The Atlantic spread before them like hammered pewter, vast and indifferent beneath a sky bruised with storm clouds. The Trans Am was gone, replaced by a sleek transport—silent, efficient, sterile—that skimmed the waves with mechanical grace. Tavo pressed his face to the porthole, breath fogging the glass as wonder and dread warred in his chest.
Then it rose.
The Atlantic Accelerator breached the surface like a primordial leviathan waking from millennia of slumber. Water cascaded from its flanks in silver torrents as the station emerged—a cathedral of steel and purpose, part fortress, part laboratory, wholly magnificent. Its central spire pierced the sky like a needle threading heaven and earth. Below, Tavo glimpsed the darker bulk submerged beneath the waves, windows glowing with bioluminescent intent.
"Mon Dieu," Barkhad whispered, his thunderous voice softened to reverence. "She's beautiful, eh? Like the pyramids—but alive. Built where the old stories say Atlantis once dreamed."
Tavo's heart pounded—devoid of joy, but with something colder. Beneath the awe, questions gnawed at him like rust:
What if Sky was wrong?
What if I'm not strong enough?
What if this miracle doesn't give me back my legs—but takes the rest of me instead?
The transport shuddered as it docked. Through the glass, Tavo saw them waiting: medical personnel in pristine white, faces masked, posture brisk. Soldiers stood at attention, weapons gleaming. And there, beside them, sat a wheelchair—chrome, clinical, inevitable.
His stomach twisted. The golden chariot was gone. The dragon-car belonged to another world—another self. Here, he was patient again. Subject. Test case. The fire that had blazed during the chase guttered to ash.
Barkhad glanced at him. "You sweating, Tavo? You scared?"
Tavo said nothing. His hands trembled on the armrest, knuckles white. The silence stretched until it cracked.
A memory surfaced—unbidden, unwanted:
The playground.
Other kids running.
His body sprawled in the dust, wheels spinning uselessly.
Their laughter rising like knives.
He blinked hard, jaw clenched. He wanted to say no, to lie—but the word shredded in his throat. His hands darted out, clutching Barkhad's shirt with the grip of a drowning boy. Tears burned down his cheeks.
The medical staff hesitated. Protocols demanded speed, sterility. But Barkhad saw what they missed: the child behind the chart. The boy trying not to drown beneath the weight of what he had left behind.
Without a word, Barkhad lifted him—effortless, steady.
"Easy, petit frère. I carry you, oui? No chair until you're ready."
"Sir," a nurse began, "we really must follow—"
"Dr. Trehan?" Barkhad spoke calmly into his comm.
A pause. Then: "Allow it. Mr. Qaran has full authorization."
The nurse stepped back. Orders were orders—and whatever Barkhad represented, it outweighed protocol.
They moved through humming corridors, past laboratories where white coats bent over instruments that bent light. The station throbbed with ambition, with the fierce pulse of human will pushing against the impossible.
Then they stopped.
A door loomed ahead—massive, sealed, adorned with radiation warnings and magnetic field advisories. Above it, gleaming metal read:
JORDENS RÖST CATAPULT
MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC LAUNCH SYSTEM UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Beneath it, etched in light:
"In honor of Hannes Alfvén, whose mastery of magnetohydrodynamics gave wings to Earth's voice. May the Jordens Röst carry humanity to peace among the stars."
Every soldier in their escort saluted. Engineers paused to touch the plaque, their fingers reverent. A ritual, private yet public. Tavo stared, forgetting his fear in the hush of collective awe.
"Why do they salute?" he asked.
The sergeant's mask slipped, just a little. "Because Sky once said the mightiest warriors weren't just soldiers—they were the scientists who gave this place its soul. Men like Alfvén, who saw the cosmos as current, and taught us how to flow with it."
Tavo's thoughts sparked. His grandfather had spoken of men like that—scientists who listened to the stars and found poetry in plasma.
"But why not just use electromagnets?" he asked. "Why this... magnetohowever?"
Barkhad chuckled, his chest warm beneath Tavo's cheek. "Ah, petit, that's the question. Electromagnets push metal. Magnetohydrodynamics? It commands the blood of the universe. Plasma—charged particles, like lightning—becomes the road, the river. You don't fight matter. You dance with energy itself."
