The machine was, by any reasonable standard, an abomination of engineering.
It stood in the corner of the tent, roughly spherical and barely large enough to contain a fully grown adult in a tightly curled position. Gears lined its exterior, connected to a hand crank that Curiosity had salvaged from a broken orrery. The interior was padded with what appeared to be repurposed cushion foam, cut unevenly and glued in place with more enthusiasm than precision. A series of belts and buckles dangled from the sides, their purpose apparently to secure the occupant in place before the machine began its work.
"What exactly," Pioneer said, her white hair falling across her face as she peered at the contraption with evident distaste, "is it meant to do?"
"Shakes you about a bit," Curiosity said cheerfully. "Tests durability. Just a bit of fun."
"It's proper rubbish," Voyager added quietly. He was sitting cross-legged on his cushion, watching the machine with the wary expression as he was promised it would not be tested on him. "Absolutely mental, if you ask me."
Kamina, who was already climbing into the machine, clearly did not share their reservations. "This is brilliant. You built this in a week?"
"Three days," Curiosity said. "Voyager helped me."
Voyager muttered. "Chaos. Controlled chaos, I s'pose, but chaos nonetheless."
Imogen stood with her arms crossed, watching Kamina wedge himself into the spherical contraption. "This is stupid," she said.
"It's for science," Kamina replied, his voice muffled by the padding.
"It's not for anything. It's a shaking machine built by a Thirteen-year-old."
"Built by two of us," Curiosity corrected, sounding rather pleased.
Pioneer sighed and turned away from the machine, returning her attention to the chessboard where Voyager had left his pieces in a thoroughly hopeless position. "I fail to see how being rattled about in a metal ball advances any scientific endeavor whatsoever. It doesn't make a lick of sense."
"Not everything needs to make sense," Kamina said. "Sometimes you just have to…"
The tent flap opened. Shmuel stepped through.
He stopped. He looked at the spherical machine. He looked at Kamina, who was now almost entirely inside it, his knees drawn up to his chest, his katana propped awkwardly against the curved wall. He looked at Curiosity's hand resting on the crank. He looked at Imogen, whose expression communicated a profound and wordless exhaustion.
"Bro," Shmuel said. "I told you to not act crazy in front of the kids."
He let out a long, deep sigh.
Curiosity turned the crank. The machine began to shake.
The machine shuddered to a halt after ten minutes of violent shaking. Curiosity released the crank, his face flushed with exertion and barely contained glee.
Kamina emerged.
He unfolded himself from the spherical contraption. His legs wobbled. His arms trembled. His eyes were unfocused, his pupils swimming in opposite directions. But the grin was still there, broad and unshakable, plastered across his face.
"What," he said, his voice slightly slurred, "is the result of this great Kamina?"
Voyager consulted the readout panel attached to the machine's side. The data scrolled across the small screen in neat columns of sepia-toned text. "You're very durable," he said, his tone matter-of-fact. "As expected, really. Would've been rather surprising if you weren't."
Shmuel stepped forward. "Let me see the data."
Voyager tilted the screen toward him. "His body works similarly to a human's, but..." The boy paused, his small brow furrowing. "There's something off about it. Something I can't quite put my finger on."
Curiosity leaned over Voyager's shoulder, scanning the numbers. "That's odd."
Opportunity crossed the tent to join them, her arms still folded, her expression shifting to analytical. Pioneer rose from the chessboard and approached without speaking, her pale eyes fixed on the screen.
"The data pattern," Pioneer said quietly. "It's like a double helix. But not biological. Mechanical. And it's..." She hesitated, searching for the right word. "Rotating. Continuously. As though it's drilling through something we can't see."
"An infinitely drilling drill," Curiosity said, shaking his head. "That's what it looks like. Never seen anything like it. Blimey."
The four children exchanged glances. Whatever they had found in Kamina's data, it was strange enough to give even them pause.
Curiosity turned away from the machine first. Pioneer followed, then Opportunity. They approached Shmuel.
"What's it like," Curiosity said, "to become an Abnormality?"
The question came without preamble. It hung in the air of the tent, sudden and stark against the earlier absurdity of the shaking machine. The colorful cushions and the warm lamplight seemed to dim slightly.
Kamina, still swaying on his feet, went still. Imogen, who had been watching the machine's readout with detached curiosity, turned her head.
They all knew the answer. Everyone in the Great Kamina Office knew it. It was written in the scars Shmuel carried, in the memory of the Titanic and the flooded dining hall and the broken glass heart.
