Day 10. 2:03 PM.
-70°C exterior.
20°C inside.
Unit 1418.
Ji-yoo dropped the can.
Not set it down or placed it but dropped, the half-eaten corned beef spilling across the kitchen floor in wet pink chunks scattering across the white porcelain tile like shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade.
The can clattered and spun with aluminum shrieking against ceramic, the sound sharp and sudden and wrong in the quiet bunker, and came to rest against the base of the dark granite countertops with a hollow thunk that echoed through the living room like a distant gunshot.
Her hand was shaking, not the kind that came from cold or fear or too much caffeine but something deeper and something seismic, her whole arm trembling with fine rapid vibrations that moved up from her fingertips to her elbow to her shoulder and hummed through her bones like a tuning fork struck against the skeleton itself.
"Ji-yoo?" Rico questioned, a warm concern softening his gruff voice.
'The same voice. From the thunderstorms, when I was small and scared.' Ji-yoo recalled, a familiar warmth cutting through the trembling. 'When the lightning cracked the sky open and I'd crawl into his lap and breathe in the smell of gun oil and Old Spice and safety.'
"I'm fine. Just, my hand fell asleep." Ji-yoo deflected, a defensive casualness masking her trembling as she pressed her hand flat against the granite countertop.
It hadn't fallen asleep and they both knew it.
She flexed her fingers and the trembling stopped, then picked up the can and wiped the spilled meat with a rag from the cabinetry.
Normal motions and normal girl and everything normal except her chest felt strange, not painful and not tight but heavy, like someone had placed a small stone on her sternum right behind the bone in the soft space where the ribs meet and she couldn't quite catch her breath around it.
She ignored it because she'd been ignoring things for ten days and what was one more.
— • • • —
2:11 PM.
The heaviness got worse.
Ji-yoo was sitting on the porcelain tile with her back against the kitchen wall and the cold of the ceramic seeping through her jeans and numbing the skin beneath her hip bones, the knife in her lap not held but just kept close the way she always did.
The stone on her chest had grown into a weight, like something pressing down on her from the inside from the space behind her ribs that had always been empty and was now filling with something she couldn't name.
Not her lungs because she could breathe fine and not her heart because it was beating steady at sixty-two, but something beneath both, something beneath the lungs and the heart and the bone that had never been there before.
She thought about Jae-min in the corner with his eyes closed and the void cracked open to a whisper, the faint hum so low it was almost subsonic and vibrating in her molars and her wrist joints and the spongy tissue between her vertebrae.
She'd always been able to feel it, not the void itself but the proximity of it, the way it made the air taste metallic like licking a battery and the way it made her skin prickle when he used it.
Ten days of living inside her brother's spatial signature and she'd learned to read it the way sailors read weather.
He'd gone dark for one hour and during that hour something in her chest had started to ache, not the ache of absence which she knew but the ache of arrival.
When he'd restarted it the ache had changed and deepened and become this weight, not just his frequency returning but returning at a different register as if the shutdown and restart had shifted something fundamental between them.
'Something is arriving. Something pushing through a door that should have stayed closed.' Ji-yoo realized, a cold unease settling over her. 'This isn't absence. This is something new.'
She didn't tell anyone.
— • • • —
2:19 PM.
The first hallucination hit her in the kitchen.
She was reaching for a bottle of water from the cabinetry with her fingers curling around the cold plastic when the room tilted, not physically but perceptually, like a camera lens rotating forty degrees without the camera moving.
For half a second she wasn't in the kitchen anymore but somewhere cold and white with mountains.
The vision lasted less than a heartbeat, a single frame of film burned into her retina and then gone, but in that frame she saw pine trees thick and dark and covered in mountain snow pristine and untouched, and beyond the trees a mountain massive and cloaked in fog that moved like something alive.
And something in the fog, something twisted, something made of metal and fire and screaming, a shape that hurt to look at and was already gone by the time her eyes focused.
The kitchen snapped back and she was holding the water bottle against the granite counter with bone-white knuckles and her pulse hammering in her ears.
'What the hell was that.' Ji-yoo panicked, a cold disorientation freezing her spine. 'Mountain snow. Pine trees. A shape in the fog. That wasn't a memory. That wasn't mine.'
"Ji-yoo?" Alessia questioned, a worried care softening her doctor-mode as her eyes scanned pupil dilation and skin color and respiratory rate.
