Canada from the air was enormous in a way that didn't seem real.
Not city-enormous. Just — land. Continuous, unbroken, stretching in every direction with nothing interrupting it. Forest and rock and the occasional frozen lake catching the early light like a mirror dropped in the middle of nowhere. Yuki had both hands on the window.
"It just keeps going," she said.
"Second largest country in the world."
"There's nothing in it!"
"There's a lot in it. It's just spread out."
She turned from the window. "In Tokyo everything is on top of everything else. Here it's just—" she gestured at the endless nothing outside, "—this."
"Different approach to space."
"Your apartment was four hundred square feet."
"Our apartment."
"Our apartment," she corrected, and smiled briefly. "And now we have the penthouse. And now we're over Canada which is apparently infinite." She looked back at the window. "The world is very large."
"You've been to Japan, Germany, Egypt, Brazil, and now Canada," he said. "In about three months."
She looked at him. "Is that a lot?"
"Most people don't do that in a lifetime."
She considered this with the expression she had when something landed that she hadn't expected. Then she grabbed his arm with both hands and leaned into him. "Good thing I have you then."
"I'm the reason you're in a helicopter drop zone above Canadian wilderness."
"That's what I said," she said cheerfully, and went back to the window.
The helicopter was loud and cold and Yuki found it completely fascinating.
She had her face almost against the window the entire descent, watching the forest come up — enormous trees, dense, the kind of growth that had been there longer than most cities. The gate was visible from the air: a black circle in a clearing, incongruous, like a hole punched through the world.
The pilot set them down in the nearest clearing, a quarter kilometre out.
They stepped into Canadian November.
Yuki inhaled sharply. "It's—"
"Cold," he said.
"Very cold." She pulled her white coat tighter. Then she looked at the forest around them — the scale of it, trees going up and up with no ceiling, the specific silence of wilderness that had no human noise in it anywhere. "Oh," she said quietly.
He looked at her face.
She was doing the thing she did with cathedrals and sky and things that were larger than expected — that complete focused look, taking it all in.
"It's very quiet," she said.
"No city under it," he said.
"I've never heard nothing before." She turned slowly, looking up through the trees. "In Tokyo there's always something. Even at 3 AM there's something." She stopped turning and looked at him. "Do you hear it?"
"The nothing?"
"Yes."
He listened. Wind in the trees. Their own breathing. The distant settling of the helicopter cooling behind them. Nothing else in any direction.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him with the bright expression. "I like it."
"We have a gate."
"I know." She climbed onto his back, her new white coat rustling, white scarf going over both of them. "Lead the way."
Floor 67 was a forest interior.
Same trees, same scale — the floor had used the environment outside the gate as its template. Dense, dark between the trunks, visibility poor. The contacts were spread through the canopy rather than the ground, which he hadn't encountered before.
"Above us," Yuki said immediately. Her ability was already spreading, moving through the trees, and he could feel the quality of it — wider here, the forest conducting it differently from stone or water. "Twelve contacts. All elevated. They're using the canopy like a formation grid."
"Coordinated drops," he said. "They'll come down simultaneously."
"Can you go up instead of waiting for them?"
"Yes." He looked at the canopy. Fifty feet up, maybe more. "Hold on."
"Always," she said, and tightened her grip.
Flash Step — vertical.
They hit the canopy level in under a second and he was already moving between the trunks before the contacts registered the intrusion into their layer. Up here the formation was visible — twelve of them distributed in a wide circle, the coordination clear.
He went through the circle from the inside out.
Moon Slash worked differently at this range — closer quarters between the trunks, he kept the output tight and precise rather than wide. Yuki directed him left and right and above with the calm efficiency she'd developed over months of this, and he followed her calls the way he followed Detection, trusting them completely.
Eight minutes.
The gate closed below them and they dropped back to the forest floor, the white coats somehow still white despite everything, which continued to be remarkable.
The fog wall was near the gate's former position — already fading now that the floor was cleared, but still visible, still solid.
She touched it.
The white room. The figure. The voice.
"Origin sequence confirmed. Wilderness instance. Fourteen remain active."
Gone.
Yuki stood in the quiet forest and looked at the space where the room had been.
"Fourteen," she said.
"Fourteen," he said.
A beat of silence. Just the forest around them, enormous and unhurried.
She turned and kissed him — quick and warm, face tipped up, breath visible in the cold air. He caught her face and kissed her back properly and she made a muffled surprised sound and then leaned into it, her cold hands on his jaw.