Shmuel met Curiosity's eyes. The boy's expression was open and genuinely curious, untainted by morbid fascination. It was simply a question he needed answered.
"The loss of the self," Shmuel said. His voice was steady. "The complete dissolution of identity. You become an abstraction of what you were. Your grief. Your rage. Your longing. It lost its shape. Replaced by the thing that was born from your pain or the world's."
He paused. The tent was utterly silent.
"One day," he said, "I'll write a book about it. About what it was like. About how unique it is." His mechanical hand flexed, the freshly repaired servos responding smoothly. "I'm the only person ever recorded to have returned to being human after becoming an Abnormality. I think it's important that someone records it."
The children absorbed this in silence. Pioneer's eyes were thoughtful. Curiosity had stopped fidgeting. Voyager watching Shmuel with an expression that was difficult to read.
Shmuel let the silence hold for a moment longer. Then he spoke again.
"What's the project called? The telescope. What are you naming it?"
Voyager answered.
"Project Lipperhey Telescope," he said. "After the fellow who invented the telescope. Or so they say. Seemed fitting."
The four children dispersed across the rooftop.
Voyager settled himself at the base of the telescope, his small hands moving across the control panel with surprising dexterity. "Initiating preliminary alignment verification," he murmured, his voice taking on a different quality. "Assessing azimuthal bearing tolerances against baseline parametric thresholds. There's a slight deviation in the equatorial mount's rotational inertia. Compensating now."
Curiosity had climbed a ladder to access the upper calibration rings, a spanner in one hand and a brass gauge in the other. "The collimation optics are exhibiting minor refractive aberration in the secondary mirror assembly," he called down. "Nothing catastrophic, but the diffraction patterns are suboptimal for the resolution we're aiming for. I'll need to adjust the focal plane alignment by approximately three hundred microns. Should take but a moment."
"Three hundred and fifty would be more appropriate," Pioneer said without looking up. She was seated at a portable terminal near the telescope's base, her mechanical fingers flying across the keyboard, lines of data scrolling across the screen in sepia-toned text. "The thermal expansion coefficient of the brass housing hasn't been accounted for in your preliminary calculations. The ambient temperature has increased by nearly two degrees since our last calibration sequence, which introduces a measurable variance in the material's dimensional stability."
"Ah," Curiosity said, not missing a beat. "Quite right. Three hundred and fifty it is."
Opportunity stood at the center of the operation, her red hair catching the grey light as she moved between stations, checking readouts and cross-referencing data. She was the coordinator, the one who held the full schematic in her head and ensured that each component's calibration did not interfere with another's. "Voyager, what's the status on the chromatic dispersion compensator?"
"Functioning within acceptable parameters," Voyager replied. "The refractive index gradient has been stabilized across the full spectral range. There's a minor fluctuation in the ultraviolet bandwidth, but it's within the margin of error for our observational objectives. I'm implementing a secondary damping algorithm to smooth the residual variance."
"Implement it. Curiosity, how's the thermal regulation system holding up?"
"Steady as she goes," Curiosity said, tightening a bolt with a precise quarter-turn. "The heat dissipation array is maintaining equilibrium across all seven cooling conduits. No hotspots detected in the primary lens housing. We should be able to sustain continuous observation for up to four hours before thermal saturation becomes a concern."
"Four hours is more than sufficient for the initial observation window." Opportunity turned to Pioneer. "Cognitive load distribution framework?"
"Preliminary modeling suggests a distributed observation protocol will reduce individual neural strain by approximately sixty-two percent," Pioneer said, her eyes still on the screen. "The risk of cognitive fragmentation remains non-zero, but the probability curve decreases significantly with each additional observer added to the network. At four simultaneous observers, the projected safety margin should be... acceptable."
The Great Kamina Office stood at the edge of the rooftop, watching.
Imogen's arms were crossed, her expression caught between curiosity and the particular frustration of someone who was accustomed to not understanding things and found herself entirely out of her depth. Shmuel's face was neutral, but his eyes tracked the children's movements with the analytical focus as he understood enough of the technical language to grasp the broad strokes but not the details. He knew the streets. He knew how society functioned at ground level, how power flowed and pooled and corrupted. This was different. This was the language of people who had spent years studying things he had only ever encountered at the surface.
Kamina said nothing for a long moment. He simply watched the children work, his expression unreadable.
Then he spoke.
"I admire people like that," he said quietly. "People who get absorbed in their work. Who know exactly what they can do and what they want to do. Who disappear into their own creation because that's where they belong."
