"Wait..." Vine began, but Bullet was already in motion.
He timed the pulse, feeling it build, and leaped into empty air just as the current reached its peak.
The magnetic force caught him like a giant hand, which pulled him across the gap faster than he'd expected. His stomach lurched. His scar blazed. For a moment he was flying, truly flying, held up by unseen power.
The current released him and he was falling toward the far island. He hit hard, rolling to absorb the impact, his ribs screaming in protest. But he was across.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw the others ready to follow. Thorn went next, doing it just right, his instincts serving him well. He landed awkwardly but safely, gasping with relief.
Vine followed with characteristic confidence, her vine-wrapped body helping her control the flight. She landed like a cat, already looking towards the vortex above.
Fang paused at the edge, her fear finally overcoming her loyalty to Vine. She stood there shaking, unable to make herself jump.
"Come on!" Vine yelled across the gap. Not encouragement, but a command.
Fang jumped at the wrong time. The current was waning, not building. She didn't get enough lift.
Bullet saw in slow motion. Saw her realize her mistake mid-air, saw her arms reaching desperately for the edge of the island.
She caught it...barely. Her fingers scraped moss and rock, finding a hold. She hung there, legs kicking at nothing, the void yawning beneath her.
Bullet moved without thinking. He dropped to his stomach and reached down, grabbing her wrist. The impact of catching her nearly pulled him off the edge too, but Thorn grabbed his legs, anchoring him.
They hauled her up together, dragging her onto solid ground where she collapsed, sobbing with terror and relief.
Vine watched the rescue with an expression that might have been approval or might have been calculation. With her it was always hard to tell.
"Almost there." she said, looking up at the vortex. "So close now."
The last island was only just big enough for the four of them to stand on. It was directly underneath the vortex. So close that the light was blinding, the energy making their hair stand on end with static electricity.
The pull in Bullet's chest was no longer a hook or a fire. It was a roar, a demand, a need so intense it drowned out everything else. His scar burned white-hot. Every instinct screamed at him to enter the vortex, to let it take him wherever it led.
Thorn stared upwards at the spiral of light, his tears streaming down his face. "Home." he whispered. "It's got to be. It's got to be home."
It hurt to see him so desperately hopeful. Bullet recognized it because he felt an echo of it himself, that longing for something he couldn't remember but knew he'd lost.
Vine maneuvered herself carefully around, measuring angles, regarding the vortex with tactical attention. Preparing for something, though Bullet didn't know what.
Fang hung back, pressed against the island's edge as far from the vortex as she could get. Her fear was palpable. Not just of the vortex itself, but of what it might mean if it really was a way out. That they'd suffered here for nothing. That they could have escaped years ago if they'd just been brave enough to try.
"Who goes first?" Vine asked, her voice cutting through the hum of the vortex.
Bullet caught a flicker in her eyes then, something cold and calculating, a plan crystallizing.
And then, before he could reply, Vine moved. She seized Thorn by the shoulder, spun him around, and pushed him hard.
Thorn stumbled backward, his feet slipping on the moss. His arms windmilled, trying to regain balance. His face twisted in betrayal and shock as he fell off the edge of the island.
But instead of falling to the void below, he fell upwards, caught by the vortex's pull. His body was sucked into the spiral of light and disappeared in a flash of blinding energy.
His scream echoed for a moment, then was swallowed by the hum of the vortex.
Silence fell over the island. Fang's eyes widened in horror, her mouth dropping open. Bullet's hand tightened on the pipe, his scar ablaze with anger.
Vine turned to them both, unrepentant. "Someone had to test it." she said coldly. "Better him than us."
She meant it. Truly meant it. To her internal logic, this made sense. Sacrifice the weak link to learn whether the vortex was survivable or not.
Bullet saw red. Patch's blood. Cowboy's scream. Rivet's broken body. Glow strangling in vines. And now Thorn, thrown away like garbage by someone who'd promised to help him reach whatever waited above.
He took a step toward Vine, the pipe rising.
She saw it coming and moved fast, faster than he'd expected. Her vine-wrapped arm blocked the pipe's swing, the impact sending a shockwave up his injured arm. She struck back, her fist catching his jaw, snapping his head to the side.
They fought upon that tiny island, inches from the void on all sides, with the vortex roaring above.
Vine was strong, stronger than she looked with the vines lending her unnatural power. But Bullet was rage given form, every loss fueling his strikes, every death driving him forward.
The pipe connected with her shoulder, drawing blood. She kicked his wounded thigh and caused his leg to buckle. He head-butted her, feeling her nose break under his forehead. She raked her fingers across his burns, making him howl with pain.
Fang was pressed against the edge, frozen with terror, not helping either of them.
Then Bullet's foot slipped on blood-slick moss. He fell backward, and Vine was on him immediately, her hands around his throat, squeezing.
She was inches from his face, her teeth bared in a snarl. "I've survived here for years." she hissed. "I'm not dying because of some scarred nobody."
His vision grayed at the edges. His scar burned so hot, it felt like it would sear through his chest. The pull from the vortex grew stronger, as though sensing his weakening, calling him upward.
His hand had found a rock. He brought it up hard against the side of her head.
Her grip loosened just enough. He flung her off and gasped, his throat bruised and aching.
Vine rolled away, blood streaming from the head wound. She was getting to her feet when Fang finally moved.
The terrified woman who almost plummeted to her death stepped forward. Sharp fangs flashed in the moonlight. With a speed born from fear and pent-up resentment, she plunged her knife into Vine's back.
Vine's eyes went wide. Blood bubbled from her lips. She pivoted slowly, looking at Fang with more surprise than anger, like she couldn't believe that her most ardent follower had betrayed her.
