The transition to the next map carried a weight unlike the others, as if the Dreamspawn hesitated before delivering them into whatever waited beyond. The slingshot seized them mid-leap, pulling their bodies into an invisible arc, and the world reassembled around them in a long, cavernous corridor where light struggled to reach the floor.
The first thing Rhett registered was the silence. Not the soft quiet of an empty room, but the heavy, expectant hush of a place that understood it had been built for watching. Everything around him maintained the look of corporate architecture - drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, polished epoxy over concrete floors. Every step echoed with the intensity of deliberate attention.
Rows of mannequins lined both walls - tall, featureless silhouettes carved from pale composite, each positioned with the stiff poise of an audience waiting for a performance to begin. Their blank faces reflected the faintest sheen of the overhead strip lights. Their shadows stood taller than they did.
Tessa swore under her breath, a quiet, brittle sound. "This isn't a normal render, Thorne."
Rhett felt the confirmation somewhere in his chest before he could name it. There was something internal about this place - something sculpted not by game design, but by pressure. By the same emotional fault lines he had been carefully avoiding since the moment he stepped into the pod.
They moved forward together, keeping close, the sound of their footsteps bouncing off the sterile surfaces. Twenty feet ahead, the corridor dissolved into deeper darkness. The mannequins seemed to grow more rigid the farther they walked, as if bracing. A Diver drifted into view at the far end of the hall - a man with a wide stance and a rifle already shouldered. He spotted them instantly. His weapon tilted upward, sighting, ready. Rhett's pulse jumped, but he never saw the diver fire.
Every mannequin in the corridor jerked sharply, their movements snapping with mechanical precision. Hundreds of heads turned 180 degrees in the same breath - each one rotating cleanly, all faces aligning on the Diver like a forest of blank sentinels. Every arm in that hallway lifted, revealing compact energy pistols in each hand, Dreamspawn in design.
"Tessa - " Rhett began. The mannequins opened fire in unison.
A tidal wave of blue-white bolts roared down the corridor, shredding everything in its path. The diver's body dissolved in the first second, erased so completely that even the Dreamspawn struggled to piece together where he had been standing previously. The barrage continued, ripping mannequins apart as the bolts ricocheted, burning straight lines through composite torsos and limbs until only the row closest to Rhett and Tessa remained intact, untouched, eerily preserved.
When the volley finally died, the corridor was thick with drifting dust and the acrid sting of scorched materials. What remained of the mannequins stood perfectly still, pistols lowered, their presence unsettling in a way that felt designed rather than incidental. Then, slowly, they turned back toward the pair. Their movements were smooth, deliberate, almost polite, as if acknowledging Rhett and Tessa with the solemnity of ritual.
Tessa pressed her lips together, her brows drawn tight in thought. "They didn't target us," she murmured, eyes scanning the room as if searching for the logic behind it. "That wasn't the game. That was something else."
Rhett didn't trust himself to speak. The mannequins watched them with faceless patience, clearing a narrow corridor between their ranks.
Tessa nudged him. "We need to get through this," she said softly. "And when we do, we do not look back."
They moved between the mannequins carefully, squeezing through the narrow aisle created by their frozen bodies, each figure posed mid-gesture as if caught in the act of warning someone who never heard them. The air smelled faintly of old paint and scorched circuitry, and the silence pressed in around them with the weight of a held breath. Rhett's shoulder brushed a rigid plastic elbow, and even that faint contact felt like trespassing into something that preferred to remain untouched.
As they reached the end of the hallway they veered a sharp left, and, the world changed again with an abruptness that felt deeply unsettling. The transition did not resemble the clean logic of a Dream Dive map rotation. It felt instead like the entire arena had stumbled into a memory and struggled to right itself on unstable ground.
A narrow alley materialized around them, washed in neon tones that flickered across rain-glossed pavement. The air carried the familiar chemical bite of a gambling den - a place Rhett had hoped never to revisit, and the sudden recognition struck him with startling force. The angle of the doorway, the broken tile near the drainage grate, the faint smear of unfinished paint on the brickwork - everything appeared precisely as it had on the night that changed his life.
They were at the Canary.
Tessa halted beside him with a sharp intake of breath, her posture tightening in a way Rhett knew meant danger rather than disbelief. Neither of them dared speak, for even the smallest slip could drift into the ears of spectators who had no business learning anything about their real identities.