Shmuel glanced at him. Imogen turned her head.
"Look at their eyes," Kamina said. "Even the ones who replaced theirs with metal. Look at the way they move. The way they talk to each other. They're building something that matters to them. Something that gives them a reason to wake up and keep going."
He paused. The children continued their work, oblivious to the conversation happening at the edge of the tent.
"Some of them replaced their flesh with steel," Kamina said. "But the flame is still there. The same flame every human carries. It's just burning in a different kind of housing." He looked at Shmuel, at the mechanical arms that had been damaged and repaired and would be damaged again. "You know what I mean."
Shmuel nodded slowly. "Yeah. I know."
The telescope loomed above them all, its brass gleaming in the grey light. And the children worked on.
The calibrations were complete.
The telescope stood ready, its massive barrel aimed skyward, its gears humming with the quiet precision of machinery that had been tuned to perfection.
The four children had gathered near the control panel.
Opportunity approached Kamina. In her hands, she held a metal cap, its surface smooth and unadorned, its interior lined with a web of thin wires and pale sensors.
"We're ready to begin," she said. "This cap is for the primary observer. The person who wears it will bear the greatest share of the cognitive strain when the telescope activates. The distributed observation protocol helps, but there's still a focal point, a single mind that anchors the network." She held the cap out to him. "It should be someone with the strongest mental fortitude. Someone who can hold their sense of self against something that doesn't want to be seen."
Kamina took the cap from her hands without hesitation. He turned it over once, examining the wiring, and then placed it on his head.
Shmuel said nothing.
Imogen said nothing.
They had both known he would do it. Kamina was Kamina. The man who threw himself into impossible fights without a second thought was not going to hesitate at a metal cap and a warning about cognitive strain. It was simply who he was.
"There's another cap," Opportunity said, producing a second one from the equipment table. She looked toward the telescope, where Voyager was making final adjustments to the azimuthal controls. "Voyager will be wearing it."
Imogen's head turned sharply. "Him? He's ten years old."
Voyager looked up from the control panel. "My mind has been tested on multiple occasions," he said. "My mental capacity ranks considerably higher than anyone else in the Far Beyond. That includes every child currently residing in Asan's House of the Star."
He adjusted a dial. "Fragility of the body doesn't equate to fragility of the mind. The two are quite separate phenomena."
Pioneer set down her tablet and fixed Imogen with her pale gaze. "Anyone in this orphanage can attest to it. His sanity is far superior to ours. We've conducted the assessments ourselves. Standardized cognitive resilience testing. Extended exposure to abstract conceptual frameworks. Pattern recognition under neurological duress." She paused. "He outperformed every benchmark we established. By a significant margin."
"It's really not as surprising as it might appear," Curiosity added, climbing down from the ladder and wiping his hands on a cloth. "Age isn't a reliable predictor of mental durability. Some of the youngest minds are the most resilient. Something about neural plasticity, we think. The brain's ability to adapt rather than fracture." He shrugged. "Voyager's been our control subject for nearly every experiment requiring high cognitive load. He's never wavered. Not once."
Voyager took the second cap from Opportunity and placed it on his head. The wires gleamed against his blond hair. He looked very small beneath it.
Curiosity moved to the telescope's primary control console. His hand hovered over the activation switch, his earlier levity replaced by a quiet, focused intensity. "We've selected our first observational target," he said. "Mercury. The closest planet to the sun. We want to see its true nature. Not the astronomical data, we have that already. The truth beneath the appearance. What it actually is, rather than what our instruments tell us it appears to be."
"Barely a fraction of the sky," Voyager murmured. "Just a speck of light to most people. But if the telescope works..." He didn't finish the sentence.
Pioneer looked at Kamina. "The cap will let you see what Voyager sees. A shared observation. You'll be the anchor, but he'll be the guide. He knows the sky better than anyone here."
Kamina grinned. The metal cap sat on his head like a crown that didn't fit quite right, but he wore it with the same defiant confidence he brought to everything. "Then let's see what this Mercury's hiding."
"Bro, do you even know what Mercury is?"
"Ha! Of course not!"
Curiosity's hand pressed the activation switch, and the telescope came alive.
Threads of white light unfurled from the massive eyepiece. They moved through the air with the slow, searching quality of something alive, reaching outward, finding each person in the tent one by one. A thread touched Kamina's metal cap and flared bright. Another found Voyager, then Pioneer, then Curiosity himself, then Opportunity. The light connected them all, a web of pale luminescence that pulsed with a rhythm almost like breathing.