He searched for words. "Imagine, instead of throwing a stone, you become the wind that carries it. The Jordens Röst doesn't just launch ships. She sings them to the stars."
Tavo held onto the image—but as they entered the medical wing, surrounded now only by white coats and hushed efficiency, the fear returned. Like water behind a breached dam.
And then—he saw her.
Lady Death.
Trailing the staff like mist. Only Tavo saw her. She passed the wheelchair, fingers brushing its chrome handle. Her eyes were calm. Ancient. Patient.
Tavo's breath caught. The playground laughter returned. The helplessness. He wanted to scream, to run—but his voice caught.
If I do this, he thought, maybe I can free them. Maybe I can stop being a weight they carry. Maybe... I can be more.
But what if it costs everything?
What if I become like the pods we outran—cold, empty, obedient?
Barkhad's arms tightened.
"You want to turn back, petit?"
Tavo shook his head, just barely. "I just... I want to be more than what I am. For them. For me."
Barkhad nodded.
The corridor hummed. The future waited.
The Atlantic Accelerator sang around them—a hymn of ambition and defiance—and somewhere behind sealed steel doors, the Jordens Röst waited: Earth's newest voice, ready to shout into the stars.
Behind them, Lady Death smiled.
They walked deeper, past the medical wing, past laboratories humming with purpose. Here, the corridors narrowed, walls thick with insulation and warning placards. The air grew warmer.
Another plaque gleamed ahead, mounted beside reinforced doors marked ENGINEERING SECTOR - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The inscription read: GINORI ENGINE - GEOTHERMAL REACTOR. Below, in the same reverent script: "To Prince Piero Ginori-Conti of Trevignano, who harnessed Earth's fire for progress. The Ginori engine powers our dreams of a peaceful cosmos."
Tavo reached out. His fingers traced the metal letters, feeling their weight, their permanence. Ginori-Conti—he remembered now. The Italian who built the world's first geothermal power plant in 1904, who saw steam rising from the earth and thought not of hell but of hope.
Maybe, Tavo thought, their strength can pass into me. Maybe standing where giants stood gives you some of their courage.
The door to the geothermal chamber slid open with a hiss like steam from a kettle.
Inside, there was only silence. The kind of silence that belongs to the Earth before language.
The reactor dominated the space—an edifice of engineering forty feet high, its surface a maze of cooling pipes that gleamed like arteries carrying the planet's lifeblood. Cables coiled around its base like root systems, thick as a man's torso, feeding power to every corner of the station. Steam condensers rose like organ pipes, their surfaces beaded with moisture from the deep heat below. The machine waited, dormant but ready, its core temperature gauges reading zero but its potential infinite.
At the reactor's base sat another machine—smaller, more intimate. An amber pod, its surface smooth as polished stone, its interior lined with sensors and neural interfaces. Tubes and wires spiraled from it like umbilicals, connecting to monitoring stations that blinked with patient lights. A concave receptacle that was also a cocoon. A cradle that was also a forge.
Tavo stared into the glowing pod. It looked like a womb. It looked like a tomb.
It looked like both.
"You ever hear," Barkhad said, settling Tavo down gently inside the cocoon, "about the man who played poker with Death?"
Tavo blinked.
"No magic. No miracles. Just a card game in the Sahel. The man won. He didn't cheat, but he laughed at her bluff." Barkhad smiled, half a beard and all shadow. "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it just refuses to fold."
Tavo's chest tightened. He remembered his grandpa, lighting a candle in the blackout, whispering: "You have to have a tempered heart, my son. Like a sword."
Barkhad moved to the amber machine, his massive hands surprisingly gentle on its controls. Soft amber glowed from within, as if candlelight had learned to breathe.
"Go forth," he said. "She's waiting. And she will deal you her terms."
The geothermal reactor hummed, a note so deep it lived in the bones. Steam hissed through pipes that reached down, down into the Earth's molten heart. The amber machine pulsed with borrowed fire, ready to reshape flesh and bone with the planet's own power.
Barkhad's hand lingered on Tavo's shoulder, warm and solid, an anchor in the hum of waiting machines.
"This is your road now," he said quietly. "No one walks it with you."
