Chapter Fifty-Two

In the sky - Part 1

Over the airspace between Switzerland and France.

EVE could not deny her surprise. She knew the target was a ship, but she hadn't imagined it was a plane. Much less such an old one.

A plane. That told her something she hadn't thought of until that moment. What was the military fence that was below her on the lake? She knew about it because she had received Janus' instructions and had alerted those two she had rescued but, according to Janus, it was a Dark Event research operation and she should not worry about them. Was that plane part of the whole thing?

And there was something that was even more strange. That plane was not normal. It had something that seemed to be attached to it. It almost looked as if a dark, leafless climbing plant had woven itself around part of the fuselage at the rear. Or maybe it was dead roots? They might well have been roots. But it had also spread partly across the wings, with thin, thick filaments crisscrossing like bony, famelike hands. Only towards the front was it less present. What gave her a bad feeling was that, due to its direction, it was more abundant just in the sector where she should be located with the Manta.

Whatever it was, she didn't have time to find out.

She had just a few minutes according to the holographic projection in the cockpit. The clock did not offer a safe reading, although at one moment it offered a reading of five minutes, the next second it jumped to two minutes and then to six minutes. It was not stable so they had to hurry while the droids continued their mission to keep the sphere stable.

EVE, holding steady on course in sync with the aircraft, positioned the ship at the bottom of the fuselage, just a few feet behind the landing gear. That was the closest she could get to her target, which would be attracted by the sphere she had in the Manta.

The mission was for the sphere to resonate with the target in the plane. To do this, both parties had to be in close proximity for the superposition. That sphere on the Manta had droid parts, but was basically a steroid version of a pocket attractor. A rather famous device a few decades ago for street thieves and one that had been marketed with some success on the black market.

There were better ways to accomplish that mission. If they had to just extract something from the plane it was much easier for the droids to simply get out and board that plane from the cargo side. Or was there a reason for them to do it that way?

EVE tried to turn on the Manta's forward scanner. There was something bothering her. Is that plane empty or is there someone inside? It can't be full of people, right? She had doubts about that. Was the reason for not boarding it because there was something inside too? Maybe some other group? Indeed, if it was an extraction, the chances were high that there were hostile elements guarding what had to be extracted. Maybe it was all about stealing some military prototype and that was the reason for the movement underneath.

The scanner made an attempt to turn on, only to turn off the next moment. It had been disabled so that it could not be used. The Manta's system had locked out some extra functions so as not to use the auxiliary batteries on unnecessary instrumentation. EVE pursed her lips. She would have to be left wondering about that.

The Manta barely touched the bottom of the fuselage and, despite the jolts from the turbulence, the system told her she was below her target. The sphere was exactly where it was supposed to be.

But something else was bothering her. On the one hand, that horrible feeling was there and, on the other hand, that plane was not going to last long in the air. She didn't know what it was due to, but it seemed that the paint was skipping in several places and that, even with the synchronization, it was wobbling in a dangerous way.

The outside vision suddenly blurred and EVE knew that the final moment of the operation had arrived. Now all that remained was for the sphere to attract the target in the cargo hold of the plane.

***

On the Corven-21 Carissia had positioned herself a few meters above the plane and had made the rear hatch of the ship translucent. Shin had risen from his seat along with Lizbeth, and they both contemplated what was happening in front of their eyes as the entire aircraft shook. Despite the clouds, now that they could see it, they had no doubt that it was the plane they had been investigating the day before.

That was, in effect, a twin-turbine Baering 616. A steel giant a hundred meters long and eighty meters wide. Compared to the Corven-21, it was like comparing a small crow to a wandering albatross. But there was something different. What were those dark things that extended like veins or roots over the fuselage? Shin soon remembered the state of the corpses the day before. Did it have something to do with the nerve tissue that had hardened as the flesh was consumed?

"How can that be possible?" Lizbeth asked, trying to make herself heard over the raging storm raging outside. Shin felt much worse, but this was not the time for him to worry about his condition. He had too many questions in his head.

