Chapter 25
JAELA
Ican feel the rumble before I see it—like the bones of the mountain knowing we’re stealing power. The floor beneath me vibrates. Dust drifts in every seam. The ruin shakes. Glyph lights flicker and pulse faster, responding to something wild behind the walls.
Kyldak is crouched beside me, one arm braced on a control panel, his other hand clasping mine, his cybernetic core humming with stabilized feedback.
The device we’ve awakened—the wormhole generator—breathes energy, coils of light sliding across glass and metal.
I’ve tied the circuits, calibrated the resonance pathways, matched his core’s output to the glyph conduits.
Now we’re tethered to it.
I call out, voice trembling: “I’ve got the sync. You keep the tether stable.”
He nods, jaw set, eyes blazing in the low light. “Don’t die.”
I swallow. “You too.”
The coils flare. A ribbon of blue-white energy arcs across the chamber, threads of luminosity weaving a door in the fabric of reality. The wormhole begins to form. A portal opening into the unknown.
But the earth beneath us groans. Cracks spider outward across the stone, conduits shudder, glyph panels fracture. The mountain’s core fights to reclaim what we steal. The ruin groans, walls splitting, metal groaning in protest.
From the entrance, the warband retreats—engines roaring, orders shouted. They know: this is the moment we risk everything. They scramble, pulling back down the corridors to safety, leaving us alone with the machine’s hum and the mountain’s wrath.
“Time’s going,” I yell. “We have seconds!”
He grips my hand harder. “Anchor with me!”
I nod fiercely. Slide behind him. We brace our bodies against the control console. The wormhole’s light pulses, flooding the chamber with glare. Heat surges. The air tastes of ozone and old power. The hum turns into a roar.
The walls tremble. Stone flakes rain. Panels crack. Power flickers. The coils flicker. The portal dips, stretches, flickers.
I feel fear in my bones. But I swallow it. Because everything depends on this.
“Come on, come on—” I chant, voice ragged, as I redirect feedback loops, stabilize resonance dampers, reroute leakage to secondary coils.
Kyldak’s cybernetic core glows, feeding energy. A lifeline. Without it, the portal collapses. His body strains. His eyes flick. Sweat beads on his brow.
The portal warps. It bends at the edges. The light sharpens in the center.
Behind us, fissures crack overhead. Dust curtains fall. Metal groaning. A roof panel splits.
“They’re coming,” he shouts. “We need to jump!”
I glance at him. Our eyes lock. The wormhole surges, widening, sucking in energy. The mountain’s roar intensifies.
My throat closes.
I grip his hand. “On three,” I shout.
He nods.
One, Two, Three.
We leap.
The light swallows us before impact. Obsidian shards vanish behind. The rumble warps. Time stretches like silk tearing. Our bodies pull, stretch, vanish.
Flash.
Then nothing.
When the world returns, I don’t know where we are. My lungs burn. My head spins. White light bathes me. Metal hums. The air tastes sterile, new, alien.
Kyldak is there—alive. I see him first. The portal’s edges behind us shimmer. I stagger toward him, knees quivering.
He catches me. Arms tight. “You okay?” he breathes.
I nod, voice shaking. “I think so.”
We stand in a chamber unlike any ruin. Walls smooth, glowing glyphs unfamiliar. The portal behind us sizzles. We stare.
A quiet hush. Our warband emerges, blinking, battered but alive.
I look at Kyldak. He looks at me. Relief, awe, terror swirl in his eyes.
I press a hand to his face. “We made it,” I whisper.
He nods. “Yes. We did.”
But underneath, something else hums. The device behind us pulses. The air vibrates. The portal remains open. The machine didn’t die. We tethered life to it.
I swallow, heart pounding. The weight of what we did begins to land.
We step forward—together—into the new world waiting.
I wake to the sound of rain.
Real rain — not acid fog, not sand-laced drizzle — the kind that smells like iron and sky.
It’s cold against my face, trickling through the cracks in my hair and down my neck.
For a long moment, I just lie there, breathing, not daring to open my eyes in case this is another cruel hallucination conjured by hypoxia or trauma.
The ground beneath me isn’t stone or glass. It’s metal. Slick, grooved, trembling faintly under weight and machinery. There’s the hum of turbines somewhere distant. The steady beeping of medtech.
A voice. Too clear, too real to belong to the dead.
“—stabilize them, now! They’re alive, I’ve got pulses on both!”
I blink my eyes open. The light hits hard — white, clinical flood beams washing across an industrial landing field. Above me, clouds churn, heavy with stormlight.
The taste of oxygen is too clean. Too Earth.
My lungs burn when I try to sit up. Hands catch me — gloved, gentle but firm. The medics. Their suits gleam white under the floodlamps, each with the EarthFleet insignia glowing blue on the arm.
Someone’s pressing a cold disc against my temple; another fastens sensors to my wrists. I see the tremor in my own hands. Not from fear — from shock.
Then I turn my head, and the rest of the world narrows to one impossible sight.
Kyldak.
He’s sprawled just a few feet away, half-buried in the twisted remains of the portal stabilizer harness. His armor is scorched, his skin smeared with soot, the gold of his scales dulled to bronze — but he’s breathing.
