When Sora woke, it was to a swaying overcast morning.
    Kairi was seated across from him, dozing. Her cheeks and scalp were sunburned, as was most of the exposed skin over her body, which was, well, most of it.
    He supposed he should have put a little more effort into blushing, but at the moment he was feeling queasy, as if someone had been holding him upside-down for a few hours. Instead of putting in the stock amount of staring, Sora took it upon himself to climb to his feet, holding onto the wooden railing of the aft stairs to get himself aloft.
    Yes. They were definitely on a boat. They were on a boat, this was the ocean, and that was Riku up on the mast batting away a predatory seagull with a stick. It was the good old times already.
    Sora must have fainted back on the shore. Which meant Riku must have dragged his ass to the docks and gotten them out of the harbor. And then to... wherever.
    Roxas was pacing. It was a poor analogy, but there were few means to describe an overactive sub-personality in one's head. He was bouncing off the walls of Sora's mind, feverish, thoughts streaming out so fast that Sora only caught them as mutters and incoherent outbursts.
    It hadn't been Axel.
    Okay, thought Sora; so who was it?
    ~How would I know? Probably Fei's Other that that guy talked about.~
    How could an Other just go and--
    It was no use. Roxas's buzzing mind had already defaulted back to its circuit. ~Axel, poor Axel, I didn't even get to see him one last time, I had to hear about it from a stupid hearted person with hair shaped like a novelty condom...~
    "Hey," Sora said out loud, the only real way to interrupt.
    On the deck, Kairi stirred from her doze and snapped her head up, brushing the hair out of her eyes.
    "You all right?"
    In his mind, Sora felt Roxas's frenetic agitation settle, like a fuzzed-up cat getting its hair gently stroked back down. Seeing Namine always had that effect on Roxas, and whenever Sora looked at Kairi, he knew that was all Roxas saw.
    It was impossible to describe, seeing one girl and interpreting it as two different ones. And Roxas, despite his resonance with Sora, was not by any means content to just look. He had been without an outlet for far too long, and now Sora knew he'd be in constant danger of Roxas's side of things pouring over. Half of all the times Sora masturbated (back before the hospital), it had been at his Other's behest to vent his lust for his girl, and that was before a solid year without physical contact. Sora's own instincts, which mostly consisted of giving Kairi flowers, were apt to go unheard.
   Well, there were no flowers now, so if they were to do anything it was likely going to be Roxas's method. The very thought of which made Sora's stomach knot like a snake with a charlie horse.
    Actually, Sora soon discovered, that had nothing to do with Roxas's hormones and everything to do with seasickness. He pitched over the starboard railing and chucked up the rest of his last straw-fed meal.
    "You shoulda saved that," Riku remarked, approaching when Sora had about finished up. He was carrying a limp bird at his side. Apparently he hadn't been trying to scare the thing off after all.
    Sora eyeballed it. "Let me guess," he gasped, wiping his mouth. "No provisions."
    "No food, no water," Kairi confirmed, climbing to her feet and dusting her pants. "No spare clothes," she joked.
    "And no bearings," said Riku. "And pretty soon, no current."
    "But the good news?" Sora asked.
    Riku glanced around the deck. He checked by his hip, and under his shoe.
    "...We've really stuck it to the mayor, at least?" he suggested.
    "We stuck it to the whole archipelago."
    Kairi frowned at the planking. She didn't say 'I hope everyone's all right,' the way an earlier version of her might. Now she knew better than to wish.
    "Whatever happened back there, it wasn't natural," Riku stressed. "Something went wrong. It was like Destiny was growing parts of other worlds."
    "Or merging with them," Sora hypothesized, staring aft. The islands were long out of sight now. "Like two galaxies colliding."
    "I wonder if it's happening elsewhere," Kairi mused. "Could this've been part of what Mickey was talking about?"
    "We won't know until we get there," Sora sighed, sinking again. "If we do."