"Nothing. Head rush. Stood up too fast." Ji-yoo deadpanned, a defensive flatness masking her racing pulse.
Alessia crossed the kitchen in three steps and pressed two fingers to Ji-yoo's wrist.
"Pulse is elevated. One-twenty. You okay?" Alessia pressed, a worried care.
"Fine." Ji-yoo replied, a razor-thin defiance.
"You don't look fine." Alessia countered, a fearful concern.
"I always look fine." Ji-yoo shot back, a bitter humorlessness.
Neither of them laughed and Alessia held her gaze for three seconds then nodded and walked back to the sectional.
Ji-yoo exhaled with her hands still shaking and the weight on her chest still growing and the image of the mountain lingering like a photograph left in the sun.
— • • • —
2:34 PM.
The second hallucination was longer.
She was sitting on the porcelain tile near the hallway with the knife in her lap and Jae-min in the corner with his eyes closed and the faint shimmer around his fingertips pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn't entirely his own.
Rico was at the Samsung TV monitoring building communications and Yue was at the glass slider with marble eyes fixed on the entity and Jennifer was asleep on the sectional with Alessia beside her checking the IV line.
Normal and mundane and safe.
Then the floor vanished.
Not literally because she could still feel the cold porcelain through her jeans, but her body disagreed with her inner ear screaming and her semicircular canals failing and every system that told a human body where it was in space stopping agreement at the same time.
She was falling, not down but in every direction at once, the sensation of freefall without wind and the stomach-lurch of a dropped elevator without cables snapping.
Her hands grabbed the floor and her fingernails scraped porcelain with a thin sharp sound like a needle dragged across vinyl.
Then she heard an engine.
— VISION —
Roaring and straining and the terrible mechanical scream of a machine working past its limits with metal on metal and turbine blades spinning at twenty thousand RPM and the high-pitched whine of jet fuel combusting in a chamber never designed to operate at minus fifty-eight degrees.
And beneath the engine, wind howling, the kind that tears breath from lungs before screaming and turns tears into ice before they leave the eyes.
And beneath the wind, voices panicked and screaming.
"BRACE FOR IMPACT!" a voice screamed from everywhere and nowhere.
Then the cabin tore open with metal screaming and a gash where the wing had been with open sky where the wall should have been, wind howling through the breach like something hungry, everything not bolted down flying toward the hole.
Luggage and blankets and oxygen masks and bodies.
Then she was moving, being pulled and ripped from her seat by a force she couldn't see, with her loose seatbelt offering nothing, out through the breach into the white.
Then the turbine, a roaring mouth of spinning titanium at twenty thousand RPM filling her vision.
Impact.
— VISION END —
Not in Unit 1418 but in her mind and in her body, a force that crushed her chest and snapped her head sideways and drove the air from her lungs and filled her mouth with the taste of copper and jet fuel and pine resin and frozen mountain air all at once.
She screamed and the sound that came out wasn't human.
— • • • —
Everyone moved.
Jae-min's eyes snapped open with the void flaring for a fraction of a second in a cold blue shimmer that pulsed and died, and he was beside her in two strides with his knees cracking from his fast movement and his boots slipping on the porcelain.
Alessia abandoned the IV line and ran from the sectional with her bare feet slapping the tile.
Yue turned from the glass slider with her hand on her jian and marble eyes wide for the first time since the freeze.
Ji-yoo was on the floor convulsing, not epileptic and not rhythmic but wild and chaotic with her body thrashing against the porcelain tile like something was trying to tear its way out of her.
Her spine arching and her limbs flailing and her head whipping side to side with her black ponytail thrashing across the tile like a live wire, the knife having spilled from her lap and skidded across the porcelain to rest against the baseboard with a soft clang.
"Ji-yoo. Look at me." Jae-min commanded, a desperate love anchoring his trembling voice as his hands found her shoulders and pinned her down, his grip firm but careful the way it had been when they were children.
Her eyes were open and wide but she wasn't seeing him or the living room or Unit 1418, she was seeing something behind the world that made her black eyes blank and glassy and wrong.
"I can't, I can't, the plane, the plane is." Ji-yoo sobbed, a raw terror fracturing her voice, not a sentence but a fragment torn from somewhere deep.
"What plane? What are you talking about?" Rico demanded, a terrified urgency propelling him across the room.
She didn't answer and her back arched off the tile at an angle that spines don't bend with her shoulder blades pressing together and her chest thrust upward like something pulling her from the inside.
