Blair’s head turned. Those blue eyes found the camera lens, and Vanessa caught something behind the Davenport steel. A girl who’d been handed a load no person should carry. A girl who’d carried it anyway because the alternative was letting everyone else drop.
"We were trapped in a Void Gate," Blair said. Flat. Clinical. The voice of someone reading a coroner’s report. "Classification was wrong. Entity density was wrong. Everything in the briefing was wrong. We fought for three days against evolved fauna. Pack hunters. Mana-saturated arthropods. A dimensional guardian that killed one of our team members."
The clearing went quiet. Even Reina stopped moving.
"One fatality?" Vanessa’s voice dropped.
"Charles Leone. He died in combat with the guardian entity." Blair said the name like she was reading it off a form. No flinch. No hesitation. That told Vanessa more about Blair Davenport’s character than any press release her father’s office had ever produced. "The rest of us survived."
"How did you destroy the core? Reports indicate that Void Gate cores require sustained multi-element assault from A-rank teams at minimum."
Blair’s mouth did something complicated. Not a smile. Not a grimace. Something between the two that Vanessa would replay on footage later and still fail to name.
"I didn’t."
"You didn’t destroy the core?"
Blair raised one hand. The movement cost her. Burns along her forearm stretched with the motion and fresh blood seeped through cracked skin. She pointed behind her, past the medical teams, past the barrier specialists, past Reina Vasquez and her tactical perimeter, toward the gate where the last figures were emerging.
"Ask him."
Vanessa followed Blair’s finger.
Two figures came through the gate together. One was tall, with hair that made Vanessa do an actual double-take. Pink and black stripes falling in tangled waves past her shoulders. Brown skin covered in ash and dried blood. She carried the remnants of what might have been a shell necklace in her free hand, or maybe she was just clutching it like it mattered. She moved with the careful, deliberate steps of someone operating on willpower and spite, and the absolute refusal to let the person she was supporting fall before they reached safety.
The person she was supporting was a young man. Broad-shouldered, maybe six feet tall. His uniform was destroyed. Not damaged. Destroyed. Four parallel gashes ran across his chest from shoulder to hip, like something with claws had tried to open him up and see what was inside.
Burns covered both arms. Raw. Angry. The kind that would need advanced healing to fix without permanent scarring. Blood painted the entire left side of his body in colors human skin was never meant to display. Purples and blacks and reds that said internal bleeding. Damage that should have killed him.
He walked with the boneless shuffle of someone whose body had already quit and whose mind hadn’t gotten the memo. Like he was moving on muscle memory alone. Each step looked like a negotiation his legs were losing.
The woman with the pink and black hair kept one arm locked around his waist and his arm draped across her shoulders. She bore at least half his weight, maybe more. No complaint. Her face was wet.
Tears ran down her dark skin, mixing with sweat and blood until she looked like someone had taken a brush loaded with too many shades of salt and copper and fear and dragged it down her face in careless strokes. She wasn’t crying. Not in the way crying usually worked. The tears just came, independent of her expression. Her face stayed locked in hard focus. That same refusal to acknowledge what the last three days had tried to do to the man whose weight she carried. Like if she stopped concentrating for one second, if she let herself feel any of what was written in those tears, she’d collapse right there beside him.
Vanessa’s camera got all of it.
The young man lifted his head. It took effort. You could see it in the way his neck muscles worked, the way his whole body had to participate in the simple act of looking up. Amber eyes, impossibly bright against the ruined landscape of his face, found the crowd. The cameras. The military personnel in their pressed uniforms. The medical teams with stretchers and equipment at the ready. His lips moved.
The microphone barely picked it up. Later, the audio team would spend an hour cleaning the recording, filtering out the wind and the helicopter rotors and the shouting reporters. They’d isolate those four words. Make them crystal clear. By tomorrow morning they’d be trending on every platform. People would make memes. Compilation videos. Remixes set to music.
"I need a fucking burger."
Then his eyes rolled back and he went limp in the arms of the woman holding him.
Reina let out a sound that might have been a laugh. Might have been disbelief. Vanessa’s mouth hung open in a way that was going to look terrible on the broadcast. The other reporters shouted questions at a man who was no longer conscious to answer them.
The girl with pink and black hair, still supporting his dead weight, shot a glare at the camera that could have curdled milk. "Back off. He needs medical attention, not an interview."
"Ma’am, can you at least tell us his name?"
"No." She started toward the medical tents at the perimeter, half-dragging the unconscious young man with strength that seemed impossible for her frame. The blue-haired girl rose shakily to her feet and moved to help, taking his other arm and distributing the weight between them.
Vanessa found her voice. "We’re witnessing what appears to be a successful Void Gate extraction. Nine of the ten students have emerged alive, with one confirmed casualty. The survivor who apparently played a key role in their escape has just lost consciousness and is being transported to medical facilities. We’ll have more details as they become available."
She paused.
"For Channel 7 News, I’m Vanessa Park."