The sky over New Eden cracked open at 03:17.
Not with thunder. With teeth.
A black rift the length of a continent tore across the night, bleeding violet lightning that didn't flicker; it crawled, like living veins. From it poured the Harrow: machines the size of cities, all edges and hunger, built by something that had forgotten mercy a thousand galaxies ago.
Captain Rhea Voss was already running when the first alarm hit. Barefoot, sidearm in hand, blood still warm on her knuckles from the bar fight she'd never finished. The orbital elevator she'd been drinking under exploded behind her in a column of white fire. She didn't look back. Looking back got you dead.
She jacked a sky-bike off a dead marine, slammed the thrusters, and shot straight into the burning skyline.
Below, New Eden died fast. Buildings folded like paper. Streets turned into screaming rivers of people who suddenly remembered they were small. The Harrow didn't fire weapons; they unfolded. Tendrils of black glass speared down, latched onto anything with a pulse, and pulled it upward into the rift. Not killing. Harvesting.
Rhea banked hard between two collapsing towers, wind screaming through her teeth. Her neural link crackled alive; someone was hacking her implant on an open channel.
"Voss, you thieving bastard, you still breathing?"
Kane. Of course it was Kane.
"Barely," she growled, dodging a tendril that punched through a mag-lev train like it was wet tissue. "Thought you were in cryo-prison."
"They let me out early for good behavior. Or because the galaxy's ending. Pick one."
A pause. Explosions blooming behind his voice. "I've got a ship. Old, ugly, faster than God. Docks 17. You've got nine minutes before the Harrow seeds the atmosphere with nanophages. Move."
She laughed once, sharp and bitter. "What's the catch?"
"I need the thing you stole from me on Rigel-9. The black cube. You still have it?"
Rhea's hand tightened on the throttle. The cube. The size of a heart, heavier than sin, currently fused to the lining of her ribcage where no scanner could ever find it. It whispered sometimes. In a language that made her nose bleed.
"Yeah," she said. "I've got it."
"Then run, thief. Run like hell."
She gunned the bike into a vertical climb, engines red-lining. A Harrow tendril whipped after her, faster than physics allowed, tipped with a mouth of spinning blades. She rolled at the last second; the tendril clipped the bike's rear stabilizer and sent her spinning toward the upper atmosphere.
Warning lights painted her vision red. Altitude: 42 kilometers and climbing. Air: gone. Blood boiling in her ears.
She punched the emergency eject. The bike exploded beneath her. She fell upward, into vacuum, into silence.
Then the cube woke up.
It burned inside her chest like a second star. Black threads erupted from her skin, weaving into a living exosuit that sealed her from the void. Her eyes went void-black. The fall reversed. She wasn't falling anymore.
She was flying.
Straight toward the Harrow mothership hanging above the rift like a moon made of knives.
Kane's voice again, faint now, laced with static and something that might have been awe.
"Voss… what the fuck are you?"
She grinned into the dark, teeth bright against the starless suit.
"Payment," she said.
And punched through the mothership's hull at Mach 30.
Inside was a cathedral of meat and metal. Corridors that breathed. Walls that screamed in frequencies that shattered minds. She walked them like she owned them, boots leaving footprints of liquid night. Every Harrow drone that lunged at her dissolved into ash before it could touch her.
At the heart of the ship, she found the Core: a sphere of pure anti-light, big enough to swallow cities. Around it floated the harvested: millions of souls suspended in torment, their faces pressed against the inside of the sphere like ghosts in a snow globe.
One of them was a little girl with Rhea's eyes. Same age Rhea had been when she first learned the universe didn't give a damn.
The cube in her chest pulsed once. Hard.
A single word formed in her mind, not hers, older than language:
Choose.
She could feel the power now. Enough to tear the Harrow apart from the inside. Enough to close the rift. Enough to burn every last one of them out of existence.
But the cube wanted more. It always wanted more. If she let it, it would keep her. Make her the new lock on the cage. Eternal. Unbreakable.
Immortal.
Alone.
Rhea looked at the little girl behind the glass. At the millions of others.
Then she reached into her own chest, fingers sliding between her ribs like they belonged to someone else, and ripped the cube free.
Black blood sprayed across the Core. The exosuit screamed and began to unravel.
She slammed the cube against the sphere.
Once.
Twice.
On the third strike it shattered.
The explosion was silent.
The mothership folded in on itself like a dying star. The rift above New Eden sealed with a sound like every door in the universe slamming shut at once.
Rhea fell.
Through fire. Through atmosphere. Through the burning corpse of a world.
She hit the ocean at terminal velocity.
And didn't die.
She floated there for a long time, staring up at a sky that was, for the first time in hours, empty.
Then a shadow crossed the water. Kane's ship, ugly as promised, hovered above. A hatch opened. He looked down at her, smirking like always.
"You owe me a new bike," he shouted.
She laughed until she cried, or maybe it was the saltwater.
As the winch pulled her aboard, she felt the place in her chest where the cube had been. Empty now. Just scar tissue and a heartbeat.
For the first time in seventeen years, the whispering was gone.
Kane handed her a flask. She drank. It burned all the way down.
"So," he said, "where to, Captain Voss?"
She looked out the viewport. New Eden still burned below, but somewhere in the ashes, something was still breathing.
She wiped her mouth.
"Somewhere loud," she said. "Somewhere that needs saving."
The engines roared to life.
Behind them, the stars looked a little less hungry tonight.
But only a little.
And somewhere, deep in the dark between galaxies, something ancient turned its attention toward the sound of engines running.
It smiled with too many teeth.
And began to follow.