The plane had crashed, there was no doubt about it. "What time is it?" Shin asked.

Lizbeth checked the time, but her Neurowire watch read 5:45AM. Carissia looked at her watch and it was the same time, but when she checked the local time, and the ship's devices were indicating that it was 6:54PM, and then 5:30PM. "The time is wrong, it's telling me several hours."

Lizbeth looked at Shin and then turned her attention near the hatch. It was raining heavily outside and the falling water was blurring the image outside, but she was sure she was seeing some raindrops that were currently rising meaninglessly. It could be an effect of the antigravity engine, but why were only a few drops rising and why did they look like they were returning to the sky?

Shin, for his part, could see those tiny particles coming from the back of the plane, but he had no idea what they could be. Those blue particles did not seem to obey any natural law, they were not affected by the wind or anything like that, they continued on their way unperturbed. Wasn't it possible that there was a magician? No, that was not possible. If that had been the case Lizbeth and Carissia could have seen it and he had no magical ability to detect occult magic, so it couldn't be Thelesis either.

When he had seen them in the Corven for the first time he had thought that maybe it was an effect of his visual fatigue. Something like phosphenes produced in the retina. After all he could only see with his left eye. But he dismissed it when he realized that those particles had a direction and not a random movement. It was coming from the plane, more precisely from a low point. Is it in the cargo area?

Shin and Lizbeth's rapid thoughts were interrupted when they heard a crunch of metal on the outside and with astonished eyes they saw how the metal towards the middle of the plane had just sunk and then, as if it were rusty iron, it broke off and opened a gap in the fuselage. Lizbeth's lips twitched as she watched as parts of the plane, backpacks, suitcases, papers, a service cart, and then two bodies flew out of that ten-foot hole and hit the tail end of the plane before being lost in the clouds.

We haven't found all the bodies, Shin thought. "It can't be possible."

One more body flew out of that hole and hit the metal of one wing of the plane with a thud, before disappearing into the clouds. A red stain appeared, but the rain quickly washed it away. No trace of the body or blood remained.

"I'm going in!" Shin said. Lizbeth looked at him as if she didn't believe what she had just heard. "Carissia! Is the attractor system working?!"

Carissia, fighting to maintain the stability couldn't help but give a quick glance over her shoulder. "What are you planning?"

"The accident hasn't happened yet. If it's 6:54PM and 5:45 it means we're at two different times... the accident happened at 7PM, right?"

***

Leman Forest.

A downpour was suddenly coming out of nowhere, but that wasn't the worst of it.

Panic had gripped the tents that served as the area's control and monitoring system. At first no one could understand what was happening, because the weather and strange event monitoring systems must be wrong. But, as the seconds passed, they realized that something really bad was happening in the skies.

An anomaly was appearing in the results. In the form of a sphere in the sky, at least five kilometers in diameter. That wasn't all that was wrong. The last of the reconnaissance ships were landing when it began to appear. Although the sphere was several kilometers above the ground, several of the ships lost altitude within a few meters and had crashed in the vicinity of the parking lots.

Pierre Allard, the director of the air crisis situation on the Swiss side, could not believe his eyes. He was in one of the main tents when everything started to go wrong. Many electronic instruments were malfunctioning and several evidence-collecting drones had suddenly gone offline.

Some soldiers watching the situation and helping the wounded who were in the crashed ships suddenly raised their eyes to the sky.

That sphere was there surrounded by clouds, but there was something strange about it. Although they could see only a tiny part of the lower part, the rest was hidden in the sky.

It looked like some kind of smoky gemstone, or perhaps a glass marble filled with gray smoke. At least that was what they could associate it with at first. It really looked like a crystal ball floating in the middle of the storm. But inside it they could see something churning rapidly. It was as if there were clouds trapped inside swirling furiously trying to escape. One of the soldiers focused his vision better. Perhaps his eyesight was deceiving him, but that thing had a watery consistency. It could be a sphere of convection but it was as if what enclosed those clouds was a wall of water and they, due to the distance, it seemed to them that it was something more solid.

