Nexus Bazaar: I Know How Every World Ends Chapter 59: Trade

The first warhead detonated over Washington at 7:21 PM Eastern, and Adam watched the eastern sky go white through the structural pane.

He had built the present mont with his own hands. He could trace every input back through Sage's log to the conversation, the gesture, the silence that had let the next thing happen. He did not look away from the flash.

The Arican Launch on Warning had triggered almost half an hour earlier. The full strategic counter-arsenal was already in flight toward Russian targets, and the British Trident and the French Force de Frappe had joined it on Article Five. Russia would be burning inside the half-hour.

But it was not finished. The exchange was hitting two continents. The world he had been told to end was still alive across the others.

He thought back about what he achieved in this ti.

Day 76. 02:47 AM.

The R&D archive vault was three levels below the Vought lobby, behind a series of biotric locks that had been written by people who had not anticipated the existence of Sage. The caras in the corridor showed an empty hallway because Sage had selected the still fra and looped it on a thirty-second buffer. The cooling system humd at the sa pitch it had humd at all night.

Adam walked between the cabinets in Stealth Mode with the suit's surface absorbing the corridor light. He did not breathe loudly. He did not need to. The vault was indexed by year and by program. The cabinet he had co for was 1947 / Series A / Original Formulation.

He drew on a pair of contamination gloves from a dispenser by the cabinet. He set the two vials he had co to take into a padded carry-case the inner suit had shaped to hold them. He looked at the labels.

The labels were faded. The handwriting belonged to a chemist who had died of leukaemia in 1962 according to a personnel file Sage had pulled in Week Two. The contents had not been touched since 1953.

" Sample integrity at ninety-one percent. Fluid clarity nominal. Two doses available. Recomnd taking both. The current-generation formulation reduced the lifespan and stress-tolerance ceilings by approximately sixty percent over the four decades of optimisation work. The original is what you want. "

The original killed eighteen of twenty trainees.

" Their preparation was a cocktail of vitamin injections and a Lutheran prayer. Yours is forty-eight days of Hamon cellular conditioning, a Nen-field reinforcent scaffold designed in the second week, and . "

Right.

He took the vials.

He left the way he had co in.

He did the first dose in his Seven suite at 04:18 AM. He had cleared his schedule for the next thirty-six hours by getting Marketing to slot him into a satellite-dia tour they had been pushing since Day Sixty. Nobody would knock on his door for a day and a half.

The first dose hit in nine seconds.

The Hamon cellular reinforcent Sage had built held for the first twenty.

Then his stomach lining tore.

It was a clean lateral tear from cardia to pylorus. He went down on his hands and knees on the carpet of the suite with one arm braced and the other pressed flat against his abdon, and his mouth filled with blood, and the blood was the wrong colour.

" Cellular response is at the upper bound of the model. Reinforcent scaffold holding. I am moving the stem-cell production line back into the marrow. Hold steady. "

The pain was the kind his Hamon-trained baseline did not buffer. His body was rewriting itself from the inside out, and the rewrite did not have a manual. The bone marrow in his femurs was producing fragnted stem cells at six tis the natural rate. The cells that survived the fragntation were larger than the cells they were replacing. The skin at his elbows split in three places along the joint lines.

Sage's tendrils were Nen at the resolution small enough to work on cellular level. She had built them for electronics. She had to repurpose them in real ti for soft tissue. The conversion took her ninety seconds, which was longer than it should have. Adam went grey for those ninety seconds. His pulse dropped to thirty-one beats per minute and his breathing went shallow. His vision narrowed to the carpet pattern in front of his right hand.

When Sage finished the initial cellular work, he felt her like a hand reaching into him from below.

" Host. I am here. Breathe with . "

His Hamon caught the rhythm of her count.

She moved through his bone marrow first. She suppressed the fragntation pathway by gating the cytokine signal that was driving it. She redirected the stem-cell production line back into the standard lineages with the modified density Compound V required. She closed the tear in his stomach lining by reinforcing the smooth muscle with a Nen scaffold that would dissolve once Hamon repair caught up.

It took her four hours.

When the suite's clock read 08:11, Adam was sitting up on the floor. His vision was clear. His pulse was sixty-six. The carpet under his right knee was the colour of his own blood.

" Phase one complete. The body has accepted the V geno. The integration is ongoing. I will manage the next four days. "

How bad does it get.

