The reinforced steel door of the bunker hissed shut, sealing out the smell of ionized ozone and the distant screams of the city. I leaned against the cold concrete wall, my chest heaving, the "Sovereign Reservoir" still humming like a live wire under my skin."Hao! You're alive!"I didn't even have time to steady my breath before Jiang Mei was in front of me. She didn't look like the scared girl I’d rescued weeks ago. Her skin was translucent, glowing with a soft, rhythmic amber light. Her eyes—usually a deep brown—were now swirling nebulae of gold and silver. She wasn't looking at me; she was looking through me, her head tilted as if listening to a frequency only she could hear."I’m alive, Mei," I grunted, wiping a smear of soot from my forehead. "The 'God’s Eye' missed. Or rather, I made sure it didn't hit.""It didn't miss, Brother," she whispered, her voice sounding like two people speaking at once. "It fed you. But that was a mistake on their part. They didn't realize you could

The air in Kazakhstan didn't just feel cold; it felt like a physical assault. A horizontal blizzard whipped across the flat, desolate plains of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, turning the world into a blurring sheet of white and grey. We stood at the edge of the perimeter fence, the towering silhouette of Hangar 7 looming through the storm like a tombstone for the space age."Four minutes to the window, Hao!" Luo Bing shouted, his voice nearly lost to the gale. He was hunched over his tablet, his fingers turning blue. "The 'calibration' cycle on the satellites is active. We’re invisible for exactly six hundred seconds. If we aren't in that hangar in sixty, we're ash.""Move," I commanded, grabbing Jiang Mei’s arm.We sprinted across the frozen tarmac. My boots crunched over ice that hadn't seen a summer in years. We reached the side bulkhead of Hangar 7, and I slammed my palm against the biometric scanner. A thin line of green light swept over my retina.Access Granted: Sovereign Clearance.