I’ve broken exactly two things in my life that I genuinely regret.

  The first was my grandmother’s antique teapot when I was nine. Irreplaceable. Ming dynasty. Worth more than my parents’ car. I cried for a week.

  The second was a testing crystal in a Togekka integration facility.

  I didn’t cry about that one.

  Mostly because I was too busy trying not to piss myself while a room full of imperial technicians stared at the shattered remains like I’d just detonated a small bomb made of gemstone and very expensive mistakes.

  “That’s…” The technician trailed off, tablet in hand, looking between me and the glittering debris scattered across the testing bay floor. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got that impression.”

  My voice came out steadier than I felt. Construction work teaches you that—how to sound calm when a beam shifts wrong, how to keep your hands from shaking when you’re forty feet up and the wind picks up. How to pretend everything’s fine when it absolutely isn’t.

  The technician was Togekka. Reptilian. Scales the color of burnished copper, eyes with vertical slits that didn’t blink as much as humans expected them to. He moved with the careful precision of someone who’d done this exact procedure a thousand times and was deeply uncomfortable that it had just failed in a way the manual didn’t cover.

  He pulled out another crystal.

  Larger this time. Denser. The kind rated for B-class candidates—people who could handle moderate portal stress without their internal organs deciding to exit through their pores.

  “Try this one,” he said, not quite making eye contact anymore.

  I looked at the crystal. Then at the debris on the floor. Then at the observation window where I could see shapes moving behind supposedly one-way glass.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

  “Protocol requires confirmation,” he said flatly.

  Right. Protocol.

  I touched it.

  It exploded.

  Same result. Crack. Shatter. Gemstone confetti that cost more than I’d make in six months.

  Someone in the observation booth swore—loud enough I heard it through soundproof glass.

  The room got very, very quiet.

  The kind of quiet that happens when trained professionals realize they’re looking at something the handbook calls “anomalous event requiring escalation.”

  The technician’s hands shook as he reached for the third crystal.

  The one in the sealed case.

  SSS-grade.

  The kind they only pulled out when someone had just broken two in a row and command needed to know whether you were going to be useful or just fail more dramatically.

  It sat in its case like a threat. Larger than the others. Darker. The light didn’t quite reflect off it right—like it was absorbing something the air around it couldn’t hold.

  “I really don’t want to touch that,” I said quietly.

  The technician looked at me. Not unkindly. Just… tired. Like he’d seen this moment before and knew how it ended.

  “Neither do the people who get sent to the worlds it’s rated for,” he said. “But someone has to.”

  Fair point.

  I reached out and touched the crystal.

  This one didn’t break.

  It glowed.

  Bright. Blue-white. The kind of light that makes you squint even when your eyes are closed. Heat poured off it—not burning, but close. Uncomfortable. Wrong.

  My arm went numb to the shoulder.

  Then the light flared brighter, and I felt something inside me—not pain, not exactly, but pressure—like my bones were tuning forks and something had just struck them all at once.

  The glow held for five seconds.

  Ten.

  Fifteen.

  Then it faded, and the crystal went dark, and I was still standing there with my hand on it, breathing too fast, heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to escape.

  The observation window exploded with movement.

  The technician stared at his tablet like it had just called him a liar.

  And I knew—bone-deep, the way you know when a structure’s about to fail—that my life had just stopped being mine.

  Five years ago, the Togekka Empire didn’t invade Earth.

  They didn’t need to.

  They just turned off the sun for five minutes and waited.

  I was twenty-three. Working a construction site in Denver. Framing a high-rise that would never get finished because halfway through the morning, the sky went dark.

  Not clouds. Not eclipse. Just… off.

  Like someone flipped a switch and the star we’d been orbiting for four billion years decided it had better things to do.

  People screamed. Alarms went off. Someone on the third floor started praying in a language I didn’t recognize.

  I just stood there, hammer in hand, staring at a sun that wasn’t there anymore, and thought: Well. That’s new.

  Five minutes later, it came back.

  The light returned. The heat returned. Photosynthesis resumed like it had never stopped.

