The shuttle Odyssey rumbled—not with sound, but with the cold, bone-deep vibration of something brushing against the hull. Subtle. Almost nothing.
Reed Auster felt it through his seat. He sat in the back row, pressed to the bulkhead window, watching the gas giant Vireos IX swell in the distance—a slow-turning globe of amber and stormlight.
Something was wrong. The spacebus shouldn't be vibrating.
"Anyone else feel that?" Reed asked, his voice barely rising above the cabin's ambient buzz. Nineteen other students from the 46th graduating class of Sector 43's 2nd High School were packed shoulder to shoulder, half already bored, the rest glued to their devices.
"What's wrong, Reed?" Mr. Harrow shouted from the front, his voice tight with irritation.
"I feel like… like we struck something."
"Come on, Reed. We've got no time for your nonsense. Sit down."
Reed sighed and sank back into his seat. Arguing was pointless. He needed Harrow's recommendation for the Government Workers' College in Sector 23, and this was his final high school field trip before the Interplanetary Scholastic Competence Exams (ISCE). He didn't want to spoil what could be a memorable experience.
The students hailed from New Florida, a massive US-flagged space station in the Lagrange Corridor. They were eight hours out, en route to Dracaxyl, a barren mini-planet that was once the first copper mine in the corridor—the very reason New Florida was built. Now, its resources depleted by American and Chinese corporations, Dracaxyl was a husk, home only to two small tourist camps for history buffs.
For a school from Sector 43—the station's grimy, forgotten underbelly—a trip like this was practically a miracle. Mr. Harrow considered himself incredibly fortunate. Securing it had been an uphill battle against the Central Education Office, which held the purse strings and funneled the vast majority of its funding to the elite schools in the primary sectors. The 2nd High School of Sector 43 was a rounding error in their budget, an afterthought. Honestly, Harrow's "good fortune" had less to do with luck and more to do with a discreetly transferred bundle of credits to a mid-level functionary who suddenly saw the educational merit in letting the hood rats see a real planet.
Life on New Florida was governed by the Articles of Orbital Governance, ratified when the station received its US colonial charter. In theory, all sectors were equal, autonomous municipal units with their own councils, schools, and chiefs. In practice, a rigid caste system had emerged.
The primary sectors, 1 through 14, formed the station's spine, enjoying direct access to power, clean water, and solar-shielded quarters. This was the domain of administrators, executives, and defense contractors. Their children attended elite academies with pipelines to the galaxy's top universities. Their neighborhoods boasted polished steel promenades, hydroponic parks, and streets that smelled of lemon-scented vent filters.
By stark contrast, Sector 43, at the far edge of the lower ring, was another world entirely. It was home to the technicians, welders, and pipe runners—the people who kept the station alive but weren't invited to the meetings. Here, the lighting flickered, the air tasted of ozone and metal, and reliable water pressure was a myth. Mold crept along bulkhead seams, and when the sewage systems backed up, the stench lingered for days. This disparity was by design, a legacy of Earth-style federalism where each sector funded its services through local taxes. It was a feedback loop of inequality baked into the walls.
For the kids of Sector 43, education was the only escape hatch. Everything hinged on the Middle School Leaving Exams (MSLE), which determined which of the three Sector 43 high schools students would attend.
The 1st High School, for science and engineering, was the golden ladder, taking those who scored in the 85th percentile or higher. Its graduates, after excelling in the ISCE-Science Track and at university, went on to research posts at Mars or corporate fellowships in the Central Bay.
The 2nd High School—Reed's school—was for arts and humanities, admitting those who scored in the 70th to 84th percentile. It offered a narrower, more challenging path. While the track was respected in theory, it was rarely celebrated. The few who excelled on the ISCE-Arts Track might land a public-sector job: a clerkship, a data analyst position, or, for the truly exceptional, a slot in the Legislature. A significant number, however, never made it past graduation, failing the exams and drifting into military service, technician retraining, or worse.
Then there was the 3rd High School, a struggling, underfunded vocational school that became a dumping ground for everyone else. It was known less for its curriculum and more for its disciplinary issues.
A moment after Reed sat down, the vibration returned. A single, overlooked maintenance flaw from their last budget-friendly check-up—a screw on a hydraulic fluid line for the navigational surfaces, left a quarter-turn too loose—finally gave way. The shuttle gave a sickening lurch as the screw shot out. Pressurized fluid vented into the void with a silent, final scream. On the command console, every steering indicator flatlined. They had no control. The ship was a coffin, waiting for an undertaker.