    He blinked down at the water, murky and despondent, slurching along the hull of the boat on a slow current. The water was still enough that he could make out his figure a little.
    He really had no idea how he looked now. The mental ward had taken away mirrors for the principle of the thing.
    Kairi and Riku were no surprise, because he'd been able to see them consistently through their internment. Kairi's curvy bits had gotten curvier, that was certain; Riku's only real improvement seemed to have been losing anything that could be called bangs entirely and graduating up to a sort of Cousin It thing. He looked like he could crawl out of a TV now.
    But Sora was sure he looked different. He felt different than he had a year ago. Bigger hands, bigger feet, greater distance to the ground. His voice had lost all pretense of boyishness, which he was glad of. For the longest time the thing had sounded like it was reluctant to get on with things.
    They were a gang of overgrown children, and technically, escaped mental patients. They were sick with withdrawal, their only food was a dead seagull, they were miles from land, and they were going nowhere.
    And they were probably all horny and too shy to do anything about it. It was just their luck the boat was too small for any sort of privacy.
    "To think," Sora said abruptly, as the three of them watched the waves. "Two years ago we would've been just fine with a raft."

    Beatrix combed an errant lock of hair behind her ears. The roots were soaked. The skin under her eyepatch was itching.
    Beatrix de la Croissouix was the oldest Chaser in first section, Echo Platoon, Juliet Company of the Third Battalion; no special accreditation or reputation, a macala of refugees just like the rest. Before the worlds broke, she belonged to a land called Gaia, and she was a military child there as well. It could be said her induction into the Chasers marked nothing more in her life than a change of scenery.
    Beatrix de la Croissouix was notoriously unfuckable, but Reno Conway was possibly even more talented than his brother. This was helpful on long missions, when everyone was cooped up together in a too-small ship, and the men-to-women ratio was inescapably 6:2, and Elena had a phobia thing going on. Crying the whole time wasn't really a great turn-on.
    But doing Beatrix was doing a favor for the whole crew. The actual participants got their rocks off, and everyone else could believe they felt the exertion vicariously and got the same taste of catharsis. It worked out great for everyone. But it especially worked out for Beatrix, because Reno was a 17-year-old with one hell of a tongue.
    Now it was over, and Beatrix lay on her side in her tousled bunk and stretched her tired limbs. In a minute she'd go for her cigarettes, but right now she seemed to be content to lie still and smirk, watching Reno wipe his mouth with the back of a hand.
    Beatrix licked her lips and swallowed with a dry throat. When Reno sat he drew Reno up wordlessly and kissed him. Not a thank-you or an apology kind of kiss, just a last burst of libido trained on her own scent. If Beatrix had a clone of herself, she'd want for no man. Reno swore she would get drunk off her own skin if she could.
    When they were completely finished, Beatrix dressed, and Reno went to brush his teeth. She was still an ice queen and he was still a bastard, the arrangement served a perfect and succinct purpose, and both were totally satisfied with it.
    This was what long missions were like. The long quiet before every eventual storm.
    The last time they'd been on one of these, they'd lost their best hand, Terra. Now there was an ice bitch no man or woman could touch. And she had gone down in her Waverer a true soldier, air pressure blown so fast as she crashed that she had probably died before the atmosphere could burn her up.
    This was yet another suicide crusade, and everyone knew it. King Mickey had known it. There were hell knew how many things amiss with having to go and find a keyblade master.
    And that had been a year ago. Sergeant Tseng had lost contact with the Castle after four months. Chasers were familiar with long hauls and particularly radio silence, but this time they knew it was something else. It wasn't that the signal wasn't carrying; it was that there was no one there. If not at the comm post, then anywhere at all.
    The 'where' of anything was even in doubt now, as the gravity of worlds beneath the Charm stratum shifted, and streams of stars collided and mingled in direct opposition of the best laid theories of astrophysics. Suddenly, the maps of a thousand brilliant Chaser scientists were useless, and bearings were little more than a security blanket. The scanners could still detect energy fields and world idents, but all orientation was gone.
