I rolled to a stop, my lungs heaving as they remembered how to process oxygen that was thick with smog and heat. I ripped off my helmet, gasping. "Dax?"
Dax was already on his feet, his iron gavel in hand. He wasn't looking at me; he was looking at the horizon. "Mia... how long were we gone?"
I followed his gaze. When we left, the world had been in the middle of a reboot chaotic, yes, but hopeful. The Vanguard had been forming. But what I saw now wasn't a world in recovery. It was a world in a civil war of physics.
To the west, the sky was a jagged wall of purple static a Zone of Silence where digital tech clearly wouldn't work. To the east, the landscape was glitching, mountains flickering in and out of existence as if the render speed couldn't keep up with reality. And between them, r
