The Crisis

The control chamber throbbed beneath Blue Ash like a buried heart. Walls sweated under jaundiced light. Cables sagged like veins. Shadows stretched long across the consoles.

Chino Tokuma sat rigid, headset biting her jaw. Every pulse of static stabbed her nerves. The veterans looked carved from stone, calm in the flicker. She had only her act: posture as armor, breath shallow, fear hidden. One slip and they would see through her.

Commander Honda stood half-lit in profile, silence heavier than commands. Two seats down, Misa slouched, feigning ease. Her eyes flicked sharp and quick. Chino caught it. Her own fear reflected back. Around them, the room held its breath, waiting for the break.

Onscreen, Falcon One drifted in tethered silence. Behind him loomed the rig, a crooked crown of steel clamped around a wound in reality. Wisps of blue light rippled at the edges, alive, curious. Each time the lens sharpened, Chino swore they were staring back.

“Engines nominal,” Falcon One said, his voice buried in static.

The readouts bled red. Grid faltered. She imagined the streets above: neon sputtering, pedestrians pausing mid-step, bones hollowed for an instant with unease they could not name. Her fingers blurred across toggles. Current steadied. Green blinked again. She let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

Misa leaned closer. “We got this. It’ll hold.”

Chino stayed silent. The pressure in her chest told her otherwise.

The gate rippled. Blue veins thickened, slithering slow. One pressed against Falcon One’s visor, smearing the glass. His tether sagged, heavy and wrong.

Static clawed her ears. Symbols twisted on her display, glyphs reshaping into rows of teeth. She blinked. They clung, gnashing at the edges of her sight. The machine wanted in.

Falcon One’s voice cracked. “Engines one, two stable. Engine three…hold on…” His glove jerked. Something snapped beneath.

“Object spotted!” a tech barked. Alarms detonated. Red flared across the boards. The camera swung, catching a glint swelling into a lance of white fire.

“Approaching…too fast…”

Honda’s composure broke. “Falcon One, report!” His voice cut raw, fear at its edge.

The visor flashed white. Light detonated through the chamber, swallowing every surface. Speakers screamed. Consoles shattered. For a breath, Falcon One’s outline lingered, body unraveling into ash. Then gone. Static filled the world.

Silence fell. Absolute. Crushing. The kind that made lungs forget how to work.

Something had come through.

Fifty Years Later

“The fiftieth anniversary of the explosion that devastated Blue Ash City. More than two point three million lives lost…for three days smoke blotted out the sun…from that rubble, New Ash City, a marvel of technolo…”

The broadcast smeared, then collapsed to black.

Apricot Signa gripped the remote too tight. Plastic slipped and clattered against the table. The sound was sharp, too loud for the small room.

Her reflection floated on the screen: pale face fractured by leftover glow, sleepless eyes ringed dark. For a moment it was not her staring back. Then snow swallowed the glass.

“We’ve all heard that story a thousand times,” she muttered. Her Castorian lilt still clung, no matter how hard Okabe tried to grind it flat.

Same script every year. Clipped. Rehearsed. Polished for the masses. Enough to bury truth beneath repetition. But the silence between the lines—that was its own lie.

Rain streaked the window, slicing neon into crooked veins of color. Houses hunched low against the storm. Angles wrong. Steel and concrete where she remembered brick and smoke.

She leaned back, jaw set, shoulders stiff. The world told its story on repeat, waiting for her to nod along. But silence pressed heavier afterward, as if something unseen still lingered.

If she was going to be a journalist worth the ink, that silence was what she had to break.