    They were explorers in wild virgin territory. And no word had come at all explaining or even theorizing how it was happening. No word had come at all.
    For all they knew, first section, Echo Platoon, Juliet Company of the Third Battalion were the last Chasers in the metaspace. The last Chasers there might ever be. The end of a legacy long overdue for its deletion. And they spent their time fucking and watching the scanners.
    Rude was waiting for Reno back in their cabin. The two had been bunkmates since their mutual internment-- both survivors of the Midgar incident, although neither had known the other before it happened. It was the closest thing to family a guy had these days. Although Rude stuck with Reno chiefly because Rude was the only member of the team strong enough to hold Reno down when the nightmares turned bad.
    Reno had brushed his teeth so thoroughly the gums hurt, just to be sure there was no trace of Beatrix's taste when Rude kissed him, fuller and headier and far more possessive. He undressed the firecat quickly with hot muscular fingers, and held him close, arms wrapped around the slighter man's waist so that they were pressed together, ill-fit and clumsy and awkward and desperate, involved in something neither was okay with at all, and that's why they did it.
    "She took my shift," Reno murmured between their lips. "I'm not... needed anywhere till oh-four-hundred..."
    "Good," Rude was saying, squeezing a flank with that strong hand. "Good."

    In another far-flung corner of metaspace, Cloud Strife set monitors to deep scan and checked the cabin pressure. Fenrir's oxygen tanks had slipped below the halfway mark that morning, meaning he'd have to make a landing somewhere within the next day or two. The prospect didn't delight him overmuch: some people were born world-travelers; Cloud was the type who, in a perfect world, would like there to be one designated corner somewhere where he'd never have to leave and no one would bother him. He was just that kind of people person.
    At the moment Cloud was nervous, even if no one save Aerith could ever tell. Up here between the Beauty and Charm strata was deep Chaser territory-- if they were still out there, Fenrir was going to show up on their scanners like a New Year's sparkler. That's what he got for never getting around to stripping its old regiment ident.
    Still, if you didn't want trouble, don't be a world-traveler. It was that simple. No one ever touched the stars and came away unscathed; that was just the price things came with. The universe was too complex and too full of problems, more than enough to share, and the mere knowledge of something outside one's own small hovel automatically set a person into another sphere of existence where those problems quite readily came at you. Fate could tell the tainted ones and swarmed its chaos around them, hungrily, greedily, and without remorse for what it was destroying.
    That's what he saw every time he met the keyblade master. A little more innocence getting chipped away. The kid was holding out a long time but it wasn't gonna last forever. Odin alone knew what was stemming the flow for that boy.
    He must be sixteen now? Tall and wiry and full of ideas. Not quite the idealist of a fourteen-year-old but just as much of a quixote. So terribly sure of himself and of life and what he wanted out of it. What an ugly age to be.
    Fenrir's console beeped with the scan results.
    Had to hand it to King Mickey: Chaser technology was some of the most sophisticated in the universe. It could hone in on virtually any chemical or energy reading metaspace could offer. From stars with breathable atmospheres, to ships, to gates, and even keyblades.

    The Three had done everything in their power to put off dinner as long as possible. They did a survey of the deck, of the hold, the mayor's cabin and the two guest bunks, and spent a great deal of time staring at the rudder, just to be sure it was, well, rudding correctly. They checked windspeed, estimated time of day and angle of the sun and, therefore, their rough direction, and how soon they were probably going to die of thirst. By that point, the seagull didn't look half bad.
    They ate on deck, huddled around a firepit made of bits of plank from the guest bunks, since they rationalized they were very well mature enough to sleep in the same room for the sake of body heat, and it wasn't like the mayor was going to be entertaining dignitaries anytime soon. The mayor was most likely dead.
