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Brakk appears ahead, hauling the anchor controls with both hands. “That was touching, and I am furious about it! Both of you get through the gap before I start biting ankles.”

The passage buckles again.

A section of ceiling drops between Anita and the gap, but it falls slowly, caught in bad gravity. She ducks beneath it and slides on one knee across the tilting floor. The shard case strikes the stone with a crack that makes my hearts seize, but the case holds. She scrambles up, one hand outstretched toward me.

I drive my claws into the edge of the folding wall and pull.

Pain tears through my shoulders. The geometry resists like living muscle. Stone, metal, and folded space grind under my grip. The gap widens by a few inches, not enough for me, barely enough for her.

“Anita, now!”

She throws herself through.

For one breath, I have her wrist.

Then the corridor convulses.

The force rips her hand from mine and hurls her forward through the gap toward Brakk and Sira. The folded section slams between us with a sound that is not stone breaking but space deciding to stop sharing. A wall seals where she had been.

I am alone on the archive side.

Anita screams my name.

Her voice comes through the wall, faint and distorted, and that small sound does more damage than the slab ever did.

I slam my fist into the sealed fold. “Anita!”

“I’m here!” Her voice shakes. “Ghar, talk to me.”

“I am on the wrong side.”

“No. Absolutely not. We are not doing that sentence.”

Brakk pounds on something from the far side. “The anchor line is still reading him, but the route is separating. Big guy, there should be a service crawl thirty meters behind you if it still exists and has not become a soup concept.”

“A soup concept?” Anita snaps.

“I am under pressure!”

I look behind me.

The corridor I came from is collapsing in segments. Amber guide-lines flicker and die one after another. Farther back, the secondary preservation nexus implodes into a white wound, and reality distortions consume the passage in expanding ripples. The floor disappears in patches, revealing depthless dark full of drifting archive symbols. The air sucks toward the collapse with increasing force.

Thirty meters.

My body gives an immediate opinion on that distance. It is not favorable.

I start moving anyway.

Each step is a negotiation with pain and physics. My injured leg nearly folds under me twice. I catch myself against the wall and leave bloody claw marks in the frost. Behind me, the collapse eats the corridor with a soft, awful sound, like cloth tearing underwater.

Anita’s voice crackles through the comm bead still clipped inside my ruined armor collar. “Ghar, answer me.”

“I am moving.”

“Good. Keep doing that. Big fan of that.”

“There is a service crawl ahead.”