Chapter Text
The jumper’s interior hummed beneath John's boots, a low, restless vibration. Rain streaked across the viewport in sharp silver lines as they dropped out of the orbital gate—the hidden one Rodney had dug out of Ancient redundancy like a secret door—and into Asuras’ atmosphere, straight into the storm waiting for them.
The storm wasn’t natural. Even from the pilot seat John could feel that the air was too tight, too electric; the sky wound up like a wire about to snap. Clouds stacked in heavy, dark layers, lit from within by silent flashes that made his eyes ache.
Rodney muttered something under his breath, then louder: “That is not meteorology, by the way. That’s power-grid discharge. I knew this planet was going to try to kill us.”
John kept his gaze on the storm instead of the anxious scientist beside him. “You’ve got the signal, right?”
Rodney's mouth tightened. “‘Got’ is a flexible word. Coordinates keep shifting. Either the atmosphere is playing games with us or the Replicators are messing with the grid. Maybe both. But the core pattern’s still there. It shouldn’t be, unless—”
“Unless she’s keeping it open,” John finished.
The words settled in the space between them like static. John kept his eyes forward, but a hard, unwelcome heat climbed behind his ribs. If she was holding the signal, she was conscious. Fighting. Still in that place while they were up here talking about it. He shifted his grip on the controls, knuckles whitening before he forced them loose again.
Rodney exhaled hard. “Yeah. Or the universe is mocking me personally. Flip a coin.”
Teyla watched John carefully. “If she is alive,” she said, “she will need to see a familiar face first.”
“She’ll see all of us,” John said, the words coming out rougher than he'd intended. He tightened his grip on the throttle, the scraped skin across his knuckles burning against the controls, an echo of the last time he'd slammed his hand against a Replicator barrier and felt her slip away. "We're bringing her home."
Ronon strapped his harness tighter, the ghost of a grin crossing his face. “If she’s not, we burn the place down.”
Rodney groaned. “Do not say that. The last time you said that, you actually—”
“I mean it,” Ronon said simply.
John’s mouth twitched, the closest thing to a smile any of them could manage. “Let’s try not to start with arson. But I like the energy.”
The console beeped. Rodney swore quietly. “Signal lock, but it’s faint. Thirteen minutes between pulses, drifting fast.”
John nudged the jumper's nose toward the worst of the storm. "Then we don't give it time to drift."
Lightning flickered in pale veins through the bruised sky. He kept his gaze forward, but the jolt of light made something twist low in his chest. If she was the one holding that signal open, if she was fighting through whatever Oberoth had done to her, then every second they lost mattered.
He didn't let himself feel the rest of it.
Teyla leaned forward behind his shoulder, her calm unshakable. “Whatever waits for us, we face it as a team.”
John nodded once, eyes on the horizon. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Together.”
Rodney hunched over the console like the storm had crawled inside the cockpit with them. His fingers skittered over the controls, too fast, too loud. “Just so everyone knows, this is officially the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. And I have data to back that up.”
Ronon checked his blaster with a calm that felt almost insulting. “You say that every mission.”
“Because you people keep giving me new material!”
“Rodney speaks his fear to control it," Teyla said, her voice quiet but firm. "It is his way."
Rodney didn’t look up. “My way is staying alive. Which, statistically, none of you seem interested in.”
Rain hit the hull in hammering sheets. The controls jolted in John's hands, every instrument flashing red for attention. The storm swallowed them whole. Wind screamed across the plating; static rattled the comms, filling his headset with a hiss like distant voices cut off mid-word.
Rodney swore, loud enough to cut the chaos, "I can't tell if we're flying or falling!"
"Both," John grunted, fighting the controls. "Hang on."
The jumper bucked, nose dropping, the horizon flipping sideways. For a heartbeat, there was no up, no down, just motion and light. John forced his hands to stay loose, muscles screaming against the instinct to lock. The jumper responded better when you treated her like a partner, not a problem.
"Altitude?" he barked.
"Too fast," Rodney snapped. "We're dropping too fast!"
"Numbers, McKay."
"Eight hundred meters—seven—six—oh, that’s a lot of lightning—”
The storm flashed white around them, the hull ringing with the impact of nearby strikes. The air outside wasn't just air anymore; it was charged, alive, angry.
