Something heavy broke the surface of the pool with a soft, deliberate splash.
Kota surfaced from sleep in stages—first the sound, then the faint tremor through the ground, then the awareness of weight and warmth pressed against his side.
Aisha.
He kept still for a heartbeat, listening.
Another splash. Not frantic. Measured. Like something big taking its time.
He eased his head up, careful not to jostle the arm Aisha was using as a pillow. The roots above them framed a narrow view of the basin and the pool beyond.
His breath stalled.
A beast stood at the water's edge.
It was easily eight feet tall at the shoulder, built long and low, its body supported by six powerful legs that ended in splayed, padded feet. Three horns arched from its skull in a rough triangle—two sweeping back along its neck, one jutting forward like a blunt spear. Its hide was a mottled dark gray, patterned with faint, slow-pulsing lines of violet that echoed the glow in the stone.
Its head turned, slowly, like a crane pivoting on a hinge.
Kota froze, barely daring to breathe.
Up close, the head was worse.
It was too flat, too wide, eyes set in two mirrored rows—four on each side, for a total of eight, each a dull, reflective black. They tracked lazily across the basin, slid over the tree roots, passed right over the hollow where Kota and Aisha hid.
For a second, one of them seemed to catch the light and fix on him.
His heartbeat spiked high enough it hurt. His fingers dug into the moss under him, useless.
The beast snorted, a low, wet exhale that sent a faint spray across the pool. Then it dipped its muzzle again, took a few slow pulls of water, and turned away with the bored finality of something that had decided nothing nearby was worth eating.
Kota watched it trot back toward the forest, its six legs moving in a strange, rolling gait. It slipped between the luminous plants and was gone, like it had never existed at all.
He let out the breath he'd been holding in a shuddery rush.
That thing could have crushed them in their sleep.
He glanced down.
Aisha was still curled against him, breath warm against his chest, brow faintly furrowed even in rest. For a moment, the hollow felt even smaller—roots overhead, stone at his back, her weight anchoring him in place while the world outside reminded him how fragile they were.
He shifted, gently sliding his arm out from under her head.
She stirred, lashes fluttering. Her eyes opened to find him half-propped up, looking down at her.
Confusion flickered, then realization.
Color rushed to her cheeks so fast it was almost visible.
She jerked back on instinct and bumped straight into his injured shoulder.
White pain shot through him. He hissed, teeth clenching.
"Sorry!" she blurted, immediately reaching for him. "Kota, I—"
"I'm fine," he managed, sucking in a breath. "Just—don't get into a fight with my arm. It'll lose."
She winced, guilt all over her face.
The moment stretched there for a second—her flushed, too-aware, him trying not to focus on the lingering warmth where she'd been.
He broke it by pushing himself carefully toward the hollow's opening.
"Come on," he said, voice rough. "We should drink while it's quiet."
They crawled out from under the roots and crossed to the pool, movements a little stiff from sleep and bruises. The air felt cooler, the sky's purples deeper, yellow bands shifted slightly
They left the basin with the pool at their backs and the broken shapes in the distance fixed in Kota's mind.
The forest closed around them fast.
One moment, there was open sky above the shallow bowl of stone and mist. The next, broad fronds folded overhead, latticed with climbing vines, and the world shrank down to trunks, roots, and the strip of ground far enough ahead not to trip on.
Kota took the lead because his body did it before his brain could argue. Aisha drifted half a step behind and to his left, quiet, eyes moving. Their boots sank into spongey moss in some places and scraped over ridged stone in others. Every step sent a faint answering vibration back through Kota's legs, like the ground was a drum somebody was playing from underneath.
The hum never went away.
It lived under everything—under the whisper of strange leaves, the faint chirps and clicks of hidden things, the soft tap of condensed mist dripping from overhead. It wasn't loud, but it was constant, a low pressure in his teeth and the base of his skull.
He shoved it to the edge of his awareness and kept moving.
"Let's… just say it out loud once more," Aisha said after a while, voice low. "The plan."
He ducked under a curtain of translucent tendrils that swayed toward his body heat when he passed, brushing lightly across his shoulders.
