The shuttle’s cockpit was a box of hell and blue glass. Mana’s helmet clocked the descent speed at just over a kilometer per second, but her body told a different story—one of salt, blood, and the heat of atmosphere carving the hull down to its molecular bones.

The HUD flickered, the overlays gone monochrome, then a wash of colorless static. Across her right eye, the warnings scrolled in a lazy suicide waltz: OXYGEN LEVELS CRITICAL; THERMAL REGULATION FAILURE; NEURAL LINK UNSTABLE. The suit’s status display suggested she would live another three minutes.

The control panel guttered with each new jolt, the wiring behind it already stinking of burnt insulation and panic. Each time the shuttle hit a denser pocket of upper atmosphere, the world lurched, and the cockpit filled with the sound of its own death rattle.

Fox's voice bled in through the static—or something that sounded like Fox, familiar and warm, the cadence she'd memorized over ten thousand missions. "Mana, you need to stabilize. The angle is—" Then nothing. Just the AI's clipped monotone replacing him: "Enter atmosphere. Enter atmosphere. Enter—" Her fingers instinctively reached for the neural port at the base of her skull. Cold. It had been cold since Eden. She didn't think about what that meant.

She braced her boots against the battered footrests, feeling the heat soak through armor to the thin layer of skin beneath. The instrument panel was a fireworks display of malfunction. When she tried to key in manual control, the haptic plate only vibrated back—a petulant child refusing her touch.

His voice again, softer now, the way he sounded during night missions when it was just the two of them: "You'll make it. You always do." Not tactical. Not useful. Just... comfort. She didn't question why the neural link would waste bandwidth on sentiment when she needed coordinates, when the ship was tearing apart around her, when survival depended on cold data. She didn't question it because she needed it more.

Another impact, this one hard enough to throw her forward into the harness, shoulder barking against the carbon strut. She fumbled for the override, found the manual lever, and yanked. The shuttle bucked, spun, and for a moment the clouds outside became a solid wall. Her stomach turned inside out. Mana clamped her jaw to keep from vomiting, the taste of copper and recycled air turning her tongue numb.

The world outside the cockpit was gold and blue, streaked with white. Even as the craft tumbled, the helmet display updated the planetary map with determined optimism: DESERT MOON, 97.2% SAND SURFACE, TWILIGHT BAND—IMMINENT.

“Enter atmosphere,” the AI repeated, now overlaid with the sound of ceramic ablators boiling off the hull. Something in the venting system gave way, and hot air poured in, painting the inside of her visor with blurry tears. Her hands, slick with sweat, worked the secondary thruster toggles. If she could get the nose down, just enough, maybe—

The stabilizers failed in series, each with a signature groan and a flicker on the panel. Mana felt the Gs mount, her limbs pushed heavy into the seat. For a second, her vision tunneled. She fought for breath, felt the Core at her neck spark in warning.

The neural port throbbed—phantom pain, like a limb that wasn't there anymore. "Fox," she gasped, not sure if her voice would make it out. And then his voice, clear as memory: "I'm here, Chief. Don't let go."

She held onto the words like a rope in the dark.

She didn't ask herself why they sounded like something she'd already heard him say, a hundred times before.

The next shock knocked the left half of the panel free, exposing the pulsing, worm-like tangle of data cables behind. Mana swore, channeled every last joule of muscle memory into the crash protocol: throttle back, disengage secondary, cycle the pitch, pray.

The computer took her prayer and spit it back as flame. Every warning on the HUD turned red. She stared through the canopy as the ground approached, sand dunes ribbed in blue shadow, the sunlight strip a thin promise on the horizon.

“Brace for impact,” said the AI. And that was all.

The shuttle hit once, skipped like a flat stone, and then the hull tore along its length. Heat and cold arrived together, a hard slap that stripped every thought from her mind. Metal screamed; the world folded. For a heartbeat, she saw the sand racing up to greet her, glassy and strange.

The last thing Mana heard was Fox, echoing, “Don’t let go—”

Then darkness.

The red pulse of the emergency lights stitched the world together in sharp, ugly fragments. Each flash exposed the inside of the shuttle as a dissection in progress: consoles half-melted, straps dangling like nerve tissue, smoke rising in lazy threads from the torn bulkheads. Somewhere aft, an engine still tried to spool up, the turbine’s whine an animal cry that refused to die with the rest of the ship.

Mana woke to the taste of her own blood, gritty with glass. She blinked, then blinked again, as the world returned in increments. The helmet’s visor was a spiderweb of fractures, a single point of impact above her right eye, the whole surface filmed with dust and sweat.

She flexed her fingers—numb but responsive. Boots braced against the cracked floor, she tried to push herself upright, but the harness locked her in place, a rib pressing hard against the edge of the restraint. With every breath, a hot wire ran up her left side. She gritted her teeth and thumbed the quick-release, letting the harness fall away. The movement sent a spike of pain through her shoulder, and for a second she saw nothing but red.

The HUD was gone, the inner lens of her helmet now a flat mirror showing only her own reflection: blood running from the hairline to the jaw, white hair slicked to her cheek, eyes cut to a feral blue by the flicker of the warning lights. She tried to contact Fox, felt the neural link crackle, but all that came back was a hiss like sand poured through a radio.

“Fox?” she rasped, barely above a whisper.

Static.

