Whatever it was, it was expanding. Slowly, barely perceptible, but it was. Jacob was already running calculations in his head.
Riley couldn't move. Her breath caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat as the pulsing darkness grew - slow, deliberate, like it knew it had all the time in the world. It didn't make a sound, but every instinct inside her body screamed like it did.
Behind the glass of the viewing gallery, nobody spoke. The silence Vassos left behind was louder than any scream could have hoped to be.
"Back away." Dr. Marlene Hutton finally said, her voice tight. "All of you. Get back to the surface. Let us handle this."
"You? This is hardly a rocks and minerals problem!" Marigold protested. Allen didn't move. He was still staring at the catwalk, now stained with his best friend's blood.
"Dad" Riley said sharply. "Move."
He blinked, turned and nodded. They backed out into the hallway. No alarms blared. No protocol exited for this. The earth itself had gone quiet, like the entire planet was holding its breath.
"It's pulling space inwards. It's not actually growing" Jacob said, his voice low. "It's pulling in geometry. Logic. Time."
"What the hell does that even mean?" Sadie whispered.
"It means," Jacob said, staring back at the chamber. "We have minutes."
Riley glanced around. Abby was holding her arm, eyes locked on the sphere through the glass. Autumn was frozen, halfway between forward and stepping back.
When she moved, she moved forward.
"I can contain it." Her voice was quiet, but certain. Everyone turned. "I can feel it. It pulls, yes, but it's... gravity. I know this. I can counter this, I've felt it before."
"No." Sadie said from behind her. "Autumn, no. You don't have to do anything."
The corridor they were standing in stretched, further and further until going back up was no longer an option. The sphere was messing with more than just the air. It was messing with spacetime itself.
"Yes, I do."
Jacob stepped closer. "She might be right. Her fields, they can counteract the effects of gravity. If she can create a counterforce, a... null space, an outward pressure, separated by an entropic void-"
"Then I can break it. From the inside."
"Exactly."
Sadie snapped. "That's insane! She could be pulled in... unmade like Vassos! This bringing groceries up to the camp, Autumn, this is... secrets of the damn cosmos we're dealing with!"
"What's your plan, then?" Autumn asked. She was strangely calm. "If we wait and do nothing, it will grow. It will consume the mountain, collapse this tunnel, and we all die anyway."
Riley's heart was racing. "If you do it, I'm going with you."
"No." Autumn said immediately. "This is my job, and mine alone. You need to be ready to teleport everyone out if it goes wrong."
Riley opened her mouth to argue, but she knew Autumn was right. "Just... please. Be careful."
Jacob handed Autumn a crumpled piece of paper. A pattern he'd been doodling. "This is what I know. The wave pattern it's following. You have to follow the inverse with your field."
Autumn took the piece of paper, looked at it, nodded. "Got it."
She stepped into the airlock without hesitation. The vault door groaned as it unsealed, the metal straining. The catwalk trembled under her boots as she moved forward, her eyes locked on the anomaly. It pulsed slowly. Patiently. It knew she was coming.
Jacob stood beside Riley, Marlene's clipboard in his hands, frantically writing down numbers. "Her field is stable. Matching the curvature nicely. She's... good. She's doing it.
On the midpoint of the catwalk, Autumn started hovering. Not high, just a few feet off the grated metal floor. She stretched out her arms, and it began.
From her fingertips, the air shimmered. Waves of opposing force rippled out like heat distortion. Gravity pushed back against gravity. The chamber walls groaned as the fields collided in the air between her and the black anomaly. It shuddered.
"She's forming a null space" Jacob explained, if only to keep himself occupied. "A pocket of zero curvature. Neutral pressure. Keeping it locked in a... a field where space doesn't bend."
For a second, it worked. The anomaly slowed its pull. The surface stopped pulsing.
Riley held her breath. The sphere started to fight back.
Its pulsing deepened. Darkened. The space around it writhed, turning to static, rippling in pointy, angry shapes all pointed at Autumn. Jacob and Abby recognised them instantly.
"It's adapting. Drawing power from her field." He lowered the pencil. "It's feeding off her."
"Autumn! Abort!" Sadie screamed, but Autumn ignored her. She was straining now. Her whole body was shaking with the effort of pushing back. Blood trickled from her nose, her arms trembled, and she hovered a few feet higher, her body caught in a bubble of shimmering distortion.
