Heat.

  That was the first thing. Heat pressing against her from all sides, thick and close, like being submerged in something that wasn't water but moved like it.

  Then pressure across her chest. Her ribs. The base of her skull. Not pain exactly. More like weight settling in from every direction at once.

  Something is wrong.

  The thought surfaced and dissolved before she could hold it.

  Sound reached her next. A low hum vibrating in her teeth, in her sternum. Mechanical. Steady. Something nearby working very hard.

  She tried to open her eyes. Nothing happened.

  Move. You need to—

  Her fingers didn't respond. Her legs didn't exist. She floated in the warmth and the pressure and the dark and couldn't remember why any of it mattered.

  Then something beeped.

  A voice followed, ft and without emotion.

  [HEART RATE DROPPING. 60 BPM. 58. 55.]

  That's mine.

  The warmth around her thickened, adjusted, pressing against a wound in her side she hadn't known existed until that moment.

  She wanted to scream. The sound stayed trapped below her throat.

  [LOCATING VIABLE HABITAT. SEARCHING.]

  She tried to ask where. Tried to ask who she was, what any of this was. Nothing formed. The hum around her was getting louder, closer, and then even that disappeared.

  The st thing she felt before the dark took her again was movement.

  Fast. Accelerating.

  Something had made a decision. She was along for the ride.

  A red line tore open in space. Twenty meters wide. Edges flickering like static on a dead screen. The portal held for three seconds. Then the sphere shot through.

  Scarlet metal. No seams anywhere on the surface. It moved fast enough to leave a trail and red particles hung in the void behind it, fading slowly.

  Inside, suspended in translucent gel, a woman floated unconscious. Her chest rose and fell, and rose again. The gel had a pink tint now, and blood spreading through it in thin clouds.

  Data streams lit up the sphere's interior. Seventeen points on the woman's body glowed red. Ruptured spleen. Three fractured ribs pressing against her left lung. Internal bleeding in her abdomen. Her heart rate dropping. Sixty beats per minute, fifty-eight, fifty-five.

  Text appeared, projected onto the gel:

  MISSION 1: REACH DIMENSION 8712390823-INF

  STATUS: FAILED. DIMENSIONAL TRANSIT FUEL EXHAUSTED.

  MISSION 2: PROTECT PASSENGER LIFE STATUS:

  CRITICAL ACTION: LOCATING VIABLE HABITAT FOR EMERGENCY LANDING.

  The sphere adjusted course. Stars slid past the viewport. White points against bck. It had already crossed three systems inside the fissure. Gray worlds with dead skies. Unstable stars. Gas giants with nowhere to nd. None of them met survival parameters.

  Now it approached the fourth system.

  Yellow sun. Stable. Four pnets in orbit. The sphere slowed as it entered the system's edge. Sensors swept across each pnet.

  Pnet one: too close to the sun. Surface molten.

  Pnet two: frozen. Atmosphere of methane and ammonia.

  Pnet three: same. Ice world.

  Pnet four...

  The sensors took six full seconds to process it.

  Heat signatures across three continents. Liquid water. Vast oceans. Oxygen at 18% atmospheric composition. And life. Carbon-based. Humanoid skeletal structure detected in multiple locations.

  But there was something else.

  An energy field surrounded the entire pnet. The sphere's sensors traced it carefully. Started at 200 kilometers above the surface. Extended outward another fifty.The field pulsed in slow waves. Each pulse sent ripples of blue-white light across its surface.

  It was artificial. The energy signatures didn't match anything natural.

  The sphere ran analysis protocols, and searched for gaps, weak points or entry corridors.

  Nothing.

  The readings didn't match anything in the sphere's database. Unknown energy type and unknown construction method.

  More data appeared:

  GRAVITY: 1.4 EARTH STANDARD

  ATMOSPHERIC ANOMALY: UNKNOWN COMPOUND, 3% CONCENTRATION

  AUTHORIZED ENTRY POINTS: 0

  The sphere calcuted. If it tried to force through, structural integrity would fail. The gel suspension would rupture. The woman would die on impact.

  Survival probability: 2%.

  Inside the sphere, an arm started beeping. Soft at first. The woman's heart rate hit forty-two beats per minute. Falling.