Her hands clawed at her chest, not metaphorically but literally with her fingernails dragging across her sternum like she was trying to open herself up, red lines blooming on pale skin.
Then her body went still, not relaxed but locked, her muscles frozen and her jaw clenched and her eyes frozen open staring at the ceiling without seeing it.
Alessia was there in a second with her fingers on her pulse and a penlight in her eyes.
"No pulse. She's in cardiac arrest!" Alessia barked, a terrified urgency cracking her professional composure.
Jae-min shoved past her and his hands found Ji-yoo's chest, locking his fingers and positioning his palms over her sternum with the heel of one hand over the other and his arms straight and his shoulders directly above the point of contact.
He started compressions, hard and fast and desperate, the heel of his palm driving into her breastbone with enough force to depress the chest two inches and the sound of cartilage shifting beneath the bone like knuckles cracking under water.
"Ji-yoo. Ji-yoo, come back." Jae-min grunted, a strangled desperation crushing his voice.
Thirty compressions, two breaths.
He tilted her head back and pinched her nose and sealed his lips over hers, and her lips were cold, not cool but cold, the kind that means the blood has stopped moving and the heart has stopped pumping and the person you love more than anything is leaving.
Thirty compressions, two breaths.
"No heartbeat. Jae-min, there's no heartbeat." Alessia reported, a terrified grief cracking her voice like thin ice as her fingers pressed into the soft hollow of Ji-yoo's throat.
"No." Jae-min denied, a raw refusal tearing from his throat as his hands drove into her chest.
Again.
"No." Jae-min repeated, a desperate refusal pounding through each compression.
Again.
Each compression a punch and each breath a prayer and each word a denial that tore from his throat like something with claws.
"COME BACK! JI-YOO, COME BACK!" Jae-min roared, a raw desperation breaking his voice on her name like glass shattering on concrete.
The sound came from the place behind his ribs where the void lived, a sound like someone reaching inside his own chest and pulling his organs out one by one while his heart was still beating.
"NO!" Jae-min screamed, a raw devastation exploding from his mouth, wet and destroyed.
His hands were a blur of thirty compressions and two breaths with her chest rising under his breath and falling and nothing, no response and no pulse and nothing.
"JI-YOO! COME BACK!" Jae-min howled, a primal devastation shaking his entire body as he drove his hands into her sternum again and again, the sound his palms made against her chest wet and heavy and wrong.
Tears were streaming down his face, not quiet and not dignified but the kind that come with sobs that wrack the whole body with the shoulders heaving and the chest convulsing and the throat making sounds the conscious mind would never allow.
"Please. Please. Please." Jae-min begged, a shattering desperation cracking each syllable into a wound.
Rico stood behind him with his face a mask but his eyes red and bloodshot and wet with tears that had appeared without his permission, the tears of a man who had watched his niece grow from a screaming infant to a fierce beautiful woman and was now watching her die on the floor of a fourteenth-floor apartment.
A tear ran down his weathered left cheek and disappeared into his grey beard, then another, then another.
He didn't wipe them and didn't try to hide them but just stood there and watched and shook, a sixty-two-year-old soldier who had survived three wars and couldn't survive this.
Alessia was crying openly with tears running down her face as she held Ji-yoo's wrist and her fingers pressed to the radial pulse point searching for a heartbeat that wasn't there, her lips moving silently counting.
One hundred and ten seconds.
One hundred and eleven.
One hundred and twelve.
"Come back. Come back. I'm here. I'm right here. Ji-yoo, please." Jae-min sobbed, a fading desperation slowing his compressions as his arms started to fail.
The strength was leaving him, not physical strength because the void would give him that forever, but something deeper, the kind of strength that only exists when there's hope, and hope was bleeding out on the white porcelain tile.
"NO! NO! NO!" Jae-min roared, a savage refusal slamming his fists against her chest, the sound echoing through the bunker like gunshots.
"JI-YOO! COME BACK!" Jae-min screamed, a raw devastation tearing through his voice from somewhere that existed before language and before thought and before everything except the bond between a brother and a sister who had shared a womb.
The silver traceries appeared.
Faint at first and almost invisible, running from Ji-yoo's sternum outward across her ribs and down her arms and up her neck, like frost patterns on a winter window and like the veins of a leaf rendered in mercury and like circuits powering on for the first time.
Nobody saw them because everyone was crying.