"You promised." Fang whispered, tears streaming down her face. "You promised we'd get out. But you were just going to use us all as test subjects, weren't you? Throw us in one by one until you knew it was safe."
Vine opened her mouth to respond, but only blood came out. She collapsed forward, her vine-wrapped body twitching once before going still.
Fang dropped the knife as if it had burned her. She stared at Bullet with wild, terrified eyes. "I had to. She would have killed us all. She would have..."
"I know." Bullet said quietly, his voice sounding hoarse from being strangled.
They stood amidst the aftermath. Two survivors on a small island, covered with bodies and blood, with the vortex roaring above them.
Bullet looked up at the spiral of light. Thorn had gone in and vanished. Was he dead? Was he somewhere else? There was no way to know without following.
The pull demanded it. His scar burned with need. Every fibre of his being said: Go. Now. This is the way forward.
But he'd lost Thorn. Vine's betrayal sat like a weight in his stomach. And Fang was standing there, shaking, staring at him like she expected him to kill her next.
"What do we do?" Fang asked, her voice small and broken.
Bullet looked at the vortex. Looked at Fang. Looked at the endless sky around them.
"We go up." he said. Because the pull left no other choice. Because standing still equated to dying slowly in Province 512's impossible heights. Because forward was the only direction that mattered.
He stepped off the edge of the island, letting the vortex take him.
The light swallowed him whole.
It was cold...impossibly cold. And bright...bright enough to blind.
He was falling and floating at the same time, torn in every direction at once. The light tore at his scars, at his wounds, at his very essence, trying to see what he was made of.
The pull sang inside him, a chorus of promise and demand. Home. Home. Home.
The word meant something. Stirred something deep. But what? Where was home for someone with no memory, no past, no name?
The light intensified, growing until it was everything.
Then spat him out.
He hit solid ground hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs. Cold bit into him immediately, deeper than the vortex had been. His breath misted in the air.
He opened his eyes to a new hell.
Province 713. The frozen tundra.
Snow fell in sheets that cut like tiny knives. The ground was ice. Not water ice but something crystalline and off, glowing faintly from within. Jagged spires rose all around like frozen daggers pointing at a gray sky.
The pull had shifted again, no longer pointing upwards but forward, deeper into the heart of the tundra.
He turned, seeking the vortex. It was gone, just a faint shimmer in the air where it had been. A cruel lie that had promised escape and delivered only another prison.
Fang stumbled through behind him, falling to her knees in the snow. Her face was already turning blue from the cold. Tears froze on her cheeks.
"No." she whispered, her breath misting. "No, this can't be..."
Others followed, survivors from the islands, who'd watched him enter and had decided to risk it. They emerged singly from the shimmer, their hope turning to ash as they saw where the vortex had brought them.
Not home. Not escape. Just another province. Another trial.
Thorn appeared last, his body battered from the passage of the vortex but alive. He looked around at the frozen wasteland, at the others sobbing in the snow, at the impossibility of what they'd found.
The worn bead was gone from his wrist, lost somewhere in the vortex's light. His last token of faith, vanished.
"There's no home." he said, his voice hollow and dead. "There never was. There's no home anywhere."
His hope shattered audibly. You could hear it in his voice, see it in his eyes. The thing that had kept him climbing, kept him moving, kept him alive, was gone.
He sank to his knees in the snow and didn't get up.
Bullet felt the weight of it. The betrayal of the vortex, the loss of Thorn's hope, the realization that Province 512 had been a lie wrapped in beauty. The floating islands, the auroras, the promise of escape...all that was a trap.
But the pull didn't care about betrayal or broken hope. It burned forward, pointing him deeper into the frozen wastes of Province 713 and demanding he go on despite everything.
His scar pulsed on. Steady. Unyielding. Refusing to let him stop.
Weighted regret settled over him, like a heavy cloak, mingling with memories of people he'd left behind. Patch dying in the sand. Cowboy consumed by the maw. Rivet's body broken on canyon rocks. Glow strangling in her vines. And now Thorn, his hope destroyed more thoroughly than any physical wound could accomplish.
Yet, the pull remained, a defiant fire against the cold, pressing him onward into the unknown.
He stumbled forward, into the frozen wasteland, and left behind him the broken survivors. Their cries and sobs disappeared behind him, swallowed by the wind. Before him stretched the tundra, endless and white, promising new horrors he couldn't yet imagine.
But he walked forward anyway. Because the pull demanded it. Because the scar wouldn't let him rest. Because stopping meant dying, and something in him, some core part that even amnesia couldn't erase, refused to give death that satisfaction.
Always forward. Always bleeding. Always surviving. And now, Province 713 awaited, cold and merciless, ready to test him in ways the floating islands never could.
-----
In Province 1, far from frozen tundras, in a chamber of shadow and stone, stood the leader before his console. The holographic map flickered with red pulses. The vortex of Province 512 had been breached.
The anomaly had slipped through again, teleporting in a trice from floating islands to frozen wastes.
"He's getting closer," the robed man hissed, hunched over the controls. His face was gaunt, hollowed out by sleepless vigilance. "Every province brings him nearer to..."
"I know," the leader cut him off, his voice sharp as a blade. His charcoal suit was immaculate. His steel-gray eyes cold as the tundra his prey now wandered. "Send more sentinels to 512. Clean up the survivors. And tighten the Seeker's hunt."
His fingers drummed once on the console's edge, the only sign of emotion he'd allow himself.
The man in robes was already on the controls.
Across the map, crimson-eyed hunters began stirring, their forms flickering to life in various provinces. They'd close the net. Narrow the path. Drive the anomaly toward whatever end it was the leader had in store.
The hunt was on, and in the snow of Province 713, the scar-faced man walked, not knowing just how close his pursuers actually were.