***

"I hope this really works," Carissia said, looking serious.

In the back Lizbeth and Shin had put on a transparent oxygen masks with extra protection for their ears and eyes. Lizbeth pressed some buttons on the side panel near the seats and stood next to Shin. A hole about a meter in diameter had opened in the floor of the Corven-21. That hole was a special device on the ship and there were two others, but those were out of service due to power problems. They were devices that were used for assault missions or emergency evacuation of the ship.

On one of the upper roof rails a circular ring-shaped device had been moved and placed just above that door.

Shin stood at the edge of the hole and looking at Lizbeth nodded. "I'm ready!" Carissia positioned the craft about three meters from the plane, just above the hole that had just opened at the top and through which the passengers and luggage had exited.

The interior of the Corven-21 was pressurized, but in that hatch there was only a sheet of the ship's protective shielding material deployed to separate it from the low pressure on the outside. The ship's personnel could exit without problems and even enter, since it was part of the functions to discriminate between a threat to the infrastructure or if what was entering or exiting were objects, tissue or a biological body. If something were to happen they had their turtle devices to assist them with oxygen masks or short flight device and emergency parachute.

Lizbeth watched with apprehension as Shin jumped from the ship into that hole in the plane. From her position she could see the lights flickering inside the plane and at the moment it seemed to her that the twisted metal hole was like the mouth of an abyssal fish that had just swallowed her boyfriend.

Shin landed and had to grit his teeth. That was a jump of about seven meters in total. In those moments he was grateful that he could not show his emotions. The truth was that he felt much more tired on the one hand and almost feverish on the other. The adrenaline of the situation was making him still standing. He could not afford to rest at the time.

Shin raised his head and looked around with a serious look. It was worse than he had imagined. Without hesitation he looked up where Lizbeth's worried face was waiting for an answer.

"Turn it on!!!"

Lizbeth walked over to a panel on the side of the ship and activated that ring on the ceiling. Almost instantly it had turned a red color, tinting everything around it. That device was the atttractor. Now all that remained was to hope that it would work as expected.

She had tried to argue that this was crazy, but something had brought her to her senses. Shin had said. "Can't you see it? We can still save the people on board."

That didn't mean that what they were about to do wasn't crazy. But madness that made sense. Temporal anomalies could exist naturally due to Dark Events. If they were right, the time anomaly meant they were witnessing moments before the plane crashed. They had only a few minutes. If it was a temporal anomaly, it could be that time was at a standstill and that the thing they had seen expanding with them inside was a big time bubble that could end at any moment.

That could also end in disaster for them and be dragged by the plane. Except for one detail. No debris from another crashed ship had been found. If what they thought was correct it meant that there was a chance that the passengers still unaccounted for were because they had never been there at the time of the crash to begin with.

Shin watched as the red beam of light penetrated through the hole to where he was and immediately ran. He looked down at the ground and saw how a crushed disposable cup had begun to rise and float upward. That was all he needed to know that the attractor was working. He had to hurry.

But the truth was that when he looked around he couldn't help but be surprised by what he found inside the passenger cabin. That seemed to be a kind of tunnel where roots had grown uncontrollably. He knew that material was everywhere. He could not analyze it but he was sure that it had the same consistency of what he had seen in the autopsies the day before in the crystallized and metallic nerve tissue of some of the victims. Around the cabin it had spread everywhere, the walls, the seats, and of course on the passengers as well.

It was a horrific sight. It looked as if those roots were feeding on everything around them. The passengers looked pale and emaciated and he could see that several had blood coming out of their ears, some seemed to be suffering from symptoms of frostbite due to the low temperature. I had seen that before too. It was something caused by the depressurization, not to mention the mess it had caused inside the main cabin. There were suitcases, backpacks, the oxygen masks that were moving all over the place, but they were unused. That none of them were being used and the way those roots were spread around indicated to Shin that it could had been a long time and that the passengers had not had time to use them either.

