(Two Flashes, Two Worlds)
I
Pembroke District, Ontario
27 September 2038, 03:12 Z
The farmhouse squatted at the treeline like an old badger's den; silent, lights out, snow frosting the roof. Behind it, the barn with its paired grain-silos looked ordinary enough, unless you knew the bins were hollow and packed floor-to-crown with crates stencilled 40 MM HEDP, 7.62 × 51 BALL, and TWO-MAN LIFT.
In the basement, eight figures waited amid stacked ammo cans. The youngest, Oleksei "Leksi" Oleksandrovich Levchenko, checked the seal on a fresh VOG-25; Mateo "Teo" Vargas-Rodriguez eased back the bolt of the SAW for a chamber check with practiced calm; Michael "Kimmy" Kim Hwan-Lee cycled his HK416D and set the selector to auto. Tamang "Wade" Weixing tightened the strap on a French field watch bought in Marseilles to replace the PLA tick-tock he'd lost in the Donbas. Lewis "Lew" Stewart laid his long SR-25 across a crate and sighted through the dust-dim light, one eye on the cellar stairs. Yosuke "Zukes" Hirogawa stood at the trestle table with his SIG-Sauer pistol gripped in his right fist, headset dark, listening for a miracle that would not come.
The man who had built this refuge, Segun Tobiloba Joyce, was six months deceased: executed in an abandoned farmhouse near the Byelorussian border when the Russian FSB had paid him an untimely, but expected visit. The team felt the empty space he had once filled, but grief was a luxury spent men could not afford.
Outside, the kill teams arrived: two ten-man detachments of 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta, HALO-dropped after staging from a Maine strip the night before Toronto burned. Their orders were clear: Eliminate every soul at the hide-site and recover the unconventional weapons cache.
Zukes glanced at the luminous dial on his wrist. "Two mikes," he muttered in Japanese.
"Copy," Wade answered in soft Mandarin, eyes on the floorplan.
They heard it—a muted *pop* of suppressed fire in the snow-dark orchard, then boot crunch, deliberate, disciplined. Kimmy clicked his radio once: all stations aware.
Claymores wired to the root-cellar hatch. PG-7Ms leaned upright behind sandbags. Escape tunnels sealed; they knew the breach team would watch for rats.
Above, the Delta point man climbed the porch steps, NODs casting the world in green. He saw a door standing ajar—bait—and raised a fist to halt the column.
Ten kilometres south-east, a missile-warning satellite pinged the wrong refinery flare and died blind, unaware that one of four Minuteman MIRVs had drifted off-course the night before, the warhead tumbling toward spare farmland instead of the Canadian Forces station at Petawawa.
Down in the basement, Leksi felt something under his boots: first a hush in the air, then a shiver through the joists. Before he could name it, a pin-bright bead of light blossomed in the centre of the room, silent and widening.
"Flash!" Zukes barked.
White swallowed wood, steel, men, and grain-silos alike. No heat. No sound. Just a pressureless glare; and then winter air rushed into an empty cellar where the Six and the JTF-2 operators had been.
II
Edge of the Four Lands, predawn hush
Clare Fairford—seven winters old by village reckoning—knelt at the river ford, wooden pail half-full. A faint tremor had roused him from the cot an hour before cock-crow, and his mother, Wynd, had murmured the old word: *precognition.* The senses that made other folk uneasy had saved the family's calves from a flash-flood last spring; now they sent him early to fetch water for the morning mash.
The sky to the east should have been pearl-grey. Instead, four white scars cut it, bright as smith-fire. Clare stared, water slopping over his boots.
A silence fell so deep he heard the river pause.
Then the wind came, hot and impossible, a wall edged with blue-white lightning. It struck the stream like the hand of a god, flinging Clare backward into the water. The world roared overhead. He felt heat like an oven door opened; and then nothing but cold rivermud, icy water closing over his head while the bank behind him vaporised.
His lungs burned; he kicked, surfaced beneath drifting steam and falling ash. Where the thatch roofs of Fairford stead had stood—his mother's song, his father's laugh, Lorn's wooden knight, Hese's clay doll, baby Corey's cradle—there was only a scorched hollow lit by sunrise that was not sunrise.
III
Between worlds
Splintered rafters and grain sacks thumped onto frosted grass. The Six lay among them, ears ringing, lungs raw, dawnless sky overhead. No kill team. No JTF-2. Only six men, fifty rifles, a barn's worth of ordnance, and a horizon empty of satellites.
Kimmy rolled to his knees first. "We lived," he rasped, almost as if he could scarcely believe it.
Zukes scanned the alien dawn and did not answer. He brushed snow off the Lobo Seven patch, felt the cold cloth, and understood the geometry of their survival: one world gone in nuclear fire, another stolen by null-aether glare.
Far to the south-west, a boy named Clare Fairford crawled from a riverbank, ash on his hair, eyes wide at a dawn that refused its colour. Two flashes had ended two worlds—one of hydrogen fire, one of ontological fracture—and braided the fates of ghosts and orphans across a place with no promise of sunrise.
The Six gathered what they could carry. Zukes looked east again.
"Dawnless," he muttered, tasting the word.
And because it was true, no one corrected him.