Turn it over in my hand.
It’s light.
Fragile.
Like the truth I just learned.
The yearswelost.
And suddenly I’m not angry anymore.
I’m just tired.
Broken.
Wrecked in a quiet way.
I sit on the floor, toy in hand, and let the silence crawl up my throat.
She kepthimfrom me.
And I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive her for that.
But I know I still love her.
Which makes it worse.
Because now?
I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with all of it.
CHAPTER 38
NOVA
The second I crack open the command records room, my stomach knots.
The lights hum low. Cold. Like everything in here is meant to feel sterile and precise. But the air iswrong. There’s a heaviness to it—like data that knows it’s hiding something.
I pull up the encrypted logs Stark thinks he buried deep enough no one would bother scratching past the surface.
But I scratch.
I always do.
And what I find curdles my blood.
The wormhole window isn’t stabilizing—it’sdecaying. The success rates aren’t just exaggerated. They’re fabricated. Entire trials redacted. Risk models inverted. On paper, it looks brilliant. In practice, it’s a loaded gun aimed at everything we’ve built.
I back up the files. Again.
Hands shaking.
He’s going to launch this thing. And he knows it’s unstable.
I push back from the console, hard, my chair screeching against the tile.
I need to find Kaz.
