When the last awakened entered the Breach, the camp outside finally loosened.
Agents dropped into chairs. Others walked off with the blunt relief of people whose shift had ended at the right moment. Only a handful remained around the perimeter, keeping watch over the unstable light of the Breach.
Richards was one of them.
He stayed near the outer line with his hands in his coat pockets, posture relaxed only on the surface. The Breach still pulsed ahead of him, suspended above the damaged street like a tear in the world that had not yet decided whether it wanted to remain open.
Then the Breach moved.
The distortion tightened, the fractured light pulling inward as if an invisible hand had grabbed the edges and dragged them together. Richards' eyes narrowed.
A second later, the opening vanished.
The space where it had hung was empty.
"The Breach—!" an agent shouted from the monitoring station, his chair scraping hard against the ground. "The Breach closed!"
The camp erupted.
People were on their feet before the words had finished settling. Someone slammed a hand down on the emergency panel. Alarm lights flashed red across the temporary structures, and a harsh warning tone burst through the camp.
Every face turned toward the empty space where the Breach had been.
Because everyone there knew the rule.
Once it sealed, no one else could enter. Only those already inside could solve it.
And if they failed, if a sealed Breach festered long enough, the ceiling rose. If something Saint rank or above came out in the middle of a city, the whole situation stopped being local.
Richards looked back at the empty air and said the only thing that fit.
"Shit."
He reached for the communicator at his belt and started sorting through names in his head before he even touched it. Other cities first. If that went nowhere, he would reach farther.
But his thoughts were not really on the city.
They were on Neo.
The boy was useful. That part had been true from the beginning. Neo had seen Roderic Duplain with his own eyes. He was a thread that might finally lead somewhere real, somewhere solid enough to rip open part of the mess the Duplains had spent years burying.
But at some point, it had stopped being only about usefulness.
He had started to care about the kid.
Richards stopped beside a government vehicle and looked once toward the place where the Breach had vanished.
'Come out of there, Neo.'
--
Inside the Breach, Neo knew nothing about any of it.
The jungle had swallowed him whole.
Heat pressed against him without mercy, thick and damp, clinging to his clothes and skin until every step carried a thin layer of discomfort with it. Green swallowed everything. Trees rose high enough to choke the sky, vines hung between trunks like old ropes, and the ground shifted under roots, wet soil, and stretches of broken stone half-eaten by moss.
He was alone.
That did not bother him.
His attention lifted and fixed on something far in the distance.
A tower.
White once, perhaps, though much of it had been consumed by green. Roots and vines coiled around its body from base to top, thick as serpents, turning the whole structure into something half-built and half-devoured.
'I guess that's where I'm heading.'
He started walking.
The deeper he went, the stronger the feeling became. Nothing obvious moved between the trees, yet the place had started pressing back in that quiet way certain places did when something alive was near and not bothering to hide properly.
He had learned to read that kind of tension long before today.
When he came across the first structure, he slowed.
Dark stone rose from the vegetation like something dragged halfway out of the earth and abandoned there. Vines had wrapped themselves around the walls, roots split the lower edges, and much of the surface had disappeared beneath moss and hanging leaves.
One thing stood out at once.
Webbing.
It stretched across the entrance, clung to the corners, and ran through the gaps in the broken stone like pale ropes pulled tight through the dark.
Neo extended a hand, and light flickered across his fingers before the sword formed in his grip.
He approached the entrance with the blade low and his weight ready to shift in any direction. Once he reached the opening, he leaned slightly and peered into the shadowed interior.
Eight red points stared back at him from the ceiling.
Something wet dripped from above and hit the stone between his feet.
The red points moved.
All eight of them, together and getting closer and closer to him.
'SHIT!'
The web came at him before he had time to step back.