  And humanity—every government, every military, every person with enough sense to do basic math—surrendered before the Togekka even made formal contact.

  Can’t blame us. Hard to negotiate when the other side controls whether plants grow.

  The integration went smoother than anyone expected.

  Medicine got better. Infrastructure got better. Energy got cleaner. The Empire wasn’t lying about that part. They didn’t need to. When the truth makes you look good, propaganda’s just wasted effort.

  But we were on probation.

  Five years of good behavior. Five years of proving we wouldn’t rebel, wouldn’t try to throw off imperial rule, wouldn’t do something stupid like attempt to build weapons that could actually threaten a civilization that treated star-killing as an opening negotiation tactic.

  We passed.

  Mostly.

  There were incidents. Protests. A few bombings by groups that thought martyrdom would inspire resistance. It didn’t. It just made the Empire tighten security and everyone else more nervous.

  But overall? Humanity folded into the Empire like it had always been there.

  And then came phase two.

  Portal access.

  The program was simple.

  Every citizen over eighteen had to report for biological screening. Walk into a facility. Touch some crystals. See if your body could handle dimensional transit without turning into what the technicians politely called “catastrophic biological incoherence.”

  Most people tested C-class.

  Safe. Stable. Good for low-stress worlds with breathable air and minimal hostile fauna. The kind of place you could homestead if you wanted, or just visit for work contracts. Mining. Agriculture. Basic infrastructure. Low pay, but honest.

  Some tested B-class.

  Better. Riskier. Higher-stress environments. Marginally better compensation. You could make a career out of it if you were smart and didn’t mind living on the edge of civilization.

  A few tested A-class or S-class.

  Rare. Dangerous. The kind of rating that came with signing bonuses and ominous legal disclaimers about “assumption of risk” and “no retrieval guarantees.”

  And then there was SSS-class.

  Point-zero-one percent of the entire tested population across every species in the Empire.

  The kind of person whose body could anchor portals to worlds so violent they would shred everyone else.

  Worlds where the air was toxic. Where the gravity crushed bones. Where the weather operated on principles that made physicists cry.

  Worlds the Empire wanted access to badly enough that they were willing to send someone in and just… see what happened.

  Pioneers, they called us.

  Sacrifices with paperwork, everyone else called us.

  I was apparently one of them.

  Lucky me.

  They didn’t let me leave the facility.

  Not immediately.

  I spent six hours in a holding room—clean, climate-controlled, comfortable enough that it didn’t feel like a cell until you realized the door didn’t have a handle on the inside.

  A medical team came through. Drew blood. Scanned me with devices I didn’t recognize. Asked questions about my health history, my family, my work.

  One of them—a human woman, older, professional—paused when she saw my hands.

  “Construction worker?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How long?”

  “Eight years. Since I was eighteen.”

  She nodded, making a note. “Good. You’ll need that.”

  “Need what?”

  She didn’t answer. Just moved on to the next question.

  Around hour four, they brought food. Real food—not rations. Steak. Vegetables. Bread that tasted like someone had actually baked it instead of extruding it from a tube.

  I ate it anyway. Mostly because I had no idea when I’d get another meal, and partly because spite only gets you so far on an empty stomach.

  Hour six, the door opened, and a Togekka stepped in.

  Older than the technician. Taller. Scales darker—deep green shading to black along the ridges of his spine. He moved like someone who’d earned the right to take up space and didn’t need to prove it.

  “Taylor Smith,” he said. Not a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Valraion. I am an imperial administrator assigned to SSS-class integration.” He settled into the chair across from me with the kind of patience that suggested he had all day and I didn’t. “Do you understand what happened in the testing bay?”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I broke two crystals and didn’t break the third one.”

  “Correct. Do you understand what that means?”

  I leaned back in the chair and looked at him. Really looked. At the way he held himself. At the tablet in his hands that he wasn’t checking. At the door behind him that I knew wouldn’t open if I tried it.

  “It means,” I said slowly, “that I’m fucked.”

