Leo and Yuki stared at the compass, its silver needle pointing firmly at the ceiling. The low hum emanating from the [Fragment of Forbidden Knowledge] was the only thing that broke the tense silence of the small restaurant.
"Up," Leo said, the word sounding hollow and stupid. "Great. How do I get there? My scooter doesn't fly, and I doubt my building's elevator has a button for 'the space between the clouds'."
"It's not the sky," Yuki said, her voice serious, her eyes fixed on the unmoving needle. She picked up the compass, which continued to point upward, regardless of how she turned it. "It's the Void. The In-Between. The Unnavigable Aether. It has many names, but they all mean the same thing: the primordial chaos that exists between stable realities, the stuff nightmares are made of."
She put away the compass and the fragment, the humming ceasing abruptly. "Our portals are like bridges. They connect one safe point to another, crossing the Void without ever touching it. The Crossroads isn't a safe point. It's the epicenter of the storm, a place where all bridges crumble. To get there, you don't need a bridge. You need a boat capable of navigating the chaos."
"And you have one of those boats?" Leo asked, a spark of hope igniting.
"No," Yuki said, crushing his hope instantly with her brutal frankness. "I'm a chef, not a suicide pilot. My job is to create perfection from dangerous ingredients. I don't cross hell to get them. But... I know the only person in the city who is crazy enough to do it."
She wrote an address on a small piece of paper. It wasn't a normal address, with a street name and number. It was a series of geographical coordinates and the name of a building: "The Adamantium Needle - Penthouse."
"His name is Jett," she explained, her voice lowering, as if the mere act of saying his name could summon chaos. "He's a 'Rift Jumper.' A genius mechanic and pilot who builds his own vehicles to navigate the Void. He's reckless, obsessed, and completely untrustworthy. He's our only option."
The Adamantium Needle was the tallest and most derelict skyscraper in the megalopolis, a relic of a corporate boom era that now stood like a skeletal finger against the polluted sky. Leo's journey there was a grim pilgrimage. The building's lobby was in ruins, with shattered marble on the floor and wild plants growing through the cracks. The elevators had been dead for decades. He found a service staircase and began to climb, his damaged scooter on his back, the hole where the headlight used to be looking like an open wound. The climb up the one hundred and fifty floors was a test of physical and mental endurance, each floor a ghostly echo of empty offices and forgotten lives.
When he finally reached the penthouse, he was exhausted, soaked in sweat and rain. It wasn't a luxury apartment. It was an open-air workshop, exposed to the elements. In the center, a massive makeshift antenna, built from satellite dishes, scaffolding, and miles of cables, hummed with a dangerous energy, occasionally crackling with small arcs of purple electricity that lit up the night.
And under it, working on a kind of hoverbike with more engines than fuselage, was Jett. He was a small, wiry man with spiky hair, goggles on his forehead, and a manic grin that seemed permanently etched onto his soot-stained face. He moved with a twitchy, crackling energy, tightening a bolt here, welding a cable there, muttering to himself in a technical jargon Leo couldn't decipher.
"Yuki sent you!" Jett shouted over the hum of the antenna, without even looking up. "I can smell her ramen on you! You want a jump to the Crossroads, don't you? Always the Crossroads! Nobody wants a leisure trip to a dimension of glass-sand beaches, no! It's always to the portal graveyard!"
"Can you get me there?" Leo asked, yelling to be heard.
Jett finally stopped and turned, his eyes glowing with a feverish intensity from behind his goggles. "Get you there? Of course, I can! My 'Vortex Jumper Mark IV' can cut through a chronal storm and be out the other side in time for breakfast! But the question isn't 'can I'. The question is 'what's in it for me?'"
"I can pay in Karma Points," Leo offered, his only universal currency.
Jett laughed, a high-pitched, manic sound that was lost in the wind. "Karma Points! What for? To buy a suit that doesn't catch fire? I build my own suits! With extra pockets!" He patted his hoverbike, which wobbled precariously. "I don't need points. I need parts. Rare parts. Parts you only find in... inconvenient places."
He wiped his hands on a rag and approached Leo, his grin widening to reveal a silver tooth. He circled Leo and his scooter, his expert eyes assessing the damage. "Nice hole. Night Market goblin? They love shiny things." He tapped the dented fairing. "And this... crystal asteroid impact damage. You've been busy."
"You have no idea," Leo muttered.
"I'll get you to the edge of the Crossroads," Jett said, his expression turning serious for the first time. "In exchange, you make a delivery for me. In there."
"In there? What could possibly be in there that you'd want?"
"The best junk in the multiverse!" Jett said with glee. "Ships, drones, probes... everything that gets lost in the Void eventually gets pulled into the Crossroads. It's a junkyard of impossible technology! And I need a very specific part."
He showed Leo a diagram on his tablet. It was a complex spherical device, full of gyroscopic rings and energy arrays. "A 'Gyro-stabilizer from a Syndicate Enforcer Drone.' These drones patrol the most dangerous routes. They're rare, but occasionally, one gets caught in a storm and crashes in the Crossroads. Their stabilizer is the only piece of tech I know that can keep a vehicle steady in the middle of a reality fluctuation. My Mark IV is fast, but... unstable. This baby," he patted his bike again, "would make her perfect. If you can find one and bring me the stabilizer... the ride is yours."
Leo looked at the diagram, then at the vortex of crackling energy forming above Jett's antenna. He had to go to the most dangerous place in existence to find a mad hermit, all while being hunted by an elite rival and the Syndicate, and now, he also had to scavenge for parts in the middle of a spaceship graveyard.
"I'll do it," Leo said, his voice firm, resignation giving way to a cold determination.
Jett's grin turned predatory. "Excellent! Try not to get erased from existence. The warranty on my 'Vortex Jumper' doesn't cover disintegration."
He gestured to his hoverbike. "Hop on. First stop is dimensional hell. Try to keep up."
With that, Jett jumped onto his machine, which rose into the air with a high-pitched whine. Leo got on his own scooter, which looked like a toy in comparison. He looked at the rainy sky of his city one last time, at the distant lights that represented a life he might never return to, before following Jett into the crackling portal that opened above them, a hole in the sky that promised nothing but chaos.