Chapter 1: Awakening Echoes

The neon bleed of the colony ring seeped through the cracked viewport of Dormitory Block C-17 like spilled chemical dye, casting jagged splinters of electric blue and lurid pink across Ang Kade's narrow cot. The colors painted his restless form in hues of artificial twilight, turning the sweat on his skin into glistening streaks that caught the light like fractured glass. He snapped awake with a sharp inhale, chest heaving as though he'd surfaced from deep water, the amber sky of Earth's final hours still burning behind his eyelids—a nightmare so vivid it felt carved into bone.At twenty-five, Ang had learned to expect these visitations. They came most nights, reliable as the ring's gravity generators that hummed through every bulkhead. But tonight the dream clawed deeper, sharper, leaving his dark hair plastered to his forehead in damp strands and his gray eyes darting through the dormitory shadows, searching for threats that weren't there. The collapse replayed in merciless detail: continents fracturing like dry clay under NexCorp's relentless drills, oceans hissing into vapor clouds that scorched the atmosphere, forests reduced to smoldering ash beneath a sky the color of infected wounds. And always, at the center of it, a small girl—Lyra, seven years old, auburn hair wild and tangled—pressing her palms flat against the ark's reinforced glass. Her forcefield had crackled around her tiny frame, green light threaded with unnatural red veins, a desperate shield against the end of everything.