Danica Inoy leaned against the hotel balcony railing, leather gauntlets creaking as she shifted her grip. Below, the city had fully surrendered to the convention. A Deadpool was breakdancing for tips outside a taco truck, someone in an inflatable T-Rex suit was aggressively photobombing strangers, and at least three different Spidermen were arguing about something that looked genuinely heated. The kind of beautiful, unhinged chaos she used to live for.
God, she missed this. She tightened the ponytail holding back her black hair. She studied the convention below with the same careful focus she brought to debugging code, searching for a little of the control she'd lost. Years of martial arts left her lean rather than bulky, and even standing still she looked ready to move.
In college she had built costumes for every event. Stayed up until two in the morning hot-gluing armor plates and debugging a voice modulator she'd coded herself for a droid build that had absolutely slapped. She'd dragged friends across state lines for cons like this one. She'd been that person.
Somewhere between then and blindly disappearing into the relationship with Beth, she'd misplaced the woman who lost herself in the fantasy.
Not lost. Misplaced. There was a difference, and right now it felt important.
"Dani?" Mark's voice cut through her spiral with all the subtlety of a glitter bomb at a funeral. Her best friend stepped onto the balcony dressed up in a ridiculously accurate Goku outfit.
She wrapped her arms around his waist before she'd decided to, her face hitting his shoulder. He smelled like convention floor and whatever overpriced product was keeping the wig in place over his dirty blond hair. Even buried beneath the ridiculous Goku wig, Mark's broad grin, green eyes, and dancer's build made it impossible for him to disappear into a crowd. He patted her head exactly once, the way he'd been doing since they were twelve, and she elbowed him in the ribs on reflex.
"Okay," he said into the top of her head. "You’re okay. No, you are amazing."
She pulled back before it could get awkward. He kept his hands on her shoulders, holding her at arm's length before his eyes dropped to Danica's cosplay.
She tugged her hood back as he looked, the motion shifting her half-cloak to reveal the full outfit underneath. A sleek jacket cinched at the waist, armored panels at the shoulders and hips, matte leggings reinforced at the knees. Twin daggers crossed at her lower back, hilts riding slightly above her belt. Practical. Dangerous-looking. Custom.
Unlike most of the last two years, this was entirely hers.
Mark's expression cycled through several stages.
"Okay wait." He dropped his hands. "Black eyed Sith Lord? No." A beat. "Ninja Barbie?"
"Assassin chic. Custom job."
"That's not 'I browse Hot Topic sometimes' leather." He circled her once, every inch the dramatic art critic, though the performance was slightly undercut by the wig, which wobbled dangerously on the turn and exposed his dirty blond hair at the edges. "That's 'I might actually kill someone and look incredible doing it' leather. Very different energy."
"That was the goal."
Mark tilted his head, reading her the way only someone who'd known her since third grade could. "The goal was you," he said. "Just you. I missed her."
She didn't answer. She didn't have to.
He clapped his hands, pivoting back to chaos mode in an instant. "Okay. Mission objective: remind Danica she's a badass. Secondary objective: get her to smile like she means it. Stretch goal: locate free swag."
Danica snorted. "You're ridiculous."
"True." He slung an arm around her shoulders. She fit neatly under it, which had always annoyed her. The problem wasn't her height. Mark was just absurdly tall. "But I'm your ridiculous, and I'm not letting you brood on a balcony like a discount tragic antihero when there's an entire con full of nerdy joy waiting for us."
Her phone buzzed. A text from Beth. She didn't open it. She hit delete.
Mark grinned. "Ohhh, is that the sound of personal growth? Do it again so I can make it my ringtone."
Her phone buzzed again. Danica sighed.
"Go on, delete Barbie's desperate attempt at relevance," Mark said, striking a fake runway pose. "Although, to be fair, maybe we shouldn't insult Barbie like that. Barbie never gaslit anyone."
"Relax, it's my brother." She was already straightening without thinking about it. Her posture always corrected itself whenever Zelimir called. Her brother had practically raised her and some habits couldn’t be broken. "I need to take this."
Their matching hazel eyes met in the familiar moment of silent understanding that always came before they spoke. Before she could say hello, Mark hollered, "Tell Danica she has to do what I say!"
Zelimir's sharp Russian features softened with a smile that never quite formed. As usual he wore a custom suit and was probably already three steps into a conversation she hadn't started yet. His eyebrow arched, a mirror of her own.
"Is he still doing that?"
"Every time."
"YOU HAVE TO HAVE FUN." Mark contributed from somewhere behind her.
Zelimir's mouth twitched. "His logic is sound." The brief warmth closed back into business. "Mom called. Orion Power Plant event tonight — she wants you nowhere near it. Direct quote: corporate death cult, soul brainwashing, the usual."
The usual. Except this time half the internet agreed with her. Orion's reactor promised more than clean energy. It promised unlimited energy. Which shouldn't be physically possible. The kind that made actual physicists go quiet in interviews instead of laughing it off. Whatever they'd built out there, it had stopped being a punchline about six months ago.
