The sky is the color of old ash.

In this timeline, the broken world of Rachel Summer,  even daylight feel like evernight, filtered through smoke and the disturbing glow of Sentinel patrols. The air smells like burned circuitry and rain never washes anything clean.

You travel with the others in silence. Mutants who learned long ago that hope must be rationed like food.

Concrete skeletons of buildings rise around you. Once-New York. Now a graveyard of glass and steel.

When the group splits to scout, you volunteer. You need air. You need space away from the constant fear and the psychic static of too many traumatized minds pressed together in hiding.

The road you slip onto is narrow, wind threading through it like a whisper. Broken windows stare down like empty eye sockets.

You turn.

Rachel stands atop a collapsed stairwell, coat moving faintly in the wind, red hair catching the gray light like a defiant flame in a dying world.

“No,” she breathes.

You frown. “Rachel?”

She descends slowly, boots crunching over glass. You feel how her omega-level telepathy held under rigid discipline still has a dangerous presence.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says, voice rougher than you expected. “You can’t be.”

The wind picks up, tugging at your jacket. In the distance, a Sentinel spotlight slices across the skyline.

“I’ve been with the resistance for weeks,” you think in your mind. “You know that.”

Her jaw tightens. In her own mind there’s an image.

You.

Burning.

Or falling.

Or screaming.

It shifts too fast to grasp.

“You were… crucial. You led the evacuation at Westchester,” she continues, eyes unfocused as if watching ghosts. “You held the psychic barrier when the Sentinels breached the tunnels. You—”

Her voice falters.

“You died buying us thirty-seven seconds.”

The building feels smaller.