not like pressure this time, but intention. Something nudged at his spine. Something old and furious and unsure whether to seduce or destroy.
Rus didn't wait for it to choose.
He turned and ran.
Hard.
The tether strained. Rus kept the link active long enough to confirm payload countdown engaged, then severed the line. The drone hovered in place, holding formation as the ADR core thrummed with contained violence.
Rus sprinted uphill across terrain that changed shape between footsteps. A rock became a root became a memory of something burning. He ignored it all. Keep counting in his head. Responding to the QTEs appearing in his vision that he mentally pressed.
Distance to the threshold was 80 meters.
Soundless wind howled.
Something large shifted above him. A floating beast-shaped island dragging its shadow like a net.
His nose bled. Rus didn't care.
He could see the shimmer. The membrane between this and that. Beyond it, the Ridge was waiting. Or what was left of it.
He dove.
Everything snapped back at once.
Not sound—yet—but weight. His body reasserted itself. His lungs screamed. My legs gave out. He hit the dirt like a dropped ragdoll.
Behind him, the shimmer convulsed.
Everyone still conscious scrambled back. Some crawled with blind panic. Others didn't move at all. Just laid flat, faces in the dirt, waiting for the end.
One minute.
He couldn't speak. He mouthed the numbers.
Two.
His eyes were burning. He stared at the sky because the ground felt wrong.
Three.
Then it hit.
Not a boom. Not fire. Just absence.
Like the world sucked in its breath and decided not to breathe again.
The Rift folded inward. Slowly, impossibly, like reverse origami. The shimmer inverted. Trees snapped upright. Light unbent. The impossible sky peeled back to reveal the real one, clouded, blue-grey, honest.
A wind rolled through the Ridge. No distortion. No static.
Then—
Sound.
A bird chirped.
Then another.
The trees rustled.
Someone sobbed.
It was Muriel.
She was on her knees, hands over her face, gasping like she'd been underwater for days. He heard her shoulders shake before he saw them. Soren sat behind her, glassy-eyed, like someone had finally unplugged the buzzing in his skull.
Gino was on all fours, retching.
Berta hadn't moved. She knelt by a broken antenna mast, eyes locked on where the Rift used to be. Her lips didn't move, but her fingers twitched like she was praying or recalibrating herself to this dimension.
Rus just sat.
Back against a rock.
Blinking.
Trying to parse noise again.
The birdsong wasn't peaceful. It was deafening. The rustle of wind in the branches sounded like a crowd screaming. Every footstep crunched too loud. His own breathing grated like metal.
The absence had filled him so long, the presence hurt.
A medic approached, said something, and touched his arm. Rus flinched. Didn't mean to. He backed off. He nodded. That was enough.
Helooked at the others.
Some were crying. Some weren't.
A TRU operator sat in the dirt, smiling at nothing. Another dug their fingers into the soil, whispering, "Still here. Still here." Over and over.
Muriel stood. Wobbled. Walked toward him.
"Rus," she said.
He looked up.
"I thought you weren't coming back."
Rus almost said something stupid. Something heroic. But the truth was simpler.
"I didn't know if I would either."
She sat beside him, shoulder against his.
They didn't speak for a long time.
Eventually, a report came through. Kaira's voice, cracked but stable.
"ADR detonation confirmed. Rift sealed. Containment complete. We're logging this as a Category Seven stabilization event. Environmental quarantine is advised. TRU initiating retreat protocols."
No one moved.
The sky was beginning to turn gold at the edges. Sunset.
Berta finally rose to her feet.
She walked over, eyes hollow. "Cyma-One," she said. "Operational integrity?"
"Partial," Rus answered.
She nodded. "Acceptable."
Then she looked at the team. Or what was left of it.
"I want all Rift-adjacent personnel tagged. We'll need psych evals. Bloodwork. Dream logging. You know the drill."
She walked off.
No one argued.
Because the Rift was gone.
But not really.
***
Two days later, we were evac'd by TRU support vehicles. No ceremony. No cheers.
Just sterilized suits, quarantine tents, debrief protocols.
He was tagged for a high-risk exposure. So was Muriel. So was Amiel, even though she hadn't spoken a full sentence since the pulse.
They said he could go home in a month.
He didn't know where "home" was anymore.
He dreamed in static now.
He heard silence in everything. Behind music. Beneath voices. Under his own thoughts.
They tested him for hallucinations. He lied and said no. They scanned his synapses. Said he had elevated neural stress, but no Rift corruption.
They didn't ask about the shape he saw in the Rift. The thing inside the heart. The city of bone and coral. The thing that he watched.
Maybe they knew.
Maybe they didn't want to know.
TRU buried the Ridge under a Level Four environmental lockdown. No one goes in. No one gets close.
On paper, the mission was a success.
The Rift didn't breach.
But they lost twelve people.
Three confirmed dead.
Six disappeared inside.
Three came back broken.
And Cyma?
They weren't dead.
But he wouldn't call them intact either.
Muriel said it best, weeks later, over a comm link during one of the mandated debrief calls.
"We closed it. That doesn't mean it's over."
And he understood.
They didn't win.
They held.
