Amaya

The charcoal briquettes hissed like a nest of angry snakes when Jenkins dumped the lighter fluid. Amaya watched, one eyebrow arched, as the flames licked at the underside of the grate—higher, higher—until Reyes yanked Jenkins back by his collar just as his eyebrows threatened to singe off.

"Christ, rook," Reyes muttered, swatting at Jenkins' sleeve where an ember had landed. "You tryin' to turn our day off into a fucking burn unit visit?"

Jenkins blinked owlishly behind his sunglasses, his face still pale beneath yesterday's stubble. "I swear the instructions said—"

"Instructions?" Garity wheezed from his sprawl on the picnic bench, clutching his stomach. He'd claimed the shady spot beneath the oak tree like a conquering king, his ball cap pulled low over his bloodshot eyes. "You needed instructions for fire?"

Amaya snorted and tossed the bag of frozen burgers onto the table with a thud that made Thompson wince. The kid was slumped over his folded arms, his forehead pressed against the weathered wood like it was the only thing keeping his skull from splitting open. "Tell me again why we invited the walking migraine," she said, nudging Thompson's boot with her toe.

Garity lifted his cap just enough to peer at Thompson's miserable form. "Because he owes me twenty bucks from last night's darts game." He dropped the cap back over his eyes with a wince. "Also, his mom makes those jalapeño poppers."

As if summoned, Thompson groaned and blindly shoved a Tupperware container toward the center of the table. The lid was slightly askew, revealing golden-brown pastry puffs oozing melted cheese. Reyes pounced on it with the reflexes of a starving wolf, popping one whole into his mouth before hissing and fanning his tongue. "Jesus fuck, those are nuclear—"

"Language," Amaya muttered, nodding toward the daughter of a team mate at the next table over. A little girl in a sunflower dress was staring at Reyes with wide eyes, her ice cream cone dripping unnoticed onto her sandals. Most of the team and their families had made it out to the last minute BBQ that Amaya decided they were having. A few were too hungover to get out of bed this morning.

Reyes swallowed with an audible gulp, tears welling in his eyes, but he lowered his voice. "Respectfully, sarge, fuck your—" Another popper vanished into his mouth. "—delicious spicy bullshit."

The scent of charring meat finally overpowered the lighter fluid stench as Jenkins managed to coax the coals into something resembling a controlled burn. Amaya watched him poke at the grill with the focus of a bomb tech defusing an IED, his tongue poking out between his teeth. She'd seen him clear rooms with less concentration.

Garity peeled himself off the bench with a groan that sounded like it came from his soul. He snatched the spatula from Jenkins' limp grip. "Move over, pyro. Before you turn our lunch into a fucking war crime." The burgers hit the grill with a satisfying sizzle, the smell of searing beef cutting through the lingering chemical haze.

“Give me that you amateur,” Amaya scoffed as she shoved Garity back onto the bench. He didn’t protest, just smiled and laid back down.

Thompson finally lifted his head, squinting at the food like it had personally offended him. "I think I'm dying," he announced to no one in particular.

Amaya flipped a patty, sending a gout of flames licking at the edges. "That's the poison leaving your body, kid." She nodded toward the cooler. "Grab a beer. Hair of the dog."

Thompson made a noise like a wounded seal. Garity tossed him a sports drink instead. "Hydrate or die-drate, pretty boy."

The park hummed around them—kids shrieking on the playground, joggers pounding the asphalt trail, the distant thump of someone's car stereo. Normalcy. Amaya let her shoulders relax fractionally, the tension bleeding out with each turn of the spatula. This was the part they never showed in recruitment brochures: the burnt edges of downtime, the glue that held them together between calls.

Jenkins peered into the cooler. "Who brought the—" He lifted a jumbo pack of hotdogs still in their neon pink packaging. "Ah. Classic Reyes."

Reyes flipped him off with one hand while using the other to wave smoke from his eyes. "You're welcome, princess. Real men eat mystery meat."

The whisper slid into Amaya's ear like smoke—soft, foreign syllables curling around the edges of her hearing. She jerked her head to the side, expecting to find Garity leaning in with another dumb joke, but he was three feet away, arguing with Reyes over proper burger-flipping technique.

She shook her head and tried to ignore it—focusing instead on pressing her thumb into the burger patty watching the juices sizzle against the grill. The scent of charred fat and Reyes' nuclear poppers should drown out everything else, but the whisper curled around her eardrum again, clearer now.

Amaya's spatula clattered against the grate. Jenkins jumped at the noise. "Sarge? You good?"

"Fine," she lied, shaking her head again like she could dislodge the words physically. “I just need a beer. Garity, take over.” Must be last night's whiskey playing tricks. She grabbed a beer from the cooler—the cap hissed as she twisted it off—and drank half in one go. The glass is cold against her palm, condensation dripping onto her wrist.