"Make it to the city," he said. "Find a building that isn't falling over. Check it for anything that wants to kill us. Then see if there's… anything. A machine. A gate. I don't know. Something that looks like 'exit.'"
"So: walk into abandoned alien ruin and hope it has a door marked 'home,'" she said. "Solid."
"You got a better option?" he asked, glancing back.
She was quiet for three, four steps.
"No," she said. "And I hate that."
His right hand settled against the hilt at his hip without thinking.
Marcus's "sword" was barely more than a length of scrap metal hammered straighter than it had any right to be, one end ground into a crude edge, the other wrapped in stained cloth for grip. Just weight and the possibility of being sharp on the right side.
"Better than a pipe. Don't… swing it at anything you don't mean to hit."
He'd held it, felt the awkward pull of it in his arm, and nodded like he knew what he was doing.
Now he hoped that would be enough.
They walked.
The forest unrolled itself in pieces.
A low rise of stone forced them to climb, Kota's boots slipping once where a thin sheen of something slick coated the rock, shimmering faintly violet when it caught the light. At the top, the "view" was just more layers of plant and glow, but to the right, something moved.
He stopped, lifting a hand in warning.
Aisha stilled behind him.
Between two trunks, a vertical ribbon slid upward. For a second he thought it was water running the wrong way. Then it angled, and he saw it was a column of tiny creatures—hundreds, maybe thousands of specks crawling together so tight they looked like a single, shifting body.
They flowed up one tree, across a branch, and down another plant, changing color as they went: deep blue on bark, pale green over leaves, then almost invisible gray against stone.
"Like a… living smear," Aisha whispered. "Nope. Hard nope."
"Don't get close," Kota said.
They skirted its path and kept going.
A patch of ground ahead looked normal—dark soil, scattered fallen fronds. When Kota set his foot on it, the "soil" flexed. The whole patch quivered, surface rippling like the skin of something big shifting only where he touched it.
He yanked his foot back mid-step.
The patch eased flat again, patient.
"Okay," Aisha murmured. "New rule. Don't step on ground that looks like it's waiting."
"That's all ground here," he said.
"So—don't step," she said. "Perfect."
He snorted once, then stopped when it pulled at his shoulder.
They passed a fallen trunk with layered shelf growths along one side—thin plates stacked like steps, each a different washed-out blue. When Aisha leaned in, interested, the edges of the plates trembled and released a slow pour of glittering dust.
It hung in the air like a curtain.
Kota hooked two fingers in the back of her collar and dragged her away.
"Hey—" she started.
"Do you want whatever that is in your lungs?" he asked.
She eyed the drifting sparkle, watched it settle onto the moss and vanish as the ground drank it.
"Point taken," she muttered. "Science later. Not-dying now."
A darting, half-visible shape shot across their path a few minutes later—something like a lizard drawn in glowing lines instead of flesh. By the time Kota's brain had finished deciding it was real, it was already gone, swallowed by undergrowth.
"Please tell me that wasn't just me," Aisha said.
"I saw it," he said. "We're not eating it."
"As if I'd chase it," she said. "It'd probably phase through my hand and lay eggs in my bones."
The idea lodged in his skull in a way he did not appreciate.
They fell into a rhythm after that: walk, scan, detour, joke just enough that their brains didn't fold in on themselves.
The forest changed in small, steady ways.
The trees began to stand straighter. Their roots didn't twist up to make arches as often; more of them just bored straight down and disappeared. The constant glow from the ground thinned, breaking into scattered pools instead of a continuous wash.
Patches of bare, honest dirt showed through.
Bits of pale stone, too.
Through gaps above, Kota thought he saw something that wasn't plant or sky.
A line. Too clean. Too straight.
He angled them that way, picking paths that didn't look like they were about to close over their ankles.
The plant still got Aisha.
It didn't look like much at first. Just a mound of overlapping leaves, waist-high, growing out of a knot of darker soil. The leaves were a plain, matte green veined faintly violet, edges soft.
He didn't trust it.
"Stay away from that," he said.
Aisha peered around him.
"It looks normal," she said.
"So did that fruit-lizard thing," he said. "Let's not repeat that."
"Fair," she said.
They stepped left, giving it a meter.
Three strides, nothing.
