The storm dropped on the seventh day.

  Not gently. Not gradually.

  It just stopped screaming.

  I was half-asleep against a container wall when the change woke me—not because it got louder, but because it got quieter. The constant roar that had been vibrating through the mountain for six days dropped to something that almost sounded like normal wind.

  I jerked upright, heart hammering.

  Grabbed the tablet. Checked the weather station.

  Wind: 58 mph

  Pressure: 912 millibars

  Status: Degraded to tropical storm equivalent

  For three seconds I just stared at the numbers, waiting for them to spike back up. Waiting for the world to remember it hated me.

  They held.

  I didn’t celebrate.

  I checked the power.

  12%

  Twelve percent.

  RIKU was still asleep. Still in deep hibernation, her processing frozen to buy me time I was about to spend.

  My hands were shaking as I pulled up the hypernode.

  The power draw hit immediately—a brutal chunk carved out of reserves I couldn’t afford. But I needed this. If there was help coming, if there was any chance—

  The connection flickered. Stuttered. The signal trying to punch through atmosphere that was still half-wrecked.

  Then Aerin’s face appeared.

  She looked terrible.

  Her scales were dull, edges rough like she hadn’t been sleeping. Her eyes were tight, the kind of tired that comes from carrying weight you can’t put down.

  “Taylor,” she said immediately, voice sharp with urgency. “Your hypernode signal has been intermittent for seventy-two hours. Status report.”

  “Storm,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected—six days of not talking much will do that. “Category six. Maybe higher. Sustained winds over four hundred miles per hour. It’s been sitting on top of me for a week.”

  Her expression shifted. Not surprise—recognition.

  Like she’d suspected but hoped she was wrong.

  “We detected atmospheric anomalies,” she said carefully. “Pressure gradients that didn’t match our models. But without stable telemetry, without your hypernode active—”

  “I had to shut it down,” I said, cutting through the procedure. “Power constraints. I’m at twelve percent total reserves. RIKU’s in deep sleep. If I don’t find crystals in the next few hours, she’s gone. Actually gone.”

  Aerin’s posture changed. Shoulders tight. Jaw set.

  The professional mask slipping just enough to show the person underneath.

  “Taylor—”

  “I need you to do something,” I said. “Right now.”

  She waited.

  I took a breath that felt like swallowing glass.

  “Activate the broadcast.”

  Her eyes widened slightly—the first crack in her control.

  “Taylor, the investigation isn’t complete. Security hasn’t cleared the authorization. There are protocols—”

  “I don’t care about protocols,” I said. My voice stayed level but something in it made her stop talking. “If I’m about to lose RIKU on a world the Empire sent me to by mistake, then people should see it. Let them witness what SSS actually costs when the system breaks.”

  She stared at me.

  Not with anger. Not with shock.

  With something colder.

  Calculation.

  The look of someone weighing careers against lives and hating the math.

  “You are asking me,” she said quietly, “to expose imperial failure in real time. To billions of viewers. While you are still in crisis.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Because if you don’t, and I don’t make it back, the only story anyone will ever hear is the one you write afterward.”

  The words landed like stones in still water.

  Aerin’s throat moved. A swallow she couldn’t quite hide.

  Then she blinked—slow, deliberate, the way Togekka do when they’ve made a choice that can’t be unmade.

  “One moment,” she said.

  The screen flickered.

  Went dark for three seconds that felt like thirty.

  When it came back, there was someone else beside her.

  Older. Composed. Wearing insignia patterns I didn’t fully recognize but understood instinctively meant power at a level I’d never touched.

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  “Magistrate Sael,” the figure said, voice like silk over steel. “Voice of the Office of the Empress.”

  My stomach dropped.

  Sael’s gaze was steady. Clinical. The kind of look that stripped away pretense and saw exactly what you were.

  “You want the broadcast activated,” Sael said.

  Not a question. A statement of fact delivered with the weight of someone who already knew the answer and was deciding whether to care.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m about to find out if the Empire’s mistake kills me,” I said. “And if it does, people should know how it happened. Not the edited version. Not the report. The truth.”

  Sael didn’t blink.

  Didn’t move.

  Just watched me like I was a data point in a calculation that involved numbers I couldn’t see.

  Then Sael turned slightly toward Aerin.

  “Your assessment.”

  Aerin’s voice came through tight, controlled, but with an edge underneath that said she’d been holding this in for days.

  “Pioneer Taylor Smith has been on an undocumented world for seventeen days,” she said. “Deployed via corrupted glyph chain. Alone. Under-supplied due to corridor blackout. Now facing catastrophic power failure during an extinction-grade atmospheric event.”

  She paused.

  “If he loses his bonded Grid Walker because we delayed broadcast authorization for political comfort, the failure is ours. And it will be public regardless of what we decide here.”

  The silence that followed felt like pressure.

  Then Sael nodded once.

  “Activate it.”

  Aerin exhaled like she’d been holding her breath underwater.

  “Understood.”

  Her hand moved off-screen. A gesture. A command I couldn’t see.

  And then a new icon appeared in my HUD, glowing softly in the corner of my vision.

  BROADCAST STATUS: ACTIVE

  DRONE: ONLINE

  VIEWERS: CONNECTING…

  I felt the weight of it immediately.

  Not physical. Not visible.

  But real.

  Somewhere out there, people were watching. Billions of them, maybe. All tuned in to see what happened next.

  To see if I lived or died.

  “Taylor,” Aerin said, and her voice had changed—sharper now, focused, the way it got when she was working a problem. “There is a portal signature five miles west of your current position. It registered twenty-three minutes ago.”

  My heart kicked hard enough to hurt.

  “Supplies?”

  “Emergency power replenishment package,” she confirmed. “Crystals. Backup cells. Portable reactors. It was authorized when we detected your hypernode going intermittent. We couldn’t reach you to confirm delivery.”

  I looked at the tablet display.

  11%

  Eleven now. The hypernode call was bleeding power I didn’t have.

  “RIKU’s at eleven percent,” I said. “How long does deep sleep buy me?”

  “Two hours of draw time,” Aerin said. “Maybe three if conditions are optimal.”

  I grabbed my jacket off the hook, movements automatic now.

  “Then I’m going. Now.”

  “Taylor—”

  “I’m not losing her,” I said. The words came out flat. Final. “Not after everything.”

  Sael spoke for the second time, voice calm as stone.

  “The Empire is watching,” Sael said. “Do not die poorly.”

  I almost laughed.

  Almost.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  Then I cut the connection.

  The hypernode went dark.

  The power percentage dropped to ten.

  And somewhere above the mountain, invisible in the gray post-storm light, a surveillance drone I’d never seen activated its optics and locked onto my position.

  I didn’t look up at it.

  Didn’t wave.

  Didn’t perform.

  I just opened the hangar door wide enough to slip the ATV through, fired the engine, and drove out into a world that had tried to erase me and failed.

  The wind hit me like a fist—sixty miles per hour of salt and spite.

  But I’d survived worse.

  And five miles west, there was power.

  Enough to bring her back.

  That was all that mattered.