He looked at the nearest passengers and could see that they had vital signs, but they were weak. Close to where he had entered there were a few who had almost none of those things around them. That thing did not seem strong, and when he grabbed the first passenger, a middle-aged man, that thing did not hold him but was as weak as a spider's web in the thin filaments, meanwhile a bit more like crystal on the thicker ones even though it looked metallic. He sent two others that he had nearby and was about to send a fourth when he looked at him and saw that he was already dead.

He had to give priority to those who needed help the most. And that's when he realized. There were some passengers who didn't have much of that thing growing around them. Not only that, he could see that they were children.

That was a plan drawn up in a matter of seconds but with a slim chance of success. To begin with, he had to be realistic. How many could he rescue? Ten? Twenty at the most if he were lucky? As soon as everything destabilized he will need to run to the red beam and that would be the end of it. He couldn't afford to enter the cockpit to lower the plane to an altitude where the pressure would be suitable. Because he knew the plane would not survive to begin with.

Even if they were able to rescue several people, he had to take into account the condition of the Corven-21. Turning on the attractor device consumed part of the energy and he already knew what had happened to all the electronic devices in the plane. On the other hand, for the same reason it was impossible to count on the spatial distortion in their ship. If they stayed too long near the plane there was no certainty that they could land safely and they would have to count on Carissia to splash down over the lake once they were out of that distortion.

It was not heroic action, it was simply doing what they could. As Mai used to say: we do what we can with what we have.

With the flashing lights blinking and drawing ghostly silhouettes of the passengers Shin could get an idea of what had just happened before his arrival. There were many passengers on the floor, others in their seats, but all passed out and others had already died. But for how long could the others still be alive? He looked at a woman and remembered her. He had done an autopsy on that woman, her body was burned from the waist up and yet she was still alive there but cover with those things. He gritted his teeth and decided on the most logical option he had thought of with Lizbeth.

Children. Because of the light weight and ease of moving them they had priority. Was he being too optimistic? Maybe none of them had been discovered yet because they had been consumed in the explosion or hadn't looked in the right place in the lake. What if the whole assumption was wrong and it not only ended up with the plane, but also endangering Lizbeth and Carissia?

No. He didn't have to think about that. Something told him he was doing the right thing. He couldn't explain it, but he knew it was the right thing to do. They might not be able to avoid the ultimate tragedy, but at least that hell they could save someone was good enough to have been worth the attempt.

The first child was on the side of the window and he grabbed it quickly. He was breathing. Shin moved quickly and shouted as loud as he could, trying to make himself heard in the storm. "There goes the first one!!!"

Lizbeth gulped and braced herself. The passengers Shin had already sent had been dragged close to the seats and she had placed devices in their ears that, when deployed, transformed into oxygen masks. Some of the emergency equipment she had taken out of a nearby suitcase.

Shin placed the child in the light beam and the child's body began to rise. Since he was unconscious he looked like a puppet, but Shin didn't stop and went back inside.

Lizbeth received the boy and for the first time in those two days she felt a real knot in her throat. When she investigated cases she almost always started with some tragedy and the plane had been one too. A typical case of picking up the pieces of the disaster to find out how it had happened, another of the thousands of cases that always occurred in a year.

But since everyone had assumed that the passengers had died, no one had ever imagined that there was a possibility that there were any survivors. That emotion made her swallow her tears. She herself had given them all up for dead. But here she had just received a child who couldn't have been more than eight years old and was breathing. She quickly carried him to the nearest seat and pressed the button to activate the automatic seat belts, along with a mask.

Soon two more entered through the beam of light. This time two girls, a little girl with pigtails and a teenage girl. Lizbeth carried them both to the seats and peeked through the hatch just as a fourth child was arriving.