The door to the Canary creaked open with a labored metallic sigh, as a second Tessa stepped out beneath the sputtering neon sign. Her expression carried the same blend of exasperation and concern that had defined the night she patched up his broken ID bracelet. Her eyes found Rhett first, then flicked toward the Tessa standing at his side, as her hand rose in a silent, instinctive threat. The Tessa close to Rhett mirrored the motion immediately, chrome fingers angling into a stance that would have cut a clean line through anyone foolish enough to stand between them.
Rhett felt his chest tighten as both women calculated trajectories with identical precision. He knew exactly what her finger-gun blast could accomplish, and the idea of two Tessas preparing to fire in opposite directions made his pulse thrum with cold anxiety.
"Tessa, wait - " he began, but speaking her name aloud felt like stepping onto a live wire.
Both Tessas snapped their attention toward him, and that shared movement revealed something in their periphery neither of them had noticed before: a Diver crouched along a neighboring rooftop, a heavy beam cannon braced against their shoulder and aimed directly at the Canary's foundation. The weapon hummed with building charge, its core pulsing with a steadily increasing glow.
The Tessa close to Rhett reacted with striking speed. She pivoted toward Rhett and drove her chrome fist straight into his chest, a full-force blow meant to knock him free from the compromised dream layer before any observers could witness more than they should. Her strike landed at the same instant the Diver's cannon discharged, and the shock tore the scene apart with catastrophic force.
Rhett's vision fractured into overlapping images of the alley, each one slightly misaligned as though the memory had been printed three different times and layered imperfectly. The neon lights smeared across his field of view, as the entire world buckled under the weight of colliding realities. Dark tendrils erupted from the collapsing corners of the alley and wrapped around Tessa with alarming speed. They dragged her backward across the pavement, sparks bursting from her chrome fingers as she clawed for purchase, as the the darkness swallowed her without leaving the faintest trace behind.
Rhett felt the ground vanish beneath him, as the entire construct peeled away as though someone had torn the dream apart by hand. She woke in absolute darkness, surrounded by stillness so complete that her own breathing sounded unnervingly loud. No light spilled from the edges of the walls, no distant hum of the Dreamspawn lattice reached her ears. The space felt small and windowless, as though the Dive had folded her into a pocket that was never meant to hold anyone at all.
Her hands explored the walls until she found the unmistakable shape of a doorknob. She grasped it firmly, her pulse steadying with the simple reassurance of action, as she pushed the door open into a wash of sudden light.
The alley unfolded before her like a tableau she had already lived. She stepped onto the familiar back steps of the Canary, only to find Rhett standing several feet away beside a second version of herself. Her instincts snapped into place like the chambers of a weapon locking. She raised her chrome hand toward her double, her expression flat and merciless. Both Tessas held their hands in identical firing stances, having taken their finger-gun configuration, their bodies angled with perfect symmetry. The sight unsettled her with an intensity she had not expected. Their standoff bristled with the potential for catastrophic force.
Rhett began to call out - an attempt to anchor the moment before it shattered, but his voice carried too much urgency for her to ignore. She shifted her gaze toward him just long enough to register the fear behind his eyes, and in that movement, she caught something sharp at the edge of her peripheral vision.
A Diver stood poised on the roof of an adjacent building, the barrel of a beam cannon glowing with imminent release, as everything threatened to break open around her. The weapon's core glowed with the cold, rising brilliance of something designed to tear through structures without hesitation. Tessa read the scene in less than a breath. She understood exactly what was coming, and in that instant her entire body shifted into motion.
The lighting in her arm flared as she opened her palm toward the ground. There was no need to target the Diver or try to counter the incoming blast. She aimed directly beneath herself - before releasing a concentrated surge of energy with such downward force that it cracked the pavement beneath her feet, A column of blinding light erupted from her hand and launched her straight upward - flinging her into the sky with a velocity that almost felt impossible.
The Diver fired in almost the same instant. The beam struck the Canary's foundation with catastrophic impact, sending a shockwave through the alley that blossomed into a roaring eruption of debris, flames, and shattered brickwork. The entire back entrance bucked instantly. Rhett felt the explosion tear the dream world apart with a violence that splintered the air into jagged pieces of sound and light.
High above the alley, Tess twisted her body in alignment with the building below. The shockwave had given her some forward momentum, giving her a vantage point over the entire fractured landscape of the Dive. She drew a knee in, let gravity take her, and adjusted her chrome fist toward the rooftop where the Diver still knelt in the drifting haze of the explosion.
She descended like a struck comet.
