"One more jump," she whispered. "I have one more in me."
He pressed his forehead to hers. Brief. Warm.
"Make it count."
She poured everything into it.
The portal screamed open—not the clean, golden tear she'd managed before, but a jagged wound in reality that flickered between colors no human eye should process. Hazel grabbed Nate and jumped.
They hit nothing. Fell into nothing. Hung suspended in a space that was neither here nor there, a corridor between worlds made of overlapping dimensional membranes that rippled like heat shimmer off summer asphalt. The walls—if walls was the right word—showed glimpses of every realm they'd passed through. Forest. Crystal. Sky. All of them bleeding together at the seams.
"The portals are destabilizing!" The Codex burned against her chest, feeding her data she didn't want. Structural collapse. Dimensional membrane integrity at twelve percent and dropping. The waypoint network, built by practitioners centuries dead, was shredding itself apart under the strain of their passage.
Nate's detection magic sparked weakly at his fingertips. He shook his hand, tried again. Nothing but a faint green flicker. "Our magic is too drained to maintain them!"
A membrane to their left tore. Through it she caught a flash of the crystal caves, already dark, already claimed. To their right, another membrane bulged inward like something pressing against a soap bubble from the other side.
The Collector's face appeared in the distortion. Not one face—dozens, layered over each other, cycling through every identity he'd ever stolen. Old and young. Male and female. All wearing the same patient smile.
"Nowhere left to run, my precious pair."
His voice came from everywhere, vibrating through the membrane walls. The corridor narrowed. Hazel felt it physically—dimensional pressure squeezing them like a fist. Her ears popped. Nate's nose bled.
She searched the Codex's knowledge with shaking hands pressed flat against its cover. Every emergency waypoint was compromised. Every portal path collapsed or corrupted. Except?—
There. Buried so deep in the Codex's memory she almost missed it. A sanctuary realm. Not a waypoint but a blind spot, a pocket dimension folded into the gaps between gaps. Old magic. Older than The Collector. Built by practitioners who'd understood that sometimes the only escape was a place that didn't technically exist.
"Nate." She grabbed his face. Blood from his nose smeared against her palm. "I need everything you have left."
"Hazel, if we don't make it?—"
"We will. Together."
His jaw tightened under her hands. He didn't argue, didn't hedge, didn't calculate odds. He kissed her, hard and fast, tasting of copper and ozone, and she felt his remaining magic surge into hers like a river breaking through a dam.
She turned that surge into a needle and punched through the floor of reality.
They dropped into warmth.
Soft grass. Real sunlight—or something close enough that her skin couldn't tell the difference. A meadow ringed by silver birch trees that hummed with protective frequencies so ancient the Codex couldn't date them. The air tasted clean. Nothing watched them here.
The entry point sealed behind them with a sound like a book closing.
Hazel collapsed. Nate collapsed beside her. They lay on their backs in the grass, breathing hard, magic so depleted she couldn't have lit a candle.
"He tracked us through every dimension." Nate stared at the impossible blue sky. "Every single one."
"Our bond." She turned her head to look at him. Grass tickled her cheek. "He follows the resonance. The stronger our connection, the brighter we burn."
"So we can't hide. We can't outrun him."
She reached over and laced her fingers through his. Even empty of magic, the contact felt like coming home.
"No." She squeezed his hand. "We go back. We face him in Assjacket, where our people are, where the Codex is strongest. Where the fight is ours to choose."
Nate rolled onto his side. Grass stains on his shirt, blood drying on his lip, green eyes steady as bedrock.
"Together?"
