KESTREL POV
The dinsional barrier burst in my face.
I threw myself backward as reality cracked like broken glass, each shard showing a different world bleeding into this one. A desert mixed with an ocean. A forest grew through a city. The confusion made my stomach turn, but I forced myself to keep watching.
This was the seventh barrier failure in three hours. All because Lily was still jumping between worlds.
"Sir?" My helper, Marcus, appeared beside with his clipboard shaking in his hands. "The Council is wanting answers. They want to know why we haven’t caught the oga yet."
I wiped blood from my nose where a reality shard had cut . "Tell the Council that hunting soone isn’t as simple as they think."
But that wasn’t the real trouble. The real trouble was that I was starting to understand why Lily was running, and it was making my job a lot harder.
I’d been a Dinsion Hunter for fifty years. I’d tracked down hundreds of beings who could move between worlds without permission. Most of them were criminals or monsters who used their skills to hurt others. Capturing them was easy because I knew they deserved it.
Lily was different.
I pulled out my tracking device and watched the small red dot that showed her position. She was three dinsions away now, moving fast. Every jump she made sent shockwaves through the physical structure, but I could tell she wasn’t doing it on purpose. She was scared and running for her life.
"Marcus," I said, "pull up the files on oga dinsional travelers from the past century."
"All of them, sir?"
"All of them."
While he worked, I thought about my talk with Lily’s son - that void entity who’d spoken with such pain about his mother. He’d called her a healer, soone who brought order to her pack. That didn’t sound like the dangerous thief the Council had described.
Marcus gave a tablet loaded with files. I started reading, and with each page, my blood ran colder.
Every oga dinsional visitor in the past hundred years had been killed by Hunters. Not caught and judged. Killed. And every single one had been described the sa way in their ho worlds - healers, peacemakers, bridges between different groups.
"Marcus," I said slowly, "how many of these ogas actually committed cris before we hunted them?"
He checked his screen. "According to the reports? None, sir. They were all classed as ’preventative threats.’"
Preventative threats. We’d been killing harmless people because they might beco dangerous soday.
I closed my eyes and tried to push down the sick feeling in my stomach. I’d beco a Hunter because I wanted to protect innocent people from dinsional monsters. What if I’d beco the monster instead?
My tracking device beeped quickly. Lily had jumped again, and this ti the dinsional shockwave was huge. Reality moved around us like water, and for a mont I could see straight through to another world where giant butterflies flew through purple clouds.
"Sir!" Marcus grabbed my arm. "Look at the readings!"
The numbers on his screen made no sense. According to our tools, Lily’s latest jump had actually strengthened the dinsional barrier instead of weakening it.
"That’s impossible," I mumbled. "Unauthorized jumps always cause damage."
But as I watched, the cracks in reality started to heal themselves. The mixing worlds separated back into their proper realities. The chaos that had been growing for days started to calm down.
"Run a full scan," I ordered. "I want to know exactly what she did."
The results ca back ten minutes later, and they changed everything I thought I knew about dinsional flight.
"Sir," Marcus said in a shocked voice, "it appears the oga didn’t force her way between worlds. She... asked permission first."
"Explain." " The readings show she interacted with the dinsional structure itself. Instead of tearing a hole, she convinced the barriers to open freely. That’s why it fixed the damage instead of making it worse."
I stared at the numbers, my mind running. In fifty years of shooting, I’d never seen anything like this. Dinsional travelers always damaged reality when they jumped. It was a basic rule of physics.
Unless they weren’t really tourists at all. Unless they were sothing else entirely.
"Marcus, get a direct line to the Council. Ergency priority."
While he set up the connection, I thought about what this ant. If Lily could fix dinsional barriers instead of breaking them, then everything the Council had told about oga threats was wrong. They weren’t dangerous - they were exactly what reality needed to stay grounded.
The Council’s leader showed on my screen, his ancient face twisted with impatience. "Kestrel. Report."
"High Councilor," I said carefully, "I’ve found sothing important about the oga we’re hunting. Her powers don’t hurt dinsions - they heal them."
The Councilor’s face didn’t change. "Irrelevant. Continue the hunt."
"But sir, if she can repair dinsional damage, shouldn’t we be working with her instead of hunting her?"
"The oga is a threat to dinsional stability," he said coldly. "Eliminate her."
Sothing in his tone made pause. "High Councilor, did you know about her healing abilities?"
For just a mont, his mask slipped. I saw sothing in his eyes that made my blood freeze - not surprise, but anger that I’d figured it out.
"Kestrel," he said slowly, "there are things you don’t understand about the bigger picture." " Then explain them to ."
He was quiet for a long mont. When he spoke again, his voice was different - older and more tired.
"The dinsional structure isn’t breaking down by accident," he allowed. "We’ve been weakening it on purpose for decades. Small tears, managed damage. It gives us power over which realities live and which ones don’t."
I felt like he’d punched in the stomach. "You’re destroying worlds on purpose?"
"We’re controlling them," he anded. "Reality is chaos, Kestrel. Soone has to decide which dinsions deserve to exist. We bring order to the multiverse."
"By committing genocide," I whispered.
"By making hard choices that others are too weak to make." His eyes hardened. "Ogas like Lily threaten that order. They heal what we carefully harm. They give hope to realities we’ve marked for death."
The truth hit like a sledgehamr. The Council wasn’t protecting the worlds from oga travelers. They were protecting their own power from people who could undo their harm.
"I won’t hunt her," I said.
"Yes, you will," the Councilor answered calmly. "Because if you don’t, we’ll send soone else to hunt both of you. And we’ll start with your ho dinsion."
The screen went black, leaving staring at my own image.
Marcus stood behind , his face pale. "Sir? What are we going to do?"
I looked at my tracking device. Lily’s dot was moving again, jumping to another world that would probably try to reject her. She had no idea that the organization hunting her was the sa one destroying worlds across the multiverse.
But now I knew the truth. The question was: what was I going to do about it?
I made my choice and started typing a ssage into my communicator. Not to the Council, but to soone else entirely.
"Marcus," I said, "how do you feel about becoming a traitor?"
Before he could answer, alarms started blasting throughout our ship. The tracking device in my hand burst in a shower of sparks, and every screen around us went dead.
Soone had just cut off all our contact with the Council.
And in the sudden darkness, I heard a voice that made my heart stop - Lily’s son, the void entity, speaking from the shadows.
"Hello, Father," he said. "We need to talk."
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