Her punch landed with such focused force that the entire rooftop collapsed inward, sending a tremor through the adjacent structures. Concrete and metal folded beneath her like wet paper, the Diver vanishing beneath the obliterated roofline as the upper floors crumpled in a billow of dust and debris. A wave of displaced air rippled outward from the impact point, cracking windows across the alley and tearing at the edges of the rendered environment.
As she landed, the rooftop collapsed beneath her like a ruptured lung, the ground giving way in a violent, grinding cascade of shattered beams and pulverized concrete. Tessa felt the shock ripple up through her arm and spine, managing to to evade the fall a split second before the building folded inward, collapsing into its own footprint. She landed hard on a slanted metal awning of adjoining building, rolling off and into a shadowed stairwell door before the other building could drag her down with it.
Dust drifted through the air like pale smoke. The sound of collapsing architecture groaned groaned across the dreamscape, a low, resonant tremor that made the entire world feel unsteady under her boots. Tessa steadied herself with one hand against the stairwell frame, caught her breath, and then forced her body up the dark flight of stairs. She climbed to the rooftop with a sense of urgency the bordered on instinct. Elevation meant vision, and vision meant a chance to understand what the dive had become. When she pushed open the final door and stepped into the open air, the shifting nebula of the dreamscape washed over her chrome arm and reflected faintly across the rooftops worn surface.
From this vantage, the fractured geometry of the Dive stretched in all directions. The nebulous horizon shimmered like torn silk, and several floating structures flickered in and out of reality as Rhett's subconscious wrestled for control. She moved to the rooftops edge, every sense angled toward the alley below - and froze entirely at what she saw.
Down in the Canary's back courtyard, Rhett stood beside another version of herself, the two locked in a defensive posture shaped by confusion and fear. Their bodies were angled away from the shadows, each searching for a threat that had not yet presented itself. The lighting flickered along the alley walls, illuminating just enough of their stances to confirm they were preparing for conflict. That's when the Canary's back door creaked open.
Another Tessa walked out, identical in posture and expression, a perfect echo of a moment that should never have been duplicated. She stepped into the neon wash, her gaze sweeping the scene with precise, clinical calculation. A flicker of cold realization passed through the Tessa on the rooftop. The safest path forward was likely also the simplest one - she needed to destroy the Canary. Leave nothing recognizable behind. She scanned her surroundings, spotting a weapon half-obscured by a table: a heavy rail cannon, much larger that anything she could reasonably carry outside the Dive, but perfectly feasible in this reality where strength bent to intention and emotional focus. She crouched beside it, wiped the dust off the charging fins, and confirmed the weapon had been rendered with enough detail to function.
The cannon hissed faintly as she lifted it onto her shoulder. Its magnetic coils aligned with a metallic whisper, the barrel lengthening as the internal rails synchronized for discharge. She braced one foot against a cracked section of the concrete, leaned forward just enough to narrow her aim, and exhaled slowly as she lined up the shot. He visor overlay pulsed in quiet recognition, locking onto the Canary's front facing support beam - the one most likely to bring the entire structure down in a single strike.
Just as the rail gun was about to finish charge, Tessa saw both of her counterparts react simultaneously. Their heads snapped upward with identical sharpness, each reading the electric tension in the air the exact same way. Their eyes locked onto her position. The cannon's charge peaked, humming with the promise of catastrophic force. Tessa adjusted her stance, tightened her grip, and allowed herself a single, steadying breath. Then she fired.
The railgun's recoil rolled through her shoulder, heavy and clean, as the blast sheared across the sky in a spiraling column of white-hot energy. She didn't wait to watch the Canary take the hit. The weapon clattered to the rooftop as she pivoted away from the explosion - eyes settling on a ventilation access hatch that would be perfect for protecting her from at least some of the fallout. She dropped beneath it just as shards of rooftop tile hissed through the air above her. Dust drifted down in thin sheets. The hatch vibrated under each aftershock, metal flexing, bolts rattling in their housings. Smoke curled along the floor, warm against her cheek as debris rained on the rooftop.
For a moment, everything seemed like it would work out. Then the air itself changed. A low pressure rolled across the building - slow at first, then sharp, the way a storm announces itself without light or thunder. The hatch trembled against her spine. Gravel skittered. A shadow passed over the rooftop, too fast and too heavy to belong to anything she'd seen in this match.
She shifted her weight, bracing for a blast that didn't come. Instead, the entire rooftop lurched. beneath her. The hatch buckled inward. The ductwork fractured overhead in a jagged line. A curtain of debris slammed down, filling the hollow with dust thick enough to scrape in her throat. She tucked her head and shoulders, chrome forearm taking the brunt of falling steel as she angled her body toward whatever space remained.