When she pulled back her nose was red from the cold.
He looked at it.
"Don't," she said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to look at it."
"I was looking at your face—"
"My cold face with my cold nose—"
He kissed the cold nose.
She went completely still.
Then she buried her face in his chest and said nothing for several seconds while he stood in the Canadian forest with his arms around her and said nothing either because he'd won that one comprehensively.
"That was unfair," she said, into his coat.
"Ready for Vancouver?" he said.
She pulled back, pointed at him, opened her mouth, closed it. Turned and started walking toward the helicopter.
He followed.
Vancouver was a different world from the wilderness.
City on the water — mountains behind it, the harbour enormous, the gate sitting in the middle of it visible from the shore, a black circle on the water's surface with boats diverted in a wide arc around the cordon perimeter. The pull radius on open water was different from land — extended further, the water conducting it outward.
The harbour officials had a boat waiting.
Yuki looked at it. Looked at the water. Looked at the gate three hundred metres out.
"Can we just walk on the water," she said.
He looked at her.
"Your Flash Step works on any surface," she said. "The water would hold for the contact time, wouldn't it?"
He considered it. "Yes."
"And my ability carries further on open water." She looked at the harbour. "We'd have better range and speed without the boat."
The harbour official opened his mouth.
Kairo stepped off the dock.
His foot hit the water surface and held — the surface tension, the speed, exactly as it worked in floor environments. Yuki shifted her weight on his back and her ability spread outward across the harbour surface in a wide silent ring, moving faster than anything, and from where they stood he could already feel the contacts inside the gate responding to the suppression.
He ran.
Water under his feet, the gate coming up fast, Vancouver behind them and mountains behind that, and Yuki on his back with her ability running at full spread and both of them in white coats on the dark water and he thought distantly that this would absolutely be filmed by every person on the harbour front.
The gate opened around them.
Floor 71 was open ocean — vast simulated water, grey sky, swells moving slow and heavy. The contacts were below the surface. Large, fast, the kind that used depth as cover.
"Six below," Yuki said. "Deep. They'll surface to strike."
"I'll go down to them."
"The water—"
"I've been in floor water before." He looked down at the surface. "Direction?"
She pointed — two o'clock, forty metres, the slight disturbance below the surface that her ability had clocked before his eyes could.
He went in.
Cold. Immediate and total. But the body worked — the floor's water was environmental, not real, and the same logic that let him stand on it let him move through it. Moon Slash underwater was a different thing entirely — the energy spread outward in a sphere rather than a crescent, the water conducting it.
Four contacts in the first pass.
He came back up. Yuki was above on the surface, her ability still spreading, and she pointed immediately — behind, ten metres.
Two more. Done.
The gate closed.
He came back up through the surface and the Vancouver harbour materialised around them — the city, the mountains, the boat full of officials who had watched two people run across the water into a gate and come back out.
Yuki pushed wet hair out of her face.
"You're soaked," she said.
"Observed."
"The coat—"
"It's fine."
"It's not fine, it's dripping—" She pulled at the collar, assessing damage with the focus of someone who had opinions about coats. "We need to get you dry."
"We need to check for the node," he said.
"You're dripping on the boat—"
"Yuki."
"Fine." She turned. The fog wall was already visible — rising from the water's surface, denser than the surrounding air, solid where it shouldn't be.
She reached out and touched it.
The white room. The figure. The voice.
"Origin sequence confirmed. Harbour instance. Thirteen remain active."
Gone.
The water was flat around them. The mountains sat behind Vancouver in their permanent indifferent way. Thirteen nodes. Two down today. The synchronisation file would move — she could feel it, the specific internal shift that came after a confirmation.
She looked at Kairo.
He was dripping steadily onto the boat's deck, coat dark with harbour water, and he was looking at her with the expression he'd had since the Canadian forest kiss — the unguarded one, running warm and constant.
"Thirteen," she said.
"Thirteen," he said.
She crossed to him and adjusted his soaking scarf with both hands — completely unnecessary, it was wet through, adjusting it did nothing — and he watched her do it with the expression of someone who had stopped finding this unreasonable and had started finding it just hers.
"We're going to need a dryer," she said.
"We're going to need a flight home," he said.
"Both," she said, and looked up at him. "Good day."
"Two nodes," he said. "Yes."
She smiled — the full one. "Good day," she said again, softer, and he pulled her in by the back of her wet coat and kissed her right there on the harbour boat with the Vancouver mountains behind them and the officials very carefully watching the water.
Thirteen remaining.
They were moving.