Carrisia, hooked up to the ship's transmission systems couldn't believe it either. She was an aeon, an artificial life form, but seeing those children brought back memories of many decades ago when she did not yet belong to Nevermore. Her own personal tragedy, when she lost the two children she was in charge of, flashed in her brain. Please let it work, she thought to herself, as she continued to try to maintain the ship's stability.

Shin meanwhile had continued with his work and it was when he picked up a little girl that he noticed. He looked at the woman in the next seat and the other passengers. They were all unconscious, but he could see their eyes moving under their eyelids.

Are they dreaming? he wondered. That was impossible. Then he remembered the autopsy examinations of the previous day. Many of them had been scared and had adrenaline spikes, of that he had no doubt. But that they were dreaming was impossible. The REM state is not reached until several hours after a person is asleep. The decompression could have knocked everyone out, which in a decompression situation was already unlikely, but it was impossible for everyone to be in a synchronized dream state.

If it wasn't a dream, why were everyone's eyes moving so fast? And what the hell were those particles still coming from the rear of the ship? Given the degree of direction he could tell without a doubt that it was coming from somewhere in the cargo hold. He recalled the conversation with Mai and the team the day before. There was something that had come from Diego Garcia on the plane. Did that have anything to do with it after all?

He had no way of knowing and he didn't have the time either. He sent the girl through the beam of light and crossed to the other row. There were two young men, perhaps brothers. He charged one by one toward the beam and continued his search.

"Oh, and these two?" In separate seats he had found a mother still holding her little boy in her arms, he couldn't have been more than three years old. Two seats over there was another little girl who couldn't have been more than five.

Shin swallowed as he carried the two little ones. "I'm sorry," he murmured. He remembered the faces of the parents. They had also appeared among the dead the day before.

"Watch out for the next ones they are too small!" Shin alerted Lizbeth and sent them both through the attractor tunnel.

He turned to continue the search when he became dizzy. It hadn't been due to the sudden movements of the plane, it had come from his head. He staggered and almost lost his footing if he hadn't grabbed a seat. The vision in his one eye seemed to be trembling. No, it was more like the eye was twitching rapidly.

"Are you Mr. Shin?" "I just want to see my daughter again." "Don't forget the sacrifices. "Better to die free than imprisoned by the fate someone wrote for you." "One day you'll have to make that decision too."

Shin held his seat. Those voices had come from nowhere, but he had heard them as if they had spoken in his ear. He thought he recognized a couple of them, but the rest were unfamiliar. Did that have anything to do with what he had felt when he saw the plane for the first time? That feeling of familiarity was there, but he couldn't remember when, or why, he felt it.

Without time to recover, he walked to the back of the plane and found two teenagers, one of whom had tripped and broken his neck on a seat.

"I'm sorry," Shin said bitterly and turned to carry the next one. How many were there already? Twelve? Thirteen? How much time had passed? A minute and a half maybe? Time seemed to slow down in those situations where it was passing quickly.

He sent the young man out and came back once more. He should have sent those who were farther away first but being an unstable situation he didn't know how much time he had left. If it was a minute and a half and the clock had read 6:54 when they made the plan then he had three minutes at the most until 7PM which was the time when the plane had crashed on Tuesday evening. He was aware that there could be some distortion in the time that would give him more minutes, but that wasn't certain either.

He made two more trips, carrying a little girl and another boy at the same time who couldn't have been more than ten years old and then a little girl who was almost at the tail section of the plane. He had crossed back to the other row and there he found three more, one of them had hit his head and was bleeding, but was breathing. He carried the two little ones and went back for the girl. Towards the back he had stumbled a couple of times and had taken off his mask to see better. He had trouble breathing at first, but then recovered quickly. As he moved forward and stepped on those roots in the ground they shattered like glass and then vanished in wisps of dust as if they had never been there.

Lizbeth meanwhile had been placing the children in the ship seats as best she could. But she was somewhat glad that it was working out. She knew there would be problems when they woke up, but they would have time to deal with it later.