" Worse before it gets better. The neural reconfiguration is on day three. Plan for forty hours of unsupervised cellular work and twelve hours of consciousness loss. "

Right.

He stood up.

He cleaned the carpet.

Then he went to the second injection.

The next eleven days he ran a parallel life. The public Adam went to the Marketing-arranged satellite-dia tour and answered Vogue's questions about various topics. The public Adam attended two Seven training sessions. He walked through the lobby of the Tower twice. He took etings with Edgar's deputy on the licensing rollout for the Brave Maeve doll.

The private Adam, in the suite, between appearances, was on his back on the floor with his eyes closed, breathing in the Hamon pattern Sage was maintaining for him, while she worked on his bones.

The bones thickened across days four through six. The marrow density went from forty-five percent to seventy-two. The cortical layer gained a structural fibre Sage tagged in her log as composite, V-derived, na pending. The fibre wove through the bone in a lattice that did not exist in standard human anatomy. Adam's left tibia, when Sage tested it on Day 80 with a controlled TK strike from her, took fourteen tons of focused impact and did not crack.

His muscle fibre density tripled in days seven through nine. The new fibre was denser per unit volu and recovered at four tis the baseline rate. He gained no visible mass or bulk. The suite's full-length mirror showed a man with the sa outline he had always carried. The change was internal.

His skin re-set on Day 84.

The dermal layer thickened by twelve microns and reorganised. The fibroblasts produced a collagen variant the chemistry textbook had no na for. Sage tagged it as V-collagen, type A. The new collagen was structured at the molecular level the way Kevlar was structured at the macroscopic level, a woven lattice that distributed kinetic energy across the whole surface rather than concentrating it at the impact point.

Adam tested it on Day 84 evening. He drew a Vought-issue training knife from the drawer beside his bed. The blade was a forged-steel combat trainer with a six-inch edge and a tested cutting capacity that could put a slot through quarter-inch plate steel.

He pressed the edge into his forearm.

The blade slid across the skin like it was being drawn across polished granite.

He pressed harder.

The blade snapped.

" V-collagen integrity confird. Standard small-arms ammunition will not penetrate baseline skin. Sa with bladed weapons. Anti-material rounds, shaped charges, kinetic-energy projectiles in the rocket-and-tank-shell yield range can still penetrate. We have not built you the body of Holander. We have built you the body of a 1947 Soldier Boy with the modern stress-tolerance ceiling intact. "

Show the rest.

She showed him the rest.

His lung capacity had expanded from six to ten litres. His oxygen processing had improved by a factor of two and a half. His resting heart rate was forty-one. His core temperature regulated across a forty-degree ambient range without strain. The afterburner capacity in his fast-twitch muscle fibre had been redesigned around a recovery cycle Sage had borrowed from a marine mammal study Vought had funded in 1973.

His reflex envelope, on Combat Instinct plus Future Sight plus the new fibre and the new myelin density, was now reading consistent two-millisecond response tis against Sage's calibration drills. Three tis his post-Rusukaina baseline.

His TK lift on the test rig in the suite (that Sage prepared) read fifty tons of directional force. His TK envelope had expanded along with him.

His Nen reservoir, Sage's asurent protocol fully extended at his request, ca back at three hundred and eighteen thousand units.

He stood in front of the mirror for a long ti.

He understood what Sage had built him.

The Compound V did not give him a power. No heat vision, no flight, no super-strength as a discrete capability. It gave him a body that ran his existing systems at a fundantally higher amplitude. His Nen reservoir held more because he held more. The TK ceiling rose with the new envelope. Hamon ran cleaner through denser tissue, and Internal Armant bit deeper into bone that had stopped being human.

The Compound V was a multiplier on the multiplier.

His lifespan readings, when he asked, ca back at four hundred years.

He looked at himself in the mirror and saw the sa outline. Sa hair, sa shoulders, sa face. He looked like a man who could be twenty.

" You will continue to look like that for the next thirty to forty years. The aging slowdown begins at full effect once the cellular work completes. Lena and Henrik will notice within a decade. "

Mm.

He took a shower. The water was clear.

He slept for the first uninterrupted nine hours he had slept in four months.

Day 138. 7:21 PM Eastern. The window.

The Washington flash had faded. The atmospheric column from the second detonation over Baltimore was visible across the Hudson, a vertical pillar of dust and ionised air. The third blood sowhere south of Philadelphia. The fourth at Boston. The CNN feed on the wall went static. The Bloomberg ticker on the executive-floor display showed the sa line for thirteen seconds and then went black.