Lyla Chen, who always thought rules were for other people, hadn't bothered with her seatbelt. She was flung from her chair, a ragdoll in the sudden chaos. Her trajectory was cruelly perfect. Her head connected with the thick bulkhead window with a wet, explosive thump that was less a sound and more a feeling—a shockwave felt through the deck plates. A starburst of crimson sprayed across the viewport, the droplets and brain matter freezing instantly into a delicate, bloody frost against the black. Lyla's body, boneless and empty, slid to the floor, leaving a grotesque smear painting the window to the void. One of her shoes had come off, and it rocked gently back and forth in the zero-g before settling. Her eyes were still open, staring with placid surprise at the ceiling, a single trickle of blood escaping her nose to hang in the air like a ruby teardrop.
Before the first scream could fully form in anyone's throat, the consequences of Harrow's shortcut manifested. Their uncontrolled drift, a direct result of deviating from the safety of Intergalactic Highway LG123XY2, carried them directly into the sparse meteoroid stream he had gambled on. What should have been harmless pings became a barrage of cosmic fists. The sound was deafening, a relentless, metallic hammering as if they were trapped inside a drum being beaten by a giant. Each impact was a body blow, shaking the shuttle to its core. A rock the size of a fist punched through the outer hull with a violent shriek of tearing metal, shredding a bundle of power conduits in a blinding flash of sparks. The main lights died, plunging them into absolute, terrifying blackness for a heartbeat before the emergency system kicked in, bathing the scene of carnage in a ghastly, pulsing red glow.
"Suits! Emergency suits!" Harrow shrieked, his voice cracking, the sound of a man watching his own damnation unfold.
Chaos erupted. The aisle became a panicked crush. A writhing mass of bodies. They fought for the lockers, no longer classmates, just obstacles. Francesco tripped, and Joseph and Margaretta trampled him, their boots sinking into his back without a second glance. Reed saw a Jennifer, her face a mask of tears, get her helmet on backwards, her muffled screams of confusion turning to desperate, choked sobs as she clawed at the release she couldn't find. Joseph managed to get his suit on but fumbled the oxygen connection, his gasps for air turning into a silent, wide-eyed convulsion, his face turning a deep, horrifying shade of purple.
Reed, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, pulled up the nav-data on his visor. The map confirmed the terrifying truth: their icon was a lone, crippled spark, drifting helplessly toward a region colored in blood-red. UNSTABLE FIELD – FORMER RIFT EXPERIMENT SITE 7. TRAVEL PROHIBITED.
Riftzones. Cosmic scar tissue from failed teleportation experiments. Wounds that never healed, birthing spontaneous, unpredictable portals into… somewhere else. A place from which nothing ever returned.
"Mr. Harrow!" Reed screamed, his voice tinny inside his hastily sealed helmet. "We're heading for the rift field!"
The teacher's face, illuminated by the dying red glow, was a frozen portrait of realization. His mistake. His cheap shortcut. His bribe. All of it had led to this.
Through the cracked, blood-frosted window, past Lyla's still form, Reed saw reality begin to tear itself apart. The stars didn't streak; their light began to unspool like thread from a ripped tapestry. The blackness between them seemed to tear loose, revealing something raw and wrong underneath. Vireos IX began to curdle, its colors running together in a nauseating swirl as if the universe itself was having a stroke. A pressure, immense and dreadful, clamped down on the shuttle.
The ship began to stretch. The sensation was a deep, cellular violation. Reed felt the very idea of his own body come loose. The distance between his hand and his elbow felt arbitrary, a number that could be changed. The integrity of his own skin felt like a suggestion, not a fact. It was the physical sensation of going insane. A low hum vibrated through his skull, a note of pure wrongness that threatened to tear his sanity apart, a sound that promised dissolution.
Then came the scream. It wasn't a scream of fear, but of pure, unadulterated agony. Marco Diaz, whose parents had gone into crippling debt for his state-of-the-art optical and neural implants—a desperate gamble to cheat his way into the 1st school that had failed anyway—was convulsing in his seat. The spatial distortion was playing hell with his cybernetics, turning his own enhancements into instruments of torture. Under the skin of his temple, something sharp and metallic was pushing out, tenting the flesh like a tent pole under a tarp. His eyes, wide with a horror beyond comprehension, fixed on Reed, pleading.
A spike of polished chrome, the anchor of his neural link, burst from his forehead in a wet spray of blood and brain matter that splattered across the seat in front of him. It was followed by another, a silver needle tearing through his cheek with a sound like ripping canvas, hooking his lip and pulling it back in a grotesque, permanent snarl. The implants, designed to integrate with his body, were now rejecting it with murderous, mechanical force, impaling him from the inside out. He made a final, gurgling sound as a data port, a small black rectangle, punched through the back of his neck, severing his spine with a dull, wet snap. His body went limp, a grotesque marionette with strings of flesh and wires, twitching as stray electrical signals fired through his ruined nervous system, his head lolling at an impossible angle.
The students who saw it vomited in their helmets, the hot, acidic stench filling their enclosed spaces. The shuttle, now a tomb of dead metal and fresh horror, was pulled deeper into the shimmering, distorted vortex.