The alarms find me before consciousness does—master caution screaming through the cockpit in that particular frequency that means everything is dying at once. My helmet feels too large, and that's wrong, that's the first wrong thing in a cascade of wrong things I don't have time to catalogue because the sky outside the canopy isn't a sky at all.
It's a wound.
The wake tears through the atmosphere like someone took a knife to reality and twisted. Just our luck as we discovered another new use for the mineral responsible for everything wrong in the world. Cordium energy bleeds red-white at the edges, and through that impossible gash I can see—nothing. Everything. Stars that don't belong to any constellation I've ever seen. My instruments spin useless, the HUD flickering between conflicting data before giving up entirely.
"Hitman Two, Hitman One," The radio spits static. 'Anyone, anyone,"
No response.
"Prez." Monarch's voice cuts through the chaos, steady as it's always been. Steady as a heartbeat as our ailerons are ripped off in one go from the stress of the wake. "We're losing hydraulics. Primary and backup."
I force my hands to move, checking readouts that tell me nothing useful.
His shoulders tensed before he made for a memorable moment. "Lining us up for ejection. You're going first."
"Negative—"
"Not a discussion." His tone shifts, that particular edge that means he's already calculated the odds and found them wanting. "I while hold her steady while you punch out. I'll be right behind you."
The aircraft shudders, a death rattle that travels up through my spine. Through the canopy, I watch the wake expanding, swallowing the horizon in violet light. We're too close. We're already inside it.
"Monty—"
"On my mark." His hands move across the controls with that precision I've watched for three years, six months, and eleven days. Not that I'm counting. Not that I've memorized the way his shoulders set when he's made a decision he knows I'll hate. The canopy breaks free from our F4. "Three. Two. One. Punch out, Prez."
I pull the handle.
The world becomes violence—explosive bolts firing, and then I'm thrown upward with enough force to compress my spine into something smaller than it should be. The ejection seat rockets me through alien atmosphere, and I'm spinning, tumbling, trying to orient myself against a sky that has no reference points I recognize.
Below me, the F-4 spirals.
I watch. I can't not watch.
Monarch's canopy is still intact. His seat hasn't fired. The aircraft rotates once, twice, and I can see him through the glass—still fighting the controls, still trying, because that's who he is. That's who he's always been. The man who never stops trying.
"Eject," I whisper. Then scream it. "EJECT!"
There's no massive explosion. No fireball. No dramatic end. Just a violent nose dive kilometers from me followed by silence, and I'm falling through air that tastes like copper and wrong. My ejection seat already trailing away from me as my chute deploys automatically. I barely register it.
The jolt snaps me out of my spiraling descent but not out of my spiraling thoughts. He should be here. He should be floating down beside me, making some dry comment about the quality of our situation. He should be—
He's not.
The trees come up faster than they should. Wrong trees—too tall, too dense, colors I can't quite name in the strange light. My chute tangles in branches, arresting my fall in a series of violent jerks that leave me dangling twenty feet above the forest floor. I fumble for my survival knife, sawing at the risers with hands that won't stop shaking.
I fall. Hit branches on the way down. Hit the ground hard enough that something in my ribs screams and my breath evacuates my lungs in a single, explosive wheeze.
For a long time, I just lie there. Staring up at a sky that's slowly revealing stars in configurations that match nothing. No Orion. No Big Dipper. No reference points at all.
When I finally claw myself upright, everything feels wrong.
My arms are too light. My reach is off—I grab for a tree trunk and miss by inches because my arm doesn't extend as far as I expected. The flight harness hangs loose around my shoulders, and when I adjust it, my fingers brush against collarbones that feel too prominent, too close to the surface.
I'm smaller.
The thought doesn't make sense, so I file it away for later and focus on moving. North. There were lights to the north when I was falling—city lights, maybe, though nothing on this planet will match any map I've ever flown. I stumble through underbrush that catches at my boots, branches whipping against a face that feels oddly exposed.
The sky is wrong. Not just the stars—the color itself. A deeper blue than any twilight I've known, with that broken moon hanging overhead like a shattered dinner plate. I stop walking and stare at it, trying to process what I'm seeing.
The moon is broken.
Fractured into pieces that hang in impossible orbit, chunks of rock and dust suspended against the darkness. It's clearly not supposed to look like someone took a hammer to it.
The air smells wrong too. Something sweet underneath the expected forest decay—a floral note I can't identify, mixed with something sharper. Something that makes my sinuses tingle and my teeth ache.
I keep walking. One foot in front of the other. That's what you do when everything falls apart—you keep moving until the world starts making sense again, or until you collapse trying.
The distant lights grow brighter as I stumble toward them. A city. Has to be a city. Cities have people. People have explanations. Maybe someone can tell me why the sky is torn open, why my body feels like a borrowed suit, why my partner's voice isn't in my ear telling me to watch my footing. Then I glance to where I think Monty crashed and my feet move before I can think about it. It would only be about an hour to reach him if I moved now.
My hand finds my radio, switches to our private frequency. "Monarch this is Prez. Do you copy?"
Static.
"Monty. Monty, please."
Static.
I keep walking.