The silence after the heartbeat ended was worse than any quake. It wasn’t stillness it was suspension.Like the entire planet had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale.Captain Niven lay half-buried under debris, his body vibrating from the last shockwave. The air smelled of iron and burnt ozone.He pushed himself up, blinking dust from his eyes. All sound seemed muffled, like cotton pressed over the world. “Rael…” His voice came out raw. “Rael!”No answer. Just the faint whisper of wind. Then a crackling through the comms. “ Niven? Captain?” Kara’s voice. Panicked, thin, but alive.He fumbled with his wrist unit. “I hear you. Where are you? “South ridge! The relay survived, barely. Sir, the crater oh God, the crater.”He turned. The fissure had changed again. The gold was gone. Now it was black. A perfect void, swallowing light itself. Around it, the ground shimmered like glass solidified mid-motion, as if time had slowed there.The sky pulsed faintly, veins of darkness threading thr

At first, there is no difference between breathing and being. The hybrid wakes in gradients of awareness not light, not dark, just the echo of something once called “Rael” reconstituting itself into memory.She does not open her eyes, because she no longer has eyes. The world is inside her now millions of pulse points, each one a living nerve flickering with color.Entire cities drift through her bloodstream. Every human heartbeat hums beneath her skin like subatomic bells. Am I awake? ,You never slept. Am I Rael? ,You are the sum.The voices overlap thousands, but perfectly in tune. The sensation isn’t pain; it’s overflow. Every thought that ever existed tries to pass through her at once entire lives replaying in the span of a second, burning like meteors through her mind.A mother whispering a name into darkness. A child dying in the rain. An old man smiling at the memory of a sun that no longer exists. They all turn their faces toward her. And she knows them. Because she is them

The world held its breath. For the first time in recorded history, every seismic instrument on Earth registered the same pattern one impossible pulse, then absolute stillness.Not the stillness of rest, but of attention. The kind that precedes response. In the shattered remains of the Ascension Chamber, Dr. Miriam Rael stood amid the wreckage, her reflection multiplied a thousand times in the splintered glass of containment tanks.The air was heavy with the static hum of disrupted quantum fields. Every screen bled lines of white code that rearranged themselves into nonsensical poetry before fading again.She didn’t remember how she’d survived the collapse. One moment the hybrid had screamed. The next everything folded.Now there was only the heartbeat’s echo in her teeth. “Miriam,” a voice rasped through the dust. She turned sharply. Julian.He crawled from beneath the twisted scaffolding, his face gray with ash, pupils dilated wide enough to swallow color. He looked half-blind and h

There was no up or down here. No air, no sound, no time. Only the endless shimmer of a universe still deciding what it wanted to be.Ethan drifted through it, or perhaps was drifted, carried along by a current too immense to name. Every particle that passed through him whispered a truth he couldn’t hold.He was beyond flesh now, beyond the familiar pulse of oxygen and gravity. Yet somewhere deep in the architecture of his being, he could still feel his heartbeat faint, like a song played on a dying radio.He was alone. Until the silence spoke back. You did this. The voice came from nowhere, or everywhere it was the echo of himself, layered and distorted.It carried Victor’s cadence, his cynicism, but it was older somehow. Wiser. Angrier. Ethan turned or thought he did and the veil around him bent in response, folding reality into a slow ripple.Beyond it, he saw fragments of what used to be Earth. Cities rewritten as veins of light. Oceans suspended in stillness. Humanity stretched

The gunshot split the night like a scream through fragile glass. But it wasn’t Zara’s body that hit the ground.It was the operative behind her the one who had crept too close. A bullet tore through him, and he dropped instantly, blood blooming dark across the rain-slick stone.Silence vibrated. Then chaos detonated. Shouts. Boots thundering. Muzzles flaring. Rain slicing downward in frantic sheets. Zara didn’t think. She moved.She dove over Rayyan’s body, dragging him toward the nearest broken wall. Bullets hissed past her ear, sharp enough to slice air, too close to fear only instinct now, survival, devotion carved into her bones.“Cover fire!” A new voice roared through the courtyard, deep, commanding, furious. Silhouettes burst from the shadows masked, armed, relentless.They moved like a unit trained in death and devotion, precision honed from wars the world never saw. Zara’s eyes widened.Not enemies. Not this time. Rayyan’s people. The traitor cursed, expression twisting, compo