I can see the rise and fall of his chest. The faint red flicker of his cybernetic core under the ribs. His eye — that brilliant, feral red — flutters open.
My voice rips free before I can think.
“Kyldak!”
He groans. His hand twitches. Then that deep, rough voice — torn from a throat full of gravel and gods — manages, “Jaela?”
The sound of it nearly breaks me.
I crawl toward him, my knees scraping the metal deck, ignoring the medics shouting at me to stay still. “Don’t move,” I tell him, even as I’m shaking. “You’re… we made it, Kyldak. We made it through.”
He blinks up at me, the confusion in his eyes giving way to something softer — disbelief, then wonder, then a raw, unguarded relief. “This… this is Earth?” he rasps. His voice cracks halfway through the word Earth, like it’s something sacred and unfamiliar on his tongue.
I nod. “Yeah,” I whisper. “Earth.”
He laughs once — a short, broken exhale that sounds almost like a sob. “Smells different.”
It does. The air is sharp, wet with storm ozone and the tang of metal. It’s colder here, thinner than Jurtik’s furnace winds. The rain stings like pins against my skin, but it’s beautiful.
Before I can say more, a new roar cuts through the noise — a dropship. I squint up through the floodlights just as the heavy transport descends, repulsors hissing and spraying mud in violent gusts. The medics scatter to clear the pad.
Through the swirl of rain and light, a figure steps down the ramp.
My heart stops.
“Vira…” I whisper.
She’s here.
My sister looks impossibly out of place — pristine gray uniform half undone, rain flattening her curls against her forehead, a sidearm at her hip and a med badge around her neck. She’s running. Toward me. Toward us.
When she sees me, her composure crumbles. “Jaela!” she screams, boots splashing through puddles, and then she’s kneeling in front of me, cupping my face in trembling hands. Her eyes dart across my features like she can’t believe they exist. “You’re alive. You’re—gods, you’re really here.”
I can’t breathe. The lump in my throat’s too big. “You came.”
Her laugh’s half a sob. “You think I wouldn’t? Your drone pings went dark over the Black Glass Desert three weeks ago. I tracked the residual codes myself. You were never good at covering your digital footprints.”
Despite everything, I laugh — weak, wet, shaky. “Never said I was perfect.”
Behind us, Kyldak groans again. The medics rush to him, but he waves them off, staggering to his knees. His voice cuts through the rain, hoarse: “Jaela.”
I spin toward him and catch his shoulders as he nearly falls. He’s heavier than I remember — the weight of armor, of blood, of history — but he’s alive.
His red eye flicks to Vira, narrow, assessing. She freezes, recognition flashing like lightning. “You’re him,” she whispers. “You’re Kel’s father.”
Kyldak’s brow furrows. “Where is he?”
The words punch air out of me. I swallow, clutching his hand. My voice comes out small, reverent.
“He’s waiting.”
Kyldak’s expression fractures. He searches my face, as if afraid to believe it. “Waiting?”
I nod, tears spilling over. “Yeah. He’s alive. We got the samples through. The treatment worked. Vira kept him safe.”
Vira’s smile wobbles. “He’s in the city center, Jaela. In isolation, but stable. He’s asking for you. For both of you.”
The medics are shouting again — about vitals, about evac clearance, about “cross-contamination protocols.” None of it matters. I hold on to Kyldak’s hand like an anchor in the storm.
“We made it,” I whisper.
He nods, jaw trembling. “You got him home.”
“No,” I correct, squeezing his fingers. “We did.”
The next minutes blur. Med-teams swarm us, fitting us into stabilization harnesses, securing oxygen, wrapping our burns. Vira argues with a commander about access clearance.
“They are not going into quarantine alone!” — and I can hear the steel in her voice that’s always been there since childhood, the same steel that kept me alive back then and now.
The sky splits with thunder as we’re lifted into the dropship. I watch the ruin — the wormhole chamber, what’s left of it — shrink beneath us, swallowed by stormclouds and fire. The portal collapses in on itself, leaving only a smoldering crater glowing faint blue.
Kyldak watches it too. His reflection in the viewport is ghostlike — bruised, exhausted, impossibly human. I can tell he’s thinking what I am: that we shouldn’t have survived that. That something—someone—wanted us to.
Vira sits opposite us, drenched, pale, her eyes darting between our faces. “You two look like you’ve been through hell.”
Kyldak gives a dry laugh. “We were. But it wasn’t all bad.”
I elbow him gently. “Says the guy who decapitated a warlord before breakfast.”
He smirks faintly. “You started it.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
Vira blinks at us, incredulous. “Gods, you’re flirting already?”
I grin, though my lip splits. “Apparently.”
Kyldak’s smirk fades, though. He leans closer, voice low. “I need to see him.”
I nod. “You will. Soon.”
His gaze softens. He looks like he’s not sure whether to cry or smile. His hand finds mine again and doesn’t let go.
Kyldak exhales shakily, a laugh tangled in a sob. “You were right,” he says. “We made it.”
I lean my forehead against the glass. “We did.”
And for the first time since this all began — the endless flight, the lies, the blood, the burning sand — I let myself believe it.
We’re home.
We’re whole.
And our son is waiting.