First steps.
First words.
First everything.
But Igotthis.
And I don’t know what to do with it.
The toy creaks faintly in the breeze. I close my hand around it.
Maybe the truth isn’t in what I lost.
Maybe it's what Istillhave.
And the question hanging in the air like a breath held too long is:am I brave enough to forgive herbefore it’s too late?
CHAPTER 40
NOVA
The room is too quiet.
That kind of quiet that hums at the edges, like the walls themselves are holding their breath.
I shouldn't be here.
I know that.
But I also know Stark's lying through his teeth, and the only way to get proof is to dig past the layers he built to keep people like me away.
His terminal glows faintly under the low lights of the lab, screensaver cycling through neural net overlay schematics, each more opaque than the last. I override the retina lock with a microchip I palmed off Verzius last week. He doesn't know.
The terminal clicks.
Unlocks.
I slide into the chair like I belong there.
My fingers move fast. Faster than fear can catch up.
Terminal logs. Obscured file trees. Direct I/O patches. He's running a modeling cluster deep enough to avoid protocol audits. What I find tucked between dummy folders and recoded echo programs makes my throat go dry.
A live simulation.
Real-time anomaly mapping.
The wormhole's already forming.
Underneath Daveros.
The crust is thinning where the field stabilizers are staged. There’s a vibration pattern—it’s low-frequency, almost seismic. Not just unstable.
Volatile.
One wrong surge, and it’ll collapse inward. Take half the mountain with it. Probably the base too.
I sit back in the chair, blood rushing in my ears.
