These words, innocent and demanding, echoed in Kyle’s mind, intertwining with Eva’s cry. Promises. Each one now pulled not just a burden, but a red-hot chain of remorse.
He heard. But he couldn’t tear his gaze away from that small window into another, still living life. They were so close – only three hundred meters away in a straight line, behind armored glass and layers of protective barriers that now seemed thinner than a spiderweb. Ella, five years old, with her funny, tightly braided pigtails that always came undone by evening, held a hand-drawn card with the crooked, yet so sincere inscription «Daddy is a hero.» He promised to be with them in an hour, after the final, triumphant test. An hour that was supposed to change the world for the better.
«Kyle!» Eva barked, her voice almost drowned out by the rising wail of sirens. «The reactor is at 112%! Damn it, Arden was wrong! That initial fluctuation… it wasn’t interference! We should have…»
Her words were drowned out by a low, vibrating hum that rose from the depths of the laboratory, from the very heart of their ambitions and mistakes. The floor beneath his feet trembled with such force that Kyle barely kept his balance, and at the same moment the central screen flashed a blinding red: «CRITICAL ANOMALY. SPATIAL RIFT IMMINENT.» Kyle felt icy sweat trickle down his temple. This wasn’t supposed to happen. They had calculated everything down to the smallest detail. Quantum energy, their brainchild, their hope, was supposed to be salvation, an endless source for a dying planet. But they missed something, something fundamental. Perhaps the very «insignificant interference» that Eva had shouted about.
And suddenly – silence. A moment of absolute, deafening silence, stretching into agonizing eternity. And then – an explosion. Not a sound, not a flash, but a feeling as if the world, the very fabric of being, had split in two, revealing something ancient and monstrously alien.
Kyle fell to his knees as the glass in front of him, the vaunted armored glass, cracked, covered with a network of silver spiderwebs, and shattered into a myriad of shards. Behind it, in the habitat module, he saw space distort. The walls curved as if made of water, colors mixed into a nauseating cacophony, and then began to tear like worn fabric, revealing a dark, pulsating, internally glowing emptiness. A rift. The First Rift. He saw Maria, his Maria, grab Ella, holding her close, saw her lips silently scream his name, but the sound didn’t reach him, absorbed by this silent horror. The emptiness swallowed them, pulled them into its insatiable maw, leaving only an echo – a strange, low, vibrating hum that now seemed to sound directly in his skull, in his soul.
«No…» his voice broke into an animalistic rasp as he crawled towards the shattered glass, not noticing how the sharp edges cut his palms, leaving bloody marks on the metal floor. «Maria! Ella!»
But where their cozy module had been, now only a crack in reality gaped, radiating a cold, ghostly, unearthly light. Kyle stared into it, into this wound on the body of the world, until deafening sirens drowned out his thoughts, and the laboratory, their temple of science and hope, began to collapse around him, burying under its debris not only his family, but the entire former world. This was the end. And the beginning of an endless nightmare.
Chapter 1: «Last Bastion»
2247. The Fortress City «Last Bastion,» Zone 3.
Kyle Rain awoke to the wail of the siren, piercing and familiar as his own breath. The sound sliced through the damp, heavy air of the metal box that here, in Last Bastion, was proudly referred to as a living room. He lay on a narrow cot, sagging and creaky. The ceiling, covered in layers of rust resembling caked blood, flickered from the dim, uneven light of a single bulb, which seemed to be held together by sheer willpower and a couple of exposed wires. The pervasive smell of dampness, old iron, and ineradicable human despair was a constant companion in Last Bastion – a city that a handful of survivors had built from the wreckage of the old world to shelter from the primal horror that now reigned outside.
Last Bastion rose like a cyclopean fortress on the edge of an abyss – a chaotic, multi-level labyrinth of rusted steel plates, remnants of shattered military equipment, and cracked concrete structures. Lamps powered by the energy of dying, coughing generators emitted a trembling amber glow, like the sick eyes of a beast lurking in eternal darkness. Hope had no place here; it died along with the old world, leaving behind only a bitter taste. There weren’t even proper streets – just low, cramped corridors, covered in graffiti of despair and notices of missing residents, which became the inflamed nerves of the city. In these arteries, one could hear whispers of shadows dancing at the edge of the Wasteland, of voices calling from the Rifts. The oily, acrid smell of old fuel and rotting plastic never disappeared, seeping into clothes, skin, into the very lungs. There was no room for dreams here – only survival, a brutal struggle for every breath of air, for every ration of tasteless food. Sometimes, in rare moments of quiet, Kyle heard rumors of strange cults arising in the darkest corners of Bastion – people driven to the brink, seeking meaning in the madness of the Rifts, worshipping the Shadows or trying to make unthinkable deals with them.
He hadn’t truly slept. Not for eight long, endless years. Dreams, if they dared to come, were worse than wakefulness – endless, agonizing replays of the day everything collapsed. Maria. Ella. Their faces, beloved, distorted with terror, dissolving into the insatiable emptiness of the Rift. Kyle ran a trembling hand over his unshaven, gaunt face, trying to erase these images etched into his memory, but they were burned into his mind like a brand.
«Hey, Rain, are you alive in there, or has a Shadow already claimed your wandering soul?» A rough, smoky voice pierced the thin metal wall, accompanied by a dull thud. «The Council is waiting. They say they have a special assignment for you. Don’t make them nervous, or they’ll cut off your rations again, and you’ll be feeding on the rust from the walls.»
Kyle smiled wryly. His neighbor, an old mechanic named Garrett, a grizzled grumbler with golden hands and a caustic tongue, was one of the few who still tried to talk to him without open contempt. Most in Bastion avoided him – some out of primal fear of what he might have brought with him from Quantum Dawn, others out of disdain. «The scientist who killed the world,» they whispered behind his back when they thought he couldn’t hear. He didn’t argue. Maybe they were right. Guilt was his constant companion, his shadow.
He pulled on his worn, patched jacket, automatically checking if his old neural interface was in place – a bracelet that once connected him to the heart of the laboratory, now just a painful reminder of the past, of the days when he believed he could change the world. Then he stepped out into the narrow, dimly lit corridor, where the air was even heavier with the smell of burnt fuel, stale food, and concentrated human despair. Bastion was a veritable labyrinth of steel plates and concrete blocks, hastily cobbled together after the catastrophe. Above, beyond the murky, scratched protective dome, cracks were visible in reality itself – the Rifts, their glowing, pulsating edges twitching like living, hungry wounds. They were everywhere, some small, like scratches from the claws of an unknown beast, others – huge, gaping, like wounds in the sky, from which anomalies sometimes spilled: temporal jumps distorting perception, gravitational failures capable of crushing a person flat, or shadows that moved when they shouldn’t have, shadows that emanated a deathly chill.
Kyle made his way through the sparse morning crowd in the central zone, where people, exhausted, silent, with extinguished eyes, were already lining up for their daily rations. Children, too thin and serious for their age, with an unchildlike sadness in their gaze, stared at him with empty eyes. He looked away. He had nothing to comfort them with. Their future was as gray and bleak as the sky beyond the dome.
The Council building, if you could call this gloomy conglomerate of concrete and steel that, was located in the very