Carissia, with her eyes hooked up to the ship's camera system, had been looking for signals from the rear and thought she noticed an anomaly. If the transmission didn't deceive her, there was something underneath the plane, just below, less than thirty meters from where they were. That thing must have been the first signal she had detected. It was flying underneath the plane, that was the reason for the strange reading on the ship's radar. That was known as radar shadow flying. It was basically hiding the signal above or below another object in the air. But what she could see on the transmission was only a silhouette drawn by the cuts in the clouds and the water around it. But she could easily tell that it must be another ship by the passive detection system.

She activated the gravitational field detection system, but it did not give her any results. Beyond the turbulence, there was a possibility that that ship was also using a flight system similar to the Corven-21. But her doubts were dispelled by the broadband radar system and the acoustic detection system.

Indeed, by the shape there was another ship. With the broadband radar she not only detected that ship but she was able to detect that the thing was a sphere. The time distortion was a sphere that extended a little more than five kilometers with that aircraft as the center of it all.

She was about to inform Lizbeth of this when she noticed something else. With the tail of the plane cutting through the clouds she thought she saw something else.

She thought it might have been simply a visual effect, but soon dismissed it. Indeed, from the cameras she was seeing that. It was a kind of dark cloud that moved from side to side as if it had a life of its own. It could not be a flock of birds because they seemed small and given the violence of the storm they would not fly there. It reminded her of starlings in flight, but what made up the cloud must have been something very small because from a distance she could not see what it could be.

A shiver ran through Carissia. Whatever it was, she didn't like it at all.

Two more children had just arrived when Carissia's voice sounded alarmed. "Did you see that?" Lizbeth looked up at her, but couldn't see anything. Then she looked to the rear where the transparent hatch visor was still activated and saw a dark mass moving from side to side at the back of the plane. It couldn't have been more than thirty meters away. It was a sort of cloud of small fragments and larger ones. "I think it's time to go."

"An alloy of Fractium and a concentration of iron," Lizbeth mused, turning to Carissia. They remembered that Shin had found that in the nervous system of the deceased from the accident.

Fractium. The hair on the back of Lizbeth's neck stood up at the thought and she approached the mouth of the tunnel shouting as loud as she could. "Shin! We have to go now! There's something else out there!!!"

Shin had just sent another child down the light tunnel, when he heard Lizbeth's shout and was about to look for the last one he had found when he noticed something.

He was seeing that several of those unconscious passengers had just shifted in their seats. It wasn't as if they had woken up. It was more like some of them had arched their backs back and moved their heads while their mouths opened slightly.

Then he saw how many of them looked as if they were flowers wilting in fast motion. The skin took on grayish and bluish tones while the hands of others looked bony. There was a strong tremor that almost made him fall and he turned to pick up the last child.

That child had those things wrapped only around his arms, but he was beginning to pale and his cheekbones were marked, slightly hidden by wavy black hair. He couldn't have been more than fifteen years old at most. His father next to him had just died. He remembered him, he was one of the first ones he had autopsied the day before. He thought he remembered his name was Levi Fitzgerald and the boy's name was Indrid, or something similar.

He pulled those roots out of his arms and they snapped on contact. He lifted him up when he felt a sting in one of his hands. One of those roots had shot out towards him and had touched him as if it were a hypodermic needle.

There was a tremor throughout the ship and he almost lost his balance again. The instant that thing touched him, something unexpected happened. Those roots all over the plane began to unravel, or so it seemed to him. As if it were a cloud of particles, both inside the plane and outside, that cloud rose from the fuselage and began to gather towards the interior. Inside the plane, it was like a raging cloud, circling at full speed.

In the Corven-21, Lizbeth and Carissia watched in amazement as the roots broke apart and then congregated in a cloud of black particles, which joined the other dark mass they had just seen. It disappeared from the fuselage and the wings, leaving the metal of the plane eaten away as if parts had been rusting for years. Then the cloud of particles attacked the fuselage as if it were a sheet of paper.

