The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 13, 2037

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Thank God Leona’s mind processed information at the speed of light. With only seconds to think, she switched on both of their jet packs. Though they were not designed to operate within the atmosphere, they did the job in a pinch. Their descent was slowed enough to keep them from splattering onto the ground below. The problem was that they also weren’t designed to work in tandem like that. Had they had enough time, and had Mateo been born smarter, they could have done it on their own, but since Leona was pulling all the weight, she wasn’t able to exercise full control over their movements. The jets propelled them over and back up and down and all around, like a rebellious firehose. She was finally able to keep them pointed towards the water long enough to stave off their death for one more second. She switched off the jets and they fell, only to begin sinking into the depths.

Feeling the need to contribute something to the effort, Mateo tore off their spacesuits and pulled them back to the surface of the...lake. It was definitely a lake. And that tree looked familiar. Yes. It was Sherwood Lake. They were back in Topeka. As he was crawling up the beach, he saw a pair of legs run past him. A set of arms that belonged with the legs reached down and helped Leona to her feet. Her own legs were shaking, and she was having trouble standing up. He had always seen her as the strong one in the relationship, but this showed that she had been just as traumatized by the event as he had.

“Thanks, dad,” she said.

Mr. Delaney began to help her take more pieces of her suit off while his wife ran down and wrapped a towel around her. “I have her. Check on the boy.”

“No, I’m fine,” Mateo insisted. “Just a little out of breath.”

“I have a towel for you too,” she said.

“My mother? Samsonite?”

“Oh, yeah. We need to call them.” She took out her device and stepped to the side.

“What happened to them?” Leona asked of her father.

“They both lost consciousness in the water,” Mr. Delaney explained. “Don’t worry, they’ve alive, and suffered no brain damage. But the old fisherman who pulled them into his boat couldn’t remember exactly where he had found them, so we separated to look for you.”

“They’re on their way,” Leona’s stepmother said.

“Call Theo too.”

“Oh, right.” She went back to her phone.

“I don’t know how much you know,” Mateo said, accepting a bottle of water. “But there was an android woman who saved us.”

Mr. Delaney nodded, indicating that Mateo didn’t need to continue his question. “Her nanites are in the water, but they apparently lost their...cohesion or something. They tell us that she would be, for all intents and purposes, dead. I’m sorry.”

Mateo nodded understandingly. “Figures.” He looked to Leona. “How did Mirage pretend that she jumped with us?”

“I was thinking about that,” Leona replied. “She wouldn’t have been able to turn invisible, but she could have separated her nanites quick enough to make it look like she was disappearing.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

They engaged in the latest of their long line of reunions. Leona noted how much larger Theo had grown since she last saw him. Normally, that would be a cliché, but it was relevant in this case due to the time difference. He was now 18 years old, and indeed taller than his older sister. Mateo’s mother and Samsonite, on the other hand, had not changed a bit. They were as young as they had been when he first caught back up with her seven years ago. Advances in medicine in cosmetics might have accounted for such a thing, but Samsonite posited a mathematical factor. Because of Mateo’s cousin, Danica, they already knew that the powers that be were capable of immortality. And Aura and Samsonite were on a specific timeslip pattern, broken only to allow them to switch from jumping backwards to jumping forwards. According to that pattern they, along with Theo, were due to remain within the present timestream for another 300 years. They assumed the last two centuries would be finished up by their corpses, but their feelings of vitality now suggested otherwise. Theo called it their gift for following the rules for so long. Samsonite was curious to find out the truth about it. Aura was suspicious.

They drove a car that was registered to a friend of a friend of a friend, so that they were far enough removed from the prying eyes of Reaver. Paper money was still a thing that existed in some circles. It was so rare that it was relatively easy to trace, but only if you knew where you were looking. Mateo’s and Leona’s family had spent the last year turning themselves into ghosts by converting their cash to other currencies, buying innocuous goods at random places, and bartering in rural areas. They moved to the most remote place they could find in the middle of Wyoming.

