The wait isthe worst part.
I've been through crises before. I've been shot at, locked down, held hostage in my own lab while men with guns decided whether my research was worth more than my life. I've felt fear as a physical thing, metallic and sharp, living in the back of my throat like something I'd swallowed wrong. But those moments had the mercy of happening fast. Violence is quick. Even when it's not quick, it feels quick, because the body floods with enough adrenaline to compress time into a series of snapshots. You don't experience it in real time. You experience it in retrospect, piecing together the fragments after your hands stop shaking.
This is different. This is watching something happen slowly enough to feel every second of it, and not being able to do a single useful thing except watch and wait and translate data that the universe has not given me the tools to understand.
The anomaly keeps growing. The energy readings keep climbing. The tachyon signal keeps repeating, that same structured burst on a loop, and I've analyzed it seven different ways and the only thing I can tell with certainty is that it's artificial. Someone made this signal. Someone is sending it. And it's getting stronger, which means whatever is sending it is getting closer.
Minutes pass. They feel like hours, each one stretching and distorting until I lose track of how many have gone by. I checkthe chrono on my console. Six minutes since the signal first clarified. It feels like sixty.
Ethan stands beside me, solid and still, and I'm aware of him the way I'm always aware of him now. The warmth of his body close to mine. The rhythm of his breathing, measured and deliberate, the way he breathes when he's controlling his own adrenaline response. He learned that somewhere before me, in some other life where he stood in rooms like this and waited for things to go wrong, and the steadiness of it grounds me in a way I didn't know I needed.
I don't reach for his hand again. I don't need to. He's here. That's enough.
"Energy spike," someone calls from the sensor station to my left. "Massive. The formation is restructuring."
I see it on my screen before I hear the confirmation. The anomaly's pattern is changing, that breathlike pulse shifting into something faster, more urgent, the peaks sharpening until the waveform looks less like a heartbeat and more like contractions. Something is being born or forced through, and the energy required to make it happen is enough to light up every warning indicator on my board in a cascade of amber and red.
"The aperture is widening," I report. "Significantly. Diameter is up thirty percent and climbing."
"Gravitational lensing detected," another voice adds. "Something with mass is transiting."
Transiting. Such a clinical word for what I'm watching on the screen. A hole in reality is opening wider, and something is pushing through it, and we're all standing here in our little metal box in the void using words like "transiting" because the actual vocabulary for this moment doesn't exist yet.
"Visual in ninety seconds," Ethan says. His voice is calm. His jaw is tight.
I count them. Every one.
The ship comesthrough the anomaly like something expelled from a wound.
Small. That's the first thing I register. Not a warship, not an invasion fleet, not any of the apocalyptic scenarios that have been running through my head for the past forty days. A single vessel, compact enough to fit in one of Veridian-7's secondary docking bays, trailing energy residue from the anomaly in bright arcs that dissipate against the black.
It's damaged. I can see that even on the sensor readout before the visual feed resolves. Hull breaches patched with what looks like improvised plating. One engine nacelle dark, the other running at maybe sixty percent, sputtering with a frequency that suggests it's minutes from failure. The ship is limping, dragging itself through normal space like something that barely survived the crossing.
And it's transmitting.
"Audio signal detected," I say, my fingers already isolating the frequency. "Standard emergency band. It's hailing us."
"Put it through," Zane orders.
The static clears. A voice fills the command center, crackling with interference, distant and distorted, but unmistakably human.
"This is Marcus St. Laurent. Requesting emergency docking. I have survivors."
The words land in the room like a grenade with the pin pulled, that split second between release and detonation where everyone's brain is still processing what they heard and the explosion hasn't hit yet. I watch it happen in real time. The sensor operators freezing at their consoles. Zane's hands going still on the arms of his chair. The tactical officer mid-reach for her display, her arm suspended in the air like she's forgotten how to complete the motion.
And Talia.
I see her face. I'm close enough to watch it happen, the way color drains from a person when the blood retreats inward, as if the body is trying to protect the vital organs from the impact of something that isn't physical. Her lips part. Her eyes go wide, and then wider, and the tablet slips from her fingers and hits the deck with a sharp crack that nobody reacts to because nobody can move.
Zane is out of his chair and beside her before the tablet finishes bouncing. His hand on her arm, his marks already glowing with the reflected force of her emotional response, those bioluminescent lines along his skin flaring bright enough to cast shadows on the console behind him. She's shaking. I can see it from here, a fine tremor running through her whole frame like the vibration of an overstressed hull.
"Talia." Zane's voice, low and careful, the voice he uses only for her, stripped of command and rank and everything except the raw need to reach her before she goes wherever she's about to go in her own head.
"He's alive." Her voice cracks on the second word. "He's alive and he never..." She can't finish. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth, pressing hard, as if she can hold back the sound of twenty years of grief reorganizing itself into something she doesn't have a name for.
The command center is watching. Everyone is watching. But Zane stands between Talia and the room like a wall, his body angled to give her the only privacy available in a space made of glass and screens, his hand steady on her arm while his marks pulse with the color of her pain.
I look away. Not because I don't care, but because some things aren't mine to see.