They were superhuman. That's what they called them on the forms. "Enhanced resilience, Class A." What it meant in real terms was this they survived what should've killed them. Their muscles held together under Rift pressure. Their minds didn't collapse like wet paper under the stress fractals. But that didn't mean they came out unscathed.
Cyma Unit was a wreck. Internally, they were bleeding. Some literal. Most not. Physically they'd mend. Mentally—jury's out.
Gino, Dan, and Foster were still stuck in the medical ward. Gino kept trying to convince everyone he was "just winded," while hooked up to a nutrient drip and muttering about teeth in the clouds. Foster had two cracked vertebrae. Dan was sedated, twitching whenever light hit his eyes wrong.
Only Berta and Amiel were standing. Functionally.
Stacy and Kate were both temporarily blind from retinal exposure from the Rift's photonic inversion. Doc said they'd heal, eventually. In the meantime, they wore shades and spoke in quiet tones, like volume might trigger another collapse.
Berta bounced back the loudest. Which meant she was the most cracked.
She was already slouched on an ammo crate when he walked into the hangar. Bandaged leg up, chewing something caffeinated, cracking lewd jokes at Amiel's expense, none of which landed, not that she cared.
"Hey, you," she said, nodding at him. "Still broody, or did the afterglow hit?"
"Just a deep, profound sense of dread. You?"
She grinned. "Hiding it with filth and posture issues."
Amiel didn't look up from her drone. Still fixing its stabilizers, despite no orders. Her rifle was in her lap, clean and reassembled twice already. She kept her hands busy. Her words minimal.
"Wiring's burnt," she murmured.
"That's what happens when you fly it into a hellmouth, baby girl," Berta said.
Amiel didn't respond.
Berta leaned her head back. "So, Rus. Serious question. Would you have sex with me?"
There it was.
He looked at her. Deadpan.
"Piss off, Berta," Rus said, in a pure dull tone. "If I wanted to wrestle a raccoon covered in regret, I'd visit my ex."
She smiled.
But it didn't reach her eyes.
There was a pause. A real one. Her bravado flickered, just for a second. She looked at Rus, not laughing now. Just… tired.
"I'm scared, man," she said softly. "So scared of that shit. I feel like my bones still remember it. Like something's clinging inside my goddamn lungs."
She looked away. "I don't actually wanna screw anyone. I just—fuck, I just want someone to hold me and say we're still here."
Rus let out a breath. "Just a hug," he said. "And only one. You smell like battery acid and booze man."
She laughed.
Then she stood. Walked up to him and hugged him hard.
Her arms locked around his torso like she was trying to weld herself to the moment. Her face pressed against his broad shoulder, apparently, because she said it like a complaint and a compliment. She took a playful sniff and muttered something about cheap soap and poor life choices.
Then she cursed, low and bitter.
"Goddamn Rift. Goddamn drone. Goddamn you for going in there, you suicidal bastard."
He didn't say anything.
He just held her back.
They stood there like that for a long time. No words. No jokes. Just warmth in a place that had forgotten what it felt like.
Eventually, Amiel said, without looking up, "You're wrinkling the med tape."
Berta flipped her off with one hand, still hugging with the other.
The silence wasn't so heavy anymore.
Eventually, he had to peel Berta off him.
Not because he didn't care, because she started getting handsy. The kind of touchy that made him wonder if trauma broke the same filters as alcohol. She muttered something about "tactile therapy," and he unlatched her arms like defusing a bomb.
"Go squeeze a pillow," Rus said.
She called him a killjoy and sat back down on her crate, already reaching for an energy bar she didn't even unwrap. Just hold it.
He made his way over to Amiel.
She was still knee-deep in her drone, fiddling with wires that didn't need fixing. He sat beside her and poked her side. Light, annoying. The way someone might flick a broken vending machine.
She didn't look up.
"Piss off," she said. "Go back to hugging Berta or whatever."
"Just checking in. You want a hug too?"
"No."
And that was that.
She tightened a screw and wiped her brow, eyes still not meeting mine.
It didn't mean she was fine. Just meant she was handling it her way.
Before he could think of something else to say, Reed flagged him down from across the hangar with that look, the one that said paperwork and pain incoming.
He dragged himself over.
He handed him a terminal and a grimace. "You're the only one who went in and came out. TRU wants a full report."
"Of course they do."
"They're already drafting contingency procedures. Got half the science team foaming at the mouth."
"Tell them to bring towels."
"Not joking."
"Neither am I."
Rus started typing. Full entry. Timeline. Personal biometrics. He answered a dozen questions he didn't know had answers. TRU was especially interested in "spatial consistency" and "subjective perception drift." One guy asked him what color looked like inside the Rift. He told it as much as he could describe. It sounded poetic.
Still, the guy wrote it down.
Rus wasn't even trying to be poetic.
Another wanted specifics about the architecture he saw in there, the shapes, the geometry, the way the Rift bent gravity. Rus gave them all he could, and still, it felt hollow. Like trying to describe a fever dream through math.
Eventually, someone asked the wrong question.
"What did it feel like?"
Rus paused.
Then said, "Like being remembered by something that's never met you."
They went quiet after that.