The harness bit into Elijah's shoulders with a dull, constant pressure that anchored him to reality—or what passed for reality in this moment. His body hung taut in the webbing, every muscle engaged not in panic but in the rigid discipline of forced observation. His head moved in slow, measured sweeps, scanning the impossible three-hundred-sixty degrees around him. Left: nothing but pale blue atmosphere bleeding into deeper shades of violet. Right: the same gradient, broken only by the distant silhouettes of his companions, black figures suspended like insects in amber. Below: a landscape that his mind refused to properly process.
His hands moved without conscious thought, making fractional adjustments to the parachute lines. Not steering—there was nowhere to steer toward, no destination that made sense—but maintaining stability. Keeping himself level in a world that had no level. His legs bent slightly, muscles coiled for an impact that the ground refused to deliver. They'd been descending for what felt like ten minutes now, but the earth below maintained its distant, unchanging perspective, as if they were drifting horizontally rather than falling.
*What is this place?*
The thought came cold and sharp, cutting through the wind that roared past his ears. His analytical mind, the same one that had mapped escape routes and calculated survival odds through every nightmare of the past weeks, now spun uselessly against a problem with no parameters.
*The scale is wrong.*
He could see that clearly. The horizon curved, but in the wrong direction—upward, as if they were inside something vast rather than on top of something spherical. The atmospheric pressure felt different too, lighter somehow, though his lungs pulled oxygen without difficulty.
*That giant... it wasn't just a structure. It was transportation. A gateway.*
The realization settled into his bones with absolute certainty. They hadn't climbed a statue. They'd climbed through a door, and when they'd jumped, they'd crossed a threshold into somewhere that existed outside the map of known places. His eyes traced the memory of their ascent—up the titan's spine, through the increasingly abstract internal architecture, into that final chamber of impossible light—and tried to reconcile it with the vista stretching endlessly below. The geometry fractured in his mind. Paradox stacked upon paradox.
He looked toward Chloe's parachute, forty yards to his left, and saw her body language transforming.
---
Chloe had pulled herself into a tight ball the moment her parachute had deployed, arms wrapped around her knees, making herself small against the vastness that had suddenly opened around her. The shock of the jump, the terrible moment of free fall, the violent jerk of the chute catching air—all of it had compressed her into a defensive shell.
But curiosity was stronger than fear. It always had been.
She uncurled slowly, like a flower opening to impossible sunlight. One hand remained locked on the chest strap of her harness, knuckles bone-white, fingernails digging crescents into her palm. But her other hand reached out, fingers spreading wide, as if she could touch the fabric of the sky itself. The wind was relentless, tearing moisture from her eyes and sending it streaming back toward her temples, but she didn't close them. She couldn't.
She looked down, past the scuffed toes of her boots.
The ground wasn't getting closer.
It was receding. Or no—that wasn't quite right either. They were drifting laterally, skating across the top of a continent that violated every instinct about how falling was supposed to work. The landscape rolled away in all directions, a vast expanse of what looked like grass, but the wrong color—grey-blue, like smoke given texture, swaying in patterns that suggested wind but moved with an eerie synchronization, like the surface of a breathing thing.
The horizon didn't behave. It curved up instead of down, creating the dizzying impression that the world formed a shallow bowl, and they hung suspended at its center. The sky above wasn't a dome of blue with a bright point of sun—it was a gradient, deepening from pale, almost white-blue at their altitude to a profound, starless indigo in the unreachable heights above. And the light had no source. It simply existed, uniform and sourceless, dying everything it touched with a faint cyan tint.
*This isn't Crestwood.*
The thought arrived without panic, just absolute, crystalline clarity.
*This isn't anywhere on Earth.*
She'd seen pictures of strange places—the salt flats of Bolivia, the colored pools of Yellowstone, the geometric basalt columns of Iceland. But this was different. This wasn't strange geology or unusual atmospheric conditions. This was fundamentally other. The wrongness had scale. It had depth. It had an alien beauty that made her chest ache with something she couldn't name.
In the middle distance—though distance felt meaningless here—she saw rivers cutting through the grey-blue plains. But they didn't flow straight. They zigged and zagged at perfect ninety-degree angles, forming grid patterns like circuit boards, with water that reflected the sourceless light in sheets of silver. Beyond the rivers, forests rose, but they weren't made of trees. They were crystalline structures, tall and geometric, catching and refracting light in ways that sent colored prisms dancing across the landscape. They chimed. Even from this distance, even over the wind, she could hear them—a million glass bells singing in harmony.
