The plan was simple.
That was the problem.
"We can't hit Malvorn directly," Aeva said, pulling up the city map. Red zones everywhere Malvorn's hunters had split across four districts like they owned the place already. "Titus absorbs hits. Vex has no solid form. Kora's skin deflects anything under a certain"
"I know," Kazuki said.
"Your arm is broken."
"I know."
"So what's the plan?" Elena asked from the corner, arms crossed, coffee in hand.
Nobody answered for a moment.
Rina was sitting on the workbench. She hadn't spoken since she arrived twenty minutes ago. She kept her phone face-down on her knee. Every four minutes or so, without thinking, she flipped it over. Checked it. Flipped it back.
Kazuki noticed. He didn't say anything.
"The signal," he said instead. "Run it again, Aeva. The one from deep space."
Aeva frowned. "We already"
"Run it again. But don't look for coordinates. Look for a timestamp. Not when it was sent." He paused. "When it was sent from."
The room went quiet except for Aeva's fingers on the keyboard.
Then she stopped typing.
She leaned forward.
"Kazuki."
"Yeah."
"The signal origin..." She turned the screen. "It's not a location."
The data made no sense in the way that real, important things often don't make sense at first glance.
It was a date. Not a place. A year. A time.
Elena walked over slowly. Looked at the screen. Said nothing.
"It came from forty years from now," Aeva said. Her voice was flat in the way voices get when emotions are too large to fit in words. "Something forty years in the future sent a signal to the Core the night you put it on."
The room absorbed that.
"It was a welcome," Kazuki said quietly.
Nobody asked him what he meant. They were all thinking it.
At 2 AM, Kazuki went to the back room alone.
He sat on the edge of the cot and looked at the cast on his arm.
It felt loose.
He pressed his fingers against the carbon fiber. Pressed harder. He could feel the bone underneath solid. Not tender. The deep structural ache that had been constant since the bridge was gone.
He pulled the cast off.
His arm was fine. Completely fine. The skin was smooth, unbruised. He made a fist.
No pain.
Six weeks of healing in seven days.
The suit's blue veins pulsed calmly up his forearm.
He looked at them.
There was a new one.
Thin as a hair, tracing from his wrist up toward his elbow, branching once. It hadn't been there before the bridge. Before Titus broke him.
He traced it with his finger.
It didn't feel like armor.
It felt like a road.
He didn't tell Aeva. He didn't tell Elena.
He put a different cast on. A lighter one. So nobody would know yet.
He lay back on the cot and stared at the ceiling.
In the dark, the Core pulsed blue and slow.
Patient.
Like something that had already seen how this ends and wasn't worried.
[To Be Continued...]