[Mission in 00:55:59]
Less than an hour.
I sat on my bed and looked at the number and thought about the plain. The place I had spent twenty years learning to survive. The place I had crossed bleeding and half dead. The place the system had pulled me through on two percent charge with infected teeth in my neck.
And now I was going back. With a government escort and a team of students who thought adventure was a personality.
Vapour sat on his bed across the room, quiet. No endless chatter, no jokes. Just the soft rustle of him pretending to organize his things. The silence felt heavier than his usual noise—like respect, or maybe the first time he'd realized some things couldn't be talked away.
I looked around the room. I had nothing to pack. I had arrived inside these walls with one torn set of clothes and nothing else. Everything I had accumulated since the life layer lived in other people.