And beyond everything, at the edge of vision, mountains rose. But they didn't look like mountains. They looked like frozen waves, like some titanic ocean had been caught mid-swell and transformed into stone. Their surfaces were smooth, almost metallic, reflecting the strange sky in warped, impossible ways.
A drone zipped past her face, close enough that she felt the displacement of air against her cheek. It was the size of a hummingbird, silver-bodied, with multiple crystalline lenses that swiveled to track her expression. She watched it bank and circle, joined by two others, all of them capturing every angle of her wonder.
The broadcast was still running. Somewhere, people were watching this. Seeing what she was seeing.
But could they comprehend it?
---
Marcus yanked hard on the left steering line, twisting his body, trying to force the parachute into a tighter spiral. His movements were sharp, aggressive, each one an act of defiance against the wrongness surrounding him. He scanned constantly, head snapping left and right, searching for something—anything—recognizable.
A road. A building. A contrail from an airplane. A cell tower. Any marker that would ground this nightmare back in the world he understood.
There was nothing.
He looked back up, craning his neck to search the pale blue expanse above. The giant—the titan they'd climbed, jumped from—should have been there, a massive black silhouette against the sky. But the atmosphere was empty, just gradients of blue bleeding into violet, as if the structure had never existed at all. Swallowed by the same hazy distance that carpeted the upper atmosphere.
His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. Pure tactical frustration burned through his veins, hotter than fear.
*No visual reference. No cardinal directions.*
The air current was stable—perfectly, unnaturally stable—but it carried them in no particular direction. Or every direction. It was impossible to tell.
*This is a holding pattern. A display.*
Someone was controlling this. Had to be. The Game Master had orchestrated everything else, every sick twist and revelation. This was just another stage, another set piece designed to break them. Marcus's hands ached from gripping the lines too hard, but he didn't ease up. Control was all he had left, even if it was an illusion.
A drone tracked alongside him, its lenses whirring as they focused. He had the sudden, violent urge to grab it out of the air, smash it against his knee. Let them broadcast that. But the thing stayed just out of reach, perfectly calculated, and his hands remained locked on the parachute lines.
---
Vivian was gone.
Not physically—her body still hung in the harness twenty yards below Marcus, parachute deployed and functioning. But everything that made her *Vivian* had evacuated, leaving behind only a shell.
She hung limp, arms slack at her sides, legs dangling without tension. Her eyes were open, staring upward at the billowing silk canopy above her head. The wind caught strands of her hair, whipping them across her face, but she didn't blink or brush them away. She was a doll, dropped by careless gods, waiting for the ground to rise up and end the falling.
She didn't look at the impossible landscape. Didn't track the drones. Didn't search for her companions.
She just hung there, breathing, existing in the narrow space between life and complete dissolution.
---
The Crestwood Police Department bullpen had transformed into a war room, but it was losing the war.
Every monitor showed a different angle of the impossible. The main screen at the front displayed a wide shot of the four parachutes drifting over that alien landscape, while smaller displays cycled through feeds from different drones—close-ups of faces, sweeping panoramas of the crystalline forests, tracking shots following the geometric rivers.
In the tech pit—a cluster of desks overflowing with equipment—specialists hunched over keyboards, their faces lit by the cold glow of screens showing failure after failure.
On one monitor, satellite mapping software churned through its algorithms. An analyst had captured a high-resolution still of the crystalline forest and was dragging it across a digital globe, letting the program compare it against every square inch of surveyed terrain on Earth.
The results populated in a sidebar: NO TERRESTRIAL MATCH. ATMOSPHERIC REFRACTION ANOMALY. TOPOGRAPHY NOT IN DATABASE.
Another specialist ran the same image through geological survey archives, cross-referencing the crystal structures against known mineralogy databases, looking for anything—quartz formations, ice structures, volcanic glass fields.
The system returned: 0% MATCH.
A third analyst, a woman named Stacy with dark circles under her eyes from forty-eight hours without sleep, typed commands into a program analyzing the light spectrum in the footage. She stared at the resulting graph, then ran the analysis again. Same result. She looked like she wanted to throw the computer through the window.
