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I wake to the screams of alarms and the stench of burning metal. The air is wrong—thick, acrid, too warm, like an electric charge buzzing against my skin. Red warning lights pulse against the metallic walls, strobing in time with the alarms, painting my quarters in frantic, bloody flashes.

Malfor’s Kazakhstan compound—half laboratory, half prison—has been my reluctant home for months now. The sterile white corridors, reinforced security doors, and guards with red phoenix emblems have become a familiar nightmare. Every day here strips away another piece of my soul, my research twisted into something I never intended.

My bare feet slap the icy floor as the door to my dormitory slams open. Guards storm in, rifles up, faces set. They shove me toward the hallway.

“Wait!” I lunge for my desk, fingers scrambling for the small thumb drive tucked beneath my notes.

Everything is on that drive—all my research, thesis work, and years of quantum entanglement calculations. If I lose it, the past few years of my life are wasted. Worse—Malfor wins. This isn’t just data; it’s the only evidence of what they’ve forced us to do here .

I can’t leave it.

“No time!” A guard grabs my arm, but I twist away, desperation sharpening my movements.

My fingers close around the cool metal, its weight insignificant yet somehow containing my entire academic future—and perhaps the key to stopping what Malfor has set in motion. I shove the USB deep into my pocket, tucking it as far as it will go. I’ll die before leaving this behind.

“Out! Everyone out, now!” The guards’ shouts echo over the alarms.

They shove me into the corridor, but not before I snatch my shoes. The bitter stench of burning electronics slams into me, making my stomach lurch.

Someone shouts down the hall. Another guard ushers the Chens and their teenage son, Kevin, from their quarters. Kevin’s face is pale, his knuckles white where he clutches his mother’s hand. The Williams family is next, stumbling out of their room in a huddled group.

It’s a domino effect—doors opening, frightened faces emerging, voices overlapping, panic rising.

We’re funneled into the main hallway, disoriented. I spot Dr. Whittman, my thesis advisor, mentor, almost a father to me, ahead of us, his thin frame hunched forward as he clutches Maria’s arm—Rodriguez’s daughter, the youngest hostage here. The twelve-year-old stumbles, but Whittman keeps her upright, murmuring something urgent.

“Malikai!” Malia shouts for her brother.

He looks half-dead. His skin is ghostly white, his steps uncertain. Each movement costs him, but survival keeps him upright as he catches himself against the railing with trembling arms.

“Stay together!” A guard barks the order, his rifle slung low as his eyes dart between us and the shadows.

I don’t know if the command is for us or them. I grab Whittman’s sleeve, steadying him before he trips.

Adrenaline pounds through me, my heart banging uselessly against my ribs.

Is it a fire? An attack? Something else? Is this Malfor’s way of telling us we’ve run out of time?

As we’re forced toward the emergency exits, my hand instinctively presses against my pocket. The drive’s there.

My work was supposed to revolutionize secure communications and unbreakable encryption, but Malfor twisted it into something entirely different. The equations revealed patterns I never anticipated—strange energy signatures that suggested capabilities beyond what should be possible. Even if I don’t make it out, the world needs this data.

Whittman mutters something under his breath, but I only catch the word “containment.”

I want to scream at him to stop. Stop trying to process, stop trying to think—isn’t that what got us here in the first place?

The stifling heat of the facility breaks as we’re shoved outside. The night air slams into me—icy, brutal, burning my lungs clean. The facility spits us onto the open steppe, its floodlights carving the darkness into patches of blinding white and bottomless shadow.

It’s unbearably open, wide, flat, and endless. The barren landscape stretches forever in every direction. There’s nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.

Escape is impossible.

Behind me, Kevin stumbles on the icy dirt, his knee hitting the ground. Mrs. Chen grabs his arm, helping him regain his footing as he struggles to keep pace. The Williams family huddles close. Whittman’s arms lock tight around Maria, her small frame shaking in the cold. Malikai lags a step behind, his exhaustion tugging him down even as Malia tries to keep him upright.

The first explosion tears through the night. The ground bucks beneath me, a violent shock that sends a startled scream ripping from my throat. The facility’s floodlights flicker once … twice … and die.

Everything plunges into shadow and darkness.

My instincts tell me to drop to the ground, but the guards shout louder. Only this time, it’s not orders but panic .

Another explosion erupts to my right. It sears jagged afterimages into my retinas.

“RUN!”

The command cracks through the chaos, sharp and commanding, cutting through the alarms like a whip. I obey without thinking. I grab Malia and help her drag her brother forward.

Beneath my feet, the ground trembles violently and grows stronger by the second. The air tastes wrong—metallic, heavy, charged like the crackling edge of a thunderstorm.

Black-clad figures emerge from the shadows, weapons leveled, their movements lethal and precise. At first, fear spikes through me—they’re here to kill us, to finish what the explosions started—but then one of them grabs my arm and yanks me forward.

“This way!” The voice is distorted through his helmet, but there’s something impossibly deliberate in his grip. I lock eyes with him, or try, but his visor reflects only my terrified expression. His grip is unyielding, not cruel—just absolute.