“John,” Teyla said, low.
“I see it.” He rode out another jolt, then eased back. The jumper shuddered but leveled, skimming the underside of the cloud deck. The worst of the turbulence eased into a constant, teeth-gritting vibration.
The storm spit them out like a seed.
Below, the Replicator city rose from the landscape in jagged geometry, all gleam and precision. From orbit it had been a pattern. Up close, it looked like a thought made solid: towers like blades, walkways too thin and clean for human feet. In the weak daylight, the structures caught the remaining stormlight, reflecting it in hard planes. The whole place pulsed faintly with internal power, a grid of cold light threading every surface.
John had seen it from the ground before: corridors, chambers, slaughter. Seeing it from the air was worse. There was nowhere for a human to be in that design. No balconies. No windows. Just edges and intent.
“She’s in there,” he said, before he meant to. The words came from somewhere deep in his throat.
Rodney flicked data across his display, overlaying the city with ghostly grids. “Signal source is inside the central nexus. Two levels below their primary control array, about fifty meters east.” He frowned. “It’s shifting. They’re rerouting. And the interference is—okay, that’s not me. That’s new.”
“Talk to me, McKay. What does that mean?”
Rodney’s eyes darted, tracking a spike on the screen. “Something’s bleeding through the grid. It matches the EEG pattern we pulled back in Atlantis—hers. It’s… it’s riding the carrier wave and knocking it out of sync. Machines don’t do that. People do. That shouldn’t be possible unless—
“Unless she’s fighting back,” Teyla said quietly.
Rodney swallowed. “Or calling for help.”
John set his jaw. "Then we answer."
He brought the jumper in low and slow, cloaking engaged, hugging the narrow gaps between towers. Metal spires knifed up around them, too close and too many. The city's sensor web brushed against the cloak like fingers testing a curtain.
"Any sign they see us?" John asked.
"I'm keeping us off their main grid," Rodney said, fingers dancing. "But if Elizabeth keeps punching holes in their consensus, someone's going to notice. The noise she's generating is—” He broke off, staring at the numbers. “Okay, either she’s destabilizing their local array or the entire complex is about to have a very bad day.”
"Let's make it the first," John said. "Pick a landing spot."
"There." Teyla pointed to a narrow platform halfway down the central structure, barely wider than the jumper. "It looks like a maintenance access."
Rodney squinted. "That is not a landing pad."
"It is today," John said, already angling them in.
The jumper settled with a jarring scrape that rattled through the deck. For a moment, no one breathed.
Then Ronon popped his harness and stood. Without a word, he shifted half a step forward, instinctively putting himself between John and the open hatch. "Door?"
“Still cloaked,” Rodney warned. “We uncloak and open at the same time or we fry the field.”
“On my mark,” John said. “Teyla, you’re on point. Ronon, rear guard. Rodney, stick to me and don’t touch anything that glows unless it’s yours.”
Rodney muttered, “You say that like it’s ever stopped me,” but his hands were steady as he keyed the hatch.
“Three,” John said, pulse climbing. “Two. One.”
The cloak dropped. The hatch snapped open, letting in air that smelled like metal and ozone and a faint, sterile sweetness that raised the hairs on John's arms. They moved out as one, boots hitting the Replicator platform with soft thuds. The city hummed beneath their feet, a vibration running up through bone.
For a second, nothing happened, then the world tilted. A deep, subsonic shudder rolled through the structure, making the platform quiver. Lights along the nearest wall flickered but not in the precise pulse John remembered. It was an uneven stutter, as if the whole place had forgotten how to breathe.
“Is that her?” Ronon asked.
Rodney checked his tablet, eyes wide. “That’s… something. Sections of the grid—look at this—whole blocks dropping in and out of phase. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Door,” Teyla said. A seam in the wall slid open in front of them with a liquid hiss, unprompted.
They all froze.
“Rodney?” John asked.
“It’s not me,” Rodney said quickly. “I didn’t touch anything.” He stared at his tablet. “Her signal just jumped again. If this isn’t her, it’s the nicest trap I’ve ever seen.”
Another shudder ran through the structure. Somewhere deeper in the city, metal screamed.
Teyla’s gaze met John’s. No doubt. No fear. Just conviction. “She knows we are here.”
