First Contact - Part 5

First Contact

by Charlie Forêt

A short story set in the Integration era.

©2026, by Charlie Forêt, all rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Cover Photo: ©2026, by Charlie Forêt

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9985516-9-7

Part Five

Harko was breathing steadily.

That was the good news. The bubble had held while he rested. Maybe ten minutes had passed since I'd dismissed the overlay. Maybe more. Time felt different inside.

Nev was sitting beside Harko, her hand on his shoulder. Her outline cycled magenta and yellow with the pulses, the way mine did. Harko's was still overbright. Less than before, but only a little.

The bubble began to shrink.

I felt it before I saw it. The walls of stability that had been holding around us drew inward. The pressure that had been at the edges started reaching me where I stood. Outside the bubble, smaller bubbles were forming and dissolving in the field. Not drifting like before. Frothing. The teal pattern was breaking up against itself.

I moved closer to my friends.

Another pulse. The bubble took less of it this time. Nev's outline went hard yellow before it cleared. Harko's didn't clear at all. It dimmed.

[Flux anomaly: Class 5. Critical.][Resonance output: 4.2 TFU. Surge imminent.][Emergency protocol active. Three personnel in proximity zone.][Concordance merge architecture at risk beyond 8km radius.][Immediate evacuation required.]

Class five.

My breath caught. Suddenly, I was out of synch with the waves in the rift.

Eight klicks wasn't far enough.

"Did you see that, Nev?"

"Yeah." Her voice was tight. "We need to move."

"I've got the way. I don't know how long the windows will hold."

"What's a Concordance merge?"

"A blast." Harko, through gritted teeth, eyes still closed. "Not the good party kind. Eight klicks isn't far enough. It would flatten everything we know."

Nev was already moving. She got Harko's arm across her shoulders and lifted him to standing. He swayed but held. I moved to his other side and slipped my arm under him.

"Lead the way," Nev said.

The bubble we'd been resting in was already breaking apart behind us. I stepped out before it took us with it.

Nev came with me, Harko between us. His feet bore little weight. He was running on her steadiness, my arm, and whatever the rift's pressure didn't take from him.

Maybe we were giving him more than support. The pressure on him seemed less when we were pressed close.

The next wave came before we made it to the next bubble.

"Brace," I said, and we stopped. We pressed against each other, three points of pressure becoming one shape. Nev's outline hard yellow. Mine hard yellow. Harko's still dimmed, like the system was losing his signal.

The wave passed. The pressure eased. It wasn't gone this time, just lighter. Harko's outline was a darker shade of gray. Nev's was yellow. I couldn't see my own.

[Proximity exit: 40 m.]

The Integration was announcing what I'd already felt in the passing of the wave. The surface boundary of the rift the bubbles were flowing toward was close. But the bubbles were more like froth now. The froth could show me the path.

We moved between waves. Three steps, then brace. Three steps. Brace. The cycle was shorter each time. I counted thirty-one seconds, then twenty-three.

Individual bubbles disappeared, flowing past faster than I could follow. Some lasted seconds. Others flashed and dissolved in a flourish of teal-turning-cyan. The cascade of colors echoing the static I had seen in my overlay hours ago.

Harko stumbled twice. We caught him both times. His breath was shallow now. Each pulse left him visibly weaker. His darkening silhouette in my overlay agreed with my assessment.

I felt it before I saw it, deep within my chest. A build up of pressure that had no visible source. I sensed a giant bubble hurtling our direction, but saw nothing. I turned, trying to track the approach. Three seconds, maybe.

"Wall," I said.

Nev's eyes met mine. She didn't ask what kind.

She turned inward, bracing her hands around Harko's shoulders. That's when I saw it. A wave of pressure visibly forcing the froth of bubbles at us, denser than anything we'd weathered, pushing from one direction only. The cyan and teal foam shivered with the vibration ringing my jaw, forming into a wall, charging us at speed. Two seconds.

It would pummel Nev's back. She would take the brunt of the force. I could brace her over Harko's shoulders, possibly saving him, but doing nothing to help her. The geometry of the rift ignored our wants. One second.

I moved before it became a choice. I'd chosen before I had to.

"Kes!"

I was facing the wall when it hit. My arms braced, willing the wave to break against them. It was pressure greater than any we'd faced. More than pressure. The scream of static pounded my ears. The vibrations of its passage made my muscles twitch and my legs shift unsteadily.

The wave broke, not on me, but in me. The static at the back of my jaw was a crash of cymbals ringing in my skull. The vibration ran through my bones. My arms, braced before me, slammed back and inward, drawn rather than pressed. The wave passed through me, thinning my thoughts, buffeting consciousness.

My overlay flared white. Numbers and lines flashed disjointedly. Another flare of white. Screaming pain in my ears. Eyes unreliable. Arms numb.

I was still standing.

Standing.

The second fact took longer to realize. I was holding the place still. Not standing inside it, holding it. Being it. The wave was passing, not breaking and sweeping Nev and Harko away in turbulence. I had met it and beaten it.

The ache in the back of my jaw eased. The clash and fury in my ears subsided. Feeling returned to my fingers and arms. The overlay cleared, resuming its placid cyan visage.

[HP: 94% — SP: 89%][Signal: 5. Degraded.][Frame: 5. Degraded.][Drive: 6. Degraded.]

Even as I watched, as the image settled, Drive 7 flashed.

It should have been worse than this. Flux 14 inside a Class 5 rift should have been beyond survivable.