Another figure flanks me on the other side, urging me to pick up my pace. Together, they box me in. They move with the kind of precision that only comes from endless drills—one always watching the other’s back.

They keep me moving through the chaos.

Explosions ripple across the compound, each louder than the last. Gunfire cracks through the air—sharp, jarring, deafening. I glance back once, and a flash of muzzle fire nearly blinds me. Bodies jerk as the black-clad rescuers cut down guards with terrifying accuracy.

Above the noise, the hum of something mechanical fills the air.

Through plumes of smoke and bursts of firelight, shadows shift. They’re too fluid and too calculated to be human.

Four-legged, sleek, and metallic, they move unnervingly smoothly as they appear and disappear through the darkness. They leap—higher and faster than anything living.

Guards scatter, their formations collapsing as the machines brutally force them back.

“Move!” The man on my left growls the command, his grip tightening as he guides me toward a gap in the perimeter fence.

I stumble over a clod of frozen earth, barely catching myself in time.

A hand clamps around my arm, yanking me upright. The other rescuer steadies me, his hold bruising but necessary.

“Keep going!” He shoves me forward. When he glances back, his visor catches the firelight, and for a split second, I see my own panic reflected there.

Malia stumbles in front of me. One of the men helps her brother. Whittman falters, his elderly frame nearly giving out, but sheer determination keeps him upright as his grip on Maria’s wrist never wavers. More black-clad rescuers appear, their movements quick and deliberate, herding us toward a gap in the perimeter fence.

That’s when it hits.

This is a rescue.

We reach the razor-wire fencing.

Almost there.

Almost free.

But facility guards flank us, trying to cut us off. A rifle kicks as someone fires, the shockwave punching my eardrums. The shock of it leaves my ears ringing.

Before I can cry out, the man beside me pivots, one hand propelling me roughly forward while his weapon swings up in a calculated arc. He fires, the sound cracking loud and dry in the bitter cold.

The guard crumples, his body sagging into vapor-thickened shadows.

I don’t have time to process his death. My rescuer shouts at me to move, and a new surge of adrenaline feeds my oxygen-starved lungs.

“Don’t stop!” His voice cuts like a bullet, sharp and precise, as he shoves me through the breach in the fence.

The fencing falls behind us, but the vibrations beneath my feet don’t stop. They’re stronger now, thrumming through every bone in my body. My thoughts spiral in frantic circles.

I don’t need Whittman to explain what’s happening.

I know.

Quantum tunneling. Containment field destabilization. A cascade effect spiraling out of control. It’s a runaway chain reaction—inevitable, relentless. The math is merciless.

The fusion reactor is going critical.

The air changes.

It feels alive.

The vibrations pulse in rhythm, the earth itself bracing for catastrophe.

“No,” Whittman gasps beside me, his eyes wide as the explosions crescendo behind us. His voice cracks with desperation, his words garbled and too fast, but I understand.

The reactor.

“No, no, no…” Whittman’s voice is more than a gasp now—it’s close to a sob. His words tumble out, barely carrying over the frantic rush of footsteps and the deafening roar of the night. “The containment fields… they’re collapsing. If the cascade initiates—if we reach tunneling thresholds … ”

“Keep moving!” A sharp command silences him.

The black-clad figure on my left drags me forward, his voice razor-sharp and unyielding—the voice of a man who expects immediate compliance and gets it. The rescuer on my right balances that precision with something dangerously calm, his movements fluid but his rifle steady as it scans the distance.

I don’t understand their rhythm, but it’s there—perfectly honed as if they’ve moved together for years. Something about them feels familiar, a déjà vu that needles at me through the fog of adrenaline and fear. No time to chase it now.

Another explosion rocks the earth behind us, sending me stumbling into the rescuer on my left with a choked cry.

“Easy.” He pulls me upright, his grip steady, almost gentle despite the urgency.

The steppe stretches out before us, wide and desolate. We’re running, but there’s no way to escape the catastrophe of a fusion reactor reaching critical.

I grit my teeth, lungs burning.

My mind’s spinning, running calculations I wish I could forget. This isn’t a nuclear plant meltdown. It isn’t an atomic bomb.

That’s fission.

A fusion reactor losing containment is nothing like a nuclear power plant’s meltdown.

This is far worse.

The core melts down with a nuclear power plant, and the radiation leaks out, but everything stays in one place—at least long enough for some containment.

An atomic bomb? That’s fission, too.

The explosion is over in a blinding instant. There’s radiation and wholescale destruction, but we’re talking fusion.

It’s far worse than either of those.

When a fusion reactor loses its containment fields… it’s like freeing a miniature sun.

Fusion runs hotter than fission—hundreds of millions of degrees hotter.

All that heat turns rock into molten slag, air into plasma.

There’s no stopping it.

No obstacle can hold it back.

No shield can deflect it.

It’ll melt everything, turn the earth to glass. It’s not an explosion.

It’s annihilation.

And we’re trying to outrun it.