The roof didn't just collapse, it folded. A slow tilt became a drop, the floor shifting under her like a ship taking water. She slid with it, twisting to keep limbs clear of tearing edges, boot scraping against tile that no longer had intention to hold. Dreamstone gave way beneath her. Light vanished behind a tumbling sheet of concrete. The weight closed in, heavy and total. Her breath stayed steady. Her muscles stayed tight. Her hands kept searching for edges in the dark, even as the rubble swallowed the light. The last fragment fell, and nothing moved at all. Only the quiet slide into whatever shape of herself waited for her next.
Rhett saw only the aftermath - the collapsing roof, the debris scattering in all directions, the faint silhouette of Tessa disappearing into the swirling haze - before the shockwave reached him. The dream shattered, neon smearing across his vision like streaks of molten color, dozens of the overlapping impressions of the alley flickering in and dying in rapid succession. Rhett tumbled through all of them at once, each perspective forming a fragile surface that broke underneath him as soon as he touched it. He heard the dissolving remnants of Tessa's voice - far away, distorted - swallowed by the collapsing dream layer, before everything vanished into a deep, concussive silence.
When he finally stopped moving, the atmosphere around him was, wrong in a way that was instantly familiar. The air tasted metallic and damp, the wide corridor of brick walls seemed to press inward with the same oppressive weight he remembered from a recent night entirely. Rhett pushed himself onto his elbows, the ache in his ribs pulsing with each breath. He blinked until the shadows steadied, and when they did, dread swept through him with icy, slow clarity.
He was back in the alley where the debt collectors cornered him. The place where he was reminded what helplessness tasted like, where everything fell apart. Only this time he was alone - there was no sign of Tessa, no echo of her landing, no glimmer of chrome through the fog. Rhett pushed himself up, ribs aching where Tessa's punch had driven the dreamscape into shards. She was gone. The silence made that obvious. He stood alone in the same alley where he once tried to bluff his way out of a life he could no longer afford.
A sound scraped behind him. Gravel shifting under weight. He didn't turn right away -some part of him already knew what waited there, the same way a nightmare announces itself before the dreamer remembers all the details. Eventually he faced them.
Two figures stood in the mouth of the alley, shoulders blocking the minimal light. They were rendered with that oddly familiar slight blur the Dreamspawn used when the mind could fill in the rest: one tall and rangy with a cruel posture, the other built wider, his expression a fixed ledger of what was owed.
"Evening," the tall one said, as if greeting an old acquaintance. "You know how this goes."
Rhett clenched his fists, feeling the bite of broken pavement under his heels as he massed weight for the first strike. He lunged forward, no plan is sight. He was more powerful now after having spent so much time in the Dive - full of confidence and ambition and a resolve to survive - prime competition for the Collectors. Or so he thought. His knuckles crashed against a jaw that barely shifted under the impact. A counterblow came instantly, knifing through the air and into his cheek with practiced ease. The alley reeled sideways. His knees hit ground. A boot followed.
When the world blinked back into coherence, the alley stood exactly as it had when he arrived. Rhett wiped blood from his nose with the heel of his hand. He didn't remember moving, yet he was upright again, facing the same brick, the same puddles, the same two men in the same exact arrangement.
The tall one cracked his knuckles. "Round two then."
Rhett grinned at him, but it was an exhausted, humorless thing. He charged again. The outcome didn't vary. The alley split into a smear of motion as he was driven backward, his shoulder slamming into the trash bins he remembered too well. Pain folded him, and the pavement embraced him like an old friend with bad intentions. Darkness shivered. Reset.
Again.
He stood in the alley, heartbeat jolting out of rhythm as the same tableau painted itself around him. The two men waited like actors stuck in a role they no longer questioned.
A third loop. A fourth. A fifth.
Each reset felt stranger than the last. The sound of dripping water changed pitch, becoming almost musical. The neon hum grew colder, brittle, like it was frosting over the air itself. Eventually his punches became gestures made out of stubbornness rather than strategy, and even those began to lose meaning. He wasn't winning or losing. He was simply returning.
He stopped fighting for a moment to collect his thoughts. "This is the old me, and I think that's the problem." He thought to himself. "Lets try a new me. A new path forward. Tessa keeps telling me I don't have to be this. Let's see if she's right."
In the center of the alley, surrounded by wet brick and old fear and the faint metallic stink of his own blood, Rhett closed his eyes. His breath came in a single long exhale, trembling only slightly. Something in him - some inward hinge - shifted its weight. His shoulders lowered. His hands uncurled. His heartbeat steadied, not calmer, but deliberate.