  He didn’t smile. Togekka didn’t smile the way humans did. But something in his posture shifted—acknowledgment, maybe. Respect for honesty.

  “Functionally, yes,” he said. “But there are degrees of… fucked. And how you proceed will determine which degree applies to you.”

  “Great. Love a good multiple-choice existential crisis.”

  This time he did make a sound—soft, brief. Not quite a laugh, but close enough.

  “You will be assigned to an SSS-class world,” he continued. “The assignment is not negotiable. The duration is not negotiable. You will remain on that world for a minimum of ten years, possibly fifteen, depending on how long it takes for the portal to stabilize.”

  Ten years.

  Fifteen.

  I felt the number settle into my chest like a stone.

  “And if I say no?” I asked.

  “Then you will be classified as a refusal case. You will not be penalized—the Empire does not punish people for biological compatibility—but you will also not be granted portal access of any kind for the rest of your life. You will remain on Earth. C-class travel privileges revoked. Employment opportunities limited to non-transit sectors.”

  A polite way of saying: trapped.

  “So my options are: go to a death world for ten years, or stay on Earth and never leave.”

  “Correct.”

  I laughed. Once. Sharp and bitter.

  “Hell of a choice.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited. Didn’t push. Didn’t threaten. Just… waited.

  Like he’d done this before. Like he knew how it ended.

  I thought about my apartment. My job. My friends—the few I had left after five years of imperial integration had scattered everyone I knew across three continents.

  I thought about my parents. Dead six years now. Car accident. Random. Pointless.

  I thought about the fact that I had exactly nothing tying me to Earth except inertia and the faint, ridiculous hope that maybe things would get better if I just kept my head down and worked.

  “If I go,” I said quietly, “what do I get?”

  Valraion tapped his tablet. A contract appeared—dense, legal, the kind of document you needed a lawyer to parse and I didn’t have.

  “Full logistical support,” he said. “Supplies. Equipment. A support AI—bonded, restricted class, assigned to you specifically. If you survive the initial deployment and establish a stable presence, you will receive additional supply drops, priority medical support, and compensation calculated at SSS-class rates.”

  “And if I don’t survive?”

  “Then your family—if you have any—will receive a death benefit and a formal apology from the Empress.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I stared at the contract. At the numbers. At the clauses about “assumption of risk” and “no extraction guarantees” and “psychological evaluation waivers.”

  At the one line, buried near the bottom, that said: Pioneer status confers citizenship elevation upon successful stabilization.

  Citizenship elevation.

  That was the carrot.

  C-class citizens stayed on Earth or visited boring worlds under strict contracts.

  SSS-class citizens—if they survived—became something more. Something the Empire valued. Something with actual power.

  Not freedom.

  But leverage.

  “How long do I have to decide?” I asked.

  “You already decided,” Valraion said. “Or you would have said no immediately.”

  Fuck.

  He was right.

  I took the tablet. Read the contract. Signed it.

  My hand didn’t shake.

  That part came later.

  They gave me two weeks.

  Two weeks to settle my affairs. Say goodbye. Pack what little I owned that mattered.

  I sold my apartment. Sold my truck. Donated most of my tools to a crew I used to work with.

  Kept three things: my grandfather’s watch, a photo of my parents, and a pocketknife my dad gave me when I turned sixteen.

  Everything else? Gone.

  I didn’t tell most people where I was going. Didn’t see the point. What was I supposed to say? “Hey, I’m heading to a death world for ten years, maybe fifteen, wish me luck?”

  I told my neighbor. She cried. Gave me a loaf of banana bread she’d baked and made me promise I’d come back.

  I lied and said I would.

  On the last day, I stood in my empty apartment and looked at the walls I’d painted, the floors I’d walked, the window where I used to drink coffee and watch the sunrise.

  And I thought: This is the last time I’ll be here.

  Not might be.

  Will be.

  Even if I survived. Even if I came back.

  This version of me—the one who worked construction, paid rent, lived small—was already gone.

  I locked the door.

  Walked away.

  Didn’t look back.

  The deployment facility was larger than the testing center.