He didn’t say how much he hoped that was true. “Move.”
They plunged into the corridor, weapons up. The halls were as he remembered: too smooth, too bright, light coming from nowhere, air too clean. But where the city had felt perfectly balanced before, now it felt off-kilter. Lights flared and dimmed in irregular patterns. Panels along the walls flickered between states. Once, a section of floor in front of them liquefied into a glittering mesh before hardening again, like the city couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
“Left,” Rodney said, watching his tablet. “No, right, they rerouted—okay, staying with left. She keeps punching their nav grid, and it’s throwing off my map.”
“So we follow the punches,” John said.
They moved in a tight formation, Teyla leading with her P90, John at her shoulder, Rodney behind them close enough that John could feel his breath, Ronon bringing up the rear with his blaster ready. The first wave of Replicators hit them at the junction of four corridors. They came out of the walls and floor in a spray of glittering fragments, assembling as they moved. John didn’t think; they never had the luxury of that when it came to these things. He fired, aiming for joints and center mass, even though hitting them didn’t always mean stopping them.
“Contact!” he shouted, unnecessary but automatic.
Ronon’s blaster spat heat, dropping the first one mid-form. It jerked, stuttered, then dragged itself another step before collapsing entirely in a fall of dead light.
“Keep moving!” Teyla called, walking her fire across the advancing line. One Replicator lunged for Rodney. John stepped in, catching it with a burst that took out part of its arm. It still kept coming.
The lights in the corridor flickered hard. For a heartbeat, the Replicator froze, mid-lunge, its body caught mid-motion as if someone had hit pause. The floor shuddered. A raw surge of energy knifed along the walls, making John’s skin prickle. Then the Replicator shattered, its form destabilizing into fragments that rained to the floor with a sound like breaking glass.
Rodney stared. “Did you see that? That wasn’t us. That was an internal fault. The local coherence just—just dropped. And it happened exactly when her signal spiked,” he added, glancing at his screen. “That’s not coincidence.”
“Elizabeth,” Teyla breathed.
“Yeah,” John said, chest tight. “I’m betting on it.”
They stepped over the glittering wreckage and pushed on.
With every turn, the city fought itself. Doors opened before they reached them, or wouldn’t open at all until Rodney barked at the panel and jammed a bypass. Once, an entire section of wall rippled into something like liquid and tried to harden around them, but a shockwave tore through the structure at the same time. The trap stuttered, its shape collapsing, and they spilled forward, shaken but intact.
“Okay, this is officially worse than when they were fully functional,” Rodney said, voice too high. “At least then they were predictable. Now they’re glitching and homicidal.”
Teyla glanced back at him. “You said you preferred staying alive.”
“Yes, well, it would be nice if the universe occasionally cooperated with my preferences.”
“McKay,” John snapped. “Direction.”
Rodney checked his screen, jaw clenched. “Down one more level. Then east. The signal’s—John, it’s spiking. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it right now.”
Another tremor rolled through the city, stronger than the last. The lights dimmed to a low red, then surged back to white. Somewhere above them, something exploded.
Ronon bared his teeth. “Sounded like the top level.”
“Can we not be under the top level when it collapses?” Rodney demanded. “Just once?”
They hit a stairwell that wasn’t really a stairwell so much as a series of descending ramps, too smooth to be safe at a run. They ran anyway. John’s hand brushed the wall as they moved, feeling the vibration under the alien material. It reminded him of a heart in fibrillation.
He forced them to hug the same route they’d taken in, angling back toward the central spine and the narrow slice of platform where the jumper clung to the city’s skin. Halfway down, the lights cut out. Darkness dropped on them like a weight. For a second, there was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the hum of their equipment.
“Don’t panic,” John said, breathless.
“I am not panicking," Rodney shouted. "This is me being calm. You’d know if I were panicking.”
“Rodney,” Teyla said warningly.
Emergency lights along the floor flickered on, casting the corridor in narrow lines of cold blue. The light made everything feel thinner, more fragile.
“Okay, slightly panicking,” Rodney admitted.
John forced his voice steady. “Keep going.”
At the bottom of the ramp, the signal slammed into them like a physical thing.
