“Some teams recruit newcomers specifically to trigger split protocols. The newcomer signs away team loot. The team keeps everything.”— Scavantis Diver Relations, Internal Memo (leaked)The plateau dissolved with a wrench that was becoming disturbingly familiar, reality folding sideways through dimensions, and I materialized back in the diving room.Ugh, it felt like being spat out by a universe that had finished chewing.The fluorescent lights hit me first.After hours in the arterial glow of a chaos shard, the flat white institutional lighting of Diving Room 1-B4 felt like having my eyes pressure-washed.I blinked, my eyes watering, and stood very still while my brain performed the transition from “combat-ready organism on a hostile plateau” to “twenty-year-old standing in a room with plastic chairs.”The room was exactly as I’d left it.The holo-displays on the walls still showed their disconnected yellow maps. The poster about loot bags still featured its enthusiastic cartoon diver. The other poster still listed “unexplained feelings of cosmic dread” among its reportable symptoms, which I could now confirm were absolutely justified and completely unhelpful to report.The Scavantis woman was still at her station, scrolling through her holoband with the same aggressive disinterest she’d had when I’d entered.Except now there was something else underneath it. A tension in her shoulders that hadn’t been there before, as if knowing something had gone wrong inside the shard and not yet knowing how wrong.She looked up when I materialized. “You,” she said, and the word carried enough subtext to fill a corporate incident report. She stood, pushing away from her station. “Exit protocols should have placed you near the entry zone. You should have been nowhere near—” She cut herself off, recalibrated. “How did you get out?”“I (...)