The Split

Three weeks on Nexus and I've stopped counting the days.

Not because I've given up. Because days don't mean anything here. The brown dwarf hangs in the sky like a permanent sunset, and Nexus runs on a 30-hour cycle that my circadian rhythm refuses to accept. I sleep when I'm exhausted. I work when I'm not. Diego does the same, and our schedules have drifted apart like two boats untied from the same dock.

This is what we agreed on. This is the plan. It still feels like a splinter.

Yneth is the oldest being I've ever met.

Not physically — physically, Yneth is a pressurized container about the size of a filing cabinet, hovering at eye level, with a murky interior that occasionally pulses with slow light. The Driftkin don't have bodies the way I understand bodies. They're gaseous, semi-corporeal, patterns of organized matter that persist through sheer stubbornness and an atmospheric composition that doesn't exist naturally on Nexus.

But Yneth has been on Nexus for over two thousand years. Two thousand. They've watched empires rise and crumble on worlds most humans will never know exist. They've recorded gate resonance patterns since before Diego's ancestors built the first stone wall at Ollantaytambo.

And they're furious about the dead gate.

"Unprecedented," Yneth says. Their voice comes through the translation device as a papery whisper — a lossy compression of something that's probably much more nuanced in their native medium. "In all my time on Nexus, a gate has never failed. Dimmed, yes. Fluctuated, yes. But died? Never."