    Everyone was probably dead.
    If they made it to Disney Castle, everyone was probably dead there too.
    Man, they really rocked at this heroes thing.
    So they sat around the fire and ate. Kairi picked at her bit of wing and lamented how little seagull tasted like chicken after all. Sora preoccupied himself with digging tiny bird bones out of his molars. Riku demonstrated just how ninja he could really be by never actually being seen eating anything, and yet finishing off his portion so cleanly every cat in the universe would have been impressed.
    It was growing cold, and the wind had all but died on them. Kairi and Sora stood up to carry fire over to the mayor's cabin to light the lanterns while Riku stayed on deck to do the clean-up. It was a conscious and emphatic move on his part: he'd been doing it for the better part of a year now. Too frequent to be shyness, and just frequent enough to be a loud and unsubtle hint. Roxas certainly picked up on it.
    "Kairi," Sora began, when the cabin door shut behind them.
    She turned to him, and Sora forgot what else he was about to say.
    Namine beamed at Roxas from Kairi's eyes, flushing. Roxas moved Sora's hand and laid it upon what felt like all the world should be Namine's wrist.
    "Kairi," Sora said again urgently.
    In their minds, Namine and Roxas were holding, touching, falling into one another, kissing each other's nose and lips and neck, letting hands explore how they pleased--
    Kairi, on the other hand, was on the edge of hyperventilating.
    "Stop it," she cried at Namine, recoiling from two sets of stares. "We're not that kind of girl!"
    In a fit of desperation, she slapped Sora across the cheek.
    Now, Kairi was fairly strong for a girl. That was how you turned out when your two childhood friends were both rough-housing boys. A life of suppressing this behind pleated skirts, jewelry and (these days) a nicely impressive bosom did not diminish the fact that as girls went, Kairi really did not hit like one.
    "Oh, I'm so sorry, Sora!" she wailed at the boy, lying in a heap on the floor. "I don't know what came over me!"
    "I know I didn't," Sora groaned, nursing his jaw.
    "A girl shouldn't have to defend herself like that! You need to learn to control yourself!" she was all but shouting, flushing through her sunburn. "Why can't you be more mature like Riku?!"
    She fled in virtually a sprint, panicked and embarrassed, leaving him to his own on the floor.
    He thought for a moment of chasing after her, but it seemed patently futile. His body wasn't really working at the moment, and Roxas was back to muttering and pacing in his brain, about Namine and Axel and Namine and Namine--
    Riku had appeared through the doorway, and came to crouch over him, pale hair falling like a curtain over their heads.
    "Do I need to tell you how totally smooth you are, Casanova?"
    "I'm sleeping on the deck tonight, aren't I."
    "We'll build you a doghouse in the morning."

    Reno passed through the bridge doors at 0420, slipping in quietly, like a delinquent husband afraid that his wife was a light sleeper.
    The wife in this case was Irvine Kinneas, your classic cowboy soldier, whose only chastisement when Reno entered was a resigned "You're late" while they fistbumped and passed a login key between their fingers. Reno threw himself down into the empty co-chair and had his feet up on the console before he even set the scanners into their morning diagnostic.
    "Long night for you?"
    "I got some time in."
    "Yeah, I bet you slept," Irvine smirked, shuffling his deck of cards again. They snapped loudly on the quiet bridge. "As your immediate superior I find myself obligated to remind you that, ship bicycle or not, you do have more than one biological function that needs regular tending."
    "That's harsh, man. I'm a trendy little scooter at least. You know, the kind with the hand brakes."
    Irvine didn't dignify that with a reply. He just grinned, shuffled the cards one more time and presented the deck for Reno's inspection.
    Reno slid the top card off and took a glance. Jack of Clubs.
    "You're fuckin' cheating again."
    Irvine laughed. "Got me another hole in one, didn't I?"
    "That's golf, dipshit."