On the fourth, something brushed Aisha's ankle.
Her eyes dropped.
The plant lunged.
The nearest broad leaf snapped across like a sprung trap and clamped onto the cuff of her pants. At the same time, two narrower leaves speared up from the base, teeth—thin, translucent curves—unfolding from their undersides as they bit into the meat of her leg just above the boot.
Aisha yelped, high and sharp.
Kota jerked toward her before his mind caught up.
His hand hit the hilt at his hip, fingers fumbling on the cloth wrap for half a heartbeat, then he had the weight of the sword in his palm, heavier than he remembered.
He did not think about stance, or angle, or anything Marcus might have said—Marcus had never said anything beyond "don't cut yourself."
He just swung.
The blade came down in a rough, ugly arc, more shoulder than technique. It hit the thickest part of the leaf near its base with a wet crunch that jarred all the way up his arm.
The plant fought the cut.
The fleshy stem didn't part cleanly. It stretched around the dull edge, fibers straining. The hooked teeth dug deeper through Aisha's cloth into her skin. She tried to yank her leg back; one of the smaller leaves tore free, teeth carving red lines down her calf before it hit the ground and spasmed.
"Hold still!" Kota snapped.
He planted his feet, twisted his torso, and dragged the sword sideways with all the strength his good arm had.
The stem gave with a sick, popping rip.
The severed leaf shuddered once in the air, teeth clenching, then sagged and slid off Aisha's leg, smearing blood on the fabric before flopping onto the moss. It twitched weakly, teeth still working at nothing.
He kicked it away on pure instinct.
The other leaves rustled, flexing inward, but none of them snapped again.
Maybe they were slow. Maybe they were full. Maybe they were thinking about it.
Kota didn't intend to find out which.
"Back," he said.
They retreated until a tree trunk sat solid and wide between them and the plant.
Aisha's breathing came fast, shallow. She was gripping her calf just above the bite, fingers white.
"Let me see," Kota said, already dropping into a crouch.
"I'm okay," she said automatically—but she didn't pull away when he reached.
He rolled her pant leg up.
Four neat arcs of punctures ringed her upper calf where the teeth had gone in—a half-circle of little holes, deeper than scratches, not deep enough to be a chunk. Blood welled slow and dark from two of them, sliding down toward her boot in thin lines.
The skin around the bites was flushing, pink pushing out from each hole.
He brushed a fingertip lightly near one of them.
"Any numbness?" he asked. "Pins, needles? Heat?"
"Just stings," she said through her teeth. "Like stepping on a nettle patch. A very… committed nettle patch."
He watched the bites for a few breaths.
No blackening, no strange color spreading, no froth. The hum of the world stayed the same.
"Venom?" he pushed.
A muscle jumped in her jaw.
"I know what venom feels like," she said quietly.
He knew she did.
Back in Inkto, you learned fast which bites just hurt and which meant you might not wake up. Kids who didn't learn… didn't get old.
"This isn't that," she added. "Promise. Just… hurts."
He nodded once.
They had nothing to dress it with except what they were wearing.
"Hold on," he said.
He hooked his fingers under the hem of his sleeve and yanked. The fabric tore crooked, resisting until he put his weight into it. He ripped off a strip as long as his forearm, then tore that in half, leaving two uneven bands.
He uncapped the canteen and poured a little of the pale-blue water over one strip. It beaded for a second, then soaked in, darkening the cloth.
"This is either going to help," he said, "or be stupid."
"Comforting," Aisha muttered.
He wiped gently around the punctures, clearing away the worst of the blood and a faint, slick sheen the plant's teeth had left. The skin under his makeshift cloth felt hotter than the air, but not burning.
"That feels… fizzy," she said, flinching once. "Under the skin."
"Could be the water," he said. "Could be the plant. Could be everything here hates us. Stay still."
She huffed a breath that might have been a laugh if it didn't sound so tight.
When the blood slowed, he wrapped the drier strip around her calf, knotting it off above the wound. It wasn't neat, but it stayed.
"Try putting weight on it," he said as he straightened.
She did, carefully. Her face pinched for a second, then smoothed by force.
"I can walk," she said. "We're not stopping because a shrub got cocky."
