Chapter 66: Free Fall

The world lost its floor.

The rusted cat-track twisted downward with a violent shriek of tearing iron, dropping Mei directly into the path of the roaring thermal draft.

Instantly, her mind executed a cold, practiced calculation—a residual instinct from her previous lives. Distance to lower deck: forty feet. Descent speed: lethal without deceleration. Obstacles: hot steam lines, exposed rebar, collapsing catwalk. In her first life, this was where the simulation ended. In her second, this was where her team would have cut the anchor line to save the mission objective.

She didn't freeze. She kicked hard off the falling section of iron, using the collapsing platform as a springboard to throw her body clear of the superheated steam plume.

"I've got you!" Joshua’s voice cracked through her comms.

A black high-tension cable shot through the blinding white vapor. Joshua, swinging from his own grapple on the right support girder, intercepted her flight path mid-air. He locked his arm around her torso, the sudden jerk of his wire arresting their descent with a brutal snap that knocked the wind from both of them.

They swung together in a wide arc across the open vault, clearing the blast radius of the bursting pipes just as a wall of fire vented through the upper chamber.

"Hold on!" Joshua shouted, unhooking his secondary belt latch as their momentum swung them toward the lower lift platform.

"Elias! Catch!" Shane bellowed from the doorway.

Elias stepped out onto the threshold, planting his massive boots against the frame and extending his tower shield horizontally like a catch-ledge.

Joshua released the grapple at the peak of the arc. He and Mei skimmed through the air, hitting the top of Elias’s kinetic shield with a heavy thud. Elias absorbed the crushing impact without flinching, his boots skidding back two inches before he locked his knees and hauled them both over the lip onto the solid deck of the surface lift.

Shane hit the emergency slam-pad instantly.

The heavy blast doors groaned, sliding shut with a final, sealing thud just as the primary thermal wave slammed against the outer plating. The lift shuddered, its heavy cables straining before the elevator began its rapid, smooth ascent toward the surface.

Inside the lift, the air was cool, filtered, and quiet.

Joshua collapsed against the metal wall, untying his grapple rig with a long, ragged exhale. "That... was closer than I'd prefer, Captain."

Mei pushed herself up to a knee, checking her dagger out of sheer habit before sheathing it. She looked up, expecting the cold debrief or the tactical critique that always followed a near-disaster in her past lives.

Instead, Shane stepped forward and offered her a broad, gloved hand.

"Nice leap," Shane said, his grin cutting through the soot on his face. "And nice catch, Vice Captain."

Joshua gave a tired chuckle from the floor. "She made the jump. I just provided the taxi."

Mei took Shane’s hand, letting him pull her up to her feet. Elias clapped a heavy, armored hand onto her shoulder—a gesture so solid and grounded it made the memory of her past failures feel thin, like smoke blowing away in the wind.

The lift’s mechanical hum pitched higher as it broke through the final subterranean gate. Above them, through the reinforced glass ceiling of the elevator cage, the first pale rays of genuine daylight began to filter down, washing over the four of them.

Mei looked at the sunlight, then back at her team. For three lives, she had been searching for a way to survive the system. She hadn't realized that all she needed was a crew worth fighting for.