She was lying on cold concrete. The air smelled of ozone and wet ash. Something hissed in the distance, a dying vent, or a failing reactor.The blast site stretched around her like the inside of a ruptured lung: twisted metal ribs, steam rising through the fractures, the faint glow of residual circuitry still fighting to breathe.“Chris” Her voice cracked. She pushed herself upright, pain needling up her arms. The motion sent a thousand white dots across her vision. Her ears rang, thin and constant.No answer.She scanned the chamber, or what was left of it. Half the ceiling was gone. A section of wall had collapsed inward, revealing a chute of scorched earth beyond. Every few seconds, a dull thud sounded deep underground, as if something alive was shifting beneath the ruin.Deborah staggered to her feet. Her balance felt wrong, like the floor was tilting even when it wasn’t.She touched her temple. A small shard of glass fell away, glinting red. Beneath it, skin, not bleeding, but fa

The tunnel screamed as metal folded on itself. Deborah threw herself forward, feeling heat lick the back of her neck. A wall of sparks chased her down the passage, lighting the walls in frantic orange bursts.“Move, move!” she shouted at no one, lungs raw.The corridor narrowed, forcing her sideways between broken conduits. The floor buckled under her weight, a hollow clang reverberating deep below. Somewhere in the dark, the echo of her own voice kept whispering, “You can’t outrun yourself.”“Watch me.”She hit the next junction and froze. The path forked, left sloped down into pitch-black water, right flickered with green light. Behind her, the collapse roared closer. She didn’t think; she ran right.The air thickened, metallic and humid. Lights strobed overhead as she entered another chamber, smaller, circular, lined with cylindrical tanks. Something shimmered inside the glass, pale forms suspended in fluid, half-grown, half erased. Faces like hers.Her stomach twisted. “No, what i

Silence,then breath, Deborah opened her eyes and saw no ceiling, no floor only the faint shimmer of light suspended in a colorless void. Her limbs felt light, unmoored, as though gravity had been erased.When she tried to move, the motion rippled outward, folding the air like water. A whisper followed. “Don’t struggle yet.”The voice sounded almost like hers, but older, the way she imagined herself after decades of sleeplessness.She turned toward it. Shapes flickered in and out of existence, corridors, a doorway, her reflection standing several feet away, flickering like a broken hologram.“Where am I?” she whispered.“Inside what’s left.”The other Deborah smiled without warmth. Her eyes glowed faintly, lines of light tracing through her skin like circuitry. Every blink left after images that hung in the air.“Left of what?”“You. Me. The bridge between.”Her voice carried a resonance that made the space hum. Deborah’s chest tightened. The walls of the void began to assemble themsel

The wall beside them vibrated, soft, like breathing. They both froze.Then a whisper rolled through the corridor, so low it barely carried “Residual process continuing.”Chris killed the flame. The dark swallowed them whole again. “Run?” he whispered.“Quietly.”They began crawling through the wreckage, guided only by the cold draft that hinted at an exit. Each movement set loose faint glows from broken wires, ghost-light flickers that painted their faces and died.Somewhere deeper in the facility, a single tone pulsed, beep, ten seconds later beep, It followed them, patient.Deborah’s pulse matched it until she couldn’t tell which was hers. They reached a service hatch half-buried under debris. Chris shoved at it, it moved an inch, then jammed.He tried again, teeth bared. “Help me.”Together they pushed, the hatch gave way with a metallic scream that echoed down the tunnel like a warning.The beeping stopped, total stillness.Chris’s whisper was barely sound “Go.”They crawled throu

Light too much of it. Cold, liquid, electric. It poured through Deborah’s eyes like acid and memory, all at once. She gasped, but no air came. The sound that left her throat wasn’t human a distorted echo of itself.The world around her flickered between forest and code. Trees that weren’t trees vertical lines of light, flickering glyphs replacing bark.The ground rippled like glass, splitting into reflections of places she remembered, Her father’s office. The café, The night she first met Chris. All spliced together like someone was editing her life in real time.“Chris?” she whispered.Her voice came back a second later, out of sync, Chris?Chris?Echoing through the world like data lag. Then he appeared. Running through the light, fragments of his outline breaking apart and reassembling. He grabbed her by the shoulders, but his touch felt electric not skin, not warmth, but a current.“Stay with me,” he said, or maybe the world said it through him. His eyes flickered, reflecting gold