Page 5 of Rescuing Ally: Part 1

“There’s no time!” Whittman shouts behind me. His voice is cracked and thin, his breaths coming in gasps, but the panic sharpens enough to cut through the chaos. “The containment fields are collapsing! If the cascade tunnels?—”

“Shut up and run!” A voice barks the order, sharp and commanding, but I don’t know who it belongs to—the rescuers? Another guard?

I’m running blind now, my breaths ragged, dragging freezing air into my lungs so forcefully it feels like knives scraping my throat. My shirt clings to my body, damp with sweat that turns icy against the gusting wind.

The trucks screech to a halt ahead of us. More rescuers swarm out of the vehicles, shouting orders.

“Move!”

“Load them in!”

“This way—go, go, go!”

They cluster around the hostages, ushering us into cargo spaces, stepping into our panic like it’s routine.

Hands reach toward us—desperate orders to climb aboard—but my legs stop cooperating when I reach the closest vehicle.

I stagger into someone—the same black-clad figure who yanked me forward before—and he catches me just as my knees buckle.

“Get in,” he barks sharply, his voice distorted through the helmet.

I’m lifted into the air and hauled into the back of a truck, pitched forward onto cold metal. My cheek hits steel, the impact jarring. Someone’s knee presses into my ribs.

There’s no room to move. No room to breathe. Bodies pile inaround me, flesh pressing against flesh, each person clinging to whatever they can grab—metal bars, side panels, each other.

Hands reach for me, and I’m pulled to a seated position. Someone’s hand steadies my shoulder, holding me upright against the inertia pulling me down. Another hand wraps around my wrist, soft but firm.

I think it’s them.

The two men.

The truck jerks, rocking hard as more bodies climb aboard. I barely register who’s pressing against me—faces I’ve seen daily for months but now seem like strangers. It’s nothing but motion, noise, and heat where there should be freezing cold.

A communications deviceon one of the rescuer’s wrists sparks and dies as I brush against it. He taps at the dead screen with a gloved finger. The man beside him frowns, checking his device.

“Mine’s acting weird. EMG pulse from the facility, maybe?” Neither looks at me as I tuck my trembling hands closer to my body, away from their equipment.

Malia stumbles in behind me, her hand searching blindly for mine. “We’re—” Her voice cracks. “We’re going to make it.”

I clutch her hand, but I don’t believe her. As a doctoral student in nuclear fusion and quantum dynamics, I know what we face.

We won’t survive.

The truck lurches forward, its tires screaming against the frozen terrain. Around us, the other trucks roar to life, forming a convoy as they tear across the steppe.

We barrel through the snow-dusted tundra, bouncing hard over the uneven ground.

“Faster!” someone shouts ahead of us.

I glance back at the burning facility. My breath hitches as I see it; a ripple of light stretching out from the structure like a shockwave waiting to happen.

The quantumcascade has begun.

My mind races, terrified fragments of equations flashing too quickly to answer anything. For one haunting second, I imagine the worst—plasma containment unraveling, tunneling barriers collapsing, energy annihilating everything for miles.

There’s no time for calculations, no time for thought. Just the hum beneath my skin as the annihilation wave builds.

We have minutes, at most, before the end.

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