He looked at her—at the lines by her mouth, the way she was holding herself a little too straight—and then nodded.
"Tell me if it changes," he said. "If it burns worse. Or if the world starts tilting."
"If the world starts tilting, it might just be the world," she said. "But I'll tell you."
He glanced back at the plant.
From here, it could have been any bush. The teeth were hidden again, folded up under the leaves, waiting.
"How many people walked past those and never knew?" he said quietly. "Back when… if this place was alive."
Aisha followed his eyes.
"Or maybe they planted them," she said. "Like… fences. Bitey fences."
He thought of Inkto, of makeshift barbed wire and broken glass on wall tops. People everywhere liked their sharp edges.
They gave the plant a much wider circle this time and moved on.
The forest grew thinner by degrees.
The constant luminous undergrowth broke into islands. The air felt less waterlogged, scents less layered—still strange, still metallic-sweet, but not as heavy. More of the ground showed through: dark soil, pale stones veined with those faintly glowing lines.
Above, gaps in the canopy widened.
Through one, Kota saw it clearly: a slab of something pale and flat, rising at an angle in the distance. No curve, no ripple. A straight edge carving across the sky-line of leaves.
"There," he said, pointing.
Aisha followed his hand.
"That's not a rock," she said.
"Feels wrong for a rock," he said.
"Feels like work," she said.
They angled toward it, using every glimpse of unbroken geometry as a kind of crude guide. The hum underfoot shifted as they walked, losing some of its chaotic ripple and settling into something more like a slow, heavy beat.
He didn't like that either.
The change when the forest finally ended was so abrupt it felt like stepping off a ledge.
One stride, he was ducking under a sagging loop of vine. The next, there was nothing over his head but open sky.
He squinted automatically.
Purple arched high above, broader now, the yellow bands drawn farther across its surface than they'd been at the pool. The air felt… older. Cooler on his skin despite the constant hum, touched with the dry tang of dust instead of wet earth.
He took two more steps and the texture under his boots changed.
No more moss. No more soft give.
Something hard met his soles—a flat plane under a thin skin of dirt and root. He nudged the edge of it with his foot, pushing aside soil until pale material shone through—stone, or something like it, cut and set in a slab.
A path.
"Look," Aisha said, voice gone a little thin.
He followed her gaze.
The town lay ahead of them, climbing a shallow slope.
The closest structures huddled near the path, low and boxy. Some had walls that still mostly stood, others had collapsed in on themselves, roofs caved to jagged rings. Whatever had once covered them—tiles, panels, something glasslike—lay in broken sheets, half-swallowed by creeping plants.
Vines and creepers owned the place now.
Green and purple cords snaked up walls, dove into cracks, wrapped themselves around frames and railings until only the rough shape beneath hinted at what had been there. Bundles as thick as Kota's torso bulged out of some buildings like tumors, splitting stone. In others, thin threads hung like curtains, leaves trembling.
Poles and frames—street lights? signs?—jutted here and there, stripped bare, eaten down to skeletal outlines by time and whatever chewed metal in this world.
Bits of transparent material glittered among the wreckage, catching light—shards from windows, or something like them.
The hum under Kota's feet steadied into a deep, regular vibration.
No sound came from the town itself.
No voices, no engines, no clatter of life. Just the distant whisper of whatever passed for wind in this place moving through vine and broken wall.
Kota and Aisha stood half in the shadow of the last trees and stared.
"It's…" Aisha started, then stopped.
"Dead," Kota said.
"That's one word," she murmured. "Old, too. Look at the edges. The way everything's… softened."
He followed her focus.
Corners were worn. Exposed surfaces showed a different sort of wear than the slums—no rust streaks from acid rain, no soot. Just erosion, and the slow pressure of roots and tendrils forcing seams apart.
"How long for something like this to happen?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"I don't know," she said. "I don't even know what this stuff is made of. Back home, this could be a hundred years, or twenty, or…" She trailed off, frustrated. "It's not… new. That's all I've got."
"Not 'they just left,'" he said.
"No," she said. "Whatever happened here, it wasn't last week."
The path continued through the cluster of low buildings and up the slope, bending slightly as it climbed.
