The Crisis Beneath

Below Blue Ash City’s neon arteries, below the shuttered storefronts and the dying shopping center, a hidden chamber pulsed like a buried heart. Machines stacked in steel towers hummed in low harmony. Cables sagged across concrete, black veins slick with condensation. Halogen lights cast jaundiced color over rows of consoles and suspended holographic displays. The air tasted of ozone and nervous sweat.

Chino Tokuma sat at the central station, fingers resting on a gray plastic keyboard worn smooth by years of drills. Sixteen years old. Youngest technician ever cleared for Mirror Crossing Operations, a distinction that had felt like an honor six months ago and now felt like a sentence. She forced her breathing into something steady. Every click of the keys echoed louder than it should have.

Far above her, Blue Ash lived its ordinary midday life. Billboards flickered over gridlocked streets. Rain threatened from a bruised sky. Millions moved through the city, unaware that the ground beneath them held its breath.

Chino imagined them sometimes. Festive decorations behind glass. Carousel doors spinning. Polished shoes clicking on tile. Down here, those sounds never reached. The silence swallowed everything.

A hand brushed her shoulder. She flinched before she could stop herself.

“Come on,” the young woman beside her whispered, offering a thin, encouraging smile. “We’ve got this.”

Chino nodded, returned the half-smile, then let it fall away. She glanced up at the wall-length display. MIRROR CROSSING OPERATIONS. Objectives scrolled beneath it, clinical and unforgiving.

She adjusted the narrow microphone fixed to her console and leaned in.

“Falcon One,” she said, voice carefully neutral. “Confirm audio.”

Static cracked. Then a man’s voice, distant and calm.

“Reading you, home base. I have light. Ion engine operating nominally. Standing by.”

Chino exhaled through her nose. Good. So far, textbook. On the secondary monitors, lines of archaic prayer scrolled alongside bleeding-edge code. Uchellan syllables older than recorded language, compiled into executable logic. No one in the chamber fully understood how it worked. The briefings called it a fusion of ancient mantra theory and quantum computation. The engineers called it the Mantra Drive. Chino called it the thing she was not allowed to ask questions about. She had been told the promise: limitless energy. A future rewritten. She had not been told the risk, but she had read it in the silences between her supervisors’ words.

“Begin core checks,” the woman beside her said, tugging nervously at her collar.

Chino’s fingers moved. Power levels surged, green to amber to red in the space of a breath. Her stomach tightened as she rerouted load from the municipal grid. Somewhere above, streetlights dimmed. A billboard flickered. Cars slowed as traffic signals blinked dead, then returned. On one of the feeds, a cluster of schoolchildren stared up at the sudden darkness. Their teacher waved them forward, urgency sharp in her gestures.

“Stay with me,” Chino whispered. She flipped two switches, then a third. The hum deepened. Readouts crawled back toward green.

“Core One stable. Core Two stable. Core Three… stable.”

Interference rattled the line.

“Core Four stable.”

“Clear that static,” Commander Honda snapped from across the room.

Chino shrank into her chair, fingers still moving. Another hand, gentler this time, closed over hers for a second. Reassurance, brief and silent.

The radio clicked.

“My cable was loose,” Falcon One said. “Apologies. Core Five nominal. Core Six stable. Broadcasting levels now.”

Thunder rolled somewhere aboveground. Rain had arrived. On the surface feed, a broken streetlight flickered back to life, water streaming down its housing.

Chino swallowed and checked her final readouts.

“Falcon One,” she said, “begin Particle Engine inspection.”

The external camera feed expanded across the main wall. Falcon One drifted along the satellite’s spine, tethered by a single cable to the platform suspended inside the Gate’s aperture. On the monitors, the space around him was not empty. It was the Between: a dimensionless dark that the project’s instruments could measure but not explain. Wisps of blue light floated through the void like deep-sea bioluminescence, painting his white suit in ghostly color. The darkness around him did not feel vacant. It felt attentive.

Chino watched, transfixed, as he worked. Methodical. Precise. A professional at the edge of something unknowable.

“Engines one and two are fine,” he muttered. “Checking three. Yes. All good.”

Her final authorization prompt blinked. Chino took a breath that felt too shallow to matter.