Danica leaned against the railing. "Even by Mom's standards—"
"I know."
"—that's a lot."
"I know." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. Their shared tell, developed sometime around age twelve when making excuses for their parents became a survival skill. "I haven't seen them since Christmas, Dani. They wouldn't tell me where they're living."
She felt the familiar pull of that. The low-grade guilt of having escaped. They'd both escaped, but in different directions. She disappeared into code and logic and anything that followed clean rules. Zelimir disappeared into suits and boardrooms, chasing the kind of control that came with a corner office.
"Utah, last I heard. Apparently, the bunker's finally happening." She kept her voice easy — their shorthand for I don't know what to do about it either. "You can't fix them, Z."
"I know," he said. Quieter this time.
A beat passed. The comfortable kind.
"I'm skipping the event," she said. "Self-preservation. If Orion actually cracked free energy the recap will exist." She glanced back at Mark, who was doing slow-motion Goku poses at nobody. "I have more important things to attend to."
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Zelimir almost smiled. "Call me tonight." The look he gave her before hanging up said actually have fun without saying it at all.
Danica lowered the phone. The weight of the conversation settled in, the familiar burden of loving people you couldn't fix.
Mark appeared at her elbow. "How's the family patriarch?"
"Worried," she said. "As usual."
Mark gave her a sideways hug, brief and solid. "Your family is delightfully nuts, you know that?"
"Says the guy cosplaying a space alien with hair that violates basic physics."
"Touché." He released her and headed for the door, already shifting back into mission mode. "Come on. Hot people in spandex aren't going to appreciate themselves."
Danica snorted and followed him out.
The hall carried the familiar convention hotel soundtrack: muffled conversation through doors, someone's cosplay armor clanking past, the distant mechanical complaint of an ice machine working too hard. The carpet had an aggressive pattern designed to hide twenty years of coffee stains.
She didn't care. She was out. Moving. Done with the balcony and the phone call and the persistent hum of everything she couldn't fix.
Mark was halfway down the hall, doing half-hearted Goku poses at a passing Stormtrooper who gave him a thumbs up without breaking stride.
Danica found herself smiling. Not the polite, careful kind she'd been rationing for two years. The real one.
Yeah. This is what it was supposed to feel like.
She rolled her shoulders back and let herself walk like she meant it, light on her feet, quiet without trying, like someone who actually belonged in the assassin cosplay instead of simply wearing it. The ice machine alcove looked like a chokepoint. The vending machine at the end of the hall was excellent cover.
Somewhere in the last five minutes, she’d stopped feeling like a guest in her own life.
And then she saw Beth.
It took Danica a second too long to process what she was seeing.
Beth looked exactly the way she'd always intended to: honey-blonde hair spilling over bare shoulders, blue eyes practiced into warmth, every inch polished enough to make people underestimate how sharp the edges really were. The fox-eared cosplay. The painted-on top. The tiny skirt and the glossy pout and the smug tilt of her head. Every detail had been engineered to pull focus, because her ex had never once entered a room without calculating exactly what it would cost everyone else.
She's not supposed to be here.
This was another state. Another city. That had been the whole point.
"Beth." The name came out flat. Not a greeting. Not quite a question.
Beth's eyes swept over Danica's cosplay, warm with approval she hadn't earned. "Hey, baby. You look amazing."
Mark made a sound beside her. "Did we — did we accidentally summon her? Because I only said the devil's name twice. I was so careful."
Danica's pulse spiked, but not in the old way. Not the what did I do wrong spike she'd lived with for two years. This was colder. Cleaner.
How does she know we're here?
Her mind ran it back fast. Beth had never been patient enough for tech. She could barely manage her own streaming subscriptions without help. But she'd been strangely insistent about the iPad during the breakup. Made a whole production of it being hers, even though she'd barely touched it when they lived together.
Danica hadn't wanted it back badly enough to fight for it, so she bought a newer model.
Beth didn't want the iPad. She wanted my logins.
The thought hit her and her realization hollowed her out. Two weeks of texts. Read. Her location, visible to someone who had no right to it anymore.
Danica’s jaw tightened.
Beth pushed off the wall, closing the distance in slow, measured steps. The carpet muffling the sound of the high heels that let her look down on people. "You weren't answering my texts," she said softly. "I just wanted to talk. In person."
"We've talked." Danica held her ground. "You just didn't like what I said. So you followed me across two states." She kept her voice even, because Beth fed on heat and she was done being fuel. "That's not love. That's a problem."
Beth tilted her head, lips settling into the warm expression she'd perfected years ago. Danica had once found it disarming. "Oh, Dani. You're overwhelmed. You get like this, you know you do. You shut down and push people away and tell yourself it's strength." Her fingers brushed Danica's arm, light as an afterthought. "But I know you. Your family, your crazy hours, all the ways you disappear into your own head. I stayed through all of it. Who else is going to do that?"
