Chapter 14

The light swallowed everything.

Not gradually. Not with the courtesy of a fade or transition. One moment I stood in that chamber with Thorne's guns trained on us, my finger still on the button, and the next—

Nothing existed except white.

Then the white shattered.

We hit ground. Hard stone, cold and unforgiving. Kess landed beside me with a grunt that suggested she'd had the wind knocked out of her. I rolled onto my back, gasping, trying to make sense of what my eyes were telling me.

We were still in a chamber. But not the same one.

The walls here curved upward into a dome, and every surface crawled with the same symbols we'd seen before, except these moved. They flowed like water, rearranging themselves in patterns that hurt to follow. The air tasted metallic. Wrong. Like breathing in static electricity.

"What did you do?" Kess pushed herself up on her elbows. Blood trickled from her nose.

"Pressed a button."

"I noticed." She wiped her face, stared at the red on her fingers. "Where are we?"

Good question. The pedestal was gone. Thorne and his team were gone. The entrance we'd come through—also gone. Just smooth wall where it should have been, covered in those writhing symbols.

I stood, legs shaky. The device I'd activated was still in my hand. Still warm. Still humming with whatever energy I'd unleashed. The symbols on its surface pulsed in rhythm with the ones on the walls.

"Remy." Kess's voice had gone flat. The tone she used when things were very, very bad. "Look up."

I looked up.

The dome wasn't solid. Through it—through the symbols and the stone and whatever impossible material composed this place—I could see stars. But they were wrong. The constellations were wrong. The colors were wrong. Some of the stars moved in ways that stars shouldn't move, tracing geometric patterns across the void.

"We're not on the planet anymore," I said.

"No." Kess had gotten to her feet, was turning in a slow circle, taking in the chamber. "We're not."

"The device must have been a transport. A jump gate. Something that—"

"Remy." She pointed.

On the far side of the chamber, a doorway had appeared. Or maybe it had always been there and we just hadn't seen it. The symbols around its frame blazed brighter than the rest, and through the opening I could see a corridor stretching away into darkness.

"We should go back," Kess said.

"How?"

She didn't answer. Because there was no answer. The device in my hand had three buttons. I'd pressed the second one. Maybe the first would take us back. Maybe it would dump us somewhere worse. Maybe it would do nothing at all.

"Forward, then." I started toward the doorway.

"Wait." Kess caught my arm. "We don't know what's down there."

"We don't know what's anywhere. We don't know where we are or how to get back or if Thorne followed us through or if—"

"If your father knew this would happen."

I stopped. Looked at her.

"He studied this device," she continued. "Built his own version based on it. You think he never pressed that button? Never tested what it did?"

"He would have told me."

"Would he?"

The question sat between us like a blade. Because no, probably he wouldn't have. My father kept secrets the way other people kept journals. Carefully. Obsessively. With the understanding that some knowledge was too dangerous to share.

"He left me the coordinates," I said. "Left me the research. He wanted me to find this place."

"Or he wanted to make sure someone found it if he couldn't come back."

The corridor beyond the doorway seemed to pulse with that same wrong light. Inviting. Threatening. Both at once.

I walked through it.

Kess swore behind me, but she followed. She always followed.

The corridor stretched longer than it should have. The walls here were smooth, unmarked by symbols, but they gave off a faint luminescence that provided just enough light to see by. Our footsteps echoed strangely, as if the space around us was larger than it appeared.

"This is a ship," Kess said after we'd walked for what felt like ten minutes. "Has to be. A station, maybe, but I think a ship."

"Based on what?"

"The curvature of the walls. The way the gravity feels—it's not quite right. Artificial. And the air circulation. Can you feel it? There's a system running, keeping this place habitable."

I could feel it now that she'd mentioned it. A subtle current, barely noticeable, but present. Which meant power. Which meant something was still functioning after however many thousands of years this place had been here.

The corridor ended at another doorway. This one was sealed, a solid panel of that same impossible material, covered in symbols that didn't move. A control panel sat beside it, three buttons arranged in a triangle.

"You're not pressing anything," Kess said.

"Wasn't planning to."

"Good. Because the last time you pressed a button, we ended up god knows where with no way home."

I studied the panel. The symbols around the doorway were different from the ones in the chamber. More complex. Layered. Like they were instructions rather than just decoration.

"Can you read any of this?" I asked.

"Some. Maybe." Kess moved closer, traced one of the symbols with her finger. "This one means 'access' or 'entry.' This one is 'authorized' or 'permitted.' And this..." She paused. "This one I don't know. But it appears in my father's notes. He thought it meant 'origin' or 'source.'"

"Your father studied the System?"

"Everyone studied the System. Before the Collapse. Before the wars. It was the great mystery. The great promise." She pulled her hand back. "Then people started dying and we stopped asking questions."

The device in my hand pulsed. Once. Twice. The symbols on the door responded, brightening, and with a sound like stone grinding against stone, the panel slid open.

Beyond it lay a chamber that made the first one look like a closet.

It was vast. Cathedral-vast. The ceiling soared upward into darkness, and the walls—the walls were covered in screens. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each one displaying something different. Star charts. Equations. Diagrams of structures I couldn't begin to understand. And in the center of it all, suspended in the air by nothing visible, hung a sphere of light.

"Remy." Kess's voice was barely a whisper. "What is this?"