Another thread drifted downward, unnoticed by anyone, and touched the back of Shmuel's coat. It found the tiny black sphere nestled against his spine, and the sphere drank it in without a sound.
"It's starting now," Curiosity breathed.
For a moment, nothing happened. The tent was silent. The light web pulsed once, twice, three times.
Then the world dissolved.
They stood on Mercury.
The surface was a plain of shattered rock and ancient craters, stretching in every direction beneath a sky that was not a sky but an endless void of starless black. The ground was pale grey, almost white in places, the silicate crust scarred by impacts that predated human memory. Sulfur deposits stained the rocks in patches of darker grey, and the landscape glittered faintly with the reflective sheen of magnesium-rich minerals. There was no atmosphere. No wind. No sound except the faint hum of the telescope still reaching them from somewhere impossibly distant.
The Far Beyond group erupted.
"Brilliant!" Curiosity shouted, his voice carrying an exhilaration that bordered on reverent. "Absolutely brilliant! The resolution is extraordinary…look at the crater morphology, the ejecta blanket distribution…"
"The mineral composition is consistent with existing spectroscopic data but the granular detail is unprecedented!" Pioneer was already crouching, her mechanical fingers hovering just above the surface. "We're observing individual crystalline structures. This shouldn't be possible with remote observation alone."
"The telescope isn't just observing." Voyager's voice was quiet, almost awed. "It's transporting our perceptual framework directly to the target. We're not seeing Mercury. We're... experiencing it."
Opportunity turned in a slow circle, her red hair floating strangely in the absence of wind. "This is beyond our projected parameters. Significantly beyond. The cognitive load distribution is functioning better than…"
She stopped.
Everyone stopped.
Rowbotham was standing among them.
He was not wearing a metal cap. He was connected to the web of light threads. His white cloak drifting in the gravity that should not exist, his greatsword absent, his expression caught in confusion.
"The sphere," he said quietly. "On the back. It must have connected me to this network."
No one answered him. Not because they were ignoring him, but because something had changed.
The Far Beyond group was no longer talking. They stood motionless, their faces slack, their eyes fixed on the horizon. Opportunity's hand was still raised, frozen mid-gesture. Curiosity's mouth was still open, the next word caught in his throat. Pioneer was perfectly still, her pale eyes unblinking.
Shmuel did not move. Imogen did not move.
Only Kamina and Voyager remained.
Voyager reached out and touched Kamina's sleeve. His small fingers gripped the fabric tightly. "Something's wrong," he said. "The observation protocol was meant to distribute the cognitive load. It shouldn't have immobilized them. It should have..."
The surface of Mercury flickered.
The grey plain, the ancient craters, the glittering magnesium fields, all of it wavered like a reflection in disturbed water. And then it dissolved entirely, and there was nothing beneath it.
Black. Not the black of night or shadow, but the black of absence. The black of a place where something had been erased so completely that even the memory of its existence could not linger. The web of light threads still connected them, but the threads now stretched into an infinite void, their pale luminescence the only remaining evidence that the universe had ever existed at all.
The void was not empty.
Kamina saw it first. Voyager saw it second, and only because the metal cap on his head forced his perception to align with Kamina's, to share the cognitive burden of an observation that should not have been possible. The other children stood frozen. Shmuel and Imogen were motionless. Rowbotham watched from somewhere behind them, his presence a faint pressure at the edge of awareness.
And in the center of the void, a figure stood.
It was human-shaped. That was the only descriptor that fit, and it fit poorly, the way a word torn from a different language might approximate a meaning without ever touching it. The figure had arms and legs and a head and a torso, but these were not limbs in any biological sense. They were suggestions of form, outlines drawn by an artist who had only ever heard humans described and had never seen one. The figure's body was not flesh or metal or light. It was censored. Not hidden behind something, but fundamentally obscured, as though reality itself had declined to render it fully. Where its features should have been, there was only the visual equivalent of silence. Static that was not static. A gap in perception that the mind slid off like water off glass.
Voyager's small hand tightened on Kamina's sleeve. His breathing was shallow and rapid, the only sign of the terror that must have been coursing through him. He was ten years old. He had been tested for mental resilience and found extraordinary. But no test could have prepared him for this.
"There's something there," Voyager whispered. His voice was thin, barely audible. "I can't see it properly. My mind won't let me. Every time I try to look directly at it, my perception just... slides away. It's like trying to stare at the sun, but the sun isn't bright. The sun is just... not for me. Not meant for me to see."
Kamina looked at the figure. The figure looked back.