Sage pulled the count off the Norad encrypted line.

" Eighty-four warheads launched from Russian silo and submarine assets at 18:50 Eastern. Trajectory profiles: sixty-four eastern seaboard, twelve western seaboard, eight central United States. The Russian Federation committed approximately fifteen percent of its active strategic arsenal. The targeting profile was contained to North Arican population centres. "

" Arican Launch on Warning triggered at 18:54. The full Minuteman III, the Trident submarine, and the bomber are in the air or on the way out of dispersal. Targeting profile is the standard Russia counter-value with counter-force overlay. The British Trident force authorised launch at 18:57 under Article Five. The French Force de Frappe authorised launch at 18:59. The combined NATO arsenal is now in transit toward Russian targets with first impacts in approximately twelve minutes. "

Russia will not be standing in the morning.

" Confird. Twenty-seven minutes from launch to first detonation on Russian soil. "

Ti to impact, last warhead in the original Russian salvo over North Arica.

" Twenty-one minutes for the trans-Pacific approach. Eighteen minutes for the trans-Atlantic trajectory. The Russian doctrine treats the launch as authorised, complete, and not subject to recall. "

He stood at the window.

The plan he had made was for an extinction event. What the exchange would actually deliver was civilisational damage to two continents and a generation of geopolitical wreckage everywhere else. The instrunt he had built had fired in the wrong calibre.

The S-rank ceiling did not show because the exchange was contained to the superpowers.

He had to widen it.

" Three pathways. Pathway A: redirect a subset of the Russian salvo in flight before they cross apogee, reassigning warheads from North Arican targets to European, Chinese, and southern-hemisphere targets. My tendrils are aura-bound and have a working range of forty tres from your body; I need you alongside each warhead in turn. Pathway B: trigger PRC retaliation by causing a subset of redirected warheads to land on Chinese targets, which Chinese sensors will misread as a Russian betrayal or a coordinated Arican strike under cover of the Russian launch. Pathway C: trigger India-Pakistan and DPRK preemption through the cascade. Recomnd pathway A as the trigger event, pathways B and C as cascade-natural follow-on. "

How many warheads do I need to move.

" Twenty-eight. Sixteen for Europe, eight for China, one for South Arica, two for Africa, and one for the Indian subcontinent. The cascade closes on the remaining work without further input from you. "

Range of the warheads.

" Sufficient for Europe without assistance. Insufficient for the southern-hemisphere targets. You will need to provide kinetic assistance to four of the twenty-eight. "

Cost to body.

" Within expectations. The full operation will take twenty-three minutes at a sustained cruise of Mach six. "

Mach six is past the pre-V envelope.

" The Velden test capped the pre-V body. The cap is no longer the constraint. The body you have now will hold. "

He looked at the eastern sky.

His own reflection in the pane between him and the burning city. He looked at it for a second longer than he had ant to. The man in the glass had Adam's outline and soone else's stillness, and he did not know which one of them was about to do the next thing.

His hand went up to the pane.

Then he was through it.

The pane did not flex against him. He went through the glass without registering it, and the glass ca apart behind him in pieces too small to track.

He cleared the building in two seconds.

He hit Mach two at three hundred tres and Mach four at the cloud line. Sage piloted the air-corridor wedge ahead of him with the new envelope and the new body. The wedge held cleaner than it had on the Velden test. His ribs did not strain at Mach four. His vestibular system held at Mach five. At Mach six the cabin he flew inside of (the air pocket his suit and the corridor maintained around him) held a stable forty-degree spread from the ambient stratosphere.

The first warhead was at sixty-four kilotres of altitude over the Atlantic, climbing toward apogee on a trajectory that would take it to Wilmington in four minutes.

He flew alongside it.

Sage's tendrils extended.

The warhead's avionics package was a Soviet-era design Russia had retrofit over the years with newer GPS overrides and contemporary inertial-navigation packages. The encryption on the guidance system was elliptic-curve. The encryption on the targeting bus was not. Sage had read the spec three weeks earlier off a German intelligence report.

She reached into the targeting bus.

She rewrote the destination coordinates in eleven seconds.

The warhead's nose corrected by zero-point-eight degrees. Its new arc ran south-east across the Atlantic toward Lisbon.

