POV : EARTH

  Back on Earth, the feeling in the atmosphere was odd. At first, the Portals had been a regular menace, snatching up people every week like some sick cosmic lottery. Then, like a wonky clock, it slowed to once a month. But now, nothing. It was driving the Portal Anomaly Study and Tactical Agency (P.A.S.T.A) mad.

  Just when they had launched their big-budget, groundbreaking documentary, Atlas and the Portal Crushers: What’s Going On in the Wasteland, the Portal activity came to a screeching halt. No new disappearances, no new data. Everything they’d claimed—every prediction—was now hanging by a thread. It was embarrassing.

  The theories that had taken months to piece together? Obliterated. “It’s like the Portals are mocking us,” the lead scientist had said in frustration during a recent meeting. It was a nightmare for the government, too. No new data meant no answers, and no answers meant fear still loomed like a dark cloud over the population.

  Tick, tick, tick. Time stretched on. A week passed. Then two. Then an entire month with no one getting sucked in. It should have been a relief—should have—but it wasn’t. It felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop. The panic in people had started to change, replaced by a constant unease.

  But not everyone was at peace.

  ‘‘‘

  Jim felt like a ghost, wandering through his quiet house, waiting for the front door to burst open and for Johnny to come back. He still remembered the last conversation he’d had with Atlas, years ago, before the madness began.

  “You ever think Johnny could handle a place like that?” Atlas had asked, with a look, like he already knew what was coming.

  Jim had volunteered to go into the portals first. He was ready to dive headfirst into danger, but Atlas stopped him—had insisted he stay with his son. That decision, it turned out, had been one hell of a cruel twist of fate. Johnny had vanished, snatched by the portals on his 18th birthday.

  Jim clenched his fists at the memory. If Atlas were standing in front of him now, he wasn’t sure if he’d hug him or throttle him. ‘Did Atlas know?‘

  That question haunted him. His son was gone, thrown into the unknown of the Wasteland, and every day Jim prayed he had taught Johnny enough to survive. He hoped—no, prayed—that Johnny had found Atlas, and not some wasteland full of cannibals and monsters.

  ‘‘‘

  Meanwhile, high above the action of regular life, Alicia was in her luxury hotel suite, though she was hardly at rest. She’d convinced the government to let her out of confinement by promising to help them deal with the portals. But now that they’d stopped, her usefulness was once again under question.

  In the middle of her private gym in the suite, drenched in sweat from a workout, Alicia paused and looked out over the skyline of Calgary. “I wonder how Atlas is doing,” she murmured to herself, her voice barely audible in the quiet room. It had been months since anyone had been portaled, months since there’d been any sign of Atlas or his crew.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  ‘Will they ever come back?‘ The thought gnawed at her. She felt a strange kind of nostalgia—Atlas had been the reason she’d joined the SFB in the first place. Without him, everything felt… hollow. Even the SFB League, which had skyrocketed in popularity, felt meaningless. People were training like their lives depended on it, but with no portals opening, the urgency had started to fade. Alicia knew better, though. ‘They’ll come back. The portals never stop for good.‘

  But the longer it went on, the more her mind wandered. ‘What if she was stuck here forever, with no closure, no answers? What if the Portal Crushers had moved on without her?‘

  Back at P.A.S.T.A., the tension was rising by the day. They were stuck in a strange paradox. No more portals meant no more missing people, which was a good thing. But no more missing people also meant no more chances to gather data, to figure out why this had all started in the first place. This was not a good thing.

  In a dimly lit conference room, scientists and officials sat around a long table, staring at the massive screen on the wall. A flashing red alert sat ominously in the corner: PORTAL ANOMALY INACTIVE.

  “We can’t just sit here waiting,” one of the government officials said, slamming his hand on the table. “We need a plan. What if they start up again without warning?”

  The lead scientist shook his head. “That’s exactly the problem—we don’t know. We’re flying blind. The portals never behaved this way before.”

  “And what about the people who vanished?!” another voice snapped from the other end of the table. “Are we just supposed to forget about them? Forget about our families?”

  ‘‘‘

  Jim had stayed silent through most of the meeting, but now, he couldn’t hold back. “We’re not forgetting anyone. My son’s still out there.” His voice cracked, raw and full of pain. “Atlas has to be out there, too. We just need to figure out how to get them back.”

  The room fell into an uneasy silence. Everyone was thinking it, but nobody wanted to say it out loud.

  ‘What if they never come back?‘

  ‘‘‘

  Atlas had always said that people could return home at the end of the year, and the Earth scientists had been keeping close track of that time. Eleven months had passed, and they were closing in on the final month. They hoped the portals would stay closed till year end.

  ‘‘‘

  Their hopes were crushed, though, as portals opened across the world again. This time, it wasn’t random; they were popping up in strange areas all around the globe, and the people being sucked in were uniformly young—between the ages of 18 and 21.

  Yes, this was a Targeted Portal. Just like the hospital incident before, this time it focused on a specific type of person: those who had played a lot of board games, video games, and devoured fantasy novels.

  In a dimly lit lab, the scientists from Earth stared at the screens in stunned silence. Monitors flickered with data from all over the world, showing portal after portal swallowing up teenagers and young adults.

  Dr. Harris slammed his fist down on the console. “Damn it! We thought we had this under control!”

  “How is this even happening?” one of the junior scientists asked, nervously adjusting their glasses. “We reinforced the barriers. We shut down the portal zones!”

  “Clearly not well enough,” Dr. Lee muttered, pacing back and forth. “This… this is targeted. We’ve never seen the pattern before. Fantasy fans? Gamers? It’s like they knew exactly who to pull in.”

  Dr. Harris sighed, rubbing his temples. “We prepared as best as we could. And now it’s happening again.”

  Meanwhile, the regular folks watching the news at home were in a frenzy. Social media exploded with memes, theories, and conspiracy threads.

  “Wait, so… I just have to play more board games, and I could end up in a fantasy world?!” one teenager posted on a forum, half-joking, half-terrified.

  Parents clutched their kids tighter, checking their bookshelves and game collections nervously. A new kind of panic spread, not over a virus or a war, but a magical portal that no one could control.

  At a coffee shop, a group of friends huddled over their phones, doom scrolling. “Dude, if this happened like, a year ago, that would’ve been me! I was hardcore into D&D back then,” one guy said, eyes wide.

  His friend laughed, trying to lighten the mood. “Guess it’s a good time to switch to something more chill… like Sudoku.”