And Kamina did not look away.
"I can see you," Kamina said. His voice was steady, curious rather than afraid. "You're fuzzy around the edges, but you're there. What are you?"
The figure's head tilted. The motion was almost human, but the geometry of it was wrong, the angle slightly too sharp, the duration slightly too long.
"#$%#@$^," the figure said.
The sound was not a sound. It bypassed the ears entirely and arrived directly in the brain, and even then it was mangled, the syllables stripped of meaning by some intervening force. But Kamina heard it. Not the words, not exactly, but the shape of them. The intent behind them.
"You're asking what I am," Kamina said. "That's funny. I was about to ask you the same thing."
The figure made a gesture that might have been a shrug or might have been the folding of wings that did not exist. "#$@$#%*&," it said. "&^%$#@."
"A long time," Kamina said. "You've been here a long time. Longer than the City. Longer than... anything." He paused, considering. "But you're not from here, are you?"
The figure did not confirm or deny. It simply watched him with the patient attention of something that had observed countless beings across countless millennia and found most of them unremarkable.
Voyager was trembling now. To his eyes, Kamina was speaking to empty void, addressing a nothing-shape that his mind refused to process. "Kamina," he whispered, "who are you talking to? There's nothing there. There's nothing there, and it's still breaking my head just to look at the place where it should be."
"Stay with me," Kamina said, not taking his eyes off the figure. "You're stronger than the others. That's why you're still moving. Hold on a little longer."
The figure spoke again. "#$%&*@, #$@#%&."
"You want to know what I am," Kamina said. "Same as I want to know what you are. We're both asking the same question from opposite sides of something." He paused. "I'm human. I died once and woke up somewhere else, and my body does things that people aren't usually supposed to do. Probably because I'm the one and only."
The figure went very still.
"@#$%&*," it said. The tone was a bit different. "#$@#%&*! #$%&@#$%."
"You've seen something like me before," Kamina said. "Or something close enough. Something that shouldn't exist but does. Something that breaks the rules just by being alive."
The figure nodded. The motion was slow and deliberate, and it carried a weight that made the void around them tremble.
Voyager pressed his face against Kamina's arm. "Please," he whispered, "please, I can feel it trying to look at me, I can feel it, my head is…"
"Almost done," Kamina said. His hand found Voyager's shoulder and squeezed once, firmly. "Almost done. Just hold on."
He looked back at the figure. At the censored shape that watched him from across the impossible void. At the thing that had been here since before the City, before the Wings, before any of the structures humanity had built to make sense of a senseless world.
"I've got one more question," Kamina said.
The figure waited.
"#$@#%&*!"
"You've been watching us for a long time. You've seen everything we've built and everything we've destroyed. You've seen people reach for things that break them. You are beyond the stars, and you've seen what's created them." He paused. "Who are you? What do I call a thing like you?"
The figure smiled.
It was not a human smile. It was impossible, the expression one that a human face could never reproduce. But Voyager saw it. In that moment, the mental barriers that had been protecting him, the walls his mind had built to shield itself from something it could not process, those barriers collapsed. And Voyager saw the smile.
The figure turned its attention to the small boy clinging to Kamina's arm. It looked at Voyager with something that might have been curiosity or might have been recognition or might have been something that had no human equivalent.
"#$#%@," the figure said. "@#@$&*... Hermes."
The name landed like a rocket hitting the skull directly.
Voyager screamed.
It was not a scream of pain, though there was pain in it. It was not a scream of fear, though there was fear in it. It was the scream of a mind being forced open, of boundaries being erased, of a consciousness that had been human and contained and finite suddenly being asked to hold something infinite.
Information flooded into him. Millions of messages. Millions of discrete packets of knowledge, each one too vast for a human brain to process, each one arriving simultaneously, each one demanding to be understood. He saw the birth of stars and the death of galaxies. He saw the movements of planets and the migrations of civilizations that had risen and fallen before Earth had cooled from its molten infancy. He saw the spaces between spaces, the gaps in reality where things older than time had waited and watched and whispered. He saw the sky as it truly was, not a dome of distant lights but a living thing, a breathing thing, a thing that watched back.
And at the center of it all, he saw the figure. Not censored now. Not obscured. Clear and bright and terrible, its form resolving into something that was not a shape but a concept, not a being but a function, not a god but something adjacent to godhood that had existed for so long that the distinction had ceased to matter.
His eyes were open. His mouth was open. His mind was open.
And it would not close again.
The final word was.