John didn’t hear it so much as feel it, an off-beat rhythm against his sternum, a pulse in the air that wasn’t the city’s. For a second, he thought his heart had skipped. Then he realized it wasn’t his.
“What was that?” Ronon asked, shifting his grip on the blaster.
Rodney’s eyes were wide. “She’s… she’s amplifying. It’s not just bleed-through anymore. She’s hijacking their carrier and using it as a beacon.” His voice dropped, oddly reverent. “Same timestamp offset as the pattern we saw in Atlantis. It’s her. It’s absolutely her.”
John’s throat closed. He swallowed hard. “Then we’re close.”
Rodney pointed. “Through there. That corridor, twenty meters. Then—” He cut himself off, staring at his display. “No, no, no—”
“What?”
“The grid around her just hard-locked. Somebody noticed. They’re throwing everything at keeping that chamber contained. If I push it from here, I could fry her.”
“So don’t push,” John said. “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”
Ronon grinned. “My favorite way.”
They reached the corridor Rodney had indicated. At the far end, a door waited, featureless, too smooth, humming with contained power. John knew it without needing Rodney’s confirmation.
He stopped just shy of the threshold. For a heartbeat, the memory doubled over itself: his hand slamming against a barrier, Elizabeth on the other side, Oberoth between them. The uselessness of it. The way it had felt to walk away.
The old reflex rose fast—shut it down, stay sharp, don’t hope—but he shoved it aside, hard. If he treated this like another mission, another acceptable loss, then he’d already lost her. This time he was going to let himself want the impossible and act like it was non-negotiable.
He checked his weapon, then looked at Rodney. “Can you get it open?”
Rodney stared at the door, fingers hovering. “Yes? Maybe? If I bypass the local controls, I might trigger a countermeasure that converts everything in this room to raw energy—look, I’m saying I can try.”
Teyla’s voice was low and steady. “Elizabeth opened the way for us before. Perhaps she can again.”
John’s chest tightened. “Rodney, if I put my hand on it, can she tell it’s me? Or is that—”
“Ridiculous, sentimental, and borderline metaphysical?” Rodney snapped. “Yes. Also, given the way she’s been corrupting their logic, I’d say she’s already halfway to metaphysical, so go ahead.”
John huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. He stepped forward until his palm met the door.
The surface was cool and smooth and shouldn’t have felt like anything. But underneath the material, the hum shifted, a tiny glitch in the frequency. For an instant, it synced with his pulse.
Something in his chest stuttered.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered. “It’s John. We’re here.”
For a second, nothing. Then the hum under his hand jumped, stuttered out of its perfect rhythm, and a surge tore through the door like a shiver. The lights along the frame flickered.
Rodney’s tablet chimed. “Okay, that’s not me. She heard you. Oh my God, she actually heard you.”
The door didn’t slide open. It fractured.
Hairline cracks raced out from under his palm like lightning, cutting the seamless surface into jagged segments. The material shimmered, destabilizing. With a sound like glass under strain, the door shattered inward, dissolving into a rain of bright fragments that evaporated before they hit the floor.
The chamber beyond was a wound.
The light panels along the walls flickered in wild patterns. The air smelled scorched, laced with ozone and something faintly organic, like overheated circuitry buried in flesh. The central platform was still there. So was the chair, the restraints, the cruel arc of machinery overhead.
Elizabeth was in it.
Her body was rigid against the mounts, head tipped back, jaw clenched. Thin threads of light crawled across her temple where Oberoth’s interface had touched her, pulsing in time with something that was not a human heartbeat. Blood marked a dark path from one nostril to the curve of her mouth, stark against skin gone too pale. Her hands were bound at the wrists, fingers curled like she’d been reaching for something and never made it.
The machinery above her sparked, flickering like a failing storm cloud. A figure coalesced at the edge of the platform, light condensing into the shape of a man. Oberoth’s features sharpened, the familiar, polite mask tightening when he saw them.
“Ah,” he said, voice carrying with an awful clarity despite the chaos. “The rest of the noise.”
Lines of light lanced from his hands into the rig above her, desperate threads trying to pull the interface back into alignment, to drag her fully under again even as the system fought him.
Ronon lifted his blaster. “I can fix that.”
