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When the last UNICEF field report was finally filed, both Audrey Hepburn and Henry let out a long, collective sigh of relief.
Since late January, they had been on the road nonstop—three and a half months of back-to-back trips, endless inspections, press conferences, and relief missions. By the time May rolled around, even Hepburn was ordered to take a mandatory break.
Not because she wanted it, but because the UN had hit its limit. Peacekeeping forces were stretched too thin. Unless the Security Council approved more troops—a political impossibility just for a humanitarian mission—there was simply no one left to escort them.
Troop deployment wasn't charity; it came out of UN budgets, not UNICEF's. And UN money didn't fall from the sky. Every soldier meant more bills footed by member states. Nobody was about to greenlight extra forces just so Hepburn could keep her schedule running like a Swiss watch.
So the message was clear: two weeks off. Non-negotiable.
The choice was hers—stay in New York and keep milking billionaires at galas, or head back to Switzerland and actually rest. The answer was obvious.
Which was why Henry now found himself sitting in the first-class cabin of a transatlantic flight, beside Hepburn, bound for Zurich. This time, she was footing the bill herself.
The attendants were attentive, the seats wide enough to swallow him whole, and for once, Henry didn't mind slowing down.
Sure, with super-speed he could cram days of work into hours. But that didn't mean downtime was worthless. Quite the opposite: the luxury of wasting time felt precious. For once, he wasn't sprinting ahead of everyone else. He was just… sitting. Reading. Breathing.
The direct flight would take about seven and a half hours. Henry spent most of it with his nose buried in a book, occasionally scribbling notes into a battered notebook—half-baked ideas for improving Linux functions.
Online, he didn't have much time to socialize, but under the handle CK, he'd already carved out a reputation among the open-source community as a serious contributor. Linus Torvalds himself had even dropped an olive branch once, offering collaboration on a message board.
Henry hadn't taken it. He didn't need to. Why chase the spotlight? Not every rebel wanted an imperial pardon; sometimes it was better to stay in the shadows, like a bandit who never intends to surrender.
Today, though, his focus wasn't code—it was Russian literature.
In his hands: a first-edition, Russian-language copy of War and Peace, Volume IV, complete with Tolstoy's own signature. Audrey's private collection. She owned the whole signed set, and unlike most collectors, she believed books were meant to be read, not locked in climate-controlled vaults.
So, when Henry had asked, she'd encouraged him to borrow it. She couldn't read Russian herself, and she thought it was a shame to let the volumes sit silent.
Now he was deep into Tolstoy's philosophical tangents on Moscow's fall to Napoleon, wondering just how many layers of self-indulgent despair the nobleman protagonist was supposed to represent, when a ripple of noise spread through the cabin.
Passengers leaned toward the windows, murmuring in excitement.
Henry glanced up. They were cruising high, above the cloudline, where the world outside was usually nothing but velvet-black sky, a moon, and stars. But tonight, something else was out there.
A fire.
A swirling, orange flame floated in the heavens, tendrils lashing outward like living streamers, shifting shape every second.
"Is that the aurora?" someone asked.
"No way. Auroras have symmetry, structure. This… this is different. Beautiful, but chaotic."
"So what the hell is it?"
"No idea. But it's moving."
The chatter carried easily to Henry's ears. Even Hepburn looked up from her book, peering out through the oval window.
"Henry," she said softly, "what do you think that is?"
He followed her gaze through another window, brow furrowed. The sight nagged at him—familiar, yet hard to place. Something from history? Or from the future he half-remembered?
Still, most cosmic radiation never made it through the ozone layer. And the phenomenon wasn't descending toward Earth. Whatever it was, it didn't seem like an immediate threat.
"I don't know," he admitted.
Hepburn smiled at him, amused. "Now that is rare."
He spread his hands. "The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. Ask any real scholar—they'll tell you the same thing."
She tilted her head. "Think you can get a picture of it?"
Henry reached overhead, pulled down a camera case, and swapped in a low-light lens. His own photography skills were amateur at best, so he passed the camera to her and started blocking out the cabin light with a blanket, leaving only the lens pressed against the glass.
"Reflections are the enemy. Kill the extra light, and you might actually get something."
She snapped a test shot, adjusted the settings with a careful hand, and took a few more. They wouldn't know if anything came out until the film was developed, but that wasn't the point. Hepburn, ever the romantic, wanted to remember it with her own eyes anyway.
Henry, though, kept watching. His vision pierced the atmosphere with inhuman clarity.
And he saw it.
A shuttle, gliding too close to the firestorm in the sky. One moment it was moving freely. The next—it was caught. Snared by the roiling energy. Engines sputtered, and then… silence.
The craft hung there in the heavens, suspended like a fly in amber.
Henry's stomach tightened.
This wasn't just a pretty light show.
Something—someone—was here.
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