Garity's was watching her now, his spatula hovering mid-flip. His eyebrows did that thing where one arches higher than the other—his you're-bullshitting-me tell since tenth grade. She flicked a sesame seed at him. "Keep burning those burgers and I'm revoking your grill privileges."

The third whisper came as she was handing Thompson a paper plate—not in her ear this time but vibrating up through the picnic table's weathered wood into her fingertips. The plate slips from her fingers, scattering pickles across the grass.

Amaya pressed her palms against her ears hard enough to make her own pulse roar. The whisper slithered between her fingers anyway—not English, not any language she recognized, but the sound dug into her skull like a parasite.

"What the fuck—" she hissed through clenched teeth, jerking her head toward the picnic table. The others were frozen mid-motion, Thompson with a pickle-speared fork halfway to his mouth, Garity's spatula dripping grease onto his sneakers. Their faces blurred at the edges as her vision tunneled.

"Seriously?" Amaya's voice sounded too loud in her own head. "You guys don't hear that?" Amaya stumbled back, her heel crushing a forgotten jalapeño popper into the dirt.

Reyes blinked. "Hear what, sarge?"

The whisper came again—not from the table now, but from the inside her head.

Erik

The altar drank the torchlight like a parched throat swallowing water, its slick surface reflecting nothing back. Erik's boot skidded in something thick—not mud, not in this drought. The realization hit as his torchlight swept the chamber: fourteen bodies slumped against the far wall, throats slit in perfect unison, their blood channeled into grooves that radiated from the altar on one side of the room like spokes on a cursed wheel. Three more lay atop the altar itself, their chests carved open in jagged, ritualistic patterns.

They were too late.

The blood ran to the stone slab in the middle of the room where it swirled beneath. It glistened black under torchlight. The edges of the rock platform carved with symbols that pulsed like infected wounds and its surface was coated in dark blood as well. Erik's boots skidded in the slick remains pooling around the altar—too much blood for fourteen bodies. Far too much. The air smelled of copper and burnt hair, thick enough to coat his tongue.

"Gods' breath," Victor whispered behind him, the words barely louder than the dripping from the ceiling.

Erik didn't waste breath cursing. His sword was already drawn, the edge catching the torchlight as he pivoted toward the chanting. At the chamber's heart, around the stone slab, knelt thirteen robed figures, arms raised toward something suspended in the air above the slab—a writhing darkness that pulsed in time with their guttural invocations like a living thing, tendrils of shadow lashing outward with each guttural syllable from the robed figures. Erik's sword tip dipped slightly as he took an involuntary step back—not from fear, but from the sheer wrongness radiating from that coalescing void.

"What in the seven hells—" Geoffrey began, his voice uncharacteristically thin.

"Stop them!" Erik roared, his grip tightening on his sword. The air tasted of lightning and spoiled meat. The chanting pressed against his eardrums like deep water.

"Enough!" Victor barked, striding forward with his blade raised. "By order of the Lord Commander, cease this—"

Geoffrey caught his arm, fingers digging into the steel plating. "Look."

Above the slab, the air rippled like heat off a forge. Not smoke—something thicker, darker, twisting in on itself with a sound like bones cracking underwater. One of the priests—a gaunt man with a face covered in ink-black tattoos—threw his head back and screamed a word that made Erik's teeth ache.

"Hold!" Erik bellowed, but his men were already charging forward, swords drawn.

The ripple in the air wasn't a tear—it was an unraveling. Fabric of reality peeling back like rotten parchment, revealing a darkness that wasn't absence but anti-presence, a maw that gnawed at the edges of Erik's vision until his eyes watered.

Then the rift split open.

It exploded like a wound in the sky throwing his men backwards. Then the rift began throbbing with a rhythm that matched the pounding in Erik's temples.

The rift didn't just widen—it breathed.

Amaya

Garity's hand clamped around Amaya's forearm just as her knees buckled. The world tilted—picnic tables blurring into streaks of color, Thompson's alarmed shout muffled as if underwater. She gripped Garity's arm hard enough to leave bruises, her nails digging into the familiar scars from their first tour together. "Something's—wrong," she gasped, but her tongue felt thick, alien.

The whisper in Amaya's skull sharpened into a blade—a single syllable, ancient and jagged, that carved its way out through her clenched teeth. Her beer bottle shattered against the pavement. Around her, the park's cheerful chaos froze mid-motion—Thompson's pickle suspended in air, Reyes' shout caught in his throat, even the playground swings hanging motionless as if gravity had forgotten its purpose. Only Garity remained solid, his grip on her wrist the one tether to reality as the world bent around her.

The picnic table cracked like a gunshot as the rift tore open behind Amaya—not a hole, but a rupture, edges fraying like rotting fabric. Air rushed into it with a sound like a subway train braking too fast, whipping napkins and paper plates into its maw. Garity's grip on her wrist became a lifeline as her body was pulled toward the distortion.