“No,” Rodney hissed. “Energy weapons feed their—”
Before he could finish, the lights in the chamber flared, then cratered. A surge of raw power exploded through the walls. Oberoth’s form glitched, his outline tearing at the edges.
Elizabeth’s eyes snapped open.
They were too bright at first, pupils blown, irises filmed with an unnatural sheen. For a heartbeat, John saw nothing human there at all, just code and light and pain.
Then the sheen cracked.
Her gaze found him. Fixed. Focused.
“John,” she rasped.
The sound barreled into his chest.
He moved before he thought, crossing the distance to the platform in three long strides, Teyla at his flank, Ronon covering Oberoth’s flickering projection, Rodney hanging back by the door, eyes everywhere at once.
“You’re here,” she whispered, voice thin, raw. “You’re real.”
“Yeah,” he said, something in his chest breaking loose. Up close, she looked worse and better than he’d let himself imagine—hurt, angry, alive. “You too.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Teyla’s shoulders ease, a fierce shine in her eyes; Ronon’s jaw unclench as some tightness left his stance; Rodney’s throat bobbed once, hard, like he’d just swallowed an entire argument with physics.
John reached for her, hand hovering for a second over her shoulder, afraid to touch, afraid she’d vanish under his fingers. Then she moved first. Her hand twitched against the restraint, fingers straining.
He got the message.
John grabbed the nearest shackle and yanked. It didn’t give.
“Ronon,” he snapped.
Ronon got the first shackle off with brute force, metal shrieking as it tore. Teyla was already reaching for the next, her hands steady even as sparks rained from the failing array overhead.
Oberoth’s form flickered, static crawling up his silhouette. “She is ours,” he hissed. “You cannot extract corrupted data without losing structural integrity. She will dissolve.”
“Pretty sure she disagrees,” Rodney muttered, tearing into the nearest console.
John didn’t answer him. His focus was on Elizabeth—on the way her breath hitched, on the faint tremor running through her body, on the thin thread of light crawling under her skin.
Then her spine arched. Not violently—this wasn’t Oberoth’s override. This was her. A controlled pull inward, teeth clenched, eyes squeezed shut. The overhead rig sputtered in response, its lights stuttering, dropping in and out of phase. The bind on her right wrist jittered, metal locking pins clattering as if something were scrambling its commands from the inside.
“John,” Rodney yelped, “that’s her—she just forced a feedback spike into the restraint’s control loop—”
The shackle released with a sharp, mechanical click.
Elizabeth’s freed hand fell, heavy, but she dragged it upward and curled her fingers weakly around John’s wrist.
John’s breath hitched, low in his chest, before he forced it steady.
“I’m right here,” he said, voice rough around the edges.
Her fingers tightened—weak, but purposeful. “Knew…” She struggled for the rest, didn’t need it.
Elizabeth sagged forward. John caught her, one arm around her back, the other under her knees as her legs gave out. She felt lighter than she should have. Too light. Heat skittered under her skin like trapped electricity.
Her skin was too hot and too cold at once, a fever with no sweat; her pulse against his wrist stuttered in a rhythm that didn’t quite match human or machine, like both were trying to fire at the same time. Her head tipped toward his shoulder. For a fraction of a second, she let herself rest there, eyes closing against his collar.
“Still fighting, boss,” Ronon said, watching the code cascade abort on the walls. “Knew you would.”
The chamber shuddered around them. Panels blew out in showers of sparks.
“Okay, great, touching reunion,” Rodney said, voice climbing. “But the whole grid’s collapsing. I’ve got cascading failure across half their power conduits. If we don’t move now, we all become very pretty, very dead abstract art.”
He jabbed a finger at his screen. “She’s tearing their local network to pieces trying to keep us a path out, and Oberoth’s containment routines are chewing through the rest. The city can’t handle both.”
“John.” Elizabeth’s voice was smaller now, close to his ear. “You have to go. The backlash—”
“We’re not leaving you,” he said.
“Not asking you to,” she breathed. “Just… hurry.”
Another shockwave slammed through the city, this one strong enough to stagger them all. Overhead, machinery cracked, shards of glowing material shearing off and evaporating before they hit the ground. Oberoth’s form flickered, breaking apart into stuttering threads.
“You cannot take her,” he said, but the words came in pieces, some slipping into a shriek of failing code.
