The twilight was the color of a deep bruise, purple and soft blue bleeding into the black of the canopy. Nia moved through it without a sound, a shadow detaching itself from other shadows. She didn't look back to see if Julian was following. In this world, you either kept up or you were left behind. It was a simple, clean piece of math. He followed, his borrowed muscles aching with a memory of exertion that wasn't his.
She led him to the river's edge, where a canoe rested on the muddy bank. It was a long, narrow thing, carved from a single dark log, and it looked as alive and dangerous as everything else here. Nia motioned toward it with her chin, a gesture that was both an instruction and a test. Their task was to gather the glowing moss that grew only in the deep eddies on the far side of the current. A simple job. A thing a child could do.
Julian stepped toward the canoe, his mind a frantic calculator of weight distribution and pivot points. He put one foot in the center, just as he’d seen others do. The canoe rocked violently. He pinwheeled his arms, a clumsy scarecrow, his heart lurching into his throat. For a sickening moment, he felt the phantom grace of Garran, a ghost of muscle memory trying to correct a balance his own body didn't understand. He was a bad pilot in a good machine. He finally collapsed into a heap on the bottom of the boat, the impact jarring his teeth. He had not tipped them. A small, pathetic victory.
Nia got in after him. She did not step. She flowed. One moment she was on the bank, the next she was seated at the stern, the canoe barely trembling to acknowledge her weight. Her mastery was total, an unspoken rebuke to his own incompetence. With a single, powerful push of her paddle against the mud, they slid into the black, silent water. The river took them.
The air grew cooler, thick with the smell of wet stone and sweet decay. The only sounds were the gentle dip and pull of Nia’s paddle and the distant, liquid croak of some unseen creature. Julian tried to make himself useful, taking up the spare paddle. He tried to match her rhythm, but his movements were stiff, analytical. He was thinking about the stroke, about the angle of the blade. He was watching. He was always watching.
He saw the world as a series of inputs to be processed. The current was a vector. The distance to the far bank was a variable. His own fatigue was a decaying metric. It was how he had survived the Grid, by turning life into a dashboard. But here, the data was too rich, too chaotic. It was like trying to drink the entire river through a straw. A flicker of light danced at the edge of his vision, a faint grid of shimmering blue pixels overlaid on the dark water for a half-second. A STATIC_GLITCH. A ghost from the machine, reminding him he was a foreigner here. He blinked, and it was gone.
— You are fighting it, — Nia said. Her voice was quiet, not a judgment, just a statement of fact.
— I’m helping, — he said, the word sounding defensive and hollow.
— No. You are telling the water where you want it to go. The water does not care.
They reached a bend in the river where the current slowed, pooling into a dark, quiet eddy. The banks were thick with ancient, gnarled trees, their roots like the knuckles of buried giants. And clinging to those roots, just above the waterline, were patches of the moss. It pulsed with a soft, internal light, the color of a winter moon. It was beautiful. Julian’s first thought was one of efficiency. The best approach vector. The optimal harvest pattern.
Nia let the canoe drift. She watched him, her dark eyes reflecting the faint glow from the bank. She saw the tension in his shoulders, the way his gaze darted from one patch of moss to the next, calculating. She saw a man trying to solve a problem.
— Stop watching, — she said, her voice a low murmur that was somehow louder than the river's silence.
— Feel.
The words were simple. They were also the most terrifying instruction he had ever received. To feel was to be vulnerable. To feel was to let go of the numbers, the predictions, the walls of data he had built around his own useless heart. It was an invitation to drown. He looked from her calm, patient face to the glowing moss. He had failed as a hunter. He had failed as a warrior. Maybe there was another way to not be useless. He made a choice. The price was the only thing he had left: his control.
— How? — he whispered.
— Put the paddle in the water, — she said. — But do not push. Close your eyes.
He did. He slid the wooden blade into the cold, black water and held it there. He closed his eyes, plunging himself into a world of sound and sensation. The air on his skin. The hard seat of the canoe beneath him. The distant thrum of the jungle's nightlife. It was chaos. His mind screamed for a visual, for a number, for anything to anchor him. He fought the urge. He focused on his hand, on the wood of the paddle.
At first, there was nothing. Just the dead weight of the wood and the cold. He was about to give up, to open his eyes and admit defeat yet again. Then he felt it. A tremor. A faint, rhythmic push against the blade, a pulse so subtle it was almost imperceptible. It was not a steady pressure. It was a complex rhythm, a pattern of soft nudges and long, slow pulls. It was a language.
It was the river. It was speaking to him, not in words or numbers, but in pure force. He could feel the main current pulling at the deeper end of the blade, and the slower, circular motion of the eddy tugging at the top. He could feel where the water was fast and where it was slow. He could feel its shape. For the first time in his life, Julian wasn't watching the world through a screen of his own making. He was a part of it. A small, connected part. A nerve ending.
He opened his eyes. The world looked the same. The dark water, the glowing moss, the silent woman in the stern of the boat. But it felt entirely different. The river was no longer a surface to be crossed; it was a living body, and he could feel its breath.
Nia was watching him, and for the first time, her expression was not one of suspicion or duty. There was a flicker of something else in her eyes. She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. It was not praise. It was acknowledgment. He had heard. He had listened. The bridge of trust between them, fragile as a spider's thread, had been anchored on the other side.
— Now, — she said, her voice still quiet. — We gather the moss.
He paddled toward the bank, and this time, he did not fight the water. He let it guide him. He felt the eddy's gentle push and used it, his paddle a rudder, not an engine. The canoe glided silently to the roots. They gathered the moss in silence, its cool, velvety texture a strange comfort in his hands. It pulsed with a soft, blue-white light, and its faint smell was of ozone and wet earth.
As he placed a handful in the basket, another STATIC_GLITCH flickered across his vision. This time it was different. It wasn't a sharp, intrusive grid of pixels. It was a soft, faint shimmer, like heat haze, and it was gone in an instant. It was not a ghost from his world haunting this one. It was just an echo. A memory of a place that felt impossibly far away, a sound so distant he could no longer be sure he had ever really heard it.
The basket was full, its contents a small, captive galaxy. The river was a road of black glass under a sky with no stars.