    "That's you owing me five crowns. Hey, I'll let you off if you take my latrine duty."
    The cowboy was from a country called Galbadia, a sort of neighbor to Balamb, in a binary system so close the two worlds had a long history of formal contact-- and formal war. When Balamb was split open by the Heartless, it had contacted Galbadia for help, which had refused-- and then fallen to the shadows as well.
    Before the worlds broke, Irvine had been an orphan, drafted into the military academy for training as a sniper. His job on Tseng's squad was much the same as it would have been in Galbadia, if he'd stuck around to graduate. But they caught him premature, still a year from accreditation, before the shakes had gotten ironed out of him. He was a straight man in a fight until it actually came time to shoot.
    But he was a good guy, with a big heart to share with everyone. The way the rumor went, he'd lost contact with his friends from the orphanage and had grown up seeing their faces in everyone he met. Reno certainly could understand looking for something familiar even when you knew it wasn't going to be there.
    It was a boy who stuck in Irvine's mind the most, he said. No, not like that; just... a friend. A kid that had been swept off with the solar winds back when they were both very small, who, if he survived the current at all, must have grown up in a very faraway place, and must have forgotten all about him. It broke his heart to think about it, Irvine said; the thought that something as mundane as the tide could steal away friends and hearts and even memory. He couldn't even remember the kid's name now.
    Hearing it the first time, Reno had wanted to say, 'He could still be out there. And he might even remember you. All your friends might.' But he hadn't. Instead he'd laughed, and slapped Irvine on the shoulder, and said 'You're so gay.' And then Irvine had called him a slut. And Reno had called him a fruit. And then, if he recalled correctly, they wound up on the floor together with a bottle of whiskey and Tseng had given them ten demerits apiece the next morning, and the two weren't allowed on the same shift again for a month. But that was something else entirely.
    Irvine shuffled the cards again and dealt a hand. The cards were fair for games, at least; Reno was sure Irvine had it in his power to stack things against him, but he didn't. Probably because they both knew the morning watch was too dry to cheat.
    Beyond their console, the main screen was alight with the glow of a thousand distorted, shifting stars. The entire local system was rearranging itself now, concentric circles of worlds churning into an elaborate knotwork of weaving, twisting lines. Up in the Beauty stratum where there were nothing but infant stars and nebulae of spatial dust, a Chaser ship had little to worry over a storm, particularly one for which they could do nothing. They couldn't return to headquarters until their mission was complete, that part was honor-bound-- and until they found the keyblade master, their life was to be a long, silent watch, a vigil from the zenith of space.
    Elena theorized that Mickey had sent them for a reason, knowing it was a wild goose chase and that they would never return, waiting for a time when the emergency directives kicked in and their contract was voided. Maybe the King had had a plan for them, something glorious, something full of love and hope for them. An end to fighting, an end to war, a refuge somewhere far away where the enemies could not find them, where the Alliance was just a rumor on the breeze.
    There were, obviously, reasons why only Elena thought this. The rest of the squad just watched from the heavens, only able to imagine what the carnage was below. And watch. And search. And distract themselves.
    "Royal flush," Irvine said, laying the hand flat.
    "You bastard."
    "You ain't the first to say."
    "Next time you go to sleep, I'm gonna steal your hat and chuck it out the fucking airlock."
    "And I'll see that Tseng makes you go after it, hombre. You're up to ten crowns now."
    Reno would never know why they played for money. It wasn't like they were going to see a paycheck ever again in their lives.
    "Again," he said instead with the duck of his head, folding his hand and reaching for the deck.
    The console interrupted them before he could get close. The scans had completed of the local area, a deep node query of the four closest strata, and come up with something near the division plane. A big something. A big, yellow, ugly something.
    "Hello."

    It was close to morning when Sora realized he'd drifted out of sleep on-deck and wandered to the forward port railing, watching the unreflecting water and thinking about general amounts of nothing.
