A heavy silence settled over the room after my confession. My heart felt a little lighter, but Gina and Faye sat there, stunned—trying to process everything I’d just unloaded.

  “Wow,” Gina finally said, almost under her breath. “That’s… quite unnatural. Now I know.”

  Faye stood without a word, walked to the chiller, and pulled out the last three bottles of beer. She returned to the table and set them down.

  “Here you go,” she said quietly. “The last ones for the road.”

  We popped the caps. Gina glanced at Faye.

  “Well… how about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?” Faye replied.“

  You know. What happened back then. I mean—you just left.”

  Faye let out a long sigh. “Okay then.”

  She leaned back in her chair, eyes distant.

  “At that point, I really didn’t want to go. But Dad did something stupid. He barged into Marcus’s lab, demanding his ‘fair share.’”

  “Fair share?” Gina echoed, one brow raised.

  “Yeah. He kept insisting he was the one who ‘gave’ Marcus the idea for unobtainium. Said he deserved a cut.”

  ''Unobtainium?'' Gina confusedly asked

  ''My dad's an atheist. So, he called it unobtainium instead of Christainium.'' Faye replied.

  I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.

  “I was there,” I said. “Joe—your dad—stormed in with a gun pointed at Marcus. Marcus just sat there in his wheelchair, completely calm. He asked his uncle what he wanted. I drew my own weapon and aimed it at Joe. Marcus told me to lower it. I was shocked, but I did. Then Marcus… agreed. He handed over a ‘seedling’—an experimental one. Joe grabbed it and ran.”

  Faye nodded slowly, confirming every word.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “My dad was so naive. He had no idea what he’d taken or what to do with it. He pulled me out of the academy, and we fled back to somewhere in Sector 4.”

  Gina leaned forward, voice gentle but firm. “So how did the Union manage to culture the crystals?”

  Faye took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly.

  “I asked Marcus for help. I asked him how to do it.”

  “What?!” Gina and I said at the same time.

  “I wanted to help my dad build his own little kingdom,” Faye continued, voice cracking slightly. “I thought it would be harmless—just a bit of childish happiness for him. My dad’s always been… weird. But I never imagined it would spiral like this. He went mad with it. I never thought people would actually believe in him, follow him.”

  She paused, staring at her bottle.

  “Marcus sent me a data packet with instructions. I passed it to the scientists and engineers. They made it work. Later I found out he’d given us the lowest-grade seedling—a lab-cultured seed, not one from the Origin. Not the black Christanium. The white stuff is dense, but it can’t do what the black Christanium can. It can only transmute simple metals—not specialized alloys or metamaterials. But that didn’t stop Dad from chasing his mad dreams.”

  Gina asked the question we’d all been avoiding, her tone careful.

  “And Facility 64?”

  Faye went still for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter.

  “Facility 64… is the child of my father’s madness. When the toxicity from the white unobtainium spread through the colony sites, people fell ill. Some died. Others… adapted. Horribly. The radiation and the biological effects of Hilatus Diabolis altered their DNA. Mutations.”

  She swallowed hard.

  “I called Marcus again. I begged him for a reversal process. But he got interested instead. Obsessed. He has this fixation on what he calls ‘ancient aliens’—divine beings he believes helped a supreme being or God build Earth. He financed the Union to build Facility 64. He wanted the mutants—what he calls ‘chimeras’—monitored and studied there. My father thought the money came from some harmless foundation. He followed the strict instructions and built it. The only thing Marcus did was stabilized them. Make them lived long until a cure or whatever comes.''

  Faye’s gaze flicked toward me for a second.

  “Then the Emperor found out. He sent a team to demolish it.” She gave me the briefest glance. She knew I was there. “They failed, they somehow backed up. When the mission was cancelled, Uncle Arthur decided to just bomb the entire facility—and the whole Union sector.”

  Her voice broke.

  “I went to the Imperial Palace. I begged the Emperor, my uncle not to do it. I cared too much for my father’s people… my people… the chimeras. I had to plead. ‘Five years,’ Uncle said. ‘Five years to fix this.’ I promised. But time’s almost up now, and Uncle Arthur is starting to act just like my dad. They both want more power.”

  Faye bowed her head. Tears slipped down her cheeks.

  ''All I really wanted is to make daddy happy. But it only resulted to more chaos because me.''

  Gina moved quickly to her side, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her into a gentle hug. Faye’s quiet sobs filled the room.

  I stayed in my seat, watching. She really did care—deeply—about those people.

  And right then, I made a silent promise to myself.

  I would help make this right.