" One. "

He moved to the second warhead. A newer Topol-class package. Sage handled the encryption in fourteen seconds, and the destination ran from Boston to Manchester.

" Two. "

He moved across the salvo with Sage's read on the cluster geotry, staying inside the trail of the Russian launch pattern at the leading edge of each warhead's flight curve. The Russians had no sensor on the salvo that could discriminate between the warheads and a Mach-six anomaly running alongside them. They had not designed the avionics for that scenario.

He worked through the European bracket in nine minutes. London, Paris, Berlin, Ro, Madrid, Warsaw, Vienna, Athens, Stockholm, Brussels, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Munich, Birmingham, Manchester, Rotterdam. Sixteen targets, sixteen new arcs. Two of the southern redirects took TK nudges to clear apogee. The rest ran on Sage's standard sixteen-second rewrite.

" Sixteen. China next. "

The Chinese-bound redirects took more work. The Russian western-fleet warheads did not have the range for Beijing without adjustnt. He gave them the assist with TK pulses adding eleven kilotres of altitude apiece, and Sage rewrote the targeting bus inside her standard window. Eight warheads from the Arican Midwest now ran for Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Tianjin, Wuhan, Shenzhen.

The last four he moved on harder discipline. South Arica had no nuclear powers to retaliate; the redirect was to make sure the southern hemisphere did not survive in salvageable condition. Brasilia. Johannesburg. Cairo. New Delhi. Four warheads off the Pacific salvo, each one rewritten in flight.

" Twenty-eight redirects. Operation runti nineteen minutes. "

He climbed to the ionosphere and watched the world from the top.

Below him, the Russian salvo continued its arc. The warheads he had not touched closed on their original North Arican targets. The warheads he had touched followed the new arcs. The first European impact would land in twelve minutes. The first Chinese impact in fifteen.

The cascade triggered itself on the Chinese sensor net at fourteen minutes.

Chinese early-warning satellites read the trans-Pacific approach signature of the Russian-bound warheads (now Chinese-bound) and interpreted it as a Russian betrayal of the no-first-strike protocol or a coordinated Arican strike under cover of the Russian launch. The PLA Rocket Force was on hair-trigger alert from the eighteen hours of escalation since John's press conference. The political authorisation ca through the central military commission in seven minutes.

China launched.

The Chinese arsenal was smaller than the Russian and more focused. The targeting profile was Russian first and Arican second. Two hundred and forty warheads went vertical out of silo complexes in the western interior. Forty went out of Chinese submarines in the South China Sea. The trajectories spread.

The Russian second salvo authorised before the redirected warheads even arrived. Russian command, watching NATO Trident and Force de Frappe inbound on their own air-defence boards, treated the European launch as the second-stage attack the original Russian doctrine had assud was coming. The second salvo went up at minute eleven. Two hundred and twenty warheads. The targeting profile was European capitals, NATO command-and-control, and the UK and French strategic-deterrent bases. The Russian Periter system fed authorisation forward in case the command links went down. They did go down. The authorisation went forward anyway.

" Russian second salvo confird. Twenty-two minutes to first European impact. The redirected Russian warheads will arrive ahead of the second-salvo strike. Europe will be hit by both. "

India-Pakistan tripped on the Chinese launch alert. Pakistani doctrine treated a Chinese strategic launch as conditional Indian provocation and triggered Pakistani launch authorisation. Indian launch followed. The subcontinent's combined arsenal of approximately three hundred and forty warheads went off across nine minutes.

North Korea fired its complete arsenal of forty-eight warheads preemptively. Eight were directed at Tokyo, six at Seoul, fourteen at the Arican mainland (none reached). The remaining twenty distributed across South Korean industrial centres and Japanese ports.

Israel was ambiguous. The Israeli arsenal did not launch in the first thirty minutes. Adam noted the absence. He was not sure whether Israel would still be a question in an hour. Just to make sure, he redirected one to them too.

He hung in the upper atmosphere and watched the cascade.

The Atlantic had warheads crossing it in both directions. The Pacific had warheads crossing it. The interior of every continent was tracking inbound trajectories. The major capitals went under in the next eighteen minutes in patterns the analysts who had spent careers modelling these scenarios would never write papers about.

He watched the cloud cover thicken.

He did not look away.

