Silence became a sound.
By day six, it wasn't just the absence of noise. It was pressure. Like static behind the ears, a tension that thickened the air and pressed on your skull. They stopped talking unless necessary. Their words felt wrong in the open air—too loud, too artificial.
Muriel started carrying earplugs. Said it helped her think. Gino kept rubbing his temples. Amiel stared at nothing too long, blinking slowly like her brain was buffering between thoughts.
And some of the TRU techs—god. One of them cracked by noon.
They found him curled under one of the pulse pylons, blood on his face from slamming his head against the rig, trying to make a sound. Screaming himself hoarse. Not because he was in pain, but because he couldn't stand the quiet anymore.
He wasn't the last.
Another tried playing music over their headset. Looped classical, jazz, even synth-pop. None of it helped. After an hour, they threw the headset against a rock and sat in the dirt, crying like a kid who lost their voice in a nightmare.
Rus kept it together. Of course he did.
When he looked over, he sat cross-legged near the comm tent, breathing slow, eyes half-closed. Like he was watching some invisible clock tick behind his eyelids.
"QTE sessions," he thought inwardly. "Every thirty seconds. Grounding exercise. Internal prompts, response timing. Keeps the mind aligned."
He didn't know what the fuck it meant.
It worked, though. While the rest of them felt like they were slipping into cold water, Rus stayed solid. Clear-eyed. Ready.
The rest? Not so much.
By midday, dizziness hit all.
No warnings. No triggers. Just sudden lurches in balance, like the Ridge shifted five degrees sideways and their bodies hadn't caught up. Reed threw up twice. Amiel passed out for twelve seconds. Muriel kept pinching her arm, hard, just to keep her sense of self intact.
Then came the hallucinations.
Subtle at first. Faces in trees. Shapes just outside of your peripheral vision. Shadows that moved the wrong way.
Then worse.
Rus saw his mother. She was standing by the ADR rig, pointing toward the forest. Rus hadn't seen her in years. She had died years ago.
When he blinked, she was gone.
Gino saw his brother. Said he watched him walk through the Ridge like he was just visiting, smiling, oblivious. Then watched him melt into the dirt.
Even Berta flinched once. She didn't say what she saw, but she didn't touch her food the rest of the day.
They tried making noise.
Not just talking, shouting, hammering on crates, banging metal together. One of the TRU researchers fired their pistol into the sky just to hear the gunshot. It echoed once, then stopped halfway.
It wasn't enough.
The silence swallowed everything faster now. Even their own bodies betrayed them. They could hear their blood pumping. Their teeth grinding. Swallowing became deafening. Someone heard their own heartbeat and screamed because they thought it was coming from outside.
They were unraveling.
And the Rift? It hadn't even fully opened yet.
Muriel pulled Rus aside. Her hands shook.
"We're losing the edge. Morale's past tipping point. If TRU hits phase eight before midnight, we might not have a full squad capable of handling evac."
"Are you saying we pull out, Ma'am?" Rus asked.
"No. I'm saying we might not be able to."
That's when Berta finally spoke. Her voice was dry, measured.
"If it opens. If it wants us in. Do we burn it?"
Rus looked over at the ADR. It pulsed faintly now, like a sleeping beast. Its lights were red. Step seven. Arming sequence began an hour ago. Maybe days. Time was dilated here. Final ignition switch locked in glass, waiting for the word.
"Only if TRU confirms it," Rus said.
Berta nodded once.
Didn't say a word after that.
By dusk, the Ridge folded again.
But this time it didn't fold away from them.
It folded toward them.
A slow, deliberate ripple that passed through the air like gravity shifted. And behind it, just behind the shimmer, something moved.
Not a creature. Not yet. A space. A hollowed-out section of reality, like someone had carved a wound into the forest and left it bleeding physics and light.
They watched it for minutes.
Then it pulsed.
Like a heartbeat.
A single, deep thud that shook their teeth and dropped three TRU techs to their knees.
Phase eight. The last staging before detonation.
Kaira looked like she hadn't slept in a week. Her hands hovered over the console like she was afraid to touch it.
"We're seeing full core destabilization. Rift boundary is expanding across local terrain at .5 meters per hour. That gives us…"
She trailed off.
Soren finished it for her. "Four hours before Relay Zero is inside it."
"Can we stop it without the ADR?" Rus asked.
Kaira met my eyes. "No."
"And if we detonate it?"
"Environment will be sterilized. Rift closed. Region lost."
Rus Looked around at the Ridge. At the trees curling inward. At the shimmer still crawling along the treetops.
At his unit—grim-faced, dead-eyed, trying to breathe through the mounting pressure in their skulls.
And he knew.
There wasn't a choice.
Only a delay.
* * *
The next pulse hit like a migraine from God.
No warning. No tremor. Just a wave of pressure rolling through the Ridge, and then the world tilted. Sound warped around them or rather, the lack of it did. Rus felt his stomach lurch, and someone behind him vomited. Muriel clutched her ears, eyes wide. One of the TRU operators, a young guy he didn't know by name, dropped his tablet and fell to the ground, whispering, "It's inside, it's inside, it's inside."
The Ridge groaned.
Not literally, but mentally. Every living person there felt it. Like the world itself sighed through our bones.
TRU confirmed that the the pulses were now on a thirty-minute cycle. Each one stronger than the last. They weren't just energy flares or spatial pressure anymore. They were messages. Probes. Something on the other side was knocking.
And morale didn't plummet, it outright shattered.
