Nhilly sat in the back of a land cruiser that smelled faintly of rubber, cheap coffee and old rain.
In the driver's seat was a woman with long, straight black hair and the delicate features of a porcelain doll. Her profile looked like it belonged on some recruitment poster—calm, symmetrical, unbothered. Nhilly knew better than to trust faces.
Just under the edge of her collar, where her hair shifted with each turn, he could see it: a faint, star-shaped mark along the side of her neck. It pulsed once, so faintly that anyone without a reason to look would have missed it.
A Star.
Returnee.
He caught himself staring.
"What're you staring at?" she asked without looking back. Her voice had the rough, unpolished edge of someone who didn't remember they were supposed to be gentle with the dying. It clashed with her appearance in a way that made his brain stutter.
"Are you a Returnee?" Nhilly said, because answering questions with questions was easier than admitting he'd been trying to read her.
She snorted, one corner of her mouth lifting. "Sharp. Yeah. I'm a Returnee."
The land cruiser hummed along the coastal road, rain-slick asphalt blurring by under a sky the colour of old dishwater. On the passenger seat, a worn DES folder bounced with each bump: DISSAPANT RETRIEVAL – NIHILUS, 22.
"The Dissapant EMS recently started sending us out to retrieve future Dissapants," she went on. "You know, a friendly face who's 'been there and come back.'" Her fingers flexed on the wheel when she quoted the slogan. "Supposed to remind you guys that not all hope is lost. That there's still a chance of making it back home."
"Makes sense," Nhilly muttered.
It did, in a marketing-department way. Slap a Star on the brochure. Show a smiling Returnee. Pretend the numbers weren't what they were.
Outside, the sea was a flat sheet of steel. The city behind them shrank into grey suggestion.
They both knew the truth, though.
He had no chance.
He was a frail, lonely office worker who spent his days staring at spreadsheets and pretending the ache between his ribs was just bad posture. Even his name, Nihilus—"nothing"—was a bad joke the universe had committed to. He had achieved nothing. He was nothing.
He glanced at the side window.
The faint reflection of the interior flickered there: the outline of the officer, the steering wheel, the headrest of the passenger seat. Where he should have been—back seat, slouched, eyes ringed with exhaustion—there was only an empty patch of glass and the blur of the coast.
The officer broke the silence again. "Got any questions about what happens when you disappear?"
"Not really," Nhilly said.
She glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. Her gaze passed right through where his reflection should have been and didn't slow. If she noticed, she didn't show it.
"All right then," she said. "I'll give you the basics anyway. Judging from your state, you won't last long enough for us to reach the facility, so listen closely."
Nhilly winced internally. Do I really look that pathetic?
He did. He knew what he looked like: sunken-eyed, unshaved, wearing the same office coat he'd half-slept in at his desk for the last week because there hadn't been a reason to go home. Even the nurse at triage had given him that small, pitying look people reserved for stray animals and terminal patients.
"Upon entering the YR world—short for Yarion—every Dissapant is granted two things," she said. "A Star and a Sword."
Classroom words. PowerPoint words. He'd heard them since he was a kid. YR World: the place the lost went. Returnees: the ones who came back changed and either refused to talk or wouldn't shut up.
He let his head fall back against the seat.
"You probably got fed the sanitized version in school," she went on. "First Returnee, global press conference, humanity unites, blah blah." Her mouth twisted. "Here's the part they didn't cut into a cartoon."
She drove one-handed for a moment, ticking points off with the other.
"Stars," she said. "You know the ranks, right?"
"Yeah."
"Humour me."
There was a tired, stubborn look in her eye that said she collected compliance the way other people collected keychains. He sighed.
"Stellar. Red Giant. Nebula. White Dwarf. Black Dwarf. Neutron Star. Black Hole," he recited. "Black Hole's hypothetical. Nobody's ever reached it."
"Good." She nodded once. "Stars are supernatural abilities. Personal. They don't repeat. A rank's mostly about how much you can break the rules before the rules break you. Rank is predetermined, but if you live long enough and clear enough Scenarios, it can ascend. Very rare. Very bloody."
She tapped her neck mark with two fingers. The Star there pulsed faintly in answer.
"You can use Stars on Earth," she continued, "but there's a catch. After a full solar eclipse cycle, they burn out unless you go back to Yarion to recharge them. That's roughly every six months, give or take. No Yarion, no recharge. No recharge, you're a normal human again. Or dead. One of the two."
Nhilly let the information wash over him. He already knew it. Everyone did. The eclipse charts were in every government office now, ticking down like quiet threats.
"Next is the Sword," she said. "You get one. Only one. It's keyed to you; no one else can even lift it properly. Only Swords can kill the things over there. Guns are for decoration and panic."
Her fingers tightened slightly on the wheel when she said "things."
"Unlike Stars, Swords can't leave Yarion," she went on. "They don't exist here, not really. But in YR, you can summon and dismiss yours at will once you figure out how not to stab your own foot with it. Fixed class, but you can enhance it through… unwise decisions."
"Cursed enchantments," Nhilly said.
"Yeah." She snorted. "Fancy word for 'I fed it something I shouldn't have, and now it does what I want and something I really wish it didn't.'"