One hundred and fifteen seconds.
One hundred and sixteen.
One hundred and seventeen.
Jae-min pressed his forehead against his sister's and closed his eyes and reached into the void, not outward and not toward the entity but inward, toward her, toward whatever was left of her.
His hands found hers and squeezed the way he'd held her hand when they were kids, when Mom was sick and Dad was working and they'd sat together on the living room floor watching the rain.
"Come back. You came back before. Come back now." Jae-min pushed through the twin bond, a desperate love flooding every frequency through the connection that had existed since before they were born.
One hundred and eighteen seconds. One hundred and nineteen.
The world went white.
— VISION —
Jae-min didn't see the living room.
He saw a plane.
Korean Air Flight KE627, Incheon to Manila, the fuselage white with the blue and red livery and the Taegeuk symbol on the tail fin.
The temperature gauge read minus fifty-eight degrees, atmospheric temperature at thirty-five thousand feet in an atmosphere that shouldn't exist, the windshield frosting over with spiderwebs of ice spreading across the glass like white veins.
The left engine flamed out with a pop and the turbine spun down from twenty thousand to zero in four seconds, ice in the intake, and the plane banked left and the mountain filled the windshield.
The cabin with oxygen masks dangling and passengers screaming and the overhead bins rattling.
And he saw his parents.
His mother in seat 14A with her hair pulled back and her eyes wide and her hand reaching across the aisle toward his father in seat 14C, and between them in seat 14B was Ji-yoo with her black ponytail tied too tight and her lap belt loose.
'This isn't this timeline. This is the first one.' Jae-min realized, a cold recognition freezing his soul. 'The one where I never called.'
The wing came off.
Not slowly but all at once, the left wing shearing from the fuselage ripped away by aerodynamic stress that no aircraft was designed to survive, the sound of metal screaming as aluminum and titanium and carbon fiber and three million rivets cried out at once.
The fuselage tore and a gash opened ten meters long where the wing had been, the cabin wall ripping away like paper.
The depressurization was instantaneous with everything not bolted down sucked toward the breach, luggage and blankets and oxygen masks and a meal cart spinning end over end into the white.
A flight attendant went out first with her mouth open in a scream the wind swallowed, her body tumbling into the fog.
And Ji-yoo with her seatbelt loose was ripped from seat 14B, her fingers grazing her father's hand as she passed, the last physical contact she would ever have with either parent.
Then she was out and screaming with the wind swallowing her voice before it left her throat, and the right engine still running and still spinning at twenty thousand RPM was a metal maw of titanium blades.
She hit the turbine wall at two hundred and forty kilometers per hour.
The sound was a wet heavy final sound like a melon dropped from a building, her skull fracturing against the titanium housing and shattering with the cranial vault collapsing inward like an eggshell under a hammer and the sharp fragments driving into the tissue beneath.
Her neck snapped with the cervical vertebrae separating like a column of coins knocked sideways and the spinal cord severing in the same fraction of a second that her brain stopped sending signals.
Killed instantly, no pain and no final breath.
And then she was falling through the fog with arms and legs splayed and her black ponytail whipping and blood from her shattered head streaming behind her like a crimson ribbon, the only color in a world of white.
She was dead with no pulse and no breath and no brain activity, a body in freefall above the mountain.
And in the space between life and death something screamed, not her voice and not her lungs but something deeper behind her ribs that had never been there but had always been waiting in her DNA and dormant in her blood and patient in the marrow of her bones.
'JAE-MIN.' her dying mind screamed, a desperate need burning through the void.
Her brother's name, the last thought her dying brain produced, not a memory but a need, a desperate screaming crying pleading need that burned hotter than jet fuel and cut deeper than the turbine.
'I don't want to die. I don't want to fall. PLEASE. I need to see him again.' Ji-yoo screamed inwardly, a desperate refusal burning through the void. 'I need to touch him again. I need to BE WITH JAE-MIN.'
Dead and crying with tears freezing on a face that had already stopped breathing and crystallizing on her cheeks like tiny diamonds as she tumbled toward the mountain.
'STOP THE FALL. STOP. I DON'T CARE HOW. JUST LET ME SURVIVE. LET ME LIVE. LET ME GO HOME TO MY BROTHER.' Ji-yoo raged, a ferocious denial clawing through the dark.
