The alarms began at 02:14.
A soft ripple buzzed through the Maker System first — a warning pang against the inside of Amethyst's ribs — long before the Garrison's crude sensors noticed anything. She sat upright in her bunk, the HUD snapping open across her vision.
[INCOMING OBJECT — TRAJECTORY: LOW ORBIT > DESERT IMPACT]
[TECHNOLOGICAL PROFILE: GALRA PRISONER VESSEL]
[SECONDARY SCAN: DRUIDIC/ALTEAN ENERGY MODIFICATIONS DETECTED]
[IDENTITY PROBABILITY: SHIRO — 99.2%]
Amethyst exhaled, a tight, shaky sound.
So canon was finally starting.
She slid out of bed, already dressed in the clothes she'd prepared for this exact night. Everything in her room had been arranged for rapid deployment: collapsible scanner sleeves, her Maker-crafted bracer, a modified badge for stealth access, a small swarm of "dust mote" micro-drones sleeping in a jar on her desk.
She released them with a flick of her fingers. They scattered like silver pollen, slipping through vents and cracks as they began mapping the Garrison in real time.
"Find Lance and Hunk," she whispered. "Watch for Keith."
Her voice wasn't Pidge's. It was steady, older, focused — the voice of a nineteen-year-old hiding inside a fourteen-year-old boy's file photo. The Maker System thrummed with readiness, its gridlines already reconstructing her workshop in the back of her mind.
Outside, the desert lit up faintly as the Galra vessel streaked across the sky — a burning violet comet tearing the night in half.
Amethyst swallowed hard.
Shiro is here. This is it.
She pulled up the Maker UI again.
[QUEST TRIGGER: CANON INITIATION — "Reach the Black Paladin"]
[REWARD: SYSTEM EXPANSION + NEW BLUEPRINT CLASS]
Her heart hammered.
Not fear.
Purpose.
There were things she needed to fix. Things Pidge Holt had never known how to change. But she wasn't the Pidge from canon. She wasn't even just Katie.
She was Amethyst Sage, reincarnated, system-backed, and determined to save everyone who mattered — without losing herself in the story.
The ground rumbled. The vessel hit the desert in a distant plume of sand.
Her drones pinged Lance's position. Keith's, too.
"Perfect," she breathed, slipping out of her dorm and into the shadowed hallway.
Tonight belonged to the Garrison.
Tomorrow belonged to Voltron.
And the future — if she had anything to say about it — would belong to none of the tragedies canon had planned.
---
The Garrison slept lightly that night — tension humming through the halls after the unidentified crash. Security teams marched tighter patrols. Doors that were usually left unlocked were sealed. Even the automated cameras blinked more often, recalibrating for higher alert thresholds.
Amethyst moved through it all like water.
Her badge, quietly rewritten days ago, gave her stealth access to every corridor she needed. Her micro-drones drifted in the air vents, scattering harmlessly whenever a patrol passed. She saw the whole campus in shifting layers of red, blue, and gold through the Maker overlay.
She had prepared for this night for a week.
Canon would not catch her off-guard.
At the main hangar's edge, she spotted Lance and Hunk crouched behind a cargo loader, whispering frantically. Lance kept glancing around as though sheer panic alone might reveal Shiro's location.
"Pidge!" Lance hissed when she approached. "We need help! Keith already ran off! And we need—"
She held up a hand. "I know where you need to go."
Hunk blinked. "How?"
"Math," she deadpanned.
Both boys accepted this without question — which said more about her reputation than anything else.
Her Maker System pinged gently at the edge of her vision.
[ALGORITHM DEPLOYMENT READY — ACCESS CORRIDOR OVERRIDE]
She flicked her fingers subtly, sending a silent code burst through her wrist-bracer. All at once, the hangar's side-door locks blinked from red to green.
Lance's eyes nearly bugged out. "Dude—how did you do that?"
"Garrison security is trash," Amethyst said simply, pushing the door open.
The truth?
Lance's messy attempts to hack had triggered multiple sub-systems that would alert security in eighty-seven seconds. She quietly intercepted, rerouted, and scrubbed every trace — repairing his work as they went. Keith never would have made it to the crash site otherwise.
The three of them slipped into the dim corridor.
Alarms started up again in the distance — guards shouting, boots pounding. But none of it was close. None of it was following them.
Her drones saw to that.
They found Keith exactly where Amethyst expected — sprinting down a flight of stairs, a look of furious purpose on his face. He paused when the group converged.
"Pidge?" he asked, thrown for a moment. "How did you—?"
"Later," she said. "Shiro's this way."
Keith didn't question it. Not when every instinct screamed they were right.
Together, the four cadets followed her through the maze of hallways. Cameras blinked harmlessly as they passed. Several doors should have required higher clearance, but each opened the second she approached — the Maker-coded algorithms rewriting their protocols faster than the Garrison's systems could detect.
Even Keith looked impressed.
Lance looked suspiciously like he wanted to adopt her.
Hunk trailed nervously, whispering, "Guys, I think we're actually committing like… real crimes right now."
"No," Amethyst corrected. "We're committing felonies."
Hunk whimpered.
---
They reached the crash site exit— an off-limits service tunnel still smoldering from the desert impact.
A final Maker notification flickered across her vision:
[QUEST PHASE COMPLETE — "REACH THE BLACK PALADIN"]
[REWARD UNLOCKED: SYSTEM EXPANSION+ BLUEPRINT CLASS — QUANTUM THREADING]
Her breath hitched.
Quantum Threading?
She'd look later — Shiro was the priority.
The moment they stepped outside, cold desert air slapped their faces. The sky still glowed with lingering heat from the Galra vessel's fall. Amethyst's heart pounded, not with fear but a fierce, grounded certainty.
This was the turning point.
The moment everything in canon began to change.
She lifted her bracer, sweeping a fresh Maker scan across the sand dunes.
[SIGNATURE LOCKED — SHIRO]
[DISTANCE: 0.7 MILES]
"Follow me," she said.
Four cadets — stronger than their fears, and far more important than the Garrison understood — ran into the desert night.
The story of Voltron had begun.
Just not the one the universe expected.