  Cleaner. More organized. The kind of place built by people who understood that logistics were the difference between successful colonization and expensive disasters.

  I reported at 0600. They ran me through medical again. Fitted me for a suit—environmental, adaptive, the kind that could handle vacuum or poison air or crushing pressure depending on what the world threw at me.

  They walked me through my equipment.

  A lot of equipment.

  Vehicles. Tools. Power systems. Fabrication units. Supplies rated for fifteen years of isolated operation.

  A floating crate the size of a semi-truck followed me through the facility, loaded with things I didn’t recognize and a few I did.

  “This is more than I expected,” I said.

  The logistics coordinator—human, older, efficient—nodded. “SSS-class deployments receive full pioneer packages. The Empire doesn’t send people to die. It sends them to succeed. Whether you do is up to you.”

  Fair.

  At 1400, they brought me to the bonding chamber.

  A small room. Sterile. A tablet sat on a pedestal in the center.

  “Your assigned support intelligence,” the coordinator said. “Restricted-class grid walker. You’ll need to bond before deployment.”

  “Bond how?”

  “Blood contact. Press your thumb to the screen. She’ll do the rest.”

  She.

  I pressed my thumb to the screen.

  The tablet flared—brief, bright—and then a voice came through. Thin. Faint. Like someone speaking from very far away.

  “Taylor Smith?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My designation is RIKU. I am your assigned support intelligence. Pleased to meet you.”

  Her voice was… careful. Precise. Not cold, but not warm either. Professional.

  “Likewise,” I said.

  “I have reviewed your file. You are a construction worker. No formal education beyond secondary certification. No prior portal experience. SSS-class designation acquired via biological accident.”

  “That about covers it.”

  “Good. Then we understand each other. You are not qualified for this assignment. Neither am I. We will adapt or we will die. I prefer the former.”

  I laughed despite myself.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Then let us begin.”

  The portal room was massive.

  Three stories tall. The portal itself sat in the center—an arch of metal and crystal, thirty feet high, humming with power that made my teeth ache.

  Valraion stood beside it.

  “Your world assignment has been randomized per SSS-class protocol,” he said. “We do not know what you will find. We do not know if it is survivable. You will have sixty seconds after transit to assess the environment. If it is immediately lethal, retreat through the portal. We will attempt a second assignment.”

  “And if I can’t retreat?”

  “Then you will die quickly. Which is preferable to dying slowly.”

  Jesus Christ.

  He handed me a small device. “Emergency beacon. If you trigger it, we will know you are in distress. We may not be able to help, but we will know.”

  “Comforting.”

  “It is not meant to be comforting. It is meant to be honest.”

  The portal flared.

  Energy poured through the arch, stabilizing, coalescing into a surface that looked like liquid mercury.

  “You have ten minutes before the window closes,” Valraion said. “Do you have any final questions?”

  I thought about it.

  About Earth. About my parents. About the apartment I’d never see again.

  About the fact that I was about to step through a portal into a world that might kill me in the first five seconds.

  “Yeah,” I said. “One question.”

  “Yes?”

  “If I survive this—if I actually pull this off—do I get to pick my next assignment?”

  Valraion’s eyes narrowed. Not anger. Something else.

  “If you survive ten years on an SSS-world and stabilize the portal,” he said slowly, “you will have earned the right to refuse nothing the Empire asks of you. But you will also have earned the right to ask for anything you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “Within reason.”

  I nodded.

  “Good enough.”

  I turned toward the portal.

  RIKU’s voice came through the tablet, quiet and steady.

  “Taylor. For the record—I am glad it is you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are scared. And scared people pay attention.”

  I smiled despite myself.

  “Yeah. I’m paying attention.”

  I stepped through the portal.

  The world dissolved into light.

  And when it reformed—

  Salt.

  Stone.

  Wind that cut like knives.

  An ocean that stretched to the horizon in every direction.

  And nowhere—absolutely nowhere—that looked like home.

  I stood there, soaked, shaking, staring at a world that didn’t care whether I lived or died.

  And I thought:

  All right. Let’s build something.