Her love for him was not romantic and not gentle and not reasonable but the love of a woman who had shared a womb with another human being, who had shared every nightmare and every fever since before they were born, who would have burned the world to ash if it meant she could hold his hand one more time.
'I WON'T DIE. I WON'T FALL. I WON'T LEAVE HIM. I REFUSE. I REFUSE. I REFUSE.' Ji-yoo howled, an absolute refusal shattering the silence between life and death.
One hundred and nineteen seconds.
She fell for one hundred and nineteen seconds through the fog and the cold and the white with the mountain rising to meet her.
Her eyes opened, black, the same black eyes Jae-min had known his entire life, but different now and alive.
She wasn't breathing and her heart wasn't beating and her brain had been dead for one hundred and nineteen seconds, but her eyes were open.
And behind her ribs in the same place where Jae-min's void lived something ignited, not a fire and not a light but a force, the fundamental force that pulled everything down and held everything together and determined how hard a body hit the ground when it fell from the sky.
Gravity.
She could feel gravity not as a force that acted upon her but as a force that belonged to her, a muscle she had never used and a language she had never spoken and a door that had always been there but she had never known how to open.
She grabbed it not with her hands but with something deeper that hummed the same frequency as Jae-min's void but expressed itself in a different language.
'STOP.' Ji-yoo commanded, a newborn authority seizing the falling dark.
Her fall halted, not gradually but dead stop, two hundred and forty kilometers per hour to zero in less than a second.
She was levitating forty meters above the snow, her body suspended in the frozen air horizontal with arms at her sides and legs straight and her black ponytail hanging beneath her like a plumb line.
She looked like a woman held in the palm of an invisible hand.
She lowered herself to the ground slowly and gently like a leaf settling on still water, her bare feet touching the snow, and the cold didn't bother her anymore.
She looked up at the fog and the mountain and the burning wreckage of Flight KE627 somewhere above her, the orange glow of jet fuel against the white and the black smoke curling upward and the smell of burning kerosene and melting plastic and something organic.
Her parents were dead and she knew it without checking, the same way she knew Jae-min was alive through a faint hum in the center of her chest.
'He's alive. My brother is alive. And I need to find him.' Ji-yoo resolved, a fierce desperate determination driving her forward. 'Whatever happened to me. Whatever I am now. I need to find him.'
She started walking toward the tree line, and the fog closed around her.
The vision shattered.
— VISION END —
Jae-min gasped, and his eyes snapped open.
He was on the porcelain tile beside Ji-yoo with his hand still gripping hers and his face wet with tears because he'd seen it, not a dream or a hallucination but the first timeline, the real one where he hadn't called her.
'The wing came off. She was pulled out. She hit the turbine. She died. But she woke up while she was still falling. She screamed my name and something answered.' Jae-min shattered, a raw devastated grief crushing his chest. 'She stopped in mid-air. She lowered herself to the ground. She walked away from the wreckage.'
Ji-yoo's heart beat.
Once.
Alessia froze with her fingers still on Ji-yoo's wrist.
A second beat, a third.
Then Ji-yoo's body lifted off the porcelain tile, not convulsing but rising, three inches then six then a foot, her body suspended horizontally in the air above the floor with arms at her sides and legs straight and her black ponytail hanging beneath her swaying gently.
The silver traceries beneath her skin blazed bright and hot, running from her sternum to her fingertips like circuits powering on for the first time and casting a faint mercury glow against the charcoal fabric of her thermal shirt.
Everything loose in the room rose off the floor and orbited her body in a slow deliberate circle, the water bottle and the whetstone and the protein bar wrapper and the picture frame, not chaos but control, faint and unsteady like a child taking its first steps.
Alessia scrambled backward with her eyes wide.
Rico grabbed the granite counter and held on.
Yue pressed herself against the wall with marble eyes tracking the orbiting debris.
Jennifer's glow flared beneath her sternum responding to the gravitational shift.
And Jae-min knelt beneath his floating sister with his hand still gripping hers and tears streaming down his face, and he understood.
She had crossed the threshold.
Ji-yoo's eyes opened, black and the same black eyes Jae-min had known his entire life but deeper now and older and harder.
She looked at the ceiling then down at herself and at the silver traceries and at the debris orbiting her body and at her brother kneeling below her with tears on his face.
She blinked and the debris dropped and everything clattered to the porcelain tile at once, and Ji-yoo descended slowly and gently like a leaf settling on still water.
Her feet touched the tile and her knees buckled and she collapsed.