While Reaver had lost control of his own company and was currently awaiting trial for his latest blunder with the exploding space probe, he was still a threat. As much trouble as he was in, he surely had friends on the inside of the outside, and they were a risk to Mateo and anyone close to him. It made him want to run away again, but this time actually do it right. Leona seemed to sense this and convinced him otherwise. She explained to him in no uncertain terms that every major attempt at his life had occurred while Mateo was isolated from his family, or only with Leona. They were all better off sticking together, even if it meant Leona’s father and stepmother had to destroy their old lives. None of this was their fault, and he should have been more careful about keeping them out of it. It was actually surprising how safe they had been throughout the years. It was only recently that they were really in danger. Though, Leona was right. Reaver wasn’t interested in hurting his family and friends, if only to get to him. Mateo seemed to be Reaver’s one and only purpose.

“But see, that’s the thing,” Leona said of this after finding some privacy in their very own cabin in the woods. “You first encountered Reaver more than a thousand years in the future. He had already been dealing with you, but you hadn’t even met him yet from your perspective.”

“Right,” Mateo said, prompting her to go on.

“In fact, every time we’ve encountered him thus far, he was already pissed off with you.”

“Yeah, I still don’t know why.”

“He hasn’t even bothered to tell you. We’re already pretty sure that you and I and any other salmon are capable of altering the timeline. That’s probably what we’re doing here. Either he’s a complete moron, or there’s some reason why he hasn’t so much as attempted to ask you for help with changing whatever has been done to him.”

“That’s true. I don’t know what I did, and he has to know that. There must be some reason he’s keeping his past-slash-my future from me.”

“And what’s his pattern? Is it random? Does he have control over it? If so, why doesn’t he jump out of jail? Is he a rogue member of the power that be? Or worse,” she started, “is he not rogue?”

“These are all brilliant questions.”

“We have to ask them,” Leona said, straight-faced.

“Yeah,” Mateo chuckled. “Wait, what?”

She drew closer and lowered her voice, even though the nearest people were in a separate cabin. “Maybe you were right about running away.” She weathered a brainstorm in her own head. “He’s not going to stop. He can’t. And we can’t stop him. He might not be convicted of any crime. He may retake his company. He might even be able to teleport out of jail. Hell, he could go back in time and kill your mother before you’re born.”

“What are you saying, Leona?” Mateo asked.

“We have to take the fight to him. We have to get our answers, and barring any sudden conversations with the puppeteers of all this bullshit, we have to get those answers from him.”

“We could contact the Delegator.”

“How?”

“Danica?”

“We’re not allowed in the Constant. Not even Theo can get back in. I think we’ve been put on the naughty list.”

“This sounds reckless.”

She kissed him with both the passion of a new relationship, and the ease of an old marriage. “We’re time travelers. The world could plan for an asteroid heading towards us, but we would be falling down the crater tomorrow. Reckless sounds like a casual stroll in the park to me at this point.”

Mateo yawned. “Let’s talk about it next year. We can’t do anything today. Like you said, we could jump to our death tomorrow, and none of this would even matter.”

To spite their exhaustion, Mateo and Leona finally consummated their twenty-year relationship that night.

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Crossed Off: Isolate (Part VII)

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Starla and Alec arrived at Marissa’s house just before dinner time. Things were a bit awkward at first, so Mrs. Mendegale decided to make things more awkward by starting the conversation. “So, Miss Wakefield, I am pleased to finally have proof that Marissa’s penpal isn’t a forty-year-old man in his mom’s basement.”

Alec nearly spit out his food.

“Mother!” Marissa chastised.

“Don’t insult the company, dear,” Mr. Fanchild complained to his wife.

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” Mrs. Mendegale insisted.

Alec nodded and spoke before finishing his green bean, “that’s what I’ve been trying to convince my friends.” He squinted and jabbed his fork towards her. “You and I understand each other, Mrs. Mendegale.”

She smiled, and for a few minutes, the only noise heard was the sound of silver on porcelain.

Starla caught Mr. Fanchild eyeing her wheelchair a few times, unable to resist his curiosity, but also unable to voice it. “I have a rare degenerative disease,” she volunteered. “They haven’t even had time to name it after someone yet. The full name is something I can’t pronounce, but that’ll probably change to Wakefield Syndrome in a few years.”

