Mana awoke to the electric taste of blue.

At first, there was only that color—searing, unfiltered, drilling through the cold dark behind her eyes. She sat, but her muscles would not respond. The suit held her, not as armor but as a restraint: fusion-tape sleeves clamped at the biceps, spinal leads wired tight to the data ports lining her neck. There was no air, no movement, only the pulse of the isolation chair and the faint hum of her own heart, overclocked by drugs she had not chosen.

A world assembled itself around her, one slow sensorium at a time. Light: cold and sterile, the blue of old hospital wards. Sound: the low-frequency buzz of power circuits, the wet click of a pulse monitor somewhere behind her ear. Smell: nothing, not even the ghost of sweat.

Through the link, Fox’s voice slid in. It was the only human thing left.

“Vitals normal. Neural sync at ninety-six percent. You’re stable, Mana.”

She tried to move her hands, but only felt the static rush of her own nerve signals, dead-ended at the wrist. The world was a wedge-shaped room, a command center in the UG’s black-glass citadel. The blue light bled everywhere, eating color, even the red of the warning strips on the floor. The only warmth was the memory of her last breath, still held in her chest.

At the head of the room, Director Harrow stood at the central podium. Steel-gray eyes tracked the screens without blinking; the thin scar at her temple—where the neural graft had failed years ago—caught the blue light like a fault line. Her back was straight enough to serve as a monument. Mana watched her watch the marines die, and felt something cold settle in her chest.

In the shadows, a half-step behind Harrow, was Kaplan. He wore the same gray coat as always, sleeves too long, mouth pinched in a way that suggested amusement or hunger, depending on the lighting. Today, he only watched—no notepad, no tablet, only the patient, predatory focus Mana remembered from the first time he’d mapped the insides of her skull.

On the main array: the mission. Satellite feeds stuttered through, six at a time, each one focused on the black spire of a derelict Erben outpost. The structure was wrong—too symmetrical, too organic in its geometry. From its walls, the blue-violet crystal growths stretched outward, veins pulsing in slow, stately rhythm. In the heatmap overlays, the crystals glowed hotter than the building that birthed them.

A secondary feed: the strike team. Twelve marines, each node tagged with a biosign and HUD overlay. They moved in two-by-two formation, blue bars crawling the edge of Mana’s vision. The squad lead—Voss—broadcast on all bands, voice clipped and precise, each word a bullet fired into the silence.

Mana watched through the feeds as they moved: boots crunched over glassy mineral; the entry team swept doors, clearing every blind angle with methodical, almost bored, efficiency. The blue light inside the outpost was less a glow than a frost, a haze that ate distance and made the marines look less like soldiers than ghosts, drifting through the afterlife of someone else’s war.

Fox's voice came through the neural link, flat and official—the tone he used when broadcasting on the shared channel where Harrow and Kaplan could hear: "Mission is standard recon, zero expected resistance. You're on reserve, M-137. Protocol only."

Mana did not answer. There was no protocol for what to say when twelve lives hung in the balance and everyone pretended it was routine.

She watched the vital overlays: heart rates, oxygenation, the occasional spike of adrenaline when one of the team brushed too close to a crystal seam. All green. The comms were open, but there was little talk. The marines did not chatter; their voices lived only in the data, in the mission clock counting down at the top of the screen.

Harrow’s gaze flickered, a movement so small it might have been a micro-tremor in the retinal implant. She turned, addressed Fox without looking away from the feed.

“Controller. Your asset is stable?”

Fox’s reply was immediate: “Yes, Director. Neural sync is holding.”

“Good,” Harrow said, and nothing more.

Kaplan’s eyes glittered as they tracked the marines on the holo display. His hands were buried in the sleeves of his coat, fingertips flexing in a cadence that matched the pulse of the blue crystals. Mana wondered if he even needed the screens, or if he was seeing something else, something that lived in the gaps between frequencies.

Mana dropped into the feed like a body through ice.

She felt the armor on her skin, its plates heavier than hers, dense with magnets and soft with thermal pads. Through twelve pairs of boots, she tracked the crunch of shattered glass underfoot. Her mouth filled with the taste of recycled air, metal and mint. One marine was still chewing a stimulant gum, the taste so strong it made Mana’s teeth ache. The group’s fear was a low-level static, always present, but suppressed beneath the practiced muscle memory.

The outpost did not welcome them. The geometry was hostile—walls canted at forty degrees, doors wide enough to swallow a dropship, corridors that doglegged without warning. Every surface was etched with patterns that writhed at the edges of focus. Mana saw them in triplicate: through helmet optics, through the echo in the link.

They called the entry chamber “The Nave.” The term was in the briefing, but the architecture made it real—vaulted ceiling, columns flaring like the roots of petrified trees. Crystal veins crawled up the stone, fattening as they climbed, pulsing at the crown. The air vibrated with energy, not loud but constant, like a city’s heartbeat at midnight.    

Voss split his team. “Alpha left, Bravo secure the main.” The order was clean and automatic, but the team felt the tension spike as the first squad vanished into the corridor. Mana followed both—Alpha’s cautious steps, Bravo’s knotted anxiety as they watched the door, rifles up.

One of the marines—Jaleel, she recognized from the biometrics—touched the wall and flinched. The crystal gave under his glove, then flexed back, leaving a residue of blue light on his palm. “The hell is this?” he muttered, and the squad laughed, brief and forced.