Several holes opened up and they could see how the cloud formed several jets of dark spear-shaped particles that penetrated into the plane from all sides. One of those spears penetrated the left side of the plane and almost at once there was a dry explosion. Amidst all the gray and black scenery a flare had ignited in the turbine.

Lizbeth could not believe it when she saw a new child that had just appeared into the ship through the tunnel of the attractor. That child looked worse than all the others.

"Shin! We have to go now!" she shouted back into the tunnel, grabbing the boy.

Shin for his part was fighting that thing down below. He had been lucky that he had been able to send the boy down. That thing was coming for him. No, not just for him. For the whole plane. He was already sure that more than half of the passengers were already dead and, in a few seconds, the others would follow.

That cloud was attacking everything as it circled at full speed destroying parts of the plane and killing the passengers. Absorbing their lives, as their bodies were consumed in black and gray masses. Fire had erupted from the left side. That must have been the turbine. Lizbeth was right, they had to leave.

But that thing was making it hard for him. It was attacking him with fury. It was like being exposed to a sandstorm. But instead of silicon what he felt were those metal particles trying to whip him like whips and passing like a wind around him, coming and going. Had those things reacted to his touch? At the moment he could feel as if all the metal in his body had reacted. He had felt it just moments before they found the plane.

That was a fractus. His first encounter with one. Where had it come from? 2012? Was it already at that time on earth planning the invasion that would not take place until decades later? Or did it mean that it was already known long before that there would be an invasion? If so, why hadn't they stopped it? Or was it something else?

The blue glow of the particles was diminishing, but it had been replaced by that.

He gritted his teeth and cursed. A new cloud of particles appeared, but that was his own armor. The oxygen mask shattered on contact with the armor particles, as did the shirt he wore. The harnesses of the turtle device had barely hung on. But something troubled him. That was barely a quarter of his armor or maybe less. Where had the rest gone?

He gathered the best he could in his left eye part and another part in his chest and in a fist. What he had gathered in the fist he gathered and formed a shield trying to protect himself and reach the attractor tunnel.

Or at least it tried to.

"W-wait, don't w-wait, don't go... yet!!!" A voice with a choppy, tired tone just called out to him.

Shin looked in the direction of the voice. An old man who could barely stand upright clinging to a seat was calling out to him. He was wounded in several places. That cloud of circulating particles must have attacked him, but what struck him as odd was that he was conscious and didn't look as bad as the rest of the passengers.

"You're missing one... take him, please!!!"

Shin didn't know how to react but looked to where the old man was pointing. The old man was pointing with a bony finger at a pile of luggage at the beginning of the section, but his eyes were elsewhere. To the opposite side. He wasn't looking at what he was pointing at.

"Hurry up! G-get him out of here!!!"

Shin approached with a somewhat slow pace due to the particle gusts that followed around the whole plane like a furious wind and, after a second, he saw it. Among all the fallen carry-on luggage he had just seen a different bundle. It was a young boy lying on the ground.

Shin reached over and grabbed him with one arm. It was a boy who couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve years old.

"H-hurry!!! you have to take him too!!!" The old man just pointed over his shoulder but still wasn't looking at him. No, rather he was avoiding looking at the boy.

"Are there any other children?!"

"No, but almost. You have to take someone else!"

Shin walked to the tunnel and sent the boy out and came back.

The old man looked at him and Shin recognized him. He had a scar on his left cheek and even though time had passed he could tell that the man had surely suffered an accident that had deformed his face a bit in the past. He recognized who he was, he was on the passenger list. He had been an important scientist in the past. One of the first to postulate an idea close to what in the future would be the Neurowire.

Leteo Waters.

He had not come out of his astonishment when they both lost their balance due to a turbulence much stronger than the previous ones.

Shin didn't notice it as he stood up but then he couldn't deny it. The lights on the ship were all out. And those blue particles had disappeared too.

"What the hell was that?"