The alley reset as light took the shape of something new. Only this time, Rhett wasn't standing alone. He stood beside the shorter collector, shoulder to shoulder, the air thick with the knowledge of what they were both meant to do. His body felt heavier, as if someone else's bones had been slipped beneath his skin. His breath carried a different cadence, deeper, more settled in the diaphragm. The ground under his feet seemed to accept his weight in a way it never did when he played the desperate man.
The shorter collector nudged his elbow. "You ready? He always does this the hard way."
Rhett didn't answer right away. He looked down the alley. Far off, a figure flickered into place - the dream's rendering of him, curled in the posture he remembered far too clearly, hunched like someone expecting the world to collapse on him again.
The shorter man clapped Rhett's shoulder, the touch casual, the familiarity unsettling. "Come on. Let's go collect."
The walk felt nothing like approaching danger. rather like approaching a script already written, the Dreamspawn feeding it line by line, waiting to see whether he would follow it blindly. They reached the crouched figure. The other Rhett lifted his head just enough to see boots, then faces, then the unmistakable silhouette of his own expression mirrored back at him with a kind of terrible intimacy. His eyes widened. He flinched, as if bracing for the hit that always came.
But the collector-version of Rhett crouched instead, motion slow and intentional, settling into the space like a man who had practiced calm for years. His hand extended - not in cruelty, nor pity, but in something steadier. Something closer to recognition. The other version hesitated. The simulation flickered, edges trembling as though the Dive didn't know which way to anchor the moment.
Rhett didn't rush him. He waited, palm open between them. Eventually, the other figure leaned forward, tapping his hand to Rhett's with a kind of fragile resignation, the way someone might surrender to the inevitable simply because resisting had grown too exhausting. The contact burned through the alley with a sound like cracking ice.The air folded inward. The second collector watched in confusion as his collector companiom helped Rhett tp his feet - his outline shuddered, pixelating at the seams - before Rhett reached for the gun at his hip. He leveled it with the flat precision the Dreamspawn had assigned this borrowed body, and fired.
The bullet tore through the man's chest. Light hollowing him out from the inside. He dropped without ceremony, dissolving into dust-like particles that drifted upward as though gravity had been temporarily suspended. Rhett's eyes never left his other self.
"You think this is all you're good for?" Rhett asked. Not mocking. Not pitying. Just asking the question straight, as if he expected a real answer.
The other Rhett swallowed hard. His voice was thin. "It's what keeps happening."
"Only because you keep standing here waiting for the next hit," Rhett said, leaning in closer. "But this place? This night? It doesn't get to tell you who you are."
A flicker passed through other's expression. Doubt, disbelief, something brittle cracking behind the eyes. Rhett drew in a slow breath through his nose, steadying the pulse that still thrummed under his skin. "We don't have to stay in this place," he said, his voice calm but carrying a quiet conviction. "Not you, not me. This alley isn't the truth of us unless we allow it to be. We can step out of it. We can choose something larger than our mistakes and bigger than the people who tried to keep us here. No one rescues us. We decide our future and we move toward it."
The version of himself standing opposite him watched with a wary stillness, as if weighing the words with more care than Rhett expected. The man's shoulders rose with a tentative breath, and for a moment the two versions simply existed in parallel, the humid neon haze bending around them like a held breath.
Then alley-Rhett's gaze shifted, eyes flickering past Rhett's shoulder with the sharpness of someone recognizing a threat.
"Maybe," he murmured. "But what about them?"
Rhett turned, expecting to see the collectors stepping out from the shadows, ready to repeat the cycle. Instead, the far end of the alley lay empty, washed in the same sour glow, nothing moving except the faint shimmer of heat rising off the pavement.
He pivoted back toward the other man, ready to ask who he meant.
The alley was silent.
The other Rhett was no longer there.
There was no footfall, no dissolving outline, no polite unspooling of the illusion. One moment the man existed, and the next the space he had occupied was simply vacant, as though the dream had closed a fist and removed him from the scene without explanation.
A thin tremor passed through the air. The neon flickered in a frantic, arrhythmic stutter that made Rhett's vision swim. He scanned the alley again, searching for movement, for any hint of where the missing figure might have gone. Each direction revealed the same disquieting emptiness.