    The wind had been picking up instead of calming, and there was a heady moisture to the air, like summer heat. Clouds overhead still covered the moon; if not for the lone lantern still guttering in the mayor's cabin, there'd be almost no light to see by at all.
    After a long time spent in silence, Sora's ears twinged, picking up a sort of not-sound. It was akin to the falling of snowflakes or blowing in someone's ear; the kind of anti-noise so sharp it made the hairs along your arms stand up straight. Although in this case the cold night air had already seen to the last part.
    The not-sound stopped at the railing and rested, almost heeled at his side. He didn't turn and look.
    "Does your mother know you're out this late?" he asked the girl.
    The glow of moonlight standing beside him looked defensive.
    "Why should she mind?" Namine asked. "I have my papa to chaperone, don't I?"
    Sora didn't answer. The post-dinner incident was still smarting.
    Roxas was asleep, at least. That was some help. If he were up and... frisky... now, when Kairi wasn't around to halt Namine's wishes, Sora had a pretty clear idea of what would happen. And it wouldn't involve any flowers.
    "Can I ask," Namine said after a bout of silence, "what it is you have against us?"
    Sora started. He wrapped his gaze over to her, standing there in that slip and too-long hair.
    She had aged along with Kairi, as he was sure Roxas had grown along with him, but apparently disembodied Nobodies could have all the powers of wandering about outsides their host's body and still not be able to manifest more modest clothing. Her hair, meanwhile, was nearly to her waist, flowing elegantly like a white gold curtain in steady breeze, quite nearly perfect, as she always somehow was.
    Sora shook his head. "We owe a lot to you--" he began.
    "I know you think we're intruding," she interrupted. "But Roxas and I don't have a life if it's not with you two. I just don't know how to impress upon you that we're worth the trouble."
    "If we were still in school, you could help us cheat on tests."
    "I didn't mean--"
    "I know what you mean," he said. "And it's... fine," he ceded, staring back over the railing. "I'm sure you have your reasons and they make sense to you."
    "But you're mad," Namine cried. "You're mad and you're just being polite about it."
    To his amazement, Namine shrunk when he looked up at her again. As though she thought he might hit her.
    Really, anger got him nowhere, and he knew it. If the medication withdrawal weren't gnawing so badly he might even be able to apply that knowledge better. Without the brittle smile, anyway.
    "Everyone deserves a life, right?"
    Namine frowned sadly. She raised a delicate hand --so much like Kairi's, but with none of the callous-- and, shaking a little, pressed the palm to his forehead.
    There was a moment of feverish heat, and then it was gone, as if stolen right out of his body. A smooth cool wave washed through him, easing and calming, covering over the rough edges and the open wounds, every cut and bruise real or emotional, the tics and nausea. It guided his eyes shut, as his breath and heart slowed, and the world wound down to a long, singular moment.
    A drop of water struck his forehead, right between the eyes. The moment broke.
    There was a sound. Like singing. Almost like a hymn.
    Sora opened his eyes. The girl was gone. He was alone on the deck as before, only this time he saw what he had missed approaching sternwise from the horizon.
    The wind hadn't been wind. The clouds weren't just clouds. They just preceded what was really there, what must have been chasing them from the island.
    The deck clapped with rainfall, starting light and then landing like hail, thundering on the planks. The sails guttered, bulged and contorted as the wind picked up and the wood of the mast began to creak, and in the mayor's cabin, the lone lantern flickered and blew out.
    Sora was running, head shielded with his arm. The deck tossed violently under him, tilted sharply starboard as the water sucked at its hull.
    "Riku!" he shouted. "Kairi!"
    Somewhere, a rope snapped. The main sail gushed out in a torrent of canvas, flailing threateningly in the wind. Sora turned around, back toward the bow. The corner of canvas swung away from him when he grabbed at it, whipping the tail of rope just out of reach. He climbed up onto the mainchains and took hold of it from there, the rain gushing down now, his shouts for his friends lost beneath the gale, the warning bell too far away--
    A strong hand clapped down on top of his.
