Will woke up on a ruined leather couch.
His right leg was a heavy, throbbing nightmare of torn meat and ground bone. He did not care about the medical reality. He felt the ugly, biting heat of it pressing upward through his thigh and into his hip, the specific wrongness of a compound fracture that had been set without anaesthetic by someone who was in a hurry.
He checked his internal space.
Khan was gone. Not suppressed. Absent. The void where the conqueror's presence had been running for months was just silence now. It was the wrong kind of silence. Not the quiet of an empty room. The quiet of a room where something large had been removed and the air had not settled back into the space yet. The absence had a shape. It pressed against the inside of his skull the same way that other thing had — the cold, walls-less, sequence-less wrongness from the dome, the texture of a place that shouldn't exist pressed directly into him. Something that wasn't there, making itself felt by not being there.
He spoke to the empty room, testing his dry throat.
"Coward."
Nothing. He hadn't expected anything. He reached for the bent rifle barrel leaning against the couch and used it to lever himself upright on pure, stubborn, territorial refusal to be caught lying down.
The penthouse was a paranoid hazard zone.
Harsh, flickering neon light from the street thirty floors below bled through shattered high-rise windows, casting stark ink-wash shadows across the concrete. Workbenches ran the length of the far wall, covered in disassembled drone optics leaking thick black grease onto the floorboards. Monofilament tripwire sat at ankle height near the entrance. He stepped over it on muscle memory before his conscious mind registered it. An open elevator shaft in the corner contained a heavy rappelling winch bolted directly into the concrete. Scraped brass casings were kicked against the baseboards. The whole space was a machine for surviving in, not for living in.
He limped along the workbench. His hand trailed across the surface over disassembled optics, stripped trigger assemblies, and a cracked tactical scope. Then his fingers found something that stopped him. A small, framed photograph sat pushed to the back of the bench behind a stack of cleaning rags. Two girls, maybe fourteen, one of them clearly Zeraya, stood at a tennis court that no longer existed. Both of them laughing at something off-frame.
He looked at it for a heartbeat. The massive disconnect between the smiling kid and the monofilament death-trap at the door settled heavily into his gut. He kept moving.
Heavy, irregular metallic clanking echoed from the back. Gravity-fed water running through old pipes. He dragged himself toward the noise.
The rusted door swung open. Steam bled into the freezing concrete room.
Zeraya stepped out wrapped tight in a frayed white towel. Jagged scars crossed her collarbone. It was the specific layered texture of someone who had been cut many times over many years and had not always had access to proper medical care. She had a heavy hand-cannon raised and tracking his chest before the steam cleared. She recognized him and dropped the barrel.
He held his ground, leaning on the rifle barrel, maintaining absolute eye contact.
"You're bleeding on my floor," Zeraya said.
"It really ties the room together."
She walked past him to a cooler against the wall, pulling it open. "You weigh two hundred pounds of dead weight and terrible decisions. The winch locked up at floor thirty. I dragged you up a sheer concrete shaft."
"I appreciate the hustle. We'll call it mandatory team-building."
She straightened, holding a canned water, and looked at him with the flat professional assessment of someone measuring a problem. "That thing in the dome wasn't a standard spawn. Rusted iron. Spatial folding. It looked at us like it knew exactly what we were."
Will read her on pure reflex — not the dome's wrongness, not the cold-before-a-strike instinct. This was older and quieter, a skill that had kept him fed and unstabbed for eleven months: the half-second pause before she finished a sentence, the way her eyes stayed on the canned water instead of him, the careful, almost bored flatness she'd put into her voice on purpose because the real question underneath it wasn't flat at all.
What came back wasn't suspicion. It wasn't the interrogation he was braced for. She wasn't asking what happened. She was asking him to tell her she hadn't imagined what she felt in that dome — that the thing she'd seen had been real, and that she wasn't crazy for being unable to stop thinking about it. The distinction was small and completely changed his approach.
"I blacked out after the ceiling collapsed," Will said, his voice easy. "How exactly did we survive that?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"Must have hit the core when the floor caved in." He held her gaze. "Dumb luck."
Zeraya stared at him for a long moment. He watched her decide not to push it. Not because she believed him. Because she was choosing to let it sit for now. He took the unspoken grace period without blinking.
"My regen runs hot," she said. "Faster than most. I came to first."
"Glad one of us did."
"Yeah." She set the canned water on the workbench. "But when I woke up, it wasn't doing what it normally does. It usually just — speeds things up. Knits things back. This felt different. Like a tourniquet made of heavy concrete. Something locked the geometry of my ribs in place so I wouldn't bleed out, and held it there." She looked at him steadily. "I don't have a word for what that was. But it wasn't me."
She was backed into a corner. He couldn't explain Khan or whatever had been pouring out of the bracers in the dome without opening everything. He had one breath before the interrogation hardened into something he couldn't deflect with a corporate one-liner.
He let his eyes drop. Briefly, appreciatively, without apology. He brought them back up to her face.
"I'm sorry, I got briefly distracted," Will said. "That towel is doing extraordinary structural work and I have a deep professional respect for load-bearing infrastructure."
Zeraya stared at him. "You're disgusting."
"You're deflecting," he said, which was technically her job in this exchange. "And you look incredible, which you already know, which is why you're annoyed I said it instead of pretending I didn't notice."
Something shifted in her expression. Not offense. It was something quicker and less comfortable than offense. She held his gaze for one beat longer than the exchange required, then looked away first.
She picked up the canned water and whipped it at his head. He caught it.
"Who set my leg?" he asked.
"I did. Wrench and premium tape." She was already moving toward the back of the apartment. "You owe me."
"Put it on my tab."
"You don't have one."
"Open a new account."
She paused at the doorway, not quite looking back. "Get off my floor before it gets light."
The hand-cannon racked. Sharp. Metallic. Final.
Will cracked the water. He took a long, desperate drink, keeping his eyes locked on the photograph of the destroyed tennis court until the freezing liquid numbed his throat.