[Mission in 00:55:59]

Less than an hour.

I sat on my bed and looked at the number and thought about the plain. The place I had spent twenty years learning to survive. The place I had crossed bleeding and half dead. The place the system had pulled me through on two percent charge with infected teeth in my neck.

And now I was going back. With a government escort and a team of students who thought adventure was a personality.

Vapour sat on his bed across the room, quiet. No endless chatter, no jokes. Just the soft rustle of him pretending to organize his things. The silence felt heavier than his usual noise—like respect, or maybe the first time he’d realized some things couldn’t be talked away.

I looked around the room. I had nothing to pack. I had arrived inside these walls with one torn set of clothes and nothing else. Everything I had accumulated since the life layer lived in other people.

Sherry. Daphne. Azure. May. Annabelle. Mary Stam. Mable. And now Vapour, who had talked at me for days and somehow become someone I would miss.

They had changed something in me that the plain had not been able to reach. The plain had taught me to survive. These people had taught me to live, which turned out to be a larger and more complicated subject.

I had entered the walls looking for refuge. I had found something I didn’t have a word for yet.

And now the walls are sending me back, I thought. Life sends you back to the places you ran from. That’s apparently how it works.

"Abram."

Azure’s voice through the door.

Vapour stood without a word, crossed the room, and opened the door for her. He gave me one last look—quiet, serious—then stepped into the corridor and pulled the door gently shut behind him, granting us the space without needing to announce it.

Azure was in a tall dress, which was different from her usual. She came to where I was sitting, sat beside me, rested her head on my shoulder. Her arms wrapped around my torso, holding on as if she could anchor me here. I felt the faint warmth of her body.

We stayed like that. Breathing. The countdown ticking between us.

"You remember what you said in the library?" she whispered, breaking the silence. "After Toddy."

"I said a lot of things. Remind me."

She tightened her grip. "You asked me when was the last time someone fought for me."

"Yeah. I remember."

"Do you remember what I said?"

"That you weren’t used to it."

"And you told me to get used to it." A pause. The kind that carries weight. "I’m used to it now, Abram. I’m used to you. And I don’t want this to end."

"It’s not ending, Zoe," I said, giving her the new name.

She was quiet for a long moment, face pressed against my shoulder.

"The last time someone fought for me," she said, "they died. Vince killed them. All of them." Her voice stayed level, the specific level of someone who has processed grief so many times it has become structural. "I was afraid to open my heart again. To make space for someone. But you’ve taken all of it." She pulled me closer. "Promise me you’re coming back."

I sat with it properly. Not the reflex answer. The real one.

"I’m not dying outside those walls, Zoe," I said.

She held on tighter, as if trying to memorize the shape of me.

[Mission in 00:34:57]

"I need to head to the gate," I said.

We stood. She hugged me for a full minute, her arms around my back, the red stripes faintly visible even through the fabric of her dress. Then we went out.

Vapour was in the corridor. He came forward and put his hand out. I took it.

"Best of luck, bro," he said.

"Yeah. Thank you."

He held my hand a beat longer than the handshake required.

"You’re the first roommate I’ve had in years." His voice had something in it he was fighting. He lost the fight. Tears, actually running, which was either the most embarrassing or the most honest thing I had seen at School Central. "Don’t die out there, bro."

I let go of his hand and tapped his shoulder and walked with Azure toward the campus.

"I won’t go to the gate with you," she said, when we reached the point where the paths split. "I’m not good at goodbyes."

I held her hand for a moment without saying anything. Then I let go and she went her way and I went mine.

****

The campus was packed. Students gathered in dense clusters along the main avenue, drawn by the rumor of something important. They watched like spectators at the edge of a coliseum—excited, nervous, safe.

At the administration block entrance, Daphne was standing. We found each other across the distance. Her eyes said what she couldn’t say in front of three hundred students. I nodded once and kept walking. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Through the crowd. Toward the main gate. The armored vehicles visible at the end of the path, most of the team already assembled around them.

"Abram."

I turned. Annabelle hit me at a run, arms around my neck, the impact of someone who had not calculated the approach and didn’t care. She was panting. She had run from somewhere. I held her.

Behind her, further back, Mable stood at the edge of the gathered students. Not coming closer. Not able to say goodbye in public the way Annabelle said things, openly and without apology. But present. Watching. Her eyes doing what her feet couldn’t.

Annabelle pulled back just enough to look at me, hands still gripping my shoulders.

"Promise me you’re coming back."

I had been asked this three times now. I had learned the answer. Not a promise I couldn’t guarantee. Not false certainty. Just the truth of what I intended.

"I’m not dying outside those walls," I said. "Not today."

She held my face for one second. Then she stepped back. Behind me the team was waiting. The vehicles were running. The gate was open.

Let’s go, I thought, and walked toward the School Central main gate.