The Beacon of Breath stood above the city on a platform that floated where no platform should.
Its towers were shaped like knotted balloons.
Golden light moved through their walls in slow breaths.
“Home to the balloon gods’ reset relay,” Cleo read from her scan.
A wall of symbols appeared at the entrance.
Beneath it, three glowing choices blinked in sequence: POP, FLOAT, and BLOW.
“Great,” said the dark-haired woman.
“It’s a password wall.”
“They used puns,” Cleo said.
“Of course they used puns.”
Cleo pressed FLOAT.
The floor vanished beneath her for half a second, then returned with a sharp blip.
She tried BLOW; a gust flung all three of them into a heap.
The redhead hit POP before anyone could stop her.
The door opened.
“Where to now?” she asked, rising with dignity she hadn’t earned.
“Save reality, I guess?” Cleo said.
Inside, a chamber of immense golden forms came alive.
They resembled balloons only in the broadest, most unsettling sense: faces within curved bodies, eyes like lamps, and voices that made the floor vibrate.
At their center hung a memory of the world, tiny and fragile, suspended in a sphere.
The beacon remembered all.
Cleo saw continents being drawn, erased, and drawn again.
She saw cities that had never existed and one that looked painfully familiar.
Every version swelled until it reached a limit.
Then a great hand pressed the reset.
“Oh no,” she said.
“This whole reality is just one balloon in a cosmic party pack.”
A ring of lights lit up around the chamber.
RESET.
RESET.
RESET.
“The protocol resets everything every nine hundred and ninety-nine years,” Cleo said.
“But we triggered it early.”
“So we’re early to the apocalypse,” said the redhead.
“That’s new.”
The gods turned their shining faces toward the intruders.
“SORRY TO INTERRUPT YOUR AIR,” one said.
“THE SYSTEM’S BUGGED.
HARD.
YOU’RE POPPING THIS CYCLE EARLY.”
Another raised a hand over the sphere.
The clock appeared inside it, now counting seconds.
“Guys,” Cleo said, “are we about to get outvoted by celestial gasbags?”
The dark-haired woman didn’t answer.
She was looking past the clock, at the thread of darkness that ran behind it.
The thread was growing wider.
It had begun to pull the light from the chamber.
“That’s not a timer,” she said.
Cleo enlarged her scan.
A seam split the air.
It led to a place beyond the bubble, beyond any atmosphere at all.
“It’s a Deflation Fuse,” Cleo said.
“It’s tearing everything between here and the non-air layer!”
The redhead’s fire flickered sideways and vanished into the seam.
“Well, this sucks gloriously.”
Then the floor fell away.