Youri found himself adrift in a watery abyss, drifting with no direction and no purpose. There was no up and no down here, no current to push against, only a vast, silent dark that swallowed sound the instant it left him. Altopereh was nowhere in sight — that alone was strange enough, given that he could not remember a single stretch of his life since the academy where the machine hadn't been within arm's reach. But it was not the only wrongness he could feel.
Somewhere beneath his own thoughts sat a hollowness he couldn't place, a sense of being held asleep against his will, kept under by something that had no intention of letting him wake. He lifted a hand to his own face, studying it the way a stranger might, turning it slowly in the nonexistent light. The longer he looked at it, the less it felt like his — as though the hand belonged to someone wearing his memories rather than someone who had lived them. Slowly, he lowered it again, and a single thought rose up to meet him: was he even still alive? Hadn't he died that day on Antia?
He was not in pain. Nothing here hurt at all, and the absence of pain unsettled him more than agony would have. The thought grew louder the longer he sat with it, and before he could stop himself he was replaying the battle in his mind from the beginning — the moment he had handed Altopereh full control, and everything that had come after.
A fragment of memory broke loose first. He was high above the battlefield, in open space, Altopereh's cockpit hatch already torn open and failing around him, warning lights bleeding red across a display he no longer had the strength to read, and all he could do was watch — helpless — as Tartarusios turned to face down what remained of the Terrian fleet alone. Then another memory surfaced on top of it, sharper this time: his last stand, hurling himself into the enemy's path ahead of Tartarusios, giving everything he had left to protect the one ship that had stayed at his side since the day he'd returned from Tartarus itself. He remembered the heat of it, the way the void had lit up white for a fraction of a second before everything went dark. A faint, worn smile crossed his face at the memory — he had known, in that moment, that his friends had gotten clear. He was certain of it. That certainty had been the last coherent thought he remembered having.
The smile didn't survive what came next. The memory of the Millennial Claw tearing across Antia's surface hit him like a physical blow, the Titans caught in its path with no chance to run, whole formations swallowed before a single distress call could go out. And then the faces came — Tom, Marek, Preston, Sergio, Alex — flooding in all at once: card games on the deck that ran too late into the night, arguments over nothing that dissolved into laughter within minutes, nights spent drinking themselves stupid in some nameless port, the drunken brawls that always somehow ended in someone's arm slung around someone else's shoulder instead of blood. He could almost hear Preston's laugh, could almost smell the recycled air of the mess hall. The weight of it all crashed into him at once, and Youri gripped his own head and screamed, the sound tearing loose in a storm of bubbles through the water around him.
His eyes snapped open.
He was no longer in the abyss. He was suspended inside a narrow tube, submerged in thick green liquid that clung to his skin like something half-alive, and beyond the curved glass a ring of researchers in white coats stared back at him with open shock on their faces, clipboards frozen mid-note. It took only a moment for the truth of it to settle into place. He was alive — somehow, impossibly, still alive. But he was not with his friends. He knew exactly where he was instead, because he had seen rooms like it before, in briefings and in nightmares alike: he was in a Terrian laboratory.
Youri was being held on the lowest level of the Khalil Fortress, the most feared prison the Terrian Empire possessed — a place spoken of in the fleet only in whispers, if it was spoken of at all — though he had not been kept alive simply to rot in a cell. He was being used. The Empire wanted the Tartarusios, and it had been two years since his last stand at the Battle of Hell, two years since the crew had vanished without a trace after their escape, leaving nothing behind for the Empire's hunters to follow. When simple interrogation failed — and it had failed, over and over, against a man who had nothing left to protect except his silence — the Empire had other methods at its disposal.
Mind-crawling was one of them. Terrian scientists had perfected a liquid that, once absorbed into the body, bonded to it on the molecular level — replicating the subject down to the neuron, close enough that the mirrored mind could be read, walked through, and searched like a room full of open drawers. It let them step inside a person's memories directly, wandering the corridors of another man's life with nothing left private enough to hide, no locked door they couldn't eventually force.
For more than two years, Youri had lain in an induced coma while the Empire combed through everything he had ever known, hunting for any thread that might lead them to his crew — a coordinate, a rendezvous point, the name of a single world where Tartarusios might be hiding. They had found nothing of the sort. What they found instead was worse — buried far deeper than any memory of a ship's last coordinates, past layers of his life even Youri himself had stopped consciously visiting, they uncovered the truth of where he had truly come from: the existence of Tartarus itself.
It was that discovery, and the depth it had required, that had finally begun to unravel the coma they'd built around him. The careful stillness they'd maintained in his mind for two years started to fracture, and then, without warning, Youri's eyes opened from within the pod.
The researchers surrounding him froze. No one in that room believed a self-induced coma of that depth could be broken by will alone — and yet there he was, awake, staring back at them. The head researcher spun toward one of his assistants. "Go get the director. Now."
The assistant was barely through the door when a sharp crack sounded behind him. He stopped mid-step and turned back toward the observation window, and what he saw stopped his breath entirely: Youri had already torn the tubes and breathing mask from his own body and was slamming his fists against the reinforced glass, again and again, a spiderweb of fractures spreading wider with every impact. There was no wildness in his movements, no panic — only a grim, mechanical persistence, as though he had already decided how this would end and was simply waiting for the glass to agree.
"Why are you still standing there?" the head researcher shouted, not taking his eyes off the tank. "Move! Before he breaks through — call security, now!"
The assistant bolted. Behind him, just as the lab's heavy door hissed shut, he heard the glass finally give way — a deep, splintering crack followed by the rush of liquid hitting the floor, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the sound of bare feet landing on tile. He didn't stop to look back. He slammed his palm against the corridor alarm as he ran, sprinting the length of the hall toward the director's office, the wail of the siren rising behind him with every step, red light strobing off the walls until the whole corridor seemed to pulse in time with his own racing heart.