[Flux: 14 → 16. Class 5 surge absorption recorded.][Profile reclassified: high affinity.][Signal, Frame, Drive, Echo: reduced. Functional. Recovery advised.]

I'd absorbed it.

The system had named me. High affinity. Quite a jump from flagged.

Had it known? Was it just waiting to see what I did with it?

I turned to look at my friends, at Nev.

She was looking at me. Not the cafeteria look, this was a new one. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was slightly opened. She was completely still, grounded and immovable, the way she was when she knew she was right and no one would change her mind.

Our eyes met. She took a half-step, turning toward me fully. Stopped.

What did she see?

Did I want to know? Harko was on the ground, still breathing, eyes closed. In the overlay, the gray had a hint of yellow in it.

Behind them, past Nev's shoulder, a seam of cyan-to-teal opened in the air. Quiet, pure, like the sand of a beach as the tide receded.

Nev's eyes shifted to it, then back to mine.

"Let's go," I said.

The rift was counting something. I almost knew what.

The intervals had been getting shorter. The surge had hit at eleven. Before that, thirteen. Before that, twenty-three. The numbers had a shape I recognized.

Primes.

As soon as I thought it, I knew I was right. I could feel it was correct. The next wave would be at seven, then five, three, two. I didn't want to think about what happened when the rift ran out of primes.

Negative primes? Nothing good could come from that here.

Nev had Harko over her shoulder again. I had both packs. We moved.

Forty meters became thirty. The rift didn't fight us the way it had on the way in. The bubbles had thinned past froth, leaving wide quiet stretches where the air wasn't quite anything. The gateway was where I'd seen it open. A seam that wasn't a seam, geometry that contradicted itself.

Seven seconds since the surge. The wave came on schedule. I felt it before it arrived.

I braced. Nev braced over Harko. The wave passed through us, less violent than the surge, more surgical, threading the bubbles instead of breaking against them. I kept us still through it, and still wasn't the word for what I was doing. I was holding the place still around us. The way I had at the wall, but smaller, quieter. Not holding off death, just holding a pocket where my friends could move through without shattering.

Nev's outline held its magenta. Harko's gray didn't deepen.

The pocket was holding.

The first gap was visible. A geometry inside the air, clean-edged, asking to be entered. I didn't know if Nev could see it. I didn't ask. I stepped into it.

"With me," I said, and she came.

Inside the gap was a kind of corridor that didn't exist outside of itself. We took four steps, and at the third I knew we needed to twist right. I turned. Nev pivoted with me before my hand found her arm. The geometry let us through.

Five seconds. The next wave was already arriving. I held the place still longer than I had during the seven. The wave broke gentler this time. Or maybe I'd gotten better at it.

The second gap was waiting. The space between the gaps was a held breath. I stepped first. Nev stepped after, slightly to my left, where I would have asked her to step if I'd had time to ask. I hadn't asked. She'd known.

I trusted that more than anything I'd done.

Three seconds.

The third gap should have been ahead of me. It wasn't.

The geometry was… gone. No, washed away, covered in the foam swirling around us. Moved, hidden. I twisted my head. Nothing.

Don't panic.

I closed my eyes. I exhaled, slowly, deliberate.

The path is there. Just see it.

I opened my eyes. It was there, more than ninety degrees from where it had been. Whether found or placed, I didn't know. At the moment, I didn't care which. I turned us back the way we'd come, pivoting to where I knew the path was.

Two seconds.

I squeezed Nev's arm. She stepped. I followed after.

The boundary was a seam of cyan-edged-teal, the same colors that had greeted us. More terrible from this side, now that we knew what it held.

We crossed.

The moonlit night returned. Hard cut. One step inside the rift, one step in the forest, no liminal space between. Cool air. The smell of pine. Nev's breathing audible for the first time in minutes.

She kept walking. I walked with her. Ten meters. Twenty. Forty.

We stopped at fifty.

I looked back. The rift was gone.

No detonation. No concordance merge. The forest held its quiet the way forest quiets did, with crickets and a distant owl and the soft hush of leaves moving against each other. Eight kilometers in any direction, nothing was flattened. The town was where it had been. We had not unmade it.

Nev set Harko down in the grass. He groaned, mumbled something I didn't catch, and his head fell to one side. His outline was still gray, but the yellow returning to it was brighter than it had been inside the rift. He'd recover, slowly.

I watched her hands first. She wiped them on her pants. The motion was practiced, mundane, like she was wiping flour off them after baking. The disconnect between the action and what we'd just walked out of was the first thing that felt funny.

Then I looked at her.

Her outline read differently. I didn't have a word for the difference. She'd been magenta the whole time we'd been inside, holding solid through every wave. Now there was something else inside the magenta, deeper, richer. A density that hadn't been there before. Her aura had been drawn with a finer pen. I didn't ask my overlay about it. My overlay had been quiet for a while.

She was looking at me.

Whatever she had seen me do, she wasn't going to ask me about it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe never. Like Harko, she didn't need to ask or say. Her look was so familiar, yet so different in meaning. Her eyes pointed things out without giving them voice; the cafeteria, the look in Finley's, a glance in the rift. I knew what she had been saying now, even when I'd been too embarrassed to return the look.

She knew, too. Whatever it was I'd decided when I moved in front of her, she had seen it. She didn't look away.

Her mouth softened at one corner. Almost, but not quite, a smile. Like she was memorizing something to think about later, a note, a thought.

Harko mumbled again. A name, I thought. Maybe his own.

Nev knelt beside him, one hand pressed to his shoulder. She looked back up at me.

"Let's get him home," she said.