I walked forward, drawn by something I couldn't name. The sphere pulsed in time with the device in my hand. In time with my heartbeat. The screens flickered as I passed, their displays changing, showing new information, new patterns.

"A control room," I said. "A bridge. This is where they ran everything from."

"They who?"

"Whoever built the System. Whoever created the jump gates and the stations and all the technology we've been scavenging for centuries." I stopped in front of the sphere. Up close, I could see it wasn't solid. It was made of light, yes, but also data. Streams of information flowing through it, around it, forming patterns that shifted and changed too fast to follow.

The device in my hand grew hot.

"Remy, put it down."

"It's reacting to this place. To the sphere. They're connected somehow."

"Then put it down before you activate something else."

But I couldn't. The device had locked onto my hand, or my hand had locked onto it—I couldn't tell which. The heat intensified, not painful but insistent, and the sphere began to descend. Slowly. Deliberately. Moving toward me.

"Remy!"

The sphere touched the device.

Every screen in the chamber blazed to life at once, and I saw—

Everything.

The System as it had been. Not ruins. Not fragments. Whole. Complete. A network of stations and gates spanning hundreds of worlds, all connected, all functioning in perfect harmony. I saw ships moving between them, vessels of a design I'd never encountered, sleek and purposeful. I saw cities on planets I didn't recognize, structures that defied physics, gardens that grew in the void of space.

I saw the people who had built it all.

They weren't human. Not quite. Close, but wrong in subtle ways. Taller. Thinner. Their eyes too large, their fingers too long. They moved through the stations with the confidence of people who had mastered their environment completely.

And I saw what happened to them.

The screens shifted, time accelerating, and the System began to fail. Not all at once. Gradually. Station by station. Gate by gate. The network fragmenting, connections severing, the whole beautiful machine grinding to a halt. The people tried to fix it. I watched them work, desperate, brilliant, pouring everything they had into saving what they'd built.

It wasn't enough.

The screens went dark. One by one. Until only a handful remained active, showing empty stations, dead gates, the ruins of a civilization that had reached for the stars and fallen short.

The sphere pulled back, releasing the device, and I stumbled backward. Kess caught me before I fell.

"What did you see?" she asked.

"The end." My voice sounded distant, not quite my own. "I saw the end of everything."

"Remy, you're bleeding."

I touched my face. My nose, like hers. Blood. The price of knowledge, apparently.

The screens around us had gone dormant again, but not dark. They showed something new now. A map. A star chart. With a single point highlighted, pulsing red.

"That's not where we are," Kess said, studying it. "That's... I don't know where that is."

"It's where we need to go."

"How do you know?"

Because the device told me. Because the sphere showed me. Because somewhere in that flood of information, I'd understood something fundamental about what my father had been trying to do, what he'd been trying to find.

"There's another station," I said. "The last one. The one they abandoned last. If there are answers anywhere, they're there."

"And how exactly do we get there? We can't even get back to where we started."

I held up the device. "This brought us here. It can take us there."

"You don't know that."

"No. But I know we can't stay here."

Kess looked around the chamber, at the screens and the sphere and the impossible architecture. "Why not? We have air. We have power. We could study this place. Learn from it. Maybe figure out how to actually use the System instead of just scavenging its corpse."

"Because Thorne knows where we went."

She went still. "What?"

"The device. When I activated it, it created a connection. A link. He has the coordinates now. He knows about this place. And he's going to come for it."

"You can't possibly know that."

But I did. The same way I knew about the other station. The device had shown me more than just history. It had shown me the present. Thorne in that chamber, his team analyzing the readings, tracking the energy signature. Following us.

"How long?" Kess asked.

"Hours. Maybe less."

She swore. Creatively. Then: "The third button. On the device. What does it do?"

"I don't know."

"Guess."

I looked at the device, at the three buttons arranged in a line. The first one dark. The second one still glowing faintly from when I'd pressed it. The third one waiting.

"The second button brought us here," I said slowly. "To this ship. This station. Whatever it is."

"And the first?"

"Takes us back. Has to. It's the only thing that makes sense."

"And the third?"

I met her eyes. "Takes us to the last station. The one on the map."

"You're guessing."

"Yes."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Then we end up somewhere else. Somewhere worse. Or nowhere at all."

Kess laughed. Sharp. Bitter. "Your father would be proud. You've got his talent for terrible decisions."

"We could go back. Press the first button. Take our chances with Thorne."

"No." She straightened, checked her weapon, adjusted her pack. "We couldn't. Because you're right. He's coming. And if he gets his hands on this place, on this technology..." She trailed off. Didn't need to finish. We both knew what Thorne would do with access to a functioning System station.

"So forward," I said.

"Forward."

I positioned my thumb over the third button. The device hummed, anticipating. The sphere above us pulsed once, as if in acknowledgment or warning.

"Kess?"

"Yeah?"

"If this kills us—"

"It won't."

"But if it does—"

"Then we'll be dead and it won't matter." She grabbed my arm. "Press the button, Remy."

I pressed the button.

The chamber exploded into light, but different this time. Not white. Gold. The color of stars being born. The screens shattered into fragments of data that swirled around us like a storm, and the sphere descended again, faster, enveloping us both in its glow.

I heard Kess shout something. Heard my own voice responding, though I didn't know what I said. Heard a sound like reality tearing, like the universe taking a breath and holding it.

Then silence.

Then darkness.

Then—

We were falling.