  The sphere's core hummed. Low. Felt more than heard.

  2% was better than 0%.

  The sphere accelerated. The hum turned into a roar. Every system routed power to propulsion. The pnet's energy field ahead began to glow. Layers of blue light rippled across it, reacting to the incoming sphere.

  It locked on target. Pushed harder.

  Ten kilometers out. Five, one.

  Contact.

  The impact lit up the entire field. White light exploded outward in a perfect sphere. Expanded for half a second. Colpsed back. The scarlet sphere punched through. Metal screamed as it forced a hole three meters wide through the barrier.

  Below, in a forest that stretched to the horizon, the Giant stood among the trees.

  Three hundred ninety feet tall and humanoid shape. The trees around it barely reached its knees.

  White skin, the color of paper or bone. The surface appeared smooth until you got close enough to see thousands of cracks covering every inch, like porcein about to shatter.

  The body was too thin for something that tall with arms longer than they should be, hanging past where knees would be on a human and the limbs moved in smooth curves.

  It was naked and hairless with smooth white surface where reproductive organs should have been.

  The head was featureless except for hundreds of eyes.

  They covered the entire head in every size imaginable, from dinner-pte rge down to grape small, in shapes ranging from round to oval to nearly rectangur. The colors varied wildly: brown, blue, green, bck, red, yellow, orange. Some had pupils and some didn't.

  Each eye looked in a different direction, tracking birds, following wind in the leaves, watching ants three hundred feet below, and monitoring the sky, the ground, everything at once.

  The forest around it was old with trees that had trunks thirty feet thick and a canopy so dense the ground stayed in permanent shadow.

  Massive structures stood among the trees, buildings that must have been five hundred feet tall but were broken now and tilted. Stone walls twenty feet thick, cracked down the middle with trees growing through the gaps. Roads wide enough for six eighteen-wheelers side by side, buckled and split by roots. Columns that could have supported coliseums, lying in pieces among the ferns.

  Everything was covered in moss, vines, and mushrooms the size of cars. Whatever civilization had built these things was gone, and the forest had recimed it all.

  A separate energy field covered the entire forest, different from the pnetary barrier above, older and weaker. It formed a dome following the treeline, stretching for miles in every direction and nothing could enter or leave without passing through it. It had kept the forest sealed and isoted.

  But the forest wasn't forgotten. The outside world knew it was here and they'd been trying to break in for years.

  One of the Giant's eyes moved, a green oval-shaped one on the left side of its head, shifting upward.

  Tracking something in the sky.

  Then the ruins hummed.

  The sound was low and barely audible. The Giant's head tilted. Hundreds of eyes focused in different directions. On the stone structures, on the roads, on the broken pilrs.

  Blue light flickered in the carvings, dim and irregur like a power surge. The light pulsed once, then twice, then went dark again.

  The Giant stood motionless for three seconds.

  It moved fast, faster than something that size should be able to move, crossing fifty feet in two strides before stopping next to a colpsed archway. One hand pressed against the stone.

  The carving underneath flickered again, and the light pulsed and weakened. The pattern was inconsistent.

  The Giant's voice came from somewhere inside its body. It vibrated through the ground.

  "Breach detected."

  More eyes focused upward, scanning the dome above the forest. The barrier was still there and still active, but thinner. The Giant could see it now, the shimmer in the air that was usually invisible, but now visible because it was weakening.

  The ruins hummed again, louder this time, then the sound cut off abruptly. Lights embedded in the stone structures went dark, all of them simultaneously.

  Then they flickered back on, dimmer than before.

  The Giant's hand remained pressed against the archway where it could feel the flow of energy moving through channels carved into the stone and branching through the entire forest network. The flow was stuttering as sections went dark, came back online, then failed again.

  The pnetary barrier breach had created a cascade.

  The Giant lifted its right hand and reached for its face. Fingers touched the green eye gently.

  Then it gripped and pulled.

  The eye came out cleanly and the socket sealed immediately. White surface underneath, smooth and unmarked.

  The Giant held the eye in its palm. The eye was still moving, its pupil contracting and expanding.

  Then it grew.