He took one step backward, intending to ground himself against the familiar wall, and found no resistance there. The alley wavered at the edges of his sight, pulling away from itself like fabric caught on a hidden nail. Colors smeared. Lines warped. A soft, soundless pressure pushed through the space, flattening all perspective into something unrecognizable. When Rhett blinked, the alley simply failed to return.
The world around him dissolved into a tranquil, depthless void where no pavement, no light, no sky remained. He stood suspended in a dimension without temperature or horizon, as though the Dive had pulled every landmark out from under him and left only the fact of his existence behind. Time stretched thin in that emptiness, a sensation closer to drifting than standing.
Then, cutting cleanly through the stillness, a familiar voice curled toward him with startling clarity:
"Rhett?"
Tessa's voice carried across the unraveling dream with the kind of force that gave the scenery more foundation than it had before. Rhett blinked once, bracing for another reset, but the world didn't rebuild this time. It hovered, half-formed, as if unsure what shape to take next. Her outline cut through the darkness with the assurance of someone who had fought her way out of something ugly. She carried the tension in her shoulders the same way she carried everything else - quietly, until it was time to use it.
When she reached him, she stopped just short of touching him, her breath still sharp from whatever the Dive had been doing to her in the spaces between.
"You made it back," she said, voice steadier than her pulse. Her hand hovered near his jaw, not quite daring contact yet. "I wasn't sure what… shape you'd be in."
Rhett almost laughed, except the feeling that rose in him wasn't shaped like humor. "I wasn't sure either."
The gray she brought with her resolved slowly around them, colors bleeding back into form. The alley was gone. The dream-static softened into breathable air. The floor beneath them solidified into the smooth onyx of the Royale Arena's lower plane. The Dive had chosen a neutral space to rebuild. Tessa exhaled, a long, slow release that she probably didn't intend to be audible. "That wasn't the Dive, by the way" she murmured. "That was you."
"Bad news for your career then," Rhett said softly, but the joke fell gently between them, not sharp enough to deflect anything real.
She nudged his shoulder with the back of her knuckles. "We should definitely talk about this later."
They both stepped forward as the world pulled itself together. The colors grew sharper. The architecture expanded outward. The Royale signal chimed distantly, informing remaining players that a new phase was beginning. But then the ground shuddered.
A soft, reverberating hum slipped into the air, the kind that the Dive rarely used - not for combat, not for transitions.
This was a recall tone.
Tessa froze. "They're pulling us."
Rhett frowned. "But we're not eliminated?"
"That tone isn't elimination." Her eyes flicked upward, scanning for the source. "It's an override."
The hum deepened into a pulse. A lattice of light formed around their feet, fractal patterns crawling outward in perfect synchrony. Above them, the sky fractured into administrative glyphs. Someone, somewhere in the Crescent Well, was pressing a button Divers prayed never needed to be used.
Tessa's face sharpened. "They think we're compromised."
Rhett's stomach dropped. "Were we?"
Her gaze met his - steady, clear, unwilling to lie. "Yes."
The world did not give them time to argue. Light surged, swallowing the arena floor as the Dreamspawn severed its link in a single decisive burst. Rhett felt the sensation climb the length of his spine, a pulling that had nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with extraction - as if the dream were peeling him away from himself in clean, efficient layers.
"Tessa - " he started, reaching for her as the lattice rose. She reached too, their hands almost touching - before the Dive folded them into whiteness. Cold air hit first, then the addition of weight. Then the sharp metallic scent of the Crescent Well's hardware. Rhett gasped awake in the pod, restraints hissing as they released. His vision struggled to focus past the fog of oxygen rushing back into his blood.
Voices filled the chamber - tense, hushed, too many to ignore. One cut through them all:
"He's up."
Tessa. Her pod had already opened. She sat upright, a blanket thrown over her shoulders, her chrome arm dimmed to safety-mode brightness. Relief flickered across her face - too brief for anyone else to catch, impossible for Rhett to miss. The Host stood nearby, expression unreadable behind the reflective visor running across half his brow. He held a diagnostic slate covered in red-white warning scripts.
"Forty-two minutes unresponsive," he said, his voice gentler than his posture. "That is not survivable in most Diver pairs."
Tessa bristled. "We were stable."
"You vanished," he countered. "Both of you. The Dive stopped receiving your markers entirely. We thought we had a psychological cascade event."
Rhett sat back, still catching up to himself. "Are we disqualified?"
The Host studied him for a long moment. A complicated one. "No," he said matter of factly... "You are something else entirely."
The slate dimmed. The tension in the room shifted from fear… to interest. Rhett felt the air change.
"You," he continued, "are a Lucid."