"Amaya—!" Garity's shout warped, syllables stretching like taffy as the rip pulsed. His sunglasses flew off, vanishing into the void with a plastic crunch.

Behind her, the rift inhaled.

Amaya's boots skidded against the grass as the opening yanked, her body arcing backward like a ragdoll caught in a hurricane. Garity's fingers dug into her wrist hard enough to crack bone, his other hand scrabbling for purchase on the picnic table. Amaya swung her free hand forward to clasp his forearm.

"Don't you fucking let go!" Reyes bellowed, lunging forward to seize Garity’s belt. Thompson crashed into them both, wrapping his arms around Garity's waist in a desperate human chain as Garity slid away from the table. The rift inhaled deeper, distorting the air around them—Amaya's braid whipped upward, individual hairs snapping taut like fishing lines before vanishing into the tear.

“Brian!” She cried in shock and terror. Rips opened up along the seams of her clothing from the strength of the pull.

“I got you Mai,” he called back. “Don’t let go.”

Through the undulating center of the rift, figures flickered—armored men with swords raised, their mouths open in shouts that reached Amaya's ears as distorted echoes. One stood silhouetted against torchlight, his blade raised toward the hole in the air. His eyes—pale as winter sky—locked onto hers across the impossible divide.

"Stop" Garity roared out to them, but the words fragmented in the maelstrom. "You can't have her!" The armored man's lips moved in response, his free hand shot toward her just as Garity's grip slipped another inch.

Jenkins tried to anchor Reyes as he lost his grip on the table, the rookies full weight crashing into the pile of bodies clinging to Amaya. The rift shuddered—reality itself groaning like overstressed metal—as the two worlds pressed against each other. For one crystalline moment, Amaya saw everything: the blood-slick altar, the bodies, the robed figures collapsing mid-chant, the armed men.

The rift inhaled again, and Amaya's ribs screamed as her body stretched between worlds—one foot still planted in damp grass, the other vanishing into that impossible darkness. Thompson's grip on Garity's waist slipped, his fingernails scraping his shirt. Reyes roared something wordless, his biceps bulging as he hauled backward with all his SWAT-trained weight but it couldn’t combat the pull coming from the rift.

Amaya's other boot slipped on the grass and left the ground entirely. Her body suspended parallel to the ground from the suction of the opening. The rips on her clothing multiplied and grew larger. Small cuts formed on her skin. The force of the pull stole the breath from her lungs.

"Stop—please—" Garity's voice cracked as his fingers slipped another inch down Amaya's forearm, her wrist slick with sweat. His boots heels plowed furrows in the grass, the picnic table's splintered debris scattering around them. "You're tearing her apart!"

Through the writhing center of the rift, the armored man's face contorted—not with malice, but desperate understanding. His sword tip dipped as he shouted back, the words warping across dimensions: "We didn't want this!" Blood streaked his gauntlet where he'd reached toward her, fingers outstretched like a man trying to catch a falling star. "The ritual—it's out of our control!"

Amaya's vision tunneled. The armored man's eyes locked onto hers with terrifying intensity. His mouth moved again, the shape of the words clear even if she couldn’t hear the sound: Hold on. Then his gaze flicked to something behind her, widening in alarm.

Jenkins saw it first. "The table!" he shouted, voice thin with panic. The picnic table was sliding toward the rift, gathering speed. Reyes twisted just in time to take the impact on his shoulder rather than his skull, but the distraction cost them precious leverage.

Jenkins' scream was the last thing Amaya heard before the picnic table struck Garity in the back like a battering ram. The impact sent him crashing forward, her grip on his wrist slipping—then gone.

The rift inhaled her whole.

For three heartbeats there was only vertigo—a scream trapped in her lungs as she tumbled through suffocating darkness. Then Amaya hit stone with a sound like a butcher's cleaver striking bone and a pained cry. Air rushed from her abused lungs in a voiceless gasp as torchlight stabbed her vision. Her ribs screamed—something felt cracked, if not broken—and her mouth filled with the coppery tang of blood. Her body contorted with pain and she tried to bite back the pained groans leaving her mouth. The world spun, a nauseating carousel of torchlight and shadows. Her fingers scrabbled against slick stone.

Her clothes were shredded—khaki pants torn at the knees, sleeves hanging in tattered ribbons where the rip’s gravity had clawed at her. Blood seeped through the fabric in jagged lines, painting her forearms in crimson streaks.

A torch sputtered nearby, casting flickering light over her ruined hands. The knuckles were raw, scraped down to pink flesh. The whisper was gone, replaced by a ringing silence that pressed against her eardrums. She thought she might have heard Garity’s voice calling her but everything was muffled.

Movement to her left. Amaya rolled onto her elbows, gasping as the motion tugged at the fresh wounds crisscrossing her back. A figure loomed in front her—tall, armored, his sword glinting with fresh blood. The same winter-pale eyes she’d seen through the rift.