"Sword classes," she said, and he could hear the old lecture sliding back into place beneath her tone. "Four of them:
CommonTemperedRelicHoly
"Holy are myths to most people. Relics ruin lives just fine on their own."
Nhilly tuned her out for a moment.
He knew all this. He knew what awaited him: some other sky, some other hell, a Star he probably wouldn't know how to use until it was too late, a Sword he might never learn to swing properly.
His gaze drifted back to the window.
She was there. He wasn't.
The officer's hands were steady on the wheel in the reflection, knuckles pale from old scars. Her hair fell forward as she leaned into the next turn, covering the faint mark on her neck like a curtain drawn over bad memories.
His own seat sat empty, the headrest a dark square against the smear of ocean.
"Oh, one more thing," the officer added.
Her tone shifted. The casual, bored cadence dropped away. What slid into its place had weight—the kind you only got by surviving something you shouldn't have.
"You've been taught since childhood that once you reach Yarion, you should find a Scenario and clear it to come back home," she said. "Right?"
He shrugged. "That's the deal. Go there. Do the impossible. Get spat out back here with trauma and a Star recharge. Smile on the poster."
"Listen carefully," she said.
He surprised himself by obeying.
"Sometimes survival means forgetting that dream," she said. "Sometimes it's better to accept YR as your new home and never look back."
Her eyes stayed on the road, but Nhilly could see her jaw tighten.
"The reality is," she continued, "unless you're incredibly lucky, obscenely talented, or handed a Star that bends the rules in ways that make gods nervous, clearing a Scenario is… close to impossible. Winning is the exception. Not the pattern."
"What's your rank?" he asked quietly.
It wasn't really the question he wanted to ask—What did you see? What did you do to get back?—but it was the one that fit in the space.
"Neutron," she said, after a moment.
He blinked. He'd never met a Neutron Star rank in person. They were whispered about like minor apocalypses that had learned to wear faces.
"Then why are you driving a car for DES?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be… I don't know. In a lab. Or a war room. Or on a talk show pretending any of this can be controlled?"
She gave him a flat look in the mirror. "Because I'm good at dragging idiots like you off beaches."
A beat. Then, softer: "And because the people in war rooms like thinking they're in charge. A Neutron Star in the building makes them nervous."
He let that sit.
"What's your Star do?" he tried.
"It keeps me alive when I shouldn't be," she said. "And sometimes it does the opposite for other people. That's all you need to know."
There was something in the way she said it that pricked at the back of his memory.
He pushed the thought away. That had been years ago, another life. She hadn't known his name; he was sure of that. And even if she had…
"Anyway," she said, as if cutting that line of thought off in both their heads, "stop thinking in return tickets. You're already halfway gone, Nihilus. Make peace with the possibility that there's no coming back. It'll hurt less when you're standing under a sky that wants you dead."
"Nihilus," he repeated, tasting the syllables. "Is that what it says on the form?"
She flicked the corner of the DES folder with one finger. "Birth name. Date. Estimated disappearance window." Her eyes flicked up to the mirror again, as if checking something that wasn't the road. "You got anyone waiting for you?"
"No," he said.
Then, after a beat: "Nobody that would recognise me if I came back."
She huffed. "That's more honest than I usually get."
"What do people normally say?"
"'My family. My girlfriend. My dog.'" She paused. "Most of them mean it. Some just say what they think I want to hear."
"And what do you want to hear?" he asked.
"That you're going to live," she said simply. "Because people who say it out loud sometimes do."
He didn't answer.
The road curved inland, cliffs rising on their left, the sea dropping away behind scrub and wire. The sky thickened, clouds stacking on clouds until the light turned bruise-dark.
"Scared?" she asked, after a while.
"Yes," he said. "But not of Yarion."
"What then?"
He watched his lack of reflection in the window one last time.
"Of coming back the same," he said. "Or worse—coming back exactly how I am now. Just further away from the beach."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"That's not going to happen," she said at last. "One way or another, you won't be the same."
The wipers beat a slow rhythm across the glass. The engine's hum settled into a low, constant vibration. The world outside the windows narrowed to grey road and darker sky.
He felt tired.
He'd been tired for months, the slow kind that seeped into bone. This was different. It was as if something had noticed the empty space where his reflection should have been and decided to finish the job.
His eyelids grew heavy.
"…hey," the officer said, voice coming from further away than it should have. "Stay with me. We're almost—"
The sentence blurred at the edges.
Sound stretched, then compressed. The land cruiser's engine grew louder, a deep roar that vibrated through his teeth. The pressure of the seat against his back increased, pinning him as if the car had suddenly leapt from a reasonable speed to something obscene.
His vision tunnelled. The edges of the world smeared into streaks of colour and then into nothing at all.
Weight flooded his limbs. Or maybe it left them. It was hard to tell.
Through the thickening fog in his head, he heard her voice one last time, clearer than it had any right to be.
"Good luck, Nhilly," she said.
Darkness claimed him before he could decide whether that was really what she'd said—or how she could possibly have known the name, a nickname he hadn't heard since he'd still believed in saving everyone.