The humor didn’t last. The corridor twisted, and the floor went soft under their weight. Not like mud—more like walking on a membrane, something designed to flex but never quite snap. The marines pressed forward, every sense tuned to the possibility of violence.

At the central chamber, the alien geometry collapsed into an open rotunda. The floor was ringed with columns, each one encased in blue-violet crystal, patterns spinning down their lengths in loops that never quite repeated. In the middle: the sigil, a spiral of light cut deep into the black stone. It pulsed, not randomly, but with a rhythm that Mana could almost, almost name.

Voss’s voice in her head, crisp as a blade: “Command, we have contact. Inscription at center matches Eden coordinates. Awaiting further—”

He never finished.

The moment was not dramatic, not marked by noise or light. It was simply twelve voices, all at once, howling in every register. The pain was everywhere: eyes, gut, teeth, even the bones. The sigil went nova, filling the room with a blue so bright it erased every shadow, and then—

—and then Mana felt herself die, over and over.

Not just body, but self: each marine’s memory flickered out, replaced by an empty ache, and a sharp, cold quiet. The last thing she saw through Voss’s eyes was the squad dissolving, armor and flesh peeling away, leaving only blue motes drifting up like spores. The link struggled to hold, but the noise overwhelmed it; for a few milliseconds, Mana experienced twelve entire lifetimes of panic and rage, each one ending in a cold blue hush.

She came back to herself with a scream she did not hear. Something pressed against her shoulders—Fox's presence in the link, steadying her, anchoring her to the real even though his hands were nowhere near. Her eyes snapped open, searching for Fox, but found only empty air. The war room materialized around her, its blue-lit machinery indifferent, the sensation of being held still lingering on her skin.

The taste of mint and blood lingered in her mouth.

Director Harrow’s voice: “What did you see?” Not a question, but a demand.

Mana’s vision doubled, then snapped back into place. She tried to speak, but the only thing she managed was a whisper: “It’s not a weapon. It’s a door.”

Harrow’s eyes flickered. “Keep talking.”

Mana blinked, the afterimage of the sigil burning her vision. “The outpost—it reads signatures. The marines—didn’t match.” She hesitated, piecing together memory and neural echo. “It rejected them. But it knows the Eden sequence.”

Kaplan stepped into the light, his face pale and hungry. “But you survived,” he said, softly. “You are compatible.”

Mana shook her head. “I’m not sure. It wants something else. The sigil, it…” She trailed off, because there was no language for what the sigil had done to her. It was not just pain, not just erasure. It was hunger, and expectation, and the sense that the blue light was waiting for her to make a decision.

Fox’s voice, raw in the link: “She needs rest.”

Mana’s body shuddered, but she willed it still.

Kaplan smiled, a tiny, cruel thing.

In the blue glass of the console, Mana saw her own face. No fear, only the echo of twelve deaths, and the hunger to understand what waited inside the crystal.

She was ready.

She had to be.

Fox did not speak. His silence was a black hole, swallowing every word in the war room and leaving behind only the throb of alarms and the cold blue light.

Kaplan stepped from the margin of shadow, his eyes locked on the screens. “Fascinating,” he said, voice low and almost reverent.

Harrow turned to him, her face unreadable. “You knew.”

Kaplan shrugged. Not a denial, just an admission without pride or regret. “I had theories. Now I have data.” His gaze flicked to Mana, still pinned in her isolation chair, every muscle rigid against the aftershock of the link. “The outpost isn’t passive. It reacts to presence. But only to certain signatures.”

He tapped the edge of the console, and the biosensor window for Mana’s feed expanded. Green across every line, stable, flawless. Not even a tremor. Kaplan’s smile was thin, more predator than friend.

“Asset M-137 would be an interesting test.”

Fox’s voice cut through, quiet and raw: “No.”

Kaplan did not look at him. “That wasn’t a question, Controller.”

Harrow raised her hand. “Enough.” She keyed the command herself, and on Mana’s visor, new orders bloomed: 

DEPLOYMENT: IMMEDIATE

OBJECTIVE: SECURE ERBEN OUTPOST

RECOVER MARINE SPECIMENS

PRIORITY: ZERO

Mana read the words. Her vision tunneled on the line: specimens. Not bodies. Not comrades. Specimens.

Fox's voice, on the private channel, barely more than a breath: "Mana." A pause, then three soft clicks in sequence—their code for danger beyond protocol. In the static between words, she felt his presence lean closer in the neural space they shared. "Komm zurück zu mir," he whispered.

The restraints on the chair hissed. Mana’s limbs were slow to obey, but she forced herself upright, legs trembling. Fox met her eyes through the glass—there was nothing left of the Controller, just the man, raw and brittle.

Her fingers found the seam of her tactical suit, working along the reinforced edge in a precise pattern: three strokes right, three strokes left. The rhythm steadied her as images of blue light and dissolving marines flickered behind her eyes.

She nodded at him, once. He nodded back.

Kaplan watched her, a glint of hunger in his gaze. Harrow, already on to the next task, began dictating the debrief for Command, her voice flat as the tile beneath their feet.

Mana left the chair behind. Her boots hit the floor with a sharp, frozen certainty. The blue light in the war room was colder than anything she had felt on the ice moon. For the first time, she wondered if there would be anything left of her, or of Fox, or of anyone at all, when the outpost was done with them.

She let herself hope, just for a heartbeat, that the blue hunger would find her worthy.

She squared her shoulders and walked toward the door.

Behind her, the alarms faded. The light did not.