His footsteps echoed across the chamber. The door sealed with a pneumatic hiss—the last tether to the outside world cut clean. The amber pod waited, patient as stone, patient as time.
Tavo lay back. The neural interfaces adjusted to his skull with mechanical precision, sensors mapping the architecture of his spine, his damaged nerves, the geography of his limitations. The hum deepened—not just sound now but something felt in the marrow, like the trumpets that signal the end of worlds.
The cocoon sealed shut.
Then warmth.
Then pressure.
Then silence so complete it had weight.
He couldn't move his legs. He told them to shift, to respond, to prove they still belonged to him. They did not obey. The old panic rose—familiar as breathing, shameful as secrets. But this time there was no one to hide it from. No one to perform strength for.
The amber liquid began to rise.
She didn't walk in. She was just there. Across the chamber, beyond the pod's transparent walls. Still. Not threatening. A mirror of stillness.
Lady Death stood like geology—patient, inevitable, unhurried. Her form was shadow given substance, night wrapped in the shape of waiting. Not cruel. Not kind. Simply present, as fundamental as gravity, as certain as entropy. Her eyes held no malice, no pity. They held nothing and everything—the weight of all endings, the peace of all conclusions.
The liquid rose to his waist. Thick as honey, warm as blood, amber like the fossilized dreams of ancient trees. Each millimeter climbed with deliberate purpose, carrying sensors and nanomachines, the tools that would rewrite him from the cellular foundation up.
"You always come early for people like me," Tavo said, his voice echoing strangely in the sealed chamber. She didn't respond. Didn't nod. Didn't blink. Just watched.
The liquid reached his chest. His breath came shorter, he wasn't drowning—the science was perfect, the oxygen flow regulated—but the weight of being observed by forever was suffocating.
"You didn't wait for my grandpa," he spoke, words tumbling faster now, as if speed could delay the inevitable. "He told me stories about heroes, about men who faced you down and won. But you took him anyway. In his sleep. No fight. No glory. Just... gone."
She remained motionless. A statue carved from the space between heartbeats.
The amber reached his throat. Each breath tighter than the last. Panic clawed at his chest—not rational, not based in science, but primordial. The fear that lived deeper than thought, older than consciousness.
"Is this a test?" His voice cracked, sixteen years old and terrified. "Is this your game? You let me feel strong in that car, let me think I was brave, and now... now you're here to collect?"
Nothing. No acknowledgment. No mercy. No cruelty either. Just the terrible honesty of what was.
"I'm scared," he whispered, the words torn from somewhere deeper than pride. "I don't want to die. I don't want to become something else. I don't know if I'm strong enough for this. What if the procedure works but I'm not me anymore? What if it fails and I die here, alone, and no one remembers I tried?"
The liquid rose past his chin. The final sensors activated, mapping the neural pathways of terror, of hope, of the trembling space between.
His body betrayed him then, as it always had. His legs, unfeeling weights. His hands, shaking like leaves in a storm he couldn't escape. Tears mixed with the amber, salt dissolved in synthetic amniotic fluid.
"You don't care, do you?" he sobbed. "About courage or cowardice. About whether I deserve this chance. You just... are. Like gravity. Like time. Like the space between stars."
She just... watched.
The liquid covered his mouth. Breathing apparatus engaged, forcing air into lungs that wanted to panic, to fight, to rage against the dissolution of everything. But there was nowhere to run, no wheelchair to retreat to, no Barkhad to carry him to safety.
Only her.
Only the dialogue with entropy.
Only the conversation between a flicker and the void.
"I was here," he whispered into the breathing mask, words bubbling through the amber medium. "Whatever happens. I was here. I chose this. I chose to try..."
Consciousness wavered. The machinery hummed its ancient song, older than civilization, older than life crawling from primordial seas. The genetic restructuring began—cells receiving new instructions, damaged pathways rerouted, the fundamental code of his existence rewritten by forces borrowed from the Earth's molten heart.
He looked at her one last time before the darkness claimed him.
She hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't given ground or taken it.
But she smiled now. A full, quiet, solemn smile. Not cruel. Not triumphant. Just... accepting. The way the Earth accepts back its seeds. The way the universe embraces the transformation of all things.
Like entropy honoring the courage it takes to become.
Then everything went black.