Jae-min caught her.
His arms wrapped around her, not gently and not carefully and not with any controlled restraint, but like a man catching the most precious thing in the world, like a man who had just watched her die.
And then he broke.
Not the desperate violent fighting kind of breaking from the CPR but a different kind, a worse kind, the kind that happens when the fight is over and you've won and the relief hits so hard that the body shatters.
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min choked, a raw devastation breaking his voice as the name came out like a sob, not a word but a wound.
He pulled her against his chest and wrapped both arms around her and held her so tight that his arms shook, not from weakness but from the effort of trying to squeeze a human body hard enough to prove it was real.
And he rocked her.
Back and forth, back and forth, the way he'd rocked her when they were seven and she'd had nightmares about the dark, the way he'd rocked her when Mom was in the hospital and they didn't know if she was coming home, the way he'd rocked her ten days ago when the blue dot stopped moving over the Alishan Mountains.
"You came back. You came back. You came back." Jae-min sobbed, a shattering relief tumbling out like water through a broken dam, each repetition a prayer and a denial of the one hundred and nineteen seconds where she'd been dead on the porcelain floor.
He pressed his face into her hair and breathed her in and cried harder, the silent shuddering full-body sobs so intense they paralyzed the vocal cords.
His lips found her forehead and he kissed her, not soft and not gentle but desperate, a kiss that pressed into her skin like he was trying to leave a mark and prove she was warm and alive and here.
Then her temple, then her cheek, then the bridge of her nose, then her other cheek, then her forehead again, then her hair.
He kissed every inch of her face not with romance but with the desperate gratitude of a brother worshiping the fact that his sister was still breathing, each kiss leaving a wet mark where his tears had touched her skin.
"You're here. You're here. You're here." Jae-min whispered between kisses, a fragile relief breaking on every word, his arms still wrapped around her and still rocking her back and forth.
He was crying harder now than during the CPR because during the CPR there had been no room for grief and only fight, but now the fight was over and the grief hit him all at once like a wall, like a wave, like the mountain.
He pressed his forehead against hers with their noses touching and their breath mingling, his warm and ragged and hers faint and shallow but there and alive and real.
"I felt you go." Jae-min whispered, a raw grief scraping his voice to almost nothing. "I felt you stop. I felt the bond cut and it was like."
His voice broke and shattered and disintegrated into a sob that wracked his entire body.
"It was like someone reached inside me and ripped out half my soul." Jae-min confessed, a devastating grief tearing through his chest.
"I'm here." Ji-yoo whispered, a quiet certainty anchoring her frail voice.
Two words, the only two that mattered.
And Jae-min sobbed, not a quiet sob but a wail, the sound of a man who had been holding himself together with willpower and duty and cold tactical discipline and who had finally found a moment where he didn't have to be strong anymore.
He held her and rocked her and kissed her hair and her forehead and her temple and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose and the tip of her cold nose and the corner of her jaw and the spot below her ear.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Rico stood behind them with tears running down his face and his jaw clenched and his hands balled into fists, wanting to reach out and hold them both but knowing this moment belonged to the twins.
'She's breathing. The girl is breathing.' Rico thanked, a gratitude beyond words and beyond reason pressing through his tears. 'The girl on the floor is breathing.'
Alessia sat on the porcelain tile three feet away with her hands over her mouth and tears streaming between her fingers, watching the man she loved hold his sister like she was the only thing keeping the universe from collapsing.
She didn't feel jealous or left out but awe, the awe of witnessing something so fundamental that it was almost holy.
Yue watched from the wall with dry marble eyes but her hand gripping the jian so tightly her knuckles had gone white, and somewhere deep inside her beneath the discipline and the logic something moved that she would never admit to feeling.
Jennifer watched from the sectional with wet ice-blue eyes and her fingers curled in the linens.
'I will never be loved like that. I will never be held like that.' Jennifer grieved, a sorrow so sharp it cut through her exhaustion. 'I will never be someone's whole world the way she is his.'
She was right but she didn't look away because nobody looked away.
Because the two figures on the porcelain floor, the man with the void behind his ribs and the woman with gravity in her blood holding each other like the world was ending and rocking back and forth and kissing foreheads and temples with the desperate gratitude of people who had just stared into the abyss and won, were the most human thing anyone in that room had ever seen.
The rocking slowed, and the sobs quieted, but Jae-min's grip didn't loosen, and his face was still pressed against her hair.