Caleb stood behind them all, arms crossed over his chest, expression carved from stone. But his eyes—his eyes betrayed him. They'd taken on an ugly quality, dark and hollowed, the look of a man watching his understanding of reality crumble in real-time. He wasn't just a father anymore, terrified for his daughter. He was a detective, twenty-three years on the force, staring at a crime scene that violated the laws of physics.
"It's a mind game!" Owen's voice cut through the tense quiet, sharp with desperate certainty. He slammed a hand on the desk, making coffee cups jump. "A composite fake! That lunatic is screwing with us! He's got them in some warehouse with green screens, CGI-ing this whole thing!"
Stacy spoke without looking up from her screen, voice flat with exhausted defeat. "The terrain imagery has been analyzed at the pixel level. Seven different programs, three different specialists. There's no evidence of digital compositing. No repeat textures. No rendering artifacts. The light source consistency across the entire feed is..." She paused, searching for the word. "Perfect. It's either real, or it's a rendering from a system generations ahead of anything in existence."
A uniformed cop—young, Johnson, barely two years out of the academy—stepped forward. "That's impossible! If it's real, it'd be on a map! Satellites would see it! This is... this is insane!"
Nia and Caleb spoke simultaneously, their voices overlapping: "Maybe it's not on our maps."
The room went quiet.
Another cop, older, Martinez, with grey in his mustache, cleared his throat. "What, like... a forbidden zone? A government black site? How would he move four people there? How would he build that? This is nonsense!"
Caleb didn't answer. His expression had gone somewhere else, somewhere classified and dark, traveling down corridors of thought that no one else in the room had clearance to follow.
The bullpen door opened.
---
Anthony Stroud entered like weather—a shift in atmospheric pressure that made everyone stand straighter without conscious thought.
He was mid-fifties, hair silvered at the temples in a way that suggested distinction rather than age, dressed in an impeccably tailored trench coat over a charcoal suit that probably cost more than most of the cops' monthly salaries. He held an unlit cigar between two fingers, a prop more than a vice. His movements carried the quiet, assured authority of someone whose presence altered a room's center of gravity.
"Commissioner Stroud." The nearest cop straightened, nodded with automatic respect.
Stroud's response was a faint, weary smile and a small, dismissive hand gesture—*drop the formalities*. His eyes found Caleb across the room, locked on with the precision of a targeting system.
"Lieutenant. A moment?" His tone was polite, conversational. It left absolutely no room for refusal. "Something's come up."
Caleb gave a curt nod. "Not busy." The sarcasm was barely detectable, professional camouflage over fury and fear.
The two men moved toward the door, walking with a shared, grim purpose that excluded everyone else. The room watched them go, then collectively exhaled.
Detective Danny Kim sat at his desk near the back, his legs bouncing with nervous energy that had been building for hours. His fingers drummed on the desk surface, rapid and erratic.
Owen noticed. "What now, Dan? You look like you're about to jump out of your skin."
Danny swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Hey, guys... remember that thing I was telling you about? The parasitic tale? Those weird signals we picked up last year, the missing hikers in Redwood State Park..."
Owen's expression was bored dismissal. "Yeah, yeah. What about it?"
"What if... what if Miss Halvern and the others were taken to—"
A uniformed cop appeared at Danny's shoulder so suddenly that Danny flinched. The cop leaned in close, whispering urgently into Danny's ear. The words were inaudible to the rest of the room, but their effect was immediate and devastating.
Danny's face drained of color. All the nervous energy—the bouncing leg, the drumming fingers, the anxious rambling—drained away in an instant, replaced by something much worse. Pure, cold dread settled over his features like a mask.
He stood up slowly, mechanically, movements stiff and wrong, like a puppet with tangled strings.
He didn't speak. Didn't explain. Just turned and walked out, following the whispering cop, his gait wooden with fear.
Nia watched him go, her sharp analytical gaze tracking every detail. Her expression—skeptical by nature, trained by years of seeing through lies—deepened into something darker. Suspicion. Deep, professional suspicion that connected dots no one else seemed to see.
She looked from the door Stroud and Caleb had exited through to the door Danny had just disappeared behind. Two exits. Two conversations happening outside the room. Two threads of something larger pulling at the edges of this nightmare.
Her eyes narrowed.
She'd find out what those threads connected to.