"%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%"
The sound tore through the void like a blade through paper. It was not language. It was not communication in any sense that a human mind could grasp. It was the raw, unfiltered presence of something that existed on a frequency entirely separate from mortal comprehension. The threads of light connecting the observers snapped. The void collapsed. And the world shattered into fragments of displaced space and fractured time.
Kamina felt the sensation of falling. It was not the controlled descent of a jump or the panicked tumble of a missed step. It was the violent, disorienting plunge of a body being hurled through reality by a force that did not care where it landed. He twisted in midair, his arms closing around the two small figures nearest to him, Curiosity and Pioneer, and pulled them against his chest. The ground was coming up fast.
They crashed through the roof of a building.
Steel beams screamed. Concrete crumbled. Drywall exploded into clouds of white dust. Kamina's back took the first impact, his body plowing through three floors of a ruined highrise before they finally came to a stop in a heap of shattered masonry and twisted rebar. He lay still for a moment, his arms still wrapped around the children, his lungs forcing air back into his chest.
Curiosity coughed. Pioneer stirred. Both of them were alive.
"You okay?" Kamina's voice was hoarse.
"Define okay," Curiosity wheezed. "I think I've got plaster in places plaster isn't meant to go."
"We're alive," Pioneer said quietly. "That's more than enough."
Kamina untangled himself from the debris and rose to his feet. The building around them was a skeleton of its former self, the walls blown out, the floors sagging, the ceiling open to a sky that was not the sepia-toned grey of T Corp's Nest but something darker. Something filled with smoke.
Across the city, the others were scattered like seeds thrown to the wind.
Imogen had reacted on instinct. The moment the void collapsed and the falling began, her E.G.O. had ignited. The burning robes of [Effloresced E.G.O:: Wedlocked] wrapped around her body, the crown of blackened wood settling on her head, and she caught Voyager's limp form against her chest. The Barrett-11 was in her free hand, its molten surface casting orange light across the smoke-filled air.
They landed hard in an open field. The ground was churned mud and torn grass, scarred by trenches and craters that spoke of prolonged conflict. Smoke hung in thick curtains across the horizon, reducing visibility to a few dozen meters in any direction. And in that smoke, figures moved.
Imogen held Voyager closer. The boy was unresponsive, his eyes open but unseeing, his mind still lost in the cascade of information that had flooded it. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest, rapid and uneven, but he was alive. That was all she could do for him now.
The figures in the smoke resolved into shapes. Human shapes. But wrong. Arms that were not arms, but chitinous blades. Heads that were not heads, but compound eyes and clicking mandibles. Wings that buzzed and hummed with the particular frequency of insects. They wore the remnants of military uniforms, their insignia torn and faded, their bodies augmented with the grotesque bio-mechanics of a fallen Wing.
And they were fighting.
Across the battlefield, white cloaks moved through the smoke. Proselytes of the Index, their cloaks still short, their movements still learning the deadly precision of the Proxies they shadowed. They fought in small groups, families of five or six, their weapons flashing as they cut down the insectoid soldiers. One of them fell. Another stepped into the gap. The rhythm of violence was practiced, methodical, almost ritualistic.
Imogen did not know where she was. She did not know when she was. She only knew that she had to protect Voyager, and that the battle was getting closer.
Shmuel landed on a rooftop.
Opportunity was in his arms, her red hair whipping across her face as they descended. He twisted at the last moment, his mechanical legs absorbing the impact, the rooftop cracking beneath his boots but holding. He set Opportunity down carefully, his eyes already scanning the horizon.
They were in a ruined office building. The walls were pocked with bullet holes and scorched by explosives. Papers fluttered in the wind. A shattered window frame looked out onto a cityscape that Shmuel did not recognize. The architecture was familiar, Backstreets architecture, the same bones as every district in the City but the skyline was wrong. Buildings that should have been there were absent. Others stood where they should not.
Rowbotham was already at the window.
He had landed on his own, his body absorbing the impact with the same durability that had shrugged off Imogen's combustible rounds. His white cloak was torn at the edges, his black formal attire dusty but intact. He stood motionless, staring out at the smoke-choked city, at the insectoid soldiers swarming through the streets, at the white-cloaked figures cutting them down.
His hand tightened on the windowsill.
"The Smoke War," he said. His voice was quiet, but it carried a weight that silenced the room. "This is the Smoke War. The fall of Old L Corp. The fall of Old G Corp." He turned his head, his single visible eye meeting Shmuel's. "We are in the past. We are currently in the Smoke War. Prepare for the worst"