Elizabeth stirred, lifting her head. Her eyes were clearer now, humanity burning through the network’s residue even as it tried to reclaim her.
“And you can't have me,” she said, voice shaking but steady.
John felt the floor lurch, Elizabeth’s weight in his arms the only solid thing left.
Emergency light strips along the base of the walls flared to life in a dim, reddish glow. Oberoth’s form was gone. The machinery overhead hung in twisted ruin.
Rodney’s tablet screeched a warning. “We need to go. Right now. Structural integrity on this level is—oh, good, I always wanted to die in a building collapse on a machine planet.”
“Save the eulogy,” John said through gritted teeth. He shifted Elizabeth more securely in his arms. “Rodney, lead. Teyla, Ronon, watch our backs.”
They ran.
The corridor outside the chamber was worse on the way out. The city wasn’t just glitching now; it was failing. Walls pulsed, sections of floor flickered between solid and not, lights boiled and dimmed. Twice, they had to jump across gaps where the floor had simply stopped existing, vaporized into a crawling mesh of light.
“Left,” Rodney gasped. “No, right—no, it’s changing underneath us, that’s cheating—okay, straight, go straight, just keep moving!”
“Good strategy,” Ronon said dryly, firing over his shoulder at a Replicator that had managed to assemble out of still-functioning fragments. The thing jerked, twitched, and dissolved into dust mid-lunge as the power grid hiccuped again.
Elizabeth’s breathing hitched against John’s neck. Too fast. Too shallow. He felt the unnatural heat beneath her skin, the way her muscles trembled in waves that didn’t match the rhythm of her breath. The urge to stop, to lay her down, to do something, anything, was a physical ache.
Later. He forced himself to compartmentalize, to do what she’d always been better at: prioritize.
“Almost there,” Teyla said, more for Elizabeth than for any of them. “The jumper is waiting.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Elizabeth whispered, words slurring at the edges. “Woolsey—IOA—”
“Yeah, they can yell at us when we’re not exploding,” John said. “New rule.”
She huffed something that might have been a laugh and then grimaced as another tremor shivered through her.
They reached the ramp corridor. The emergency lights here were failing, plunging whole sections into intermittent darkness. The floor bucked under another series of distant impacts.
Rodney’s voice broke. “Oh good, explosions. I love explosions. Nothing says ‘stable environment’ like things blowing up around my face.”
“Keep going,” John ordered.
“I am keeping going! This is me keeping going and also pointing out that the ceiling may not keep going with us!”
Ronon glanced up as a crack raced along the overhead structure. “Move faster.”
They did.
John’s arms burned, a deep, shaking fatigue creeping in from shoulder to fingertips; his bad knee protested every jolt of the failing floor, but he locked his jaw and kept his pace even. Dropping her wasn’t an option his body was allowed to entertain.
By the time they burst out onto the exterior platform, the storm had found the city. Rain slashed sideways, blown by high winds, plastering hair to faces, soaking tactical vests in seconds. Lightning danced along the taller spires, feeding straight into the wounded grid.
The jumper crouched where they’d left it, ramp down, systems humming. For a heartbeat, John felt a surge of something like relief so sharp it hurt.
Then the platform lurched.
“Go!” he shouted.
Teyla and Ronon sprinted ahead, clearing the way. Rodney pounded up the ramp, skidding into the co-pilot’s chair with a string of panicked commentary.
John took the steps slower, each one an argument with his body. Elizabeth’s weight dragged at his arms, but he refused to shift his grip into something less careful. Her fingers were still wrapped weakly around his sleeve, knuckles white, knuckles human.
Teyla turned at the top of the ramp. “I have her,” she said, reaching.
For a second, he didn’t want to let go. Then he made himself. Teyla slid an arm under Elizabeth’s shoulders, guiding her toward the nearest bench as gently as if she were made of glass.
As soon as John’s hands were free, he stumbled into the pilot’s seat and hit the controls. The ramp closed with a hydraulic hiss. The jumper lifted as the platform behind them sheared away into empty air, crashing down in a rain of debris.
“Atmospheric integrity on this planet is now officially shot,” Rodney said, checking his readings. “The energy dump from their grid collapse is—oh, look, we’ve spawned our own weather system. Fantastic.”
“Can we fly through it?” John asked.