“Headquarters clears you to engage the Mantra Drive.”

Falcon One braced himself, clipped a second tether, and grasped the cylindrical switch embedded in the device’s housing. With a metallic groan, he turned it. One by one, the satellite’s rods ignited red. The chamber vibrated. A low chant bled into the audio feed. Not spoken. Not recorded. Present, the way pressure is present before a storm. Human syllables riding electrical current. Prayer inside the wire.

Then:

“Commander,” someone shouted. “We’ve got a contact.”

Chino jerked upright.

“Object spotted,” she said, heart stuttering. “East of the gate.”

The system locked on automatically. A distant point of light bloomed on the screen. Too fast. Too bright.

“Falcon One,” she said, voice tightening, “do you have visual?”

“I see it,” he replied. His HUD framed the object in green. Numbers raced downward inside the box. “It’s approaching rapidly.”

Something in the chant warped. The hum deepened, distorted. For a split second, Chino thought she heard laughter folded into the static. She reached for the abort switch. Her hand stopped. No one had authorized abort. Honda’s eyes were locked on the screen. The room had gone silent except for the hum and the thing inside it.

“Falcon One, readings?” Commander Honda demanded.

The light swelled. On the feed, frames began to skip. One second Falcon One was reaching for his tether. The next, his hand was somewhere else entirely. The timestamps in the corner of the display stuttered, jumped backward, froze. Chino felt time itself lose its grip on the moment.

The flash obliterated the feed. Sound followed: an impossible, concussive roar that blew speakers from their mounts. Consoles exploded. Glass and metal scythed through the air. The floor heaved. Something tore open beneath them.

Chino was thrown backward, pain blooming white across her senses. Someone screamed. Maybe her. The last thing she heard was Honda’s voice, breaking.

“Falcon One, do you copy—”

Then nothing. Only darkness.

•  •  •

Fifty Years Later

“Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the explosion that destroyed Blue Ash City…”

Apricot Signa muted the broadcast. The anchor vanished into black. Her reflection surfaced in the darkened screen, pale and sleepless, fractured by neon from beyond the glass. Rain streaked the window behind her, breaking the city’s light into veins of color that crawled down the pane.

I’ve heard this every year. Two point three million dead. Three days without sun. Tragedy compressed into a script.

Outside, New Ash City burned bright. Towers of glass and hologram light rose from the bones of the old world, humming with self-driving traffic and artificial daylight. Progress built atop a mass grave.

Apricot stared out the window, jaw set. The world told its story on repeat, waiting for her to nod along. But the silence pressed heavier afterward, as if something unseen still lingered beneath the broadcast’s polish. A frequency she couldn’t name. A pattern the official numbers didn’t account for.

Downstairs, the house was settling into its evening rhythm. She could hear her father in the living room, the low drone of a second television tuned to something technical. Water ran in the kitchen where her mother was finishing the dishes. Jasper’s muffled music bled through the wall from his room, the same three songs on repeat, the way he always studied. The ordinary sounds of the Signa household doing what it did every night: winding down, not looking back.

Apricot turned from the window and sat at her desk. Her coursework for the week was stacked beside the lamp, journalism theory and media law, the state’s approved curriculum for students who wanted a license to report the news. The licensing exam was eight months away. Without it, she could not publish a word. The Uchellan Press Bureau made sure of that. Every journalist registered, every story reviewed, every credential revocable at the Ministry’s discretion. They called it professional standards. Apricot had learned to call it that too, at least out loud.

She pulled a notebook from beneath the textbooks, flipped past her lecture notes to the pages she’d been filling on her own time. Names. Dates. Inconsistencies in the official record. Numbers that didn’t add up. The pen felt heavier than it should have.

If I’m going to be a journalist worth the ink, that silence is what I have to break.

She closed the notebook and slid it back under the stack, out of sight. Down the hall, Jasper’s music cut off. A door opened and closed. The bathroom faucet ran. The house was preparing for sleep the way it always did, one small sound at a time. Apricot switched off her desk lamp and sat in the dark for a moment, the muted screen still glowing with the anchor’s frozen smile. Outside, the city hummed its constant electric hymn. Somewhere far below it all, in the bones of the old infrastructure, something else hummed too. Quieter. Patient. Waiting to be found.