“I’m sorry, I was staring.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him genuinely. “The disease operates with a bottom-up structure. It started in my toes and has worked its way up to my waist. Eventually, it will reach my neck and I’ll be fully locked in. The doctors aren’t sure whether I’ll even be able to move my eyeballs or eyelids.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, but this time for a different reason.

“Starla, Alec, and I are going to meet some friends at the skating park,” Marissa said, changing the subject. “We’ll need to leave soon.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go there,” Mrs. Mendegale said. “It’s far too dangerous. And what about her wheelchair?”

“Well, it will roll down the ramp a lot better than my feet do, so I think she’ll be all right.”

“That’s not funny.”

“So is your face.”

Mrs. Mendegale closed her eyes and sighed before looking to Alec, the only other adult in the room besides her husband. “She learned how to think for herself last week, and we haven’t figured out how to reset her to her factory settings.”

She gave her mother a playful grimace as the only reply.

Marissa pushed Starla down the sidewalk while Alec meandered in the street nearby. “I’m not sure if I’m up for a large crowd tonight,” Starla admitted. “Do you think there will be a lot of people at the skate park tonight?”

“We’re not going to the skate park. We’re going to The Dust Fountain.”

“No one goes there,” Alec said. “Why are we?”

“I have a present for you.”

“And what might that be?”

“Well,” she began, “Tristan found that superhero league in Missouri, and Sendoa met that cloner guy in France, I figured it was time for me to contribute.”

“You don’t mean...”

“I do. I too found someone else with superpowers.” Marissa reached down to give Starla a hug around her neck. “It would seem that you’re all coming together like a jigsaw puzzle. I say that it’s meant to be.”

“Marissa,” Starla whined. “I came here to isolate myself from these people.”

“She’s not a these people. She’s my best friend.”

“Therasia?” Alec guessed.

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about her before?” Starla asked.

“You asked me to keep your secret, and she asked me to keep hers. But you’re here now, and I’ll be the last to admit that death comes for us all, but I kind of feel like you should meet her before you stop being able to speak. Don’t wanna be morbid or anything.”

Alec looked like he was planning an escape route.

“It’s fine,” Starla said to calm him down. “She’s right. I’m not going to be myself for much longer. I have very little to lose. Maybe René was wrong. Maybe I’m the one person who doesn’t have to fear people finding out about abilities. What’s the worst they could do to me?”

Alec moved over and stopped the wheelchair by the armrests. “I can think of a thing or two, and I’m not the psychopath. Imagine what they could come up with?”

“If I do imagine that, am I not one of the psychopaths?”

“Starla,” he said in his fatherly voice.

“You can leave,” she said.

“Like hell,” he said, releasing her.

They came up on the Dust Fountain, an ancient relic of a time when the local government was attempting to revitalize the area decades ago. The commissioning of the large fountain nearly bankrupted them. If not for a rich man dying during his travels west who fell in love with the town and bequested his fortune to it, the fountain could have been all that remained. Instead, it was left almost perfectly alone; a kind of holy ground to act as a reminder of what might have been. It was never cleaned or maintained, and was only allowed visitors on rare spiritual occasions, but still it remained standing tall. Through rain and wind, it never crumbled, and no one really knew why. “Won’t we get caught here?” Alec asked as they approached. “I assume people walk by all the time.”

“Sure, if we’re above ground,” Marissa agreed. “But we’re going downstairs.”

After they had finished lifting Starla’s chair into the fountain, Marissa took a water bottle out of her purse and stuffed it inside the mouth of the large horse statue. “Therasia’s cousin discovered this,” she went on as the water drained from the bottle. “Rain can’t reach it accidentally, but some kind of catch is released when it fills up with enough water.” Once the bottle had been emptied, the entire statue twisted and revealed a winding ramp. “She’s hoping to use this as her superhero lair some day. No one else is aware of its existence, as far as we can tell.”

“Oh, my God,” Starla said. “This is amazing!”

“It’s like it was designed for you. You would think they’d have built it with stairs.” She took control of the wheelchair and headed down backwards, keeping Starla from rolling too quickly. “We have to hurry. Once the water drains all the way, the statue closes back up on its own.”

