The camera’s red light stared back at her like an accusation.
Vanessa Park tugged her blazer straight and positioned herself so the wind wouldn’t make her look like an idiot on the evening broadcast. Behind her, the gate hung in the air like someone had ripped a hole in the world and walked off without fixing it. Fifty feet of void. Completely black.
Not the standard purple that showed up in FGRA field manuals. Not midnight blue. Black. The kind of black that made you question if you were actually seeing anything or if your brain was just lying to you about the empty space. Like reality had developed a blind spot and forgotten to fill it back in.
Three military floodlights aimed straight at the tear. Every watt hit the threshold and stopped. The light didn’t fade. It didn’t dim. It just ended. Reached the edge and died like something on the other side had swallowed it whole.
"We are live at the Sierra Nevada exclusion zone, where federal authorities have been holding a perimeter around this unclassified gate for approximately seventy-two hours." Vanessa kept her tone level, professional. No emotion. Just facts.
"What was initially classified as a C-rank forest biome training exercise for students from San Nicolas International Hunter Academy has since been reclassified as a Void Gate event. The dimensional seal activated shortly after ten students entered the fracture space. They’re trapped inside. No confirmed extraction point. No communication since entry."
She let that sit for a beat. The wind picked up. The floodlights flickered but didn’t go out.
"Federal gate analysts are calling this one of the first confirmed Void Gate incidents in California’s recorded history. The last documented case was in 2031. Hokkaido, Japan. Fourteen hunters went in. Zero came out."
She turned slightly, letting the camera catch the gate in the background.
"One of the trapped students is Blair Davenport. Eighteen years old. Daughter of Johnathan Davenport. You know the name—CEO of Davenport Industries, sits on the IHC Advisory Council, probably picks which politicians get to pretend they understand gate policy. His office put out a statement this morning through a representative."
She paused long enough for the words to mean something. "Quote: Our hearts and prayers go out to Blair and all the students involved. We are working closely with FGRA officials and the San Nicolas administration to ensure every possible resource is dedicated to their safe return. End quote."
Her tone didn’t shift, but anyone paying attention could read between the lines. Hearts and prayers. From a man who could deploy a Diamond-tier extraction team with one call. Hearts and prayers was the fallback when you’d already run the numbers and decided public grief played better than public action.
"FGRA analysts are saying the dimensional seal could destabilize in three to six hours. If that happens, we’re looking at a potential breach event. That means the gate pressure overloads, the boundary membrane fails, and fracture entities spill into the real world. The last time we had an uncontained breach in California, it left countless civilians dead and Fresno dealing with four hundred million dollars in damage."
She didn’t emphasize the number. Didn’t need to.
"Joining me now is Captain Reina Vasquez, leader of Breach Response Unit One for the Horizon Collective. Her team’s running containment operations here."
The camera panned right.
Reina Vasquez stood with her arms crossed, feet planted, wearing a tactical vest over a compression top that made zero effort to hide the fact that she was built like a professional fighter who’d decided bodybuilding sounded fun.
Twenty-six years old. Five-foot-nine of bronze skin, white hair cropped short on the sides and wild on top, and legs that could probably kick through reinforced concrete if the concrete annoyed her.
The Horizon Collective insignia on her vest caught the floodlight. Her face said she’d rather be hitting something than talking to a camera.
"Captain Vasquez, thank you for joining us."
"Didn’t have much choice. Your producer wouldn’t leave me alone."
"Can you walk us through what the current situation looks like from a tactical standpoint?"
Reina’s jaw flexed twice before she spoke, her eyes fixed somewhere past Vanessa’s shoulder at the gate itself.
"Here’s what happened. Gate sealed seventy-two hours ago with ten first-year academy students inside. Void classification confirmed after six hours when dimensional pressure readings came back with those signature dead zones. No light emission, no energy bleed. Recovery team got to the original coordinates eight hours post-deployment and found empty air. No gate. No residual mana trace. Nothing. Fourteen hours later, this thing materialized here, forty miles south. Gates don’t relocate. This one broke the rule."
"The students inside—have you received any signals?"
"Zero. Telemetry cut the second the seal activated. Standard Void behavior. We expected that part."
Vanessa pushed forward with the question her producers had circled in red during the briefing. The one designed to pull traffic.
"Captain Vasquez, realistically speaking, what are their chances?"
Reina turned her head and looked straight into the camera lens. Not at Vanessa. Not toward the gate behind them. She stared through the glass like she wanted whoever sat watching from home to understand she wouldn’t dress this up.
"Void Gates kill professional teams eighty-nine percent of the time. Licensed hunters with a decade of field experience and equipment most people couldn’t afford if they sold their house. These are academy students. Eighteen, maybe nineteen years old. Still learning which end of a mana blade cuts sharper." Her voice stayed level, clinical even. "Three days sealed inside a Void space with whatever entity population evolved in that dark? I’d tell the families to prepare for funerals."
Vanessa felt her stomach clench despite already knowing the answer. Hearing it spoken into a live broadcast made it real in a way the briefing packet hadn’t.
"But you’re still maintaining containment operations."
"Because there’s an eleven percent chance I’m wrong. And if even one of those kids is still breathing on the other side of that thing, I’m going to be standing right here when they come out." Reina’s arms uncrossed. Her hands settled at her sides, loose and ready. "That’s the job."
Vanessa opened her mouth to ask a follow-up question about evacuation protocols for nearby communities.
The gate changed color.