Together

My head throbbed as I pushed myself up, the room tilting in and out of focus. The walls cracked, yellowed, a torn curtain flapping against a window frame with no glass. The pile in the corner looked like junk, weapons, rusted tools, scraps of things that might’ve been useful once.

I knew this place.

“So are you a bounty hunter or something?” Juno asked me long ago, pointing at my wanted paper.

The building. The same one.

Where I had fought Gideon.

“Piss-eyed princess!” His words echoed in my brain.

My stomach knotted.

“Sylvi, you’re awake?!”

I turned. Juno stood at the doorway, surprise flashing across his face, then relief.

I couldn’t return it. My mouth moved, but only one word left me.

“Gideon.”

His expression faltered.

He looked away, voice quieter.

“He’s gone.”

He left before I could ask again. His footsteps faded into the hall.

I sat there, staring at my hands.

“I’m alive because he isn’t.”

Useless.

I pressed my palms into my eyes until I saw nothing but darkness.

Eventually I gathered myself, and took a step out the room and into the hallway. rooms lined them, all closed except one where I heard distant chatter. I walked closer, the voices becoming legible when I stepped through the door frame.

“One twenty one, one twenty two…”

Rilke was doing what looked to be one arm one leg pushups.

“Do one fifty and then we’ll do crunches.” In the corner of the room, hiding in the shade was Cassian, “then we’ll move onto crunches.”

Rilke groaned in protest, “Cass what’s the point of all this! This is so—“

“Wait… are you using your gloves to make you lighter?!”

She visibly flinched in response, losing balance, tumbling over.

A sigh disguised as a sharp exhale escaped him.

They gathered in this room like a bad impression of a family — stiff, half-exhausted, each of them carrying the desert on their shoulders. Vassier had insisted on everyone being present before they pushed deeper “into whatever the hell this is.” He stood in the center like a man who’d been keeping secrets for too long and finally ran out of excuses.

Juno stood beside me. He caught “You pointed to this thing on the way here,” he said, looked at Vassier. “I thought I recognized it.”

Vassier’s laugh was dry. “It sticks out like a sore thumb,” he said. “Nothing else for miles. No other possible option.” His eyes flicked over the group, Gideon’s weighed everyone down in silence. “We don’t have much time. We don’t know how far whatever you’re looking for is, and Exidus recalibrated—” he gestured at the heap of metal they’d left writhing in the sand — “we can’t be sitting here making speeches.”

Cassian was leaned against the wall now, cigarette between two fingers though none of them felt like breathing. Rilke darted glances at everyone, mouth moving even when she wasn’t speaking, like she was arguing with ghosts. The air smelled faintly of oil and old incense — old enough to be sweet and wrong.

They started toward the door, Vassier already in motion, the rest of us following because there was nothing else to do. I lagged behind, the room tilting every time I tried to catch the edges of the moment. Juno noticed and, without thinking, reached out and patted my shoulder. The touch was a small, steady thing. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We moved down a hall that smelled of dust and rust, the light thinning as if the building itself were trying to hold its breath. At the end of it the hall opened onto a balcony that looked down over the heart of the structure — an atrium so old it seemed to be remembering its own decay. Rilke had already leaned over the rail, scarf whipping, peering into the gloom below.

“It’s a long way down,” she said, almost to herself. She frowned. “What’s with that crater?”

I knew before she finished. The word struck me like a thrown stone: crater. A dent in the floor, a rupture, a place the world had given up on holding. I looked and everything fell into place with the slow, realization.

Juno’s eyes met mine. There was that same recognition, the same weight. “It’s the spot,” he said quietly.

My chest narrowed. The floor of the atrium below — a jagged, blackened ring like a burnt wound — was the place he had jumped from. The very balcony on which we stood now had been the second-floor ledge he’d climbed when madness or courage or something else had pushed him over Gideon. The memory hit my teeth — the scream, the fall, Gideon’s shape moving through the air — and it made my fingers numb.

Rilke’s voice cut through, practical and too loud. “If that’s the crater we saw, it should be shallow, right? Or… we could try to climb down, but that would be stupid.” She grinned a little, something brittle.

Cassian answered before Juno or Vassier could. “We can rappel,” he offered. “We’ve got rope. We’ve got—” he checked his pockets like a man scanning his life for tools.

Vassier’s hand was already on the rail. He looked down into the darkness and then back at us. “The structure’s old,” he said. “It’s been hollowed for who knows how long. Whatever’s below may be what they built to protect Solaris — or what they used to hide it. We don’t know its condition. We don’t know if the rim is stable.” His gaze snagged on me and softened, and I hated the way it made the pity feel like another wound.

Juno’s laugh was a sound too rough to be humor. “Or,” he said, “we jump like idiots.”

I stared at him. He stared at me. There was something stubborn and stupid and merciful in that look, and for a second I felt like a child who could be bribed into bravery with a hand held out.

“Together?” I said before I could stop myself. My voice came out thin, but the word felt like a lifeline thrown between us.

“Together,” he answered.

They argued, muted and practical, about ropes and angles and whether the rubble would cushion a fall. Rilke said it would probably snap a leg; Cassian said it would rip you to threads. Vassier calculated odds and named distances. All of it blurred into white noise; I only heard the thump of my heart.