“This is brilliant,” Alec admired.

“Be prepared to say that again.”

They reached the bottom of the ramp and found themselves in the lair’s antechamber. Lit torches lined the wall, yet it was unrealistically cold. A girl walked in from a door on the other side of the room. She outstretched her arm while she was still a good distance from them, as if to shake their hands. “You must be Alec and Starla.” A large flame slowly grew from her hand and crackled softly. “My name is Therasia Jarvi. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

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Microstory 130: Therasia Jarvi

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Therasia Jarvi might have been the most powerful anomaly of all. She could manipulate the movement of atoms, exciting them or slowing them at will. This allowed her to make the immediate area hot, cold, or windy. With better control, she was able to generate fire, ice, and water. Other anomalies could do one or two of these things, but Therasia could do them all. The more she practiced, the better she became, and the wider her range. It was theorized that, if she worked hard enough, she would be able to alter the climate of the entire world. That she wanted, she could have destroyed the planet. Therasia lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba which was one of the coldest cities in the world. She was excited when she discovered what she could do, and hoped to one day use her abilities as a superhero. Unrelated to her abilities, her parents had trouble understanding her. She did well in school, and got along with her classmates for the most part, but she also had a strange way about her. The world of psychology was only recently starting to investigate autism spectrum disorder, and history would later suggest that she would have been diagnosed as belonging somewhere on the spectrum had the field been ready for her. She expressed ideas and made connections between things that people had trouble relating to. There were concepts in her head that made sense to her, but not to most others. She was one of only a handful of people to be put on a list by the founders of Bellevue, so they were able to find her with no prompting. They insisted that she complete tertiary school, but in the meantime, was allowed to visit the hotel regularly. A boy who was only a couple years older was just finishing college at the same time and was placed in a similar sort of probationary period. They quickly latched on to each other, but the other members made her feel equally as valuable. Before Bellevue, however, there was really only one person who loved her without question; her best friend, Marissa. And it wasn’t even until later that Marissa learned of her secret...

Microstory 129: Andrew Langlais

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There was something very poetic about Emmanuelle and her brother, Andrew Langlais. They were package deal. Through a rare process called superfetation, their mother became pregnant with Andrew at a time when she was already pregnant with Emmanuelle. The doctors were worried about complications, what with Andrew being three months premature, yet they were both born healthier than most. In fact, they grew up never having gotten sick even once. Though not considered twins, the two of them were inseparable. They did practically everything together, and knew all of each other’s secrets. One day in primary school, Emmanuelle broke her arm on the Vector field and was sent to the school doctor. An older girl was in the office at the same time with a painful illness. She was suffering from stomach pains, a migraine, and aches throughout most of her muscles. Out of instinct, Emmanuelle approached the girl and tried to comfort her by holding her hands. They both began to shake and their pores widened spontaneously, yet they were unable to let go. Blood drained out of the girl’s arms and forced itself into Emmanuelle’s. After the process was over, the girl was feeling better than ever. Emmanuelle, however, was not. She started to feel the same symptoms that the girl had before. She had somehow removed the illness from her and taken it into herself. Feeling his sister’s pain from the other side of the school, Andrew raced down the halls and burst into the doctor’s office. Again out of instinct, they grasped each other’s arms and repeated the process. Andrew pulled the disease into himself, but did not become sick like she had. Instead, he nullified it. He even managed to heal her broken arm at the same time. Apart, Emmanuelle’s and Andrew’s abilities were useless. He couldn’t heal anyone on his own, and she couldn’t heal anyone alone without suffering from their condition. They gladly joined Bellevue so that they would have the resources they needed to start a healing foundation. They could not heal other people’s physical injuries (though Andrew could heal both his own and his sister’s), but together they healed literally countless people of otherwise incurable diseases. After enough time, they stopped aging, and were discovered to be incapable death. They turned out to be two of only three true immortal anomalies.