    "Go," Riku said close to his ear. "I'll hold it here. Get up the mast and drop the ropes. If we don't raise sails we're gonna lose the whole ship."
    "But you--"
    "You're faster," Riku gruffed, grasping the rope with both hands and edging Sora off it. "Get going. Hurry. Kairi!" he shouted aft. "Get ready!"
    But Kairi wasn't moving. She was frozen at the edge of the stern railing, eyes fixed on the gale, the roaring hurricane.
    "Kairi!"
    It was like she didn't hear them at all.
    Sora, abandoning the mast, raced to the stern and grabbed her roughly by the arm. "Come on!"
    "It... it's alive," she whispered into the wind, the sound lost.
    "What?" Sora shouted. "Kairi! What is it?"
    "It's alive!" she cried, tearing her eyes away, trying to run, tugging her arm from his grasp in terror. "Can't you see it?!"
    Sora looked out, tried to follow Kairi's gaze.
    It was a shape. Something massive. Veiny translucent skin, rotten flesh, the color and smell of death. And in there somewhere, in among the decay, the slime, the whipping, howling gale that was actually a roar, Sora saw a single, enormous eye.
    "Oh my god."

    Biggs lowered his navigation visor and stared.
    "It's so near the divide. What the hell is that?" Wedge muttered from the diagnostics deck. "A storm?"
    "We should be so fortunate," said Tseng, watching the screens. "I've seen this before. They call it Sin. Unconfirmed Heartless, but it might be something else. It ate the world of Spira whole."
    "Holy fuck," Reno whimpered.
    "Reno," Tseng chastised.
    "Holy fuck, sir," Reno amended.
    Tseng let it go. "Get to the ships," he said, and turned to leave.
    "Sir!" Wedge protested, when the advance team was nearly out the door. "We have another reading--"
    "I'm well aware, Wedge. That's why we're going in."
    "No, I mean-- a third reading," the diagnostics officer insisted. "Something hanging back on the Charm stratum. It's a Chaser ident, but it's tagged as stolen. It might be a deserter."
    Tseng had stopped at the doorway. He looked over his shoulder, thinking for a moment, and then saying, "What model?"
    "Lupus class. A nine-one-six."
    He nodded.
    "I've heard of him," he said, resuming on his way with his men following after. "If he knows what's good for him, he won't interfere."

    A Chaser ship. There was no mistaking it. They'd even hailed him, before they'd retracted it. Probably too busy with whatever was happening down on the division plane.
    Cloud was sure his visual down on the Charm stratum was a lot better than what they could get hold of up in Beauty. He saw the readings. He'd seen Sin rise up from the Down stratum below the division plane and burble up like an ugly sore, chewing up worlds and collecting them around itself as it advanced on a single, tiny stab of light so faint the chemical read-outs could barely detect it.
    If he didn't act now, he was going to lose it. The Chaser ship --squad or platoon class, definitely no larger-- had given a loud and clear 'back off' when it had disembarked its Waverers. New models. Classy. Armed to the teeth, and they had a hell of a lot of teeth.
    Leon would have told him to let it go. These were Chasers. They worked in the employ of the King, at least officially. The question now was whether they still were, and if he cared much for the orders they must be on if that was the case.
    Whichever. If the Chasers came out on top or if he did, the result was the same. And neither could afford for what was down there to get lost, not when it had taken so long to find.
    That settled it. It was time to dig in.

    The stern shattered first, torn apart with jaws made of wind and steel. The deck planks frayed and splintered and sent shockwaves hard enough to knock even Riku off his feet. The rope ripped out his hands shining and bloody; he cried out, more with the shock than the pain, hitting the deck and flinging arms out wildly to catch the railing before the torrent sucked him in.
    He couldn't breathe. It was like something acidic had burned away the air.