"The plane." Ji-yoo whispered, a raw grief scraping her voice. "The wing came off. I was pulled out. I hit the —."
She touched her head and felt the spot where the turbine should have killed her: nothing, no wound, no blood.
"I died. I died, and I was falling, and all I could think about was." Ji-yoo continued, a fractured grief trembling through her broken voice before she looked at Jae-min. "You."
Jae-min kissed her forehead again, longer and slower, the kind of kiss that says he would never let her go again.
"I know." Jae-min whispered against her skin. "I saw it. I saw all of it."
Rico knelt beside them with his face a mask but his hands shaking.
"Ji-yoo. You weren't on the plane. You were here. With us. In this unit. We watched it on the flight tracker together. Remember?" Rico said, a careful, controlled warmth grounding his voice.
She looked at him with her black eyes unfocused and wild and flickering with something that hadn't been there before.
"I know. I remember that. I remember sitting on the floor. Watching the blue dot stop. I remember screaming." Ji-yoo paused, a bewildered grief cracking her whisper. "But I also remember the mountain. The wind. The wing coming off. I wasn't strapped in. I was pulled out. I hit the turbine, and I died."
Her voice cracked.
"And then I was falling. And I was crying. And all I could think about was Jae-min. I kept screaming his name. I kept saying I wouldn't die. I wouldn't fall. I would survive. I would get back to him." Ji-yoo continued, a fearful wonderment robbing her of breath. "And something answered. Something inside me. Something that said I didn't have to fall. And the gravity, it was, I could feel it. Like a muscle I'd never used before."
She looked at Jae-min.
"What happened to me?" Ji-yoo demanded, a desperate confusion raw in her voice.
'She's describing the first timeline. The one where I never called.' Jae-min realized, a cold, heavy guilt pressing behind his hollow delivery. 'She was never on that plane in this timeline. But the twin bond doesn't care about timelines.'
"I don't know. A vision. A memory that isn't hers. The twin bond carried something through when the void restarted." Jae-min breathed, a heavy guilt pressing behind his hollow delivery.
It was the first lie he'd told Alessia in ten days.
Alessia studied him and knew he was holding back but didn't push, moving instead to sit beside him on the tile with her shoulder pressing against his and her hand finding his free one and lacing their fingers together.
He squeezed, and she felt the tremor in his grip and held tighter.
"Something rebuilt her. The same way the void kept Jae-min alive after his regression." Jennifer whispered, a fragile wonderment softening her thin voice. "When her heart stopped, something prevented permanent death."
Ji-yoo stirred with her fingers twitching against Jae-min's palm and her lips moving.
"I wasn't on the plane. I was here. But I was there too. Both. I was both." Ji-yoo murmured, a dreamlike grief floating through her faint voice.
Jae-min squeezed her hand. "I'm here. You're here. You're safe." Jae-min whispered, a warm tenderness wrapping around his gentle voice.
The silver traceries beneath her skin pulsed once, faint and warm, like a second heartbeat running parallel to the first.
And in that pulse, Jae-min felt something he hadn't expected: gravity, not around him but in him, a faint pull in the center of his chest in the same place where the void lived.
The twin bond had always been there, but now it was physical and tangible, and he could feel Ji-yoo's gravity the way she could feel his spatial hum.
Two frequencies, two powers, two halves of the same coin, connected always.
— • • • —
3:47 PM.
Eight hundred meters to the southeast, the entity lifted its head.
The distortion field rippled and expanded by three meters, then contracted back then expanded again like a dog catching a scent.
Not Jae-min's frequency because it knew that one and had been following it for ten days.
This was new, a gravitational signature faint but undeniable, the resonance of a force that operated on the same fundamental level as spatial compression.
Different frequency and different expression but same language.
The entity's wounded leg pulsed and the crack was almost sealed, three hours ahead of schedule, because the whisper from Jae-min had stabilized it and now the stabilization was accelerating because something else was singing.
Two songs now, not one.
The entity lowered its head, and its body shivered, not from cold but from recognition.
And eight hundred meters away in a fourteenth-floor apartment in Pasay City, a girl with silver veins slept on a charcoal sectional while her twin brother held her hand on the porcelain floor and an old soldier stared at the dining table and remembered the night he'd watched Jae-min hold that same girl while the blue dot stopped moving over a mountain that had already taken her parents.
The world was getting louder.
And the silence was running out.