Microstory 128: Donna Belmonte

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The entire population of a small town in Iowa was aware of the fact that Donna Belmonte was a medical marvel. Learning of her ability had sparked a major overhaul of their attitudes. The once dying town was reinvigorated with a desire to stay together. Many volunteered their time and energy into renovating the old and decrepit flour mill. Donna had unwittingly brought everyone closer, and formed a strong community that simply could not be broken. When she was a child, her vermiform appendix became inflamed. Though fairly important to the immunity response to disease, it was technically possible to live without, so hers was surgically removed. Later that week, she went in for a follow-up visit with the doctor who discovered her appendix to be fully intact. It had regrown. Despite hesitation from her family, the doctor began gradual and relatively safe experiments on Donna’s body. Over time, they found it possible to extract any organ from her, and it would grow back on its own before she died from its absence. Furthermore, her blood type was unlike any other seen before. Her brother insisted that they call it Blood Type K, and the name stuck. Her blood and organs were 100% compatible with anyone else’s body. There was not a single case of rejection. As the years went by, Donna was treated like royalty. She was given an unlimited allowance, the nicest house of all, and a team of dedicated guards. When she became a legal adult at the age of 16, she began to pursue her ability at full force, spending the majority of her time in surgery. A group of citizens were charged with transporting her organs across the continent, while another was responsible for making sure that no one noticed that they were all somehow coming from the same person. Amongst protests, Donna joined Bellevue at a time when it was still in its relative infancy. They promised that their resources would allow her to use her gift at its optimum level. Her neighbors were forced to accept her decision, and even ended up abandoning their homes to form new lives in the previously only hypothetical town of Bellevue, with the hotel at its center.

Microstory 127: Baldwin Grant

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When Baldwin Grant was in tertiary school, he came under the rage of a bully. The bully would torture him both physically and emotionally, but he was always careful to never leave a mark, or any other proof that anything had happened. He was always so nice to everyone else, so no one believed Baldwin when he made his accusations. Baldwin’s anger over the matter seethed in his mind, and he formulated a plan. He had always hesitated to use his ability because of the ramifications for the spacetime continuum. There was no telling what could happen after one of his jumps, but the bully problem had developed beyond any other choice. With the help of his little sister, he discovered that he could take other people into the past with him if he so chose, and it was this feature that allowed his plan to work. One day, in the middle of class, he stood up from his seat, walked over to his bully, and just began beating him ruthlessly. The teacher and the other students eventually managed to pull him off, but the damage was done. Baldwin smiled and threw his consciousness back in time to the moment just before standing up, taking only his tormentor with him. All of the sudden, the bully jumped out of his seat and started freaking out, claiming that Baldwin had just attacked him. Unfortunately for him, from the perspective of everyone else, that never happened. Only he and Baldwin had any memory of the event. The bully never went back to school, but stayed home to learn by private tutor while receiving counseling and psychological treatments.

Baldwin continued to hone his skills and study his limitations. He could only experience a span of time twice at the most. If he went back one minute, and then waited for two minutes, then he could only go back one minute at the most, because he had just hit his wall. He would never be able to go back to an earlier moment in his life and alter some older decision. He could, however, send his consciousness to witness an alternate reality that would have sprung from that altered decision, allowing him to see what might have been. When Baldwin’s former school bully, Gregory Schuster caught up with him many years later, he thanked him; not for the beating, but for opening his eyes to his inner demons. Older and wiser, the two of them became incredibly close friends. Together, they opened up a private practice and used the second part of his ability to help people understand their mistakes, and put their pasts behind them so that they could find peace and move on. Baldwin would go on to become a mentor for Verner Holt in his own goal of helping people.