Rodney shot him a look. “Can we—what do you think we just did on the way in?”
“Then we do it again,” John said. “Dial the gate.”
“The planet gate is tied into their main grid,” Rodney said, fingers already moving. “If the power surges again while we’re mid-transit, we could get shredded.”
“Options?”
Rodney’s mouth tightened. ““The orbital gate. It’s piggybacking off their subspace relays but it’s not dependent on the local power conduits. Less interference up there, if we can punch through the soup without getting turned into a very patriotic smear.”
Ronon braced himself against the bulkhead, watching the view. “I vote for not being a smear.”
“Seconded,” Teyla said calmly, one hand steady on the bench where Elizabeth lay.
“Unanimous,” John said. “Rodney. Get us up.”
The jumper surged skyward.
The storm tried to keep them. Wind slammed into the hull, making the ship shudder. Lightning arced close enough to paint the cockpit white, afterimages burning into John’s vision. The controls jerked like something alive and unwilling, but he kept his hands steady, eyes on the vague promise of clearer sky above.
“Gate?” John pressed.
“Almost,” Rodney said. “Come on, come on—yes. There. Got it. The gate’s online.”
The clouds thinned. The sky paled. Then the storm dropped away beneath them, leaving the jumper in a pocket of washed-out light and thin air. Above, the curve of the planet wrapped around them, vast and impossible. The Stargate hung in orbit like an accusation.
Rodney’s fingers flew. “Dialing. And before you ask, yes, I’ve spoofed the signal so Woolsey thinks we’re a mild power fluctuation in the east pier.”
“Appreciate the discretion,” John said.
The gate bloomed open, a circle of blue swallowing the stars behind it.
John risked one glance back.
Elizabeth lay on the bench, strapped in as best Teyla could manage on short notice. Her eyes were half-closed, lashes dark against pale cheekbones. The faint shimmer of nanite light still moved under her skin at her temple, but it flickered now, irregular, as if unsure which rhythm to follow. A line of dried blood marred the side of her face. Teyla had wiped away the rest.
Teyla caught John’s eye. “Her pulse is fast, but steady,” she said. “Her breathing is…strained. Her temperature is wrong,” she added softly. “It does not feel natural.”
Elizabeth’s eyes fluttered. For a moment, they cleared, green and sharp and present.
“You made it,” she whispered.
John held her gaze. “So did you.”
She swallowed. “I… wasn’t sure you’d find me.”
Her gaze drifted past him for a heartbeat, unfocused. “He kept trying to…rewrite me,” she murmured. “I kept breaking it. Holding on to…you. To Atlantis. It was—” She cut herself off on a ragged breath, but the effort was there, the choice to fight spelled out between the words.
He shook his head, voice rough. “Next time someone tells you that, don’t believe them.”
A ghost of a smile touched her mouth. “Next time,” she echoed, and the word held more hope than it should have.
The jumper hit the event horizon.
For an instant, the world was nothing but blue and motion, the familiar pull of wormhole transit stealing breath and weight. Then they were through, spat back into the steady hum of their own sky, Atlantis waiting somewhere ahead, a signal across the dark.
Rodney scanned his board with quick, jerky passes. “No residual Asuran signatures, no stray energy spikes, no fun surprise anomalies hitching a ride,” he reported, some of the strain bleeding out of his voice. “It’s clean.”
John let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
Part relief, part disbelief, part realization that the woman on the bench was not the same one he'd lost on Asuras. But she was Elizabeth, and that was enough.
“Rodney,” he said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s go home.”
Rodney’s hands gentled on the controls. “On it.”
Teyla adjusted the blanket she’d pulled over Elizabeth, tucking it in with careful hands. Ronon settled into the rear seat, finally letting his shoulders drop a fraction.
Elizabeth’s fingers twitched, searching along the edge of the bench. John didn’t even register moving until his hand was there, reaching back from the pilot’s chair. Her grip was still weak, but it tightened around his like a promise.
“You’re here,” she said again, barely audible.
“Nowhere else to be,” he murmured.
Outside, the jumper cut through clear air toward home. At Elizabeth's wrist, the faint shimmer under her skin flared once more, out of time with the engines’ steady pulse—a tiny, stubborn reminder that this wasn’t over.