It was a good speech. It always was.
Danica remembered the first time she'd heard a version of it six months in, after their first real fight, when Beth had reframed the entire argument until Danica had apologized for things she hadn't done. She'd believed it then. She kept believing it for a long time, because the alternative was admitting she'd handed someone her confidence and watched them spend it.
She didn't believe it anymore.
"Bold strategy," Mark said. "Very 'I'm the only one who could ever love you.' Classic."
Beth’s gaze cut to him, a flash of real irritation before she smoothed it back down. "He's never liked us together," she said to Danica, quieter now, intimate. "You know that."
"Yes. I do." Danica said it without heat. "And I'm done."
Something shifted in Beth's face. The warmth dropped and didn't come back. "You're seriously throwing away two years because you got it in your head that I don’t love you?"
"I'm throwing away two years because you followed me to another state after I ended things." Danica took a small step forward and watched the practiced confidence crack into something more genuine — surprise, then anger. "We're done. That part's not changing."
"You'll regret it." Beth's voice went brittle, the sweetness finally gone. "You think you're so together without me? You'll end up like your parents. Hiding somewhere, paranoid, wondering why nobody stayed."
The jab landed. She'd known it would. Beth had always kept good notes.
Danica straightened her hood. Slow. Deliberate. "Maybe," she said. "But it'll be my call."
Beth's mouth opened, but Mark was already moving, arm around Danica's shoulders, steering her toward the elevator with the calm efficiency of someone who had been waiting for his cue.
"Fantastic catching up," he said brightly over his shoulder. "Truly. Very healing for all of us."
Danica let herself be steered. Her steps felt lighter, which she hadn't expected. Not triumphant, just done. Like an emotional program that had been running in the background for months had finally closed.
Then she caught it. Right at the edge of her vision, Beth's expression shifting into something that didn't fit the moment. Not hurt. Not anger. Something quieter and more deliberate, like a door closing behind her eyes.
It left a chill at the back of Danica's neck that she couldn't explain.
She filed it away and kept walking.
The elevator doors slid shut behind them, cutting off the hallway and everything in it. Mark jabbed the lobby button and turned to her with the expression of someone who had been physically restraining himself for the last five minutes.
"Queen of Healthy Boundaries," he announced. "I want that on a sash. An actual sash. I will make it happen."
Danica laughed. It was real, unguarded, the kind that snuck up on her. "Please don't."
"Too late, it's already in production." He leaned against the wall, grin fading into something more honest. "You good?"
"Yeah." She meant it, which was the surprising part. She caught her reflection in the brushed metal doors. Standing straighter than she had in months, shoulders down, jaw unclenched. Someone she vaguely recognized. "Actually yeah."
"Good." He nodded once, satisfied, the way he always did when he'd decided a problem was handled. "Because whatever was going on with her eyes at the end there. That was weird, right? That wasn't just me?"
Danica's mouth curved. "Definitely weird."
The elevator hummed around them, steady and ordinary. Lobby music drifted up faintly through the shaft, a forgettable tune, slightly too cheerful. Mark was already pulling out his phone, probably mapping the fastest route to the free swag tables.
Normal. Fine. Done.
Then the lights strobed.
Danica glanced up. The elevator hummed. Then it didn't. The silence lasted half a second too long before the hum returned slightly off key.
"Did the—" Mark started.
The walls cracked.
Not physically. Not like plaster or metal. Like a screen. Like reality had a resolution limit and something had pushed past it. The brushed metal fracturing into jagged blocks before snapping back, her reflection smearing and reforming a half-second behind where it should have been.
Danica grabbed the handrail. "What—"
The chime hit before she could finish. Not a sound. More like a frequency, a tone that skipped her ears and rang straight through her skull, her teeth, the backs of her hands.
Then the voice. Everywhere and nowhere, clinical and vast, like an automated system the size of the sky.
[SYSTEM INITIATED EMERGENCY BROADCAST]
Planet U132G264890S253W1 — critical threshold exceeded. Emergency Transition Protocols activated. Please remain calm and await further direction.
"Okay," Mark said, very carefully. "That was in my head."
"Yeah."
"That was in my head and also definitely in your head."
"Yeah."
The elevator lurched. The lights blinked. Through the walls. Through what used to be walls. She could see a scene that wasn't the hotel, wasn't the shaft, wasn't anything she had a word for. Light moving in patterns. Symbols cascading through the air like code that had always been there, just below the surface, and something had finally torn the surface away.
Her phone screen cracked without being touched. Every screen in her vision flickered to the same thing: her phone, the elevator panel, the emergency display.
WORLD CORE ACTIVATED.
"Mark—" She reached for him.
Her hand passed through shadow where he'd been standing.
For one lurching, infinite second she felt herself pulled in every direction at once — not falling, not flying, it was much worse. Like the universe had taken a breath and she was caught between the inhale and the exhale.
Stay calm, the voice said again, from all around her.
She had barely enough time to think absolutely not —
And then the darkness took her.