The first North Arican impacts had already cratered Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston in the minutes before he climbed. The Arican counter-strike found Russian silo complexes at minute twenty-two. Moscow took the British Trident at twenty-three. Saint Petersburg took the French Force de Frappe at twenty-four. The first impact in Beijing detonated at twenty-three minutes from the original Russian launch. Shanghai followed nine seconds later. London at twenty-four. Paris at twenty-five. Berlin at twenty-five and thirteen seconds. Pyongyang took an Indian counterstrike at twenty-eight. New Delhi went under the Pakistani response at twenty-nine. Karachi went under the Indian response at thirty.

The southern-hemisphere impacts, the ones he had hand-redirected, landed in the next four minutes. Brasilia. Johannesburg. Cairo. He had not redirected a warhead to Sydney or Auckland or Buenos Aires. The cascade had not needed them. The fallout patterns and the global ash injection would deliver Australasia and the rest of the southern continents on a longer clock.

He hovered, waiting.

The notification arrived at minute thirty-eight.

▓ EXPEDITION COMPLETE

World code: L4-1882 Tier: L4 Days deployed: 138 (Earth-side equivalent: 27.6) Extraction window: OPEN

▓ MISSION ASSESSNT

Primary objective: survive 30 days — completed Day 30. C-rank objective (one Supe employnt milestone): completed Day 9 (admission to The Seven). B-rank objective (two milestones with cover intact): completed Day 26 (Seven public mbership confird; cover narrative stable). A-rank objective (Seven mbership held at extraction window): completed Day 138 (mber of record at extraction). S-rank objective (trigger civilizational extinction event): completed Day 138. Trigger achieved; outco unrecallable.

▓ HIDDEN OBJECTIVES BANKED

Robin Ward intercept (baseline divergence): 700 NP, completed Day 1.Madelyn Stillwell removed prematurely (Vought executive structure destabilisation): 1,200 NP, completed Day 107.Stan Edgar removed prematurely (Vought executive structure destabilisation): 800 NP, completed Day 112pound V (original-formulation series A) acquired and integrated: 2,400 NP, completed Day 88.Soldier Boy released prematurely (Cold War captivity divergence): 1,500 NP, completed Day 138.

▓ RATING

S

▓ NET POSITIONS PAYNT

Base S-rank completion: 18,500 NP Hidden objective sum: 6,600 NP Divergence multiplier (extinction-direction, first in tier): 1.20

Total: 30,120 NP

▓ REWARD Force join token (Legendary)

▓ PHYSICAL CARRY-OVER

The biological reconfiguration completed on Day 88 carries to Earth Pri in full. Lifespan, cellular density, sensory profile, and Nen-system handling persist outside this expedition. No further integration work required.

▓ EXTRACTION READY

Acknowledge to extract.

Sage read it through with him.

" Thirty thousand four hundred and ninety. NP balance projected post-extraction. Thirty percent of the voucher window covered in a single deploynt. "

Thanks Sage. I couldn't have done this without you.

" Host, this is my job. "

Extract.

He hung in the stratosphere for one more mont. He looked down at the Atlantic. The smoke had risen high enough to flatten against the tropopause. The light coming off it was the colour of old brass. The world he was looking at had nine days of survivors in major cities and weeks for so of the smaller ones and most of a year for the southern hemisphere before the ash and the cooling pulled the agriculture down.

His throat closed around sothing. His chest felt heavy. The world vanished.

Earth Pri caught him on its pad like nothing had happened.

The bay lights held the sa low warm temperature he had walked out under thirty-six days earlier. Twenty tres away, Mikhail Petrov was at the duty desk with the sa chipped white mug he had been carrying since Sigma-4's third L3. The clock on the wall read 14:11.

Mikhail looked up.

He stood up. His chair scraped once against the floor.

"Adam."

Adam tipped his head. He did not trust his voice in that mont.

Mikhail ca around the desk.

"Welco back."

"Thanks."

"Vane wants you in her office. She left word to inform you as soon as you get back."

Adam looked down at himself. The suit had reconfigured to corporate business attire on the return transit, the sa charcoal jacket and white shirt he had walked into Vought Tower wearing on Day One. The clothes had co back clean.

He took the elevator up.

Vane was at her desk.

The window behind her looked west toward the Velden river. The afternoon light caught the silver in her hair and held it there.

She did not stand.

"Adam."

"Commander."

"Sit."

He sat.

She read his face for several seconds. When she spoke, it was not the voice she had used the morning she briefed him on the guild system.

"Tell how bad."

"Define bad."