    "Kairi!" he shouted, but his voice was being stolen out from under him. "Sora!"
    It felt like there was light. Too much light, without a source. Coming from all around him. A roar, a rush of wind, something speeding overhead. Breathe. He couldn't breathe. What was...
    He saw Kairi. Hugging the deck even as it dissolved under her, gaping breathless and pale, looking at something beneath his range of view. Something below the ship.
    "Oh my god," she was crying, choked, with the last of her air. "Stars. It's full of stars."
    Sora heard it, up by the bow. He pulled himself up to the railing, coughing and dizzy, like all the blood was boiling out of his body, vision dimming and flashing in odd, random colors, like his brain was beginning to shut down.
    Roxas, awake and clinging to the last of Sora's consciousness, saw what Sora wasn't able to.
    A torrent of angry storm waves. Resonating down thousands and thousands of miles, translucent and iridescent, a poetry of color and line and streams of motion. The great humming light of worlds, all different, all disintegrating into the storm.
    And then everything broke apart. Amid the cries of beasts, and the thunder of ships pouring down in a wash of engine fire.
    Sora's body was holding onto nothing. And Roxas was the only one around to hear Kairi and Riku's last shouts, as the wind consumed everything, and even he fell into the void.

    Cloud angled sharply, braced with clenched teeth as the gust blanched Fenrir across the starboard side. The aft regulators went down in a hail of warning lights. Failure after failure, cabin pressure down, weapons disintegrating right off the damn hull, ten seconds to breach, nine, eight, seven--
    Cloud forced a hand free of the helm and clamored at the console. Override, fuck it all, override...!
    "Alert! Energy signal has been lost."
    "I know."
    "Alert! Energy signal has been lost."
    "I know! Do another scan!"
    It did. Its lights flickering, half its screen nothing but garbled raw code, it pulled up the new signal. All three of them.
    For a moment, Cloud could only stare at it. The sickness in his stomach grew.
    Two of those were bunk signals. There was nothing else it could be, he thought, as the sparks of dying wires rained down and burned his eyes. But one of those was the right. There was just no time to work out which.
    Focus, he said to himself. And pushed Fenrir into a portside turn.

    hisssssssss "Report," came Tseng's voice over the comm channel, muffled and half-static.
    hisssssss "Waver Two rep--" hissssssss "--avy damage," Beatrix grunted. "Scan--" hisssssssssssssssss "--a triplicated energy signal from the--" hissssssssss.
    "Waver Three scanners show the same," Irvine said. "It's too hairy down here, sir. Permission to--" hisssssssssssssssss.
    "Permission denied," Tseng told him. "I don't care what it is. Find the--" hissssssssssssssssssss "--signal. Do you understand?"
    Waver Six, Reno and Rude's ship that had taken the left flank and sustained the least damage, was the first to conduct a fresh scan. The triplicated energy reading persisted.
    "This is royally fucked, man," Reno muttered to his copilot. "And I don't mean the standard Mickey Mouse shit."
    "Nn," said Rude.
    Below them, along the spatial divide, the hurricane was thinning, dissolving in tendrils of wind in the vacuum. The creature, whatever it had been, had vanished, in as little as a single pass of the radar.
    Nothing but shrapnel and driftwood. World residue.
    One scrap of driftwood was nudging close to them. On instinct, Reno began to swivel the ship off to the side, but he stopped.
    Ten seconds later, the updated energy feed would confirm him, but it was his eyes that were working now.
    "Oh, fuck."
    "Dead?" Rude muttered.
    "We won't know till we get it aboard," said Reno, guiding her in close for a look. "Tell Tseng."
    Rude did. He also asked what the crew should do about the other signals.
    "Blips," said Tseng. "Or--" hissssssssss "--way it doesn't matter to us."
    "But--" hisssssssss "--or something we should--" Irvine began.
    "Let it drift. We have what we need."