We shuffled to the far end of the balcony. I felt the grain of the rail under my palms, felt how old wood gives with time under pressure. The space between us and the space below yawned out until it was a thing you could fall into like a promise.

Juno stood beside me. He smelled like sand and sweat and the copper tang of blood. He slipped one arm around me to steady me on the ledge; his other hand found hold of the railing. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

Rilke counted off something under her breath. Cassian tied ropes with the indifferent care of someone who’d stitched men back together. Vassier’s jaw was a line. The room held its breath with us.

One last look. One last, ridiculous, human thing: we bumped shoulders like friends do before a dive.

“Ready?” Juno asked.

“Ready,” I whispered.

We pushed off together.

For the first second, it felt like flying — the old, terrible, clean kind. The wind tore at my face. My stomach did that stupid flip that meant you were alive and stupid and whole. The world opened, a cavern swallowing light, and the echo of everyone’s shouts fell away.

Then the balcony did not give a little.

It gave completely.

The rail popped like a snapped twig. The floor screamed an animal sound as it tore along an ancient seam. The ropes jerked, once, twice—then the ground itself heaved, throwing up a curtain of dust.

“Mamaguevo!” Cassian howled—an instinctive, ugly note that turned the panic bright for a second.

“Did you just—wait—did you just speak Span—? WHAT THE ACTUAL FU—” Juno barked, half-laugh, half-scream, his words breaking into the roar as the ledge finally let go.

The metal ropes jerked once, twice, and then the ground beneath us threw itself forward in a shower of dust.

Juno grabbed for me. I grabbed for him.

The crater opened wide, darkness took both of us, swallowing us whole.

Meanwhile…

We could only watch as the balcony gave out. One second they were standing there, the next—gone. Stone cracked, and Sylvi and Juno disappeared into the crater like the earth itself had swallowed them whole.

For a heartbeat, no one moved. Just the echo of breaking stone ringing through the place.

“Come on, let’s go!” I bolted from the balcony, sand grinding under my boots. Vassier followed, his heavier steps pounding like hammers, and Cassian trailed just behind.

A few seconds later, we were under the balcony, staring at the jagged lip of the crater. The thing yawned downward into black nothing. No end. No sound. Just gone.

“Fucking idiots…” Vassier muttered, leaning over the edge. His voice echoed, flat. “All that planning and they jump headfirst into a sinkhole.”

“You think they’re alive?” I asked, not bothering to hide the bluntness.

Vassier shrugged like it didn’t matter either way. “They wouldn’t die that easily.”

I turned to my side. “Hey, Cass, what do you think—”

“Cass?”

He wasn’t listening. His eyes were wide, too wide, reflecting some manic glint I’d never seen before. Not even when he stayed up three days straight tinkering with some deathtrap of a gadget.

“Cassia—”

“He said it.”

His voice cracked, low at first. His hand shot up to cover his mouth as a laugh bled out anyway.

“What the hell are you—”

“He knew the language!” Cassian burst out, his laugh breaking free, unstoppable. He doubled over, still holding his mouth, shoulders shaking like he’d lost it.

Vassier’s gaze sharpened. Mine just narrowed.

“I thought I was the only one,” Cassian said between fits of laughter, breathless, his words trembling with a feverish awe. “The only one who was transported from another world. But him—Juno—he knew it. He knew it without hesitation!”

He finally dropped his hand from his face, teeth showing in a grin too wide for the moment.

“This is… unfathomable.”

I don’t know what the hell he’s hooting for, Vassier just ignored it.

“Whatever world you think he belongs to, Cass, doesn’t matter. What matters is we figure out how to get them back—or at least move forward before—”

A sound cut him off.

Not the wind. Not the groan of old stone.

A drag. A weight. A rhythm too heavy to belong to anything human.

We turned as one.

Exidus stepped out from the shadows of the hall we’d just fled. Its frame was shredded, dented, still dripping.

Blood streaked across its arms, dark and thick, meat ground into metal. Gideon’s. Maybe others. My stomach lurched.

Its single red visor pulsed in the dark like it had been waiting.

Hunting.

“Shit,” I breathed. My throat tightened.

Cassian finally stopped laughing. The sound died in him like someone crushed it.

“Run,” Vassier said, but he didn’t move. His eyes never left the machine. His jaw was set like he was about to face something he’d spent his entire life dreading.

I grabbed Cassian’s arm, dragged him, and we bolted. Exidus’s steps followed—slow, deliberate. It didn’t need to hurry.

The halls blurred as we stumbled deeper into the structure, dust, walls splitting in their age. At one point I looked back and saw it moving through the dark, not fast, just inevitable.

We burst through a set of rotted doors, into what looked like the building’s gutted heart. Cracked pillars. Collapsed stairs, no exits except the way they entered…

Cassian clutched his side, wild-eyed. “We’re trapped,” he rasped.

“No,” Vassier said, voice low. “Not trapped. Cornered.” His hand hovered near the weapon at his belt, though even he knew it wouldn’t matter.

The scrape of metal against stone carried through the chamber, steady as a heartbeat. Exidus entered the room, red visor glowing through the gloom, each step leaving a wet streak on the cracked floor.

Exidus stopped, visor glowing red in the dark.

“You think you are in danger.”

The chamber went still.

“But it is not you.” The machine’s head tilted toward the crater, slow and deliberate. “It is the child of gold himself.”