The gate was smaller than he had expected.

  Not in its physical dimensions — it was large enough, a structure of clean lines and deliberate engineering, built to do exactly what it was built to do and nothing more. Small in the sense that the space it occupied felt insufficient for what it was about to contain. He stood at the threshold and looked at it and thought: this is the last thing I will see of this place. He did not know why that thought arrived with such certainty. It simply did.

  The scientist at station three-from-right was still watching him.

  He was aware of it the way he was aware of the Nexus Seal on his wrist — as a presence that registered without requiring his active attention. He did not look at her. He stood at the threshold of the gate and he breathed and he let the awareness sit in its file and he looked at the gate.

  The speaker above him activated.

  Survivor 9,900. Please proceed to gate lock.

  He stepped in.

  The gate lock was a chamber — narrow, just wide enough for a person, the walls closer than walls usually were. The mechanism engaged behind him with a sound that was more felt than heard, a deep structural click that travelled up through his feet and into his spine. Locked. He was in and he was locked and in ninety seconds he would be somewhere else entirely.

  He stood still.

  The display on the inner wall began its count. Ninety. Eighty-nine. Eighty-eight.

  He noticed, in the particular quality of silence inside the chamber, that something in him was not quiet. Not anxiety — he had filed anxiety and knew its texture, the tightening across the shoulders, the change in the quality of attention. This was different. Something sitting deeper than thought, in a register that did not have a name yet. Something that had been there, he understood now, since before the bus. Since before he could locate the beginning of himself. A presence that was cracked and incomplete and inert, like a room he had walked past a thousand times and never opened, and only now, standing in the quiet of the gate, noticed the door.

  He did not know what it was.

  He filed it. He looked at the display. Seventy-one.

  Outside the chamber, through the narrow window set into the gate wall, he could see the transfer bay. Empty now except for the twelve scientists at their stations. The vast space that had held ten thousand people reduced to this: twelve people, their terminals, the hum of systems running their final sequence. He had watched nine thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine people go through gates that looked like this one from the outside and he had never been able to see what it looked like from the inside.

  From the inside it looked like the last sixty seconds before everything changed.

  Sixty-three.

  He looked at the display. He looked at the window. He looked at his hands and at the Nexus Seal pulsing on his wrist and he said, quietly, to no one, because there was no one:

  “Ninety seconds is a strange amount of time to be given.”

  He heard himself say it. He had not decided to say it. It had simply arrived in the air, the observation completing itself outside of him rather than inside, and he looked at the space where the words had gone and felt, briefly, that this was not the first time he had done that. Said things to rooms that contained no one. Narrated what he saw to an audience that was not there. It felt like a habit from a life he could not access — something worn smooth by repetition, the groove of it still present even though the reason for it was gone.

  He filed this too.

  Fifty.

  The tremor arrived without warning.

  Not the deep vertical pulse he had felt on the street when the ground moved — that had been the earth, something enormous happening from below. This was different. This was the ship. A lateral shudder that travelled through the structure of the chamber from somewhere far above him, a sound accompanying it that was wrong in the specific way sounds are wrong when the thing making them was not built to make them. Metal under a stress it was not designed for.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Then the alarms.

  He could hear them through the chamber wall — not loud, muffled by the gate structure, but present and continuous and multiplying. Through the narrow window he saw the transfer bay change. The twelve scientists were no longer at their stations in the way scientists stand at stations when the work is proceeding. They were moving — between terminals, toward each other, voices he could not hear through the chamber wall but could read in the shapes their mouths made and in the speed of their bodies. Numbers were being called. Systems were being checked. The particular controlled urgency of people who understood exactly what was happening and had no solution for it was visible even through glass, even at this distance.

  The most brilliant minds humanity had selected were completely lost.

  He straightened. The motion came before the thought — spine aligning, shoulders settling, the body deciding on its own that whatever was happening would be met upright. He had nowhere to go. He was locked in. He could not help, could not reach any of them, could not do anything except stand in a chamber that was counting down and watch through a window as the ship came apart around the people who had stayed so everyone else could leave.

  Thirty-seven.

  A second tremor. Harder. The chamber shuddered and the display flickered and something in the ceiling of the bay outside — a panel, a section of infrastructure — gave way and fell and the scientists nearest it moved without stopping what they were doing, the automatic movement of people who had exceeded the threshold where individual dangers registered as individual dangers.

  He looked for Director Vance.

  He did not know why he looked for him specifically. He simply did — the same way he had found his section in the boarding hall, the same way he had located the anomaly station among the twelve terminals after an hour of watching. His eyes moved through the chaos with the specific efficiency of a mind that had been doing this its entire life, and they found what he was looking for.

  Vance was at the far end of the bay.

  He was not running. He was not at a terminal. He was standing in the open space of the bay between the stations and the gates and he was looking, with the same deliberate patience he had used to wait for the hall’s silence during the announcement, at the gate. At the window. At him.

  Three seconds.

  Then Vance straightened.

  Not a reaction. A decision. The spine aligning, the shoulders settling, the specific deliberateness of a person choosing, in the middle of everything falling apart, to meet what remained with their full height. He had seen this gesture before — the first morning, on the platform, before the announcement. He understood now that it was not a gesture of confidence. It was a gesture of intention. The body saying: I am still here. I am still doing this. Whatever comes next, I am facing it standing up.

  Vance’s mouth moved. The chamber walls took the sound. But he read it — the way he had been reading things without knowing how all morning, the pattern of it arriving before the understanding of it.

  “Live on. Avenge us. Find the source of this — find out what happened here and tell the whole story at our graves.”

  A beat. Something moved across Vance’s face — not a smile, the precursor to one, the expression of a man who had just thought of something and was deciding whether the moment was appropriate and had concluded that appropriateness was a concern for circumstances that no longer applied.

  “Although —”

  He glanced at the ship coming apart around them. At the void beginning to show through a section of the far wall. At the complete absence of anywhere a grave could be placed.

  “We are going to explode in space. So. The graveyard situation is somewhat unclear.”

  From the far side of the bay, at a terminal, still typing, without looking up:

  “The gender preference field has been saved to the main database. Whatever retrieves it will know we thought of everything.”

  Vance turned toward Zhao’s direction for exactly one second. Then back to the gate.

  “You heard the man. Go.”

  The display read four.

  He looked at Director Helius Vance standing straight in a bay that was breaking apart around him. He looked at the others at their stations — each of them still there, still working, still doing the thing they had stayed to do. A hundred people who had chosen this. Who had known, when they volunteered, that the gate operation was a permanent post. Who had stayed so that nine thousand nine hundred people could leave.

  He wanted to say something. He did not have time and he did not have words and the gate mechanism engaged with a sound that moved through him like the ground pulse had moved through him on the street, except this time it was not the earth ending.

  It was him beginning.

  Three. Two. One.

  The gate pulled.

  His last image: Vance standing straight. The ship fracturing around people who had not moved from their stations. The void where the wall had been, spreading. And at the moment the gate took him, through the window, through the chaos, the scientist at station three-from-right looking at the place he had been standing with an expression that was not grief and was not relief and held too many things for a single word — an expression he recognised, somehow, in the way he recognised the reach and the straightening and the cataloguing, as something that had happened before. As something that had always been going to happen.

  Then the gate closed.

  Then the light.

  Then nothing.

  End of Chapter 8