Beyond the outlying shells, higher up, the ruins changed.
The town gave way to a city.
Broad platforms stepped up the hillside like giant, uneven stairs. On each level, larger shapes sat: blocky stacks with slanted sides, flattened domes with ribs, narrow spires that rose and then stopped halfway, leaning drunkenly against whatever was nearest. Gashes marred some of them, great dark bites taken out of walls, whole sections missing.
At the highest point, half-draped in mist, something larger than all the rest squatted over everything.
It was broad and low, its sides sloping up to a flat top, corners too sharp to be natural even from this distance. Vines sheeted its flanks in heavy curtains, but in the gaps between, Kota could see lines traced into the surface—pale channels that caught the ambient glow and fed it along in slow, faint pulses.
The sight made the back of his neck prick.
Aisha's hand crept, without her seeming to notice, to the center of her chest, fingers pressing lightly there as if to check something was still where it should be.
"Do you see that?" she whispered. "On the walls?"
He followed her gaze to a nearer building halfway up the slope, one that still had most of a facade standing.
Along the exposed face, partially hidden under clinging vines, markings had been carved or set in.
Lines and curves. Angles that looped back into themselves. Patterns that repeated, but not exactly—a rhythm that almost made sense if he stared too long.
Light ran through them, dim as the last glow of a dying coal.
"What… is that?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said.
She took half a step forward, then stopped herself.
"They look like… writing?" she tried. "Or some kind of… pattern. It's too… deliberate. Nobody chips shapes like that by accident."
Kota squinted.
Back in Inkto, writing meant spray-paint on walls, cheap printed signs, marker on scrap metal. Straight lines, curves, letters that meant prices or warnings or curses.
This was none of those.
"Maybe it says 'keep out,'" he said.
"Or 'welcome home,'" she said. "Or 'this way to the self-destruct.'"
"Comforting," he muttered.
A faint flicker ran along another set of markings higher up the slope—just a thin wash of light, flowing from one symbol to the next before guttering out.
Not dead, then. Not entirely.
The hum under his feet responded, just a hint sharper.
"What if this is where it started?" he said, the thought pushing past his teeth before he could swallow it. "The Rifts. Places like this. Worlds like this."
Aisha's jaw tightened.
"People on Earth don't even agree if the Rifts are natural," she said. "Reverence says they're some kind of gift. Domains say they're… resources. Most people just say they're problems we can't get rid of."
"Marcus says they're holes rich people throw us into," Kota said.
"He's not wrong," she murmured.
If this place had something to do with those holes…
He didn't like the way that thought sat in his chest.
The hum underfoot shifted again, like a heartbeat stuttering, then steadied.
Kota made himself breathe slow.
"We don't have to understand it today," he said. "We just… need a roof that doesn't fall on us. And a way not to die before tonight."
"And maybe, if we're feeling ambitious, a way off this world," Aisha said.
"That too," he said.
He traced the line of the road with his eyes again.
"We don't go straight for that." He jerked his chin at the massive structure squatting at the top. "Even I know that's stupid."
"Good," Aisha said. "We'd have to fight about it."
"Outer buildings first," he said. "Smaller ones. We check for holes, animals, whatever. We move slow. If something looks like it's waiting, we don't touch it."
"We say that now," she said, eyes still on the faintly glowing patterns. "Then we see something shiny and all our brain cells leave."
"You can poke the shiny thing," he said. "I'll be over there."
Her mouth twitched, almost a smile.
The forest behind them whispered. The town ahead didn't.
Kota let his eyes flick over Aisha—the ragged strip of his sleeve tied around her calf, already stained a little darker, the set of her shoulders, the way fear and curiosity pulled in opposite directions behind her eyes.
She looked so small at the edge of the dead city.
He probably did too.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Not even close," she said. "But if I stand here any longer, I'm going to talk myself into hiding in a tree for the rest of my life."
He wasn't sure that was the worst option.
He still stepped forward.
They moved off the soft edge of forest and onto the cracked, half-buried path, the hum in the ground rising just enough to remind them they were walking on the skin of something that hadn't finished with the world yet.
Together, they headed toward the overgrown town and the silent, broken city that climbed the hill beyond