Microstory 126: Connor Higgins

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Like Helen Larkin, Connor Higgins was one of the few people to be categorized as meta-anomalies, in that his only ability was to negate other people’s abilities. Sandro Watts’ darts have no effect on him, Hosanna Katz cannot manipulate his feelings, and Patience Cooney would not be able to place him inside one of her stones. Though his ability to prevent others from using their abilities had limited range, he would always remained unchanged by them, regardless of how far they were standing from him. For instance, if fire manipulator Diane Ghoti was far enough away to create a fireball and send it flying towards him across the distance, a protective force field would surround him, even though the fire itself was really just like any other fire. But there was also a downside to this. There was no way to turn his ability off, or control its targets. Connor has never teleported with Jaklyn Simonds. He has never passed through a wall with Serenity Theodo. While it’s true that, if Catriona Rice were to turn invisible within view of him, he would be able to see her when no one else could, it is equally true that he has never been physically capable of seeing one of her magnificent holographic images, even as others do. Though he passionately wanted to join Bellevue and be a part of the group, it was simply too impractical at first. They couldn’t risk having him near someone like Blake Williams when there was a quake that needed neutralizing, or Ellen Snider mid-flight. Later on in the organization’s history, as growth became more and more necessary, he traveled the world and recruited non-anomalies for field and office positions, but he missed out on a lot of the goings on. He wasn’t alone in his job, though. His best friend, Bree Nolan stuck with him even though he prevented her from using her ability. There was one major contribution that Connor was able to make. When his blood was mixed into paint, and then applied to a room, that room could become an effective prison for anomalies. This would prove to come in very handy once Bellevue started encountering some disagreeable and dangerous characters.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 12, 2036

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“How can we be sure that it worked? You could just be in the exact same position as you were before. You could have even been standing there for an entire year, and now you’re just pretending that it worked.” Leona, always the skeptic.

“I suppose you’re right,” Mirage replied.

“I am?”

“She is?”

“You’re right,” Mirage began to clarify, “in that you would never be able to know. You could jump for 300 days, and in those 300 years, I will never never aged. I could never prove to you that I was jumping through time.”

Leona and Mateo had no idea how to respond to that.

“I don’t know about all that,” said Parker, the same astronaut from a year ago. “But I do know that when you two disappeared last year, Mirage disappeared as well, and she reappeared at the exact same time.”

“Can her nanites turn invisible?” Mateo asked.

Leona and Parker laughed. Mirage looked at him like he was a three-legged puppy.

Parker? came a voice from the intercom.

“Parker here, go ahead.”

I have two visitors here who claim to be from Alyerr Base, but I can’t reach Alyerr on the comms network. They say they know you. One of them is named Gardner.

“That’s my mother, here to take us back home,” Mateo confirmed after Parker gave them an inquisitive look.

“Let them through, please,” Parker said into his comm before turning his attention back to the other three. “You’re lucky I manipulated the schedule to get myself back here at this time. I still wasn’t convinced that you guys were telling the truth about what you are, but I couldn’t risk some poor schmuck having to deal with you.”

“We appreciate the sentiment,” Leona said, half sincerely and half sarcastically.

Ironically, since the lawyers could never prove that their house exploded due to human error, Aura won an out-of-court settlement case. Reaver was forced to pay them millions of dollars. The look on his face was said to have been just absolutely hilarious, and reminded Mateo that he had yet to encounter the man in person. What would happen when that day inevitably came? In the future, Reaver’s message had suggested that they were somehow kept from killing each other directly, but that probably wouldn’t stop him from punching him in the face.

Aura spent a large amount of their money on a private spacecraft in order to retrieve them from the moon. Mateo tried to apologize for this, and for the exploding house, but she just said that she always wanted a spaceship, and that the blame for the house belonged solely to Reaver. Advances in space travel allowed the trip from the moon to take a matter of hours; the majority of their day that year. It could have been much worse. Some ships use less fuel and take days, which would have trapped in space during their jump. If Leona hadn’t fallen into his pattern, he actually might have tried doing that to see whether being in space could stop him from jumping at all, or if the powers that be would just cut their losses and let him die in the vacuum.

“I assume that you can’t simply leave Earth’s atmosphere without someone’s permission,” Leona said on the way back. “I mean, even if only rich people can do that at this point, is it not still heavily regulated?”

“It is. But it only took a few bribes to get out and back in,” Samsonite explained. “Though some collaboration has been taking place, space exploration is largely disjointed. If one country wants to send a vessel up, other countries can’t really dispute their attempt, unless it poses a clear threat to human life. Technically, we are subject to the laws of Japan as they were the easiest to contact regarding our intentions, and the most interested in keeping other governments out of their affairs.”

“I have another question,” Mateo said.

“Yes, honey?”

