Page 4 of Rescuing Ally: Part 1

No shield can deflect it.

It’ll melt everything, turn the earth to glass. It’s not an explosion.

It’s annihilation.

And we’re trying to outrun it.

Chapter 2

The steppe stretches before us,vast and desolate, providing no protection. A mountain range might shield us.

Maybe.

The bottom line?

A containment breach of our experimental fusion reactor will obliterate everything in its path—scorching earth and sky like some unholy dawn.

There’s no escape.

Headlights blink in the far darkness, swarming toward us.

Someone screams behind us—a long, piercing sound that cuts off almost as soon as it starts.

My spine stiffens, adrenaline hot and nauseating in my veins, but I keep running. My lungs burn from the cold, each breath scraping against my throat, but I don’t stop.

“Keep your head down!” the rescuer on my left growls, his voice guttural, tinged with strain.

A deafeningpop-cracksounds off to my right—gunfire. I duck instinctively, my body twitching with a grotesque, automatic survival reflex.

Shadows dart across the steppe. I can’t tell where the rescuersare firing or where the guards are still shooting, but the night is alive with chaos: wild bursts of light from nearby muzzle strobe across the frozen ground.

The Chen family runs behind me. Mrs. Chen is half-carrying Kevin despite his garbled protests. He grips her sleeve tightly and stumbles along beside her. A few paces behind them, Rodriguez’s daughter, Maria, trips. Whittman yanks her upright as she sobs, her exhaustion clear even through the haze of cold and noise.

I don’t know if I’m leading them or being carried along, but I knock into Malia’s side, my legs trembling with effort. Her brother, Malikai, slows again, his body sagging—he’s running on fumes—but she screams his name and won’t let him go.

Someone shouts behind us: “Contact rear!”

The night erupts again—a furious cacophony of gunfire and explosions that feels closer than before, too close.

“They’re buying time,” Malia gasps beside me, her voice thin but lucid as we stumble together.

“For who?” I choke out.

“For us,” she says, pulling harder.

I smell the ozone. Taste the bitter, metallic tang of imminent destruction.

Trucks, Jeeps, and armored vehicles converge on our position, their roaring engines sound so alien after months of captivity that it nearly paralyzes me. It’s not the roar of despair—it’s hope, impossibly loud and alive.

My legs are on fire, every step a half-collapse, and the cold air slicing through my throat no longer feels sharp. It feels numb. My body is giving up, but my mind won’t let it.

“Keep moving!” a voice shouts again—someone from the convoy, though I can’t make sense of anything anymore.

I instinctively pat my pocket, fingers probing for the hard edges of the thumb drive. It’s still there. Relief floods through me even as terror pounds in my veins. Everything else can be replaced, but not those calculations and not the modifications I hid from Malfor. Without this drive, all of our suffering and all thosedeaths mean nothing. The secrets buried in my equations might be the only way to prevent this from happening again.

Something tells me we’ll need them—if we survive this.

The vibrations beneath my feet are relentless now, no longer faint pulses but full-onwavesrolling through the ground. The frozen earth shakes under each step, and the resonance echoes through my bones, rattling my teeth and skull.

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