(Anna’s Point of View)

  Fourteen days had crawled past in choking dust and sour rain, but the cottage felt unnaturally still that morning—as if every cracked floorboard were holding its breath. I stood at the center of the living room, boots braced on the raw subfloor, fingertips grazing the pitted brass doorknob of the copper gate.

  The door dominated the north wall like a relic salvaged from a forgotten empire: slick, hammered planes of metal that refused corrosion, sinuous engravings of cities half?erased by fire, and, at its heart, a barely?perceptible hum—more vibration than sound. In ordinary light it lay dormant, dulled to the color of dried blood. Now, as dawn leaked through boarded windows, its surface began to glimmer: first a hair?thin lattice of orange sparks, then widening spirals that traced every carved groove. Fractal veins of white?hot copper raced outward, re?lighting lines I had studied but never fully understood.

  I swallowed—throat sand?dry—then wiped sweaty palms on the thighs of my new cargo pants. Two weeks of scavenging had turned up enough fabric to outfit a platoon, but the real prize lay in canvas sacks stacked beside my boots:

  one hundred and thirty?nine gold rings, most warped but intact

  forty?seven silver chains

  twenty?three pairs of diamond earrings—single stones missing, prong claws bent

  a Rolex submerged in corroded battery acid yet still stubbornly ticking

  and, crowning it all, a tennis necklace of marquis?cut stones that caught the lamplight in stabbing prisms.

  Finding an untouched pawnshop these days bordered on impossibility. The entire storefront had been sealed behind a warped galvanized roll?down gate; from the graffiti, no one had pried it since the outbreak. It took three hours of hacksaw sparks, two snapped jigsaw blades, and one well?placed Hammer blow to split the locking bar. Inside, every velvet tray still lay in neat rows, as if the clerk had only stepped out for coffee. The smell hit first: old carpet soaked in rodent urine, mildew sweet as rotting fruit, and a thin acrid ribbon of battery leakage. Even so, the glass cases glittered like starlight.

  I’d worked quickly—stuffing velvet rolls into a nylon duffel, ignoring the phantom thrill that someone might shout from the back office. When I finally dragged the load through broken streets, the bag’s seams groaned like dying animals. Now the haul sat sorted into burlap seed sacks, each tied with copper wire and tagged by approximate weight. Joshua would know their full worth in his world; to me they were lifelines—bricks of barter that could rebuild walls, buy antibiotics, or bribe a sniper to look the other way.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  A pulse of light snapped me back. The copper door no longer glowed; it flowed, molten graphics rippling like sunlight on hammered river water. Fractal tessellations unfurled beneath the surface—hexagons within hexagons, blooming outward as if the metal itself were rewriting its geometry.

  My pulse hammered. It had done this only once before, the night Joshua disappeared mid?sentence with a key and a promise. I had replayed that moment in dreams: his outline shredding into pixel dust, the air tasting of burning pennies, my own hand slicing through empty space where his heart had been. The Gate’s timer must follow a strict calendar—two weeks exactly.

  I forced myself into motion. Bow—check. Quiver—twelve broadhead shafts. Short sword—sharpened and oiled at my hip. Backpack—half water, half MREs, plus the pawnshop jewels double?bagged for sound dampening. I had already moved every easily?lifted board across window frames, and wedged my old steel pipe into the back?door jamb to discourage freeloaders.

  The light intensified, flooding the room in a dim salmon glow that turned dust motes to embers. Each breath tasted metallic, tingling the back of my tongue. My scars itched. With every step closer, the sacs of jewelry clinked—a silver hush under the Gate’s low drone.

  “Any minute now, Josh,” I murmured, knuckles whitening around my bowgrip. “Don’t keep a girl waiting.”

  The door’s seam surged forward—no, the carving’s impression pushed outward as if the metal were breathing—then reversed, collapsing into a plane of sheer radiance. Radiant runes widened until nothing of the original surface remained.

  Some primal need to flee vibrated in my spine; instincts screamed that this was no ordinary threshold but the maw of a living engine. Yet I stood my ground. The sacks at my feet were heavier than fear.

  Then—like a curtain tugged from a window—the brilliance receded, revealing a long rectangle of amber light hovering in the doorway’s frame. On the far side I glimpsed only blackness threaded with faint blue sparks, as though a midnight storm raged inside a tunnel of glass.

  Cold air spilled across my boots, smelling of river fog and something sweeter—coffee? Fresh soap? My chest tightened with hope.

  A silhouette coagulated within the amber glow: broad shoulders under a scuffed hoodie, cargo straps crisscrossing a chest that carried half a hardware store, and behind him, the squeak?clack of an overloaded cart’s wheels. My throat made a sound—half laugh, half sob—before my brain caught up.

  Fractals flared around the figure’s edges. The cart’s outline sharpened: sleeping?bag cylinders, boxes of food, rolls of barbed wire. And front?and?center, a cold?steel war?hammer gleamed like a crescent moon, strapped to the load in pride of place.

  Joshua Reeve’s stepped through the Gate. Copper runes whispered closed behind him. And I exhaled all the dawn?colored terror I hadn’t known I was holding.

  “About time,” I said, voice raw, eyes stinging.

  He answered with a lopsided grin I’d begun to think I’d imagined, then jerked his chin at the burlap sacks by my boots.

  “Fucking Video game Logic, Looks like you’ve been busy.”

  I nudged one sack with a boot toe—gemstones clattered inside like rain on tin. “Pawnshop jackpot.”

  “Good,” he breathed, bracing the war?hammer on the floorboards. “Because I brought Costco.”

  The Gate faded to dull copper once more, sealing us in a twilight of sawdust and radiant possibilities. Outside, the sky remained sickly gray; inside, the cottage blazed with two weeks’ worth of preparation finally converging.