Mana stands at the heart of the world, or what is left of it. Eden’s terminal chamber is larger than any cathedral, any starport launch bay, any memory of home: a vault of geometry so clean it erases all concept of chaos, the space defined by perfect symmetry, by the million-fold reflection of blue and gold. The air is cold but still. The only motion is her own breath, fogging inside her helmet, and the slow, inexorable rotation of the Arbiter at her left shoulder.

She expects an army. Instead, the Weapon-Touched comes alone, save for a brace of honor guard—six in total, three to a side. Her fingers find the armor seam without thought—three right, three left—the motion automatic as predator and prey recognize each other across the crystalline floor. Their armor is new, spined and burnished to a mirror finish, the underlays red as the arterial blood they no longer carry. At their center, the Jäger leader stands unhelmed. The crystal across his cheek glows as if lit from inside, and in his hands—palms up, held out as one might a baby bird—rests the second key.

It is the color of heart’s blood, the red so dense it seems solid, the light inside not just alive but agitated. Mana watches the way the glow flickers in the shallow hollows of the Jäger’s hands, the trembling at the edge of the pulse. He does not look at her. He only walks, measured and without deviation, toward the platform at chamber’s center.

At the platform’s edge, he halts. For a moment, the entire chamber seems to hold its breath. The honor guard forms a half-circle, standing at rigid attention. The Weapon-Touched raises the Prism-Shard, and as he does, the ancient runes that ring the floor spark to life: not blue, but a burning, vibrant red, tracing a path from the outermost glyphs inward. The resonance is physical now, a pressure on Mana’s eardrums, a thrum at the base of her teeth.

The Arbiter hovers a pace behind. He spins with his customary lazy elegance, but there is an edge—an uptick in velocity, the ancient runes on his own surfaces now flickering between languages, some of which Mana cannot parse. She hears him counting, just above a whisper: “Dreißig… einunddreißig… zweiunddreißig….”

The Jäger leader steps forward, to the first of the three circles carved in the crystal platform. He kneels. The move is not a bow; it is a promise. He places the Prism-Shard in the slot, the red light erupting as it makes contact. The resonance doubles. Runes along the walls activate, a corona of light that pulses outward in time with Mana’s heartbeat.

She stands at the center of the platform, the first key already in her hands. Her own Prism-Shard is clear, iridescent, the colorless heart of a weapon designed to never be used. She feels the energy coiling in her Core, each synapse crackling as the machine in the floor reads her, incorporates her, makes her part of the process. For a brief instant, she thinks she can feel Fox—a flutter at the edge of the neural link, a question that goes unasked.

A sound builds in the upper reaches of the chamber. It is not a voice, but a multiplicity of them, layered and modulated and then resolved into something like a song. The Kollektiven enter, not as soldiers or drones, but as a single entity—an immense, floating body that glides above the floor, its surface covered in what looks like a thousand smaller siblings, all fused together in a skin of blue-black glass. The whole assembly undulates, alive with motion, and at its core it carries the final key: a Prism-Shard so utterly black it hurts to look at, a knot of anti-light that absorbs the glow of all the rest.

The Kollektiven body does not land. It simply hovers, rotating until its “face”—a smooth oval ringed with mirrored pinpoints—aligns with Mana and the Jäger. It speaks, but the sound is everywhere, filling every crevice and every cavity of her skull.

“The Threshold awakens. The Bridge stands ready.”

The black key is released from the Kollektiven’s body, floating toward the platform under its own power. It moves slowly, deliberately, a ritual of inevitability. As it settles into the third slot, a line of darkness traces out from the circle, dividing the red and blue light with a perfect, cutting precision.

Mana’s suit diagnostic goes wild: all sensors off-scale, all alerts suppressed by the override signal from the platform. Her hands are locked around the iridescent Prism, and it feels as though it is drawing not just her physical energy but her mind, her entire history, into the mechanism below.

The Arbiter’s polyhedron whirls, surfaces colliding and sliding with an audible click at each integer. “Siebenunddreißig. Sechsunddreißig. Fünfunddreißig,” he says, the numbers gaining speed.

The chamber itself begins to move. The runes on the walls spiral inward, tracing the direction of the protocol. The floor beneath her feet hums, then shakes, then flexes as if the whole structure were alive and about to give birth.

The Jäger leader stands, blood-red light reflected in his face. He looks at Mana, for the first time, and there is nothing of hatred or even rivalry in the look. Only anticipation. “When it is done,” he says, voice deep as the platform’s vibration, “there will be no more war.”

Mana wants to answer. Instead, she focuses on the pressure at her temples, the ache behind her eyes, the rising memory of pain and triumph and loss that threatens to drown her if she lets it.

The Kollektiven speaks again, this time more quietly, but its voices synchronize to a purity that is almost beautiful. “The Bridge must choose.”

The Arbiter’s counting is a staccato now, slicing the air: “Neunzehn. Achtzehn. Siebzehn.”

The three keys glow, then pulse in unison. The chamber’s light goes out, replaced by the energy of the Protocol—a spiral of color and shadow that wraps around Mana’s body, weaving her into the pattern of the machine. She feels herself lifted from the floor, her arms outstretched, the three keys spinning around her head in a pattern older than any living thing.

Time slows. In that instant, she sees every path: the city she left behind, the girl she used to be, the faces of the Jäger she killed and the marines she failed to save. She sees Fox, his voice muffled but urgent at the edge of the void.

“Mana. You don’t have to do this.”

The light surges. The Protocol is in its final cycle.

The Arbiter’s eye, brighter than the sun, fixes on her. “Initiate.”

The world becomes one perfect note.

The world vibrates in a register not meant for nerves. Mana floats, half-evacuated from her body, aware of her hands only as theoreticals: one set clutching the iridescent key, the other set flexing in the electric blue afterimage left by the Protocol. She is a spindle, a tuning fork, a bridge exactly as the machine promised.

Fox’s voice stabs through the neural link like a distress beacon. “Mana—Mana—listen, you have to do something, it’s not stopping, it’s—” The words fragment, coming in and out as if the transmission were skipping across broken glass.

Mana tries to speak, but her own voice is lost in the sonic overload. The sound is everywhere: in her skull, in her teeth, in the Core at the base of her spine. She senses the presence of the red and black keys flanking her, the Weapon-Touched and the Kollektiven drone holding position as if trapped in the amber of the event. The chamber vibrates, and the pressure ratchets up with each cycle of the runes.

Fox's voice drops to that flat, precise register she'd learned to recognize as terror controlled. "If you don't channel it, it will wipe everything—planet, orbit, you—" Each word measured, deliberate, the calculation audible in what he's not saying. "You have to give it a target."

Mana blinks. The world refuses to clarify; the runes are now a corona of light, cycling through color bands at speeds too fast to resolve. She feels the machine reaching for her, looking for agency, for the will to direct its violence.

She wants to let go. She wants to let the machine burn itself out, consume every enemy on the surface and in the sky. But she cannot decide which enemy deserves to die first, and the thought is a pit opening under her feet.

She clamps her hands to her sides, refusing to move. She will not be the judge.