“How...does one...vomit space?”

“Are you asking for theory or practical application?”

Mateo just lurched against his seatbelts.

Samsonite quickly grabbed a pack from a drawer in the wall and opened it before handing it to Mateo. “Remember that there is no up and down. You’re going to have to propel the sick forward, and then use that liner to wipe your face before closing it and stuffing it into the ziplock bag as fast as you can.”

Mateo did as he was told. Leona didn’t seem to have any trouble, though she did always seem to have a stronger stomach than him.

Relatively speaking, when they were not far from Earth, an alarm began to sound. Then a voice came on the intercom, Private spacecraft Gelen, this is the Titan Exploration Project. Please come in.

Samsonite reached over and spoke into the microphone, “This is The Gelen. Go ahead, what’s the problem?”

We have been assigned to contact your vessel regarding an emergency. We are in the middle of experiencing a collisionally cascade. I repeat, a major Kessler catastrophe is occurring. They are currently using an ablation laser to clear the debris, but it will be another few days before you can return to Earth. Please enter an orbit of 3,000 kilometers and ration your supplies.

Samsonite shook his head urgently, “we have an injured passenger. We don’t have a few days before he dies. We have to reenter atmosphere now!”

I apologize for this. They are maneuvering the lasers as fast as possible. There is nothing that we can do. If you attempt reentry, you will all die.

“What happened?”

It was Reaver, sir. He sent an unauthorized unmanned space probe. It exploded and began the cascade. It’s...it’s awful out there. At last report, three people were dead, with several more still in immediate danger. You’re lucky to have still been out so far.

“What are we talking about?” Mateo asked.

“Space debris,” Leona explained. “When Reaver’s ship exploded, it sent shrapnel hurtling towards other objects. Those objects hit other objects, and it just keeps going. It would be like trying to walk across the highway. This is his latest attempt to kill you.”

“How did he know? We were so secretive,” Aura insisted.

“The question is, how are we going to get these two to safety. We cannot be in a moving vessel at midnight.”

“Can we go back to the moon for now?” Mateo asked.

“It would take too long,” Leona said.

“I can get you back down,” Mirage claimed. “Everybody put on your helmets. I’m going to be eating the ship.”

After some arguments, the four of them finally agreed that her plan was their best option, and their only chance for survival. As the ship drew closer towards the debris, they sealed themselves up. Mirage’s nanites chewed on the material of The Gelen and converted it to increase the number of her nanites. They were replicating at an astonishing rate. Mateo watched as the ship was being torn apart. It was only exposed to the vacuum for a few minutes before the nanites were numerous enough to create a second vessel around them.

The new nanite ship had a much smaller interior than the first so that the hull could be extremely thick and protective. Still, Mateo could tell that small pieces of the debris were damaging Mirage as they flew towards her at high speeds. She seemed to feel some level of physical pain. There weren’t any windows, but she kept them updated on how close they were to the surface. The kilometers she was listing off decreased alarmingly fast. Holes began to form between the nanites, but the structure continued to hold. Fire overwhelmed them as their descent was far too steep, but she was trying to get them down as fast as possible. Finally, they were in the air. Mirage transformed her shape so that she was more like a platform than a ship. They continued to fall, and she spoke to them through their comms, I’m doing my best, but I cannot decelerate fast enough. My nanites are faltering, and it’s almost midnight central time.

Mateo watched as the nanite platform grew smaller and smaller. Nanites were dropping away like flies. They weren’t strong enough to hold on to each other. She made one final push, trying to get them over the water. Mateo tore off his helmet and grabbed a handful of nanites, stuffing them down his own throat.

“I’m so sorry, Mateo,” Mirage cried.

“Stay with me, literally,” he yelled as loud as he could through the wind.

“I can either send my consciousness to the nanites you swallowed, or I can remain behind to save your family. I lied. The procedure didn’t work. I have been waiting for you for a year.”

An alarm rang out from Aura’s watch. “No!” Mateo yelled. Leona pulled him into a hug just before they jumped into the future. Mirage’s nanite platform was gone, along with his mother and Samsonite. They were still probably fifty meters up in the air...over land.

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