The entire area smelled like sweat and ozone. People stopped bothering to clean their gear or check their weapons. Berta's unit stopped joking entirely. No dark humor, no jabs, no tension relief. Just silence. Grim, shell-shocked silence.
Soren started pacing like a caged animal. He muttered to himself. "We shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be here." He wasn't wrong. No one said otherwise.
Muriel sat near the comms box for hours, not transmitting anything—just holding her mic, eyes glassy. She kept repeating the same phrase into a dead channel: "Cyma-One, reporting visual instability… Cyma-One, confirming boundary tension…" Again. And again. Like a ritual.
People were hallucinating without breaks now. One of the TRU security team fired two rounds at a shadow he swore moved through his gear. Nothing was there. No one corrected him.
Rus kept them from breaking down completely.
He walked a loop between all the Cyma members, eyes scanning, posture loose but ready. Calm. Focused. If the silence drove him mad, he didn't show it. His grip on reality came from somewhere internal—like he was running simulations every minute to keep ahead of the madness.
He had been tapping his leg with a rhythm. Three beats. Pause. Three beats. Over and over. Making him remind himself that he existed.
The Rift was growing faster now.
Half a meter per minute. The shimmer was clearly visible across the ridge—an oily veil dragging across the trees. Wherever it touched, reality twisted. Leaves fell upward. Dirt rippled like water. You could see outlines of things, almost creatures, tracing their forms in the folds.
There were two pulses away from full breach.
TRU rushed to finalize the ADR calibration. Kaira's voice broke as she shouted at her team, trying to fix a feedback loop in the ignition core. The radiation meter redlined. The backup cooling rig failed.
Gino finally snapped.
"Why are we doing this? Why the fuck are we here?" He spun toward Berta, red-faced. "This isn't containment. This is suicide. This is watching a tidal wave and hoping the sandbags hold!"
Berta didn't raise her voice. She just said, "We're not here to survive. We're here to close it."
It shut him up. For a while.
Then came the seventh pulse.
It wasn't pressure this time. It was a memory.
Rus can't explain it. He remembered things he'd forgotten, smells from his childhood and another life, voices of people long gone, fear he hadn't felt since a long time ago. Everyone around him stiffened like they were watching their own trauma on loop.
A TRU technician clawed at her face. She screamed, "GET OUT OF MY HEAD," and ran into the forest. Berta ordered no chase.
"We lose more if we follow."
Harsh, but true. She was gone. The Ridge had her now.
Rus sat down cross-legged again. This time for a full fifteen minutes. Rus thought he almost broke. He didn't say anything, didn't move.
They lost three people to disorientation within the next hour. Not dead, just… disconnected. They stopped responding, stopped blinking. Medical personnel declared them unfit for operational duties and locked them in the support skiffs under sedation.
The Ridge was eating them.
The shimmer had reached the outer pylons. That meant 120 meters remained between the Rift and the ADR core. When that closed, they had one final pulse before the device detonated. One last breath.
Rus looked around at the team.
Berta, now seriously, hand resting on her rifle. Muriel was trying to cry but was too dehydrated. Gino was rocking slowly. Amielwas whispering prayers. Rus was still tapping, still counting, trying to remember what a bird sounded like.
They hadn't heard one in days.
Or weeks?
Rus was unsure.
Then by the time the final pulse was due, no one could stand without trembling.
The silence wasn't just around them, it was inside them now. They felt it in their jaw, in the base of their spine. Their heart beating was a noise, and that made it unbearable. The sound of their own swallowing? A violent intrusion.
One of the TRU comms crew started bleeding from the ears and didn't even notice. Another stood with his arms outstretched toward the shimmer, whispering, "I accept you," over and over until he collapsed.
No one was giving orders anymore.
They just waited.
Except Rus.
He was the only one not being hollowed out by the void.
Rus paced between the staging tents and the ADR unit. The device was half-buried in cables, glowing with a soft amber pulse that matched the Rift's rhythm like a heartbeat syncing up with its predator. TRU engineers huddled near it earlier, before they all backed off. Some had stopped speaking entirely. Others had wandered off and never returned.
Rus ran a final check on the terminal, then walked over to Berta. She was staring blankly at the shimmer like it was an approaching god.
"I'm taking it in," he said.
She didn't respond at first. Then, without turning. "Use the drone. That's what it's for."
He nodded.
The drone in question was an old UH delivery model—bulky, not built for subtlety. It had six stabilizer arms and a reinforced chassis meant to carry the ADR's unstable casing through high-interference fields. Rus walked up to it like he was greeting a friend.
The drone didn't respond, obviously, but he patted it anyway.
He loaded the core by hand, working fast, precise, ignoring the flickering lights and distant groans from the Rift. It was close now. You could see structures in it. Shapes. Like a city made from bone and coral, turning in on itself, defying any logic we knew.
Rus activated the drone's manual guidance system.
"It needs someone to walk it in close enough," he said aloud, more to himself than anyone else. "Remote signal breaks down past the shimmer. Gotta hand-hold the nav link."
Someone croaked, "You'll die."
Rus didn't even pause. "Maybe. Doesn't matter. It has to close."
"Tell command, if they still care, that Cyma held."
Rus wanted to say something but there was nothing in him left to say. He just gave a half-salute to the remaining conscious ones and he walked in.
The drone floated beside him, its thrusters humming low and steady. It followed a tether signal from his pack, linked directly to the manual control. The shimmer crackled as they approached, distorting, stretching, warping. Rus stepped through the threshold like he was stepping onto a foreign world.