"I can do it!" She shouted back. "Just- a little-"
The anomaly surged. Lines of impossible angles flickered around it, carving glowing glyphs in the air like circuitry. Autumn's field buckled. A scream of pain pierced the chamber.
And Riley couldn't take it anymore. "No- NO!" She screamed, breaking into a sprint before Sadie could grab hold of her. "I'm not losing you!"
She launched herself into the airlock, ignoring Sadie's yell, ignoring her father's plea, Jacob's warnings. Her feet barely hit the catwalk. Space shimmered, the air bent, the world stretched and compressed around her until she reappeared right in front of Autumn No. Her eyes went wide. "Riley?!"
"I love you," Riley said, her voice quivering, but firm.
Then, she grabbed Autumn by the shoulders, closed her eyes, pictured the viewing gallery. The stone floor. The drop ceilings. The desks, the windows to the chamber, the scientific equipment, the smell of mildew - and teleported.
Autumn vanished in a burst of light that was quickly absorbed by the sphere. When she reappeared a split second later on the other side of the vault door, she collapsed, sobbing. "Riley!"
Inside the chamber, the sphere imploded. A ripple of unbeing tore through the room. The glass on the viewing gallery shattered - and the anomaly folded in on itself. It took everything with it. The catwalk. The thousand pound heavy vault door. The air.
And Riley.
The mountain groaned, the ceiling cracked, and the entire Roosevelt chamber collapsed in a roar of falling rock and darkness.
The dust hadn't even settled. Autumn was still screaming. She'd torn herself from Abby's arms, from Sadie's grasp, hands clawing at the split tile, she had reach through it somehow, pull Riley back from the rubble, from the dark, from the space between, wherever she had gone. Her power flickered uncontrollably, light gravity waves rippled throughout the room, making the air buzz.
"She was right there" Autumn choked, breathless. "I had it. I had it. I was doing it, why did she- why-" She broke, a full body sob cutting her off.
Jacob dropped to one knee beside her, but didn't speak. Logically, there was nothing to say. His hands trembled.
Dr. Allen Truman didn't move.
He stood by the jagged hole where the viewing windows had been, staring into the collapsed chamber. His glasses were gone. His jacket and what remained of his hair were powdered with concrete dust. There was blood on his hands, but he didn't notice.
"She teleported. She made it out. She must've."
Nobody answered.
"She could've made it. It's entirely possible." His knees buckled, and tears streamed down his face. "She's okay, she must be!" He slid down the wall and sat in the wreckage like a broken man, staring at nothing. "Not her. Not my girl."
No one interrupted. Not Marlene, not Sadie.
The hours blurred. Marlene tried to issue orders. The quakes had stopped, all the readings returned to normal. She'd have to undo the evacuation, start scans of the rock, take samples from the collapsed chamber. Nobody listened to her.
Outside, the rain had finally stopped. Abby took Autumn to the porch of the cabin, where they sat. Autumn didn't speak. Her hands kept shaking like they remembered the moment Riley vanished from them. Like they were reaching for her.
"She said she loved me." Autumn finally whispered.
Abby looked at her.
"She said she loved me and then she left. She saved me, and she-" Her throat closed around the rest. She fell silent again, shaking her head, teeth clenched like she could bite through the pain.
Sadie stood in the door of the common house. Her eyes were read. She didn't speak. Marigold offered her a cigarette. She took it and lit it with her thumb.
Later, someone would write down what would happen. Somebody would recover the recordings from the viewing gallery, the readings, the scans. Explain the phenomenon. Build a model. Draft a report.
But not today.
Allen Truman stayed outside, sitting in the mud next to the cabin, waiting for the mountain to give him back his daughter. His hands were folded in his lap. His lips moved, barely. Nobody knew if he was praying.
It was two days later when they lit the candles.
The clouds parted just enough to let moonlight spill down through the treetops, painting the clearing in soft silver. Jacob had swept the debris off the rope ladders, patched the bridges, fixed what he could.
It didn't feel fixed, though.
Inside the common house, the table had been cleared. A folded hoodie sat in its centre. On top of it, a red notebook, with the old USGS logo, devil horns drawn on.
They didn't have the words. Nobody ever does. So they lit candles. Dozens, maybe a hundred, the room flickering with warm light, like Riley might burst in laughing at the sight, like she'd call it stupid. She of course didn't.
The wind moved through the trees outside. The clearing was silent.
Riley Truman was gone.