"The world you went to."

He took a slow breath. He had not yet decided what register to give the answer in.

"It is not a world anymore."

She did not nod. She held the look for a second, and in that second he watched her arrive at the picture and decide what to do with it. She had read his post-Marineford debrief and the long week of conversations they had in this office afterward. She had a sense for when Adam's it is not a world anymore ant the world had ended.

"S-rank then."

"Yes."

"Direction."

"Destructive."

She breathed in once.

"That is your first ti?"

He nodded.

She looked at her desk. There was a paper file open on it. She closed the file with one finger.

"You will write the standard debrief by tomorrow morning."

"I will."

"I want to inform you that this is likely our last debrief. I am happy that you scored well. We need more people like you these days. About the guild."

She looked at the files.

"Eclipse functions well. Brandt has been running the foundational program for the cohort that ca in during your absence. Ren was on the public side. The IEC is satisfied. Your guild is alive and doing well."

"Thank you."

"Two other items."

"Yes."

She turned the file ninety degrees and slid it across the desk. He did not pick it up. He read the top sheet upside down.

It was an IEC bulletin. The header read WORLD GATE STATUS — YAUTJA ORIGIN WORLD — UPDATE, and the date was three days old.

She watched him read.

"The L3 team is dead."

He read for another five seconds.

"All three."

"All three. The trial period for the team passed and we have received no response. No transmission or changes in the Gate. This leads us to assu the worst."

"Dead."

He nodded once.

"The IEC has classified all three Explorers as KIA. The bodies remain on the other side. The Yautja gate has been blocked by the IEC for thirty days for re-assessnt."

"And the response."

"The response is on the second sheet."

He turned the page.

The second sheet read L7 RECONNAISSANCE OPERATION — YAUTJA WORLD GATE — SANCTIONED, and the operational signatures below the title were three of the IEC's standing L7 nas. Adam read them.

"Mirelle Delacroix."

"Confird."

"Volker Stahn."

"Astren senior L7. Explosion specialist. He volunteered through the Astren Explorer Board on Monday, signed by the Astren Defense Council on Tuesday."

"Hisao Yamamoto."

"Kessho Dominion's senior L7. Legendary swordmaster. The Kessho council pushed him through on Tuesday as well."

He set the sheet down.

"Three L7s deploying together."

"Yes. Mirelle as ranking officer. Stahn on the heavy-elent work. Yamamoto for close combat. The mandate is to enter the gate, hold a periter of one kilotre for thirty days, and allow L4-through-L6 explorers to follow once the periter is stable. The L4 follow-on cohort begins assembly next week."

"And the second gate."

"The Thassari-Korrath origin world remains closed. The IEC will not commit a second exploratory team while the Yautja periter is unresolved. The decision is to secure one front before opening the other."

He thought about it.

The world he had co back to had moved while he was inside The Boys verse. The world had lost three Explorers it had sent through a gate, and now the world had decided to send the three Explorers it had not been willing to risk on the first crossing.

Mirelle in the floral sundress at the HEC foyer with the baguette through her canvas bag, the mother-mode shoulder slap.

He imagined it for a mont.

Then he thought about Ren.

"When does she leave."

"Mirelle. Six days. The three of them deploy at oh-six-hundred next Tuesday."

"Does Ren know."

"Ren has known since the bulletin published."

He breathed out and than nodded.

"I will go."

"Go. Write the debrief on the way."

He stood up and left.

She did not stand. She held the look for one more mont.

The lobby door opened on a late-spring Kerenth afternoon. The Velden ran the colour it ran in May. The bridge traffic moved slow. The bakery on the corner had the door propped open with its usual brick.

Adam walked to the apartnt.

He took the stairs and reached the door. It opened.

Ren was at the kitchen counter.

She did not turn when the door opened. The tablet in her hand had her full attention.

She heard the door close.

She turned and looked at him.

"You're early."

"Three days."

"How are you."

The answer he had rehearsed in the corridor did not co out. He said the first word on his mind.

"Alive."

She looked at him for one more second, then crossed the kitchen and gave him a hug.

She did not say it was good to see him.

She did not need to.

The breath he had been holding for the last thirty-six days went out of him. He did not get to choose how it ca out. He felt his shoulders drop. She felt it too. She did not lift her head.

" Host. Welco ho. "

Adam closed his eyes and let the mont hold him.

AN: If we get to 500 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 700, another one.