She exhaled, the motion making her vision swim. The suit’s diagnostics were dead, so she ran the checklist the old way: move, catalog, move again. Shoulder: out, but not shattered. Ribs: at least two cracked, maybe three, judging by the way her lungs wheezed. Left leg: stiff but mobile. Bleeding from scalp, left forearm, a deep gash running down the calf. Nothing she hadn’t dealt with before.

The heat in the cabin was intense—no fire yet, but enough to make every breath taste like burnt plastic and impending asphyxia. The visor fogged, and the temperature strip on the chin-bar ticked up to the edge of the red zone.

Mana tore at the helmet’s release catch. At first, it refused, locked by the warp in the faceplate. She levered her fingers under the seam and pulled, feeling the strain of the suit’s servos through the numbness. The helmet came away with a crack, taking a tuft of hair and a thin layer of scalp with it. She tossed it aside, the motion flaring the wound above her eye.

Her face was slick with blood, the taste sharp in her mouth. She wiped her hand on the sleeve of her undersuit, smearing a line of red across the white mesh. For a second, she let herself breathe the raw air, filtered only by her own battered lungs.

She listened: the alarms, the dying turbine, her own heartbeat. Underneath, a new sound—the hollow, arrhythmic pop of hull metal cooling too fast, the sigh of sand finding its way inside the breach.

The world beyond the shattered canopy was nothing but sand and electric sky. Mana coughed, spat, and dragged herself up by the edge of the ruined console. The cowl above her was peeled back, exposing a slant of twilight so piercing she almost mistook it for a hallucination. No clouds, no birds—just the afterburn of her own disaster, trailing off into the blue-gold horizon.

She found the nav controls with her right hand, flipping up the panel to check for power. A single LED winked at her—miracle or joke, she couldn’t tell. The screen behind it fizzed, then flashed to life, displaying the coordinates in raw string data. She memorized the numbers, read them twice to fix them in her mind. There was no backup; there was only her.

A moment of stillness: the cockpit, the sand, her own ragged breathing. Then the cascade of memories—Eden, the city of glass, the Arbiter’s golden eye.

The comm system was on its last gasp, the transmitter module hanging by a web of wires. She keyed the open channel, cycling through every band she remembered, then every band she didn’t. The uplink icon glowed a sickly orange.

Mana took a breath that rattled through her like a spent shell casing.

“UG control, this is Asset M-137,” she said, her voice flat and hard, the syllables scraping her throat raw. “Emergency down on vector Sierra-22, local coordinates”—she rattled them off, precision and clarity, “unknown system. Priority zero, authentication bravo-slate-seven.” She paused, the transmission icon still flickering, not solid. She cycled it once more, ignored the spike in noise and the growing heat. “Mission Eden override. Requesting extraction. Coordinates repeat—” She gave them again, slower this time, then released the transmit.

There was nothing. No static, no confirm, no hiss. Only the interior of the dying ship, the slow pulse of failing systems, and the silence of a planetary grave.

Mana stared at the open frequency, waiting for a ghost to answer.

When nothing did, she thumbed the local emergency beacon, knowing even as she did it that the odds were zero: there was no one left in this sector. Not for her. Not after the Archive. Not after what she’d done. She watched the beacon count up from zero, each tick a metronome for her own racing heart.

She slumped against the nav console, let her head rest there, the warmth of the plastic almost comforting. She focused on the pain, counted her breaths. When she looked up, the screen was dead, the coordinates lost, but they burned in her skull, relentless as the blue etched into her nerves.

A new warning: HULL BREACH AFT COMPARTMENT.

Mana limped from the cockpit, dragging her left leg behind—damaged but still able, the foot leaving dark prints against the white grit of the shuttle’s interior. The lighting flickered as she passed, each strobe revealing another slice of ruined gear, a panel blown inside out by the landing. She reached the cargo bay, nearly tripping as the floor dropped away at the ruined threshold. The ramp was gone—ripped off in the crash, leaving only a knife-blade of alloy above a dune that glittered with pulverized cockpit glass. With her good hand, she keyed the weapons locker hard enough to break the keypad.

It opened, its contents shuffled and battered but mostly intact. She did an inventory by glance and touch: two racks of NEXUS charge packs, a battered pulse rifle, both sidearms, three plasma grenades still nested in their foam, and—thank fucking god—the old katana, blade case undamaged, the hilt wrapped in gray cloth long ago sweated through and never cleaned.

She slung the rifle, checked the ammo. The display flickered red, then resolved to a solid line—enough for a fight, maybe two, if her aim was perfect. She stripped the sidearms from the rack, checked both slides, primed the grenades for fast access. The weight was comforting, a return to the one ritual that had never failed her: prepare, optimize, survive.

From the cargo hold’s far end, the hull had cracked open in a toothy grin, sand already piling inside. Mana grabbed one last thing—the emergency pack, light as air but with enough caloric and med supplies to keep a human going for three, maybe four days, if they rationed the painkillers.

She looked at the hole in the ship and at the sky beyond. The sun was too large for the world beneath, and dropping fast. If anything hunted here, dusk would be feeding time.

Mana turned her head, the motion sending a lightning bolt down her neck and into her back. She reached for the med kit. The flexscreen on the kit was dead, but the manual latch still worked. She snapped two auto-injectors and pressed them into her thigh—painkillers, clotting factor, a touch of stimulant for the good it would do. The drugs hit fast, a hot spread that dulled the sharpest edges of her injuries but left everything else raw and jittering.