  The eye swelled and stretched, the round shape elongating and forming a torso. Arms sprouted from the sides and legs from the bottom. In thirty seconds there was a humanoid standing in the Giant's palm.

  It had white skin with the same texture as the Giant, stood five and a half feet tall with human proportions, and had one eye in the center of its face, the same green oval eye. Below it was a mouth with thin lips, closed.

  The Giant lowered its hand to the ground and the clone stepped off, bare feet touching moss and stone.

  "The system is failing," the Giant said. Its voice was calm but the words came faster than before. "The breach damaged the primary conduit. The dome will colpse within minutes."

  The clone looked up and its single eye found the streak in the sky, red fire cutting through the atmosphere and getting brighter.

  "Is it a weapon? From the countries breaking through the barrier?"

  "No. They don't have space travel yet." The Giant's eyes blinked in sequence, a wave starting from the left side of its head and rolling to the right with hundreds of eyelids closing and opening like dominos.

  "But they'll be here soon. Multiple factions."

  The ruins hummed again but the sound was weaker, dying. Another section of lights went dark and this time they didn't come back on.

  The Giant looked down at the clone. "When the dome falls, they'll come. All of them. The core must be preserved. The trial protocols must activate."

  The clone hesitated but just for a moment, and then it nodded.

  The Giant reached up with both hands. Gripped its own head. The hands wrapped around the neck. Fingers intercing.

  A section of ruins fifty meters away went dark. The blue light in the carvings died and the hum stopped.

  Then the Giant pulled.

  The head tore free. Blue blood poured from the neck, thick and luminous, spshing onto the ground below. The Giant lowered the head carefully and set it down among the roots of a massive tree. Blue liquid dripped from the severed neck, pooling in the moss.

  The eyes on the head were still moving. Still watching everything.

  The massive body swayed, then fell. The impact shook the ground, making trees tremble and ancient stones shift. The body y motionless among the ruins. White skin already beginning to dull.

  From the neck opening, blue-white light spilled out, pulsing slowly.

  Then eyes started emerging from the head.

  One crawled out of the opening and dropped to the ground. It nded, bounced once, then began transforming. Another followed, then three more, then ten at once. They started growing, reshaping, forming arms and legs and bodies.

  The process took seconds. When it stopped, hundreds of clones stood in the ruins. All white and with single eyes in different colors and all watching in different directions.

  They scattered without words, some climbing the trees while others moved toward the ruins in the north or headed south. In ten seconds the area was empty except for the original clone.

  It approached the Giant's headless body. The neck opening was five feet across and inside, the light pulsed brighter.

  The clone climbed up, gripped the smooth surface, reached the neck, and looked inside.

  The core sat in the center of the chest cavity, suspended by thin strands of white tissue. It was a sphere of energy glowing blue and white, bright enough that looking directly at it hurt.

  The clone reached in with both hands and gripped the core. The tissue strands stretched and snapped. The clone pulled the core free and climbed back down.

  The moment the core left the body, everything changed.

  The ruins stopped humming, cut off instantly.

  Lights that had been embedded in the stone flickered once. Dim blue glows appeared in carvings, doorways, and the centers of broken columns. They pulsed.

  Then they went dark.

  The energy field above, invisible from the ground, weakened but didn't disappear. The shimmer became visible now, a faint blue wall following the forest's edge.

  The clone held the core in both hands and looked up.

  The red streak was very close and making sound now, a roar that grew louder every second.

  The sphere fought to slow down.

  Engines fired in reverse, struggling as power drained rapidly. The sphere couldn't stop, only reduce speed. It dropped from six thousand meters per second to four thousand, then three thousand.

  It was still too fast.

  The hull burned as it cut through the atmosphere. Fmes wrapped around the metal in orange and white, trailing behind in a long tail. The outer yer cracked and peeled. Pieces of scarlet metal broke off and disintegrated. The sphere shook. Inside, the gel sloshed. The woman's body shifted with each violent tremor.

  Two thousand meters per second, then fifteen hundred.

  The forest rushed up to meet it.

  Inside the gel, her fingers twitched. Not conscious, not awake, just a reflex. For a moment her eyes moved under her eyelids, like she was trying to wake up from something.

  Then the sphere hit.