The river delta tasted of mud and the slow, patient rot of a world eating itself to be reborn. Nia lay on her stomach, the damp earth cool against her skin, her body a part of the landscape. She was tracking the shimmer of silver-scale fish, their migration a clockwork she had learned before she could speak. The patterns were everything. The way the current curled around the gnarled roots of the ironwood trees, the specific angle of the sun hitting the water, the lazy drift of pollen on the breeze. These were the words of her world, and she was fluent.
Beside her, a boy named Kael, barely a man, pointed a trembling finger.
— There, — he whispered, his voice a dry rustle of leaves. — The shadow is deeper.
— It is, — Nia agreed, her own voice a low murmur. She didn't look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the far bank, where the water eddied. — The fish are running late. The current is slow. Something has changed upstream.
She felt the rhythm of the place in her bones, a slow, steady pulse of life and death. The air was thick with the smell of wet soil and green things growing. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer hung in the humid air, a distortion like heat haze where there was no heat. A trick of the light. She had seen it before, a flicker at the edge of her vision, a brief STATIC_GLITCH in the world’s otherwise perfect song. She dismissed it, focusing on the hunt.
Then the world went silent.
Not a gradual quiet, but a sudden, total absence of sound. The chirps of insects, the croak of amphibians, the distant cry of a rust-wing bird—all of it vanished, cut off as if by a blade. Kael tensed beside her. Nia’s hand went to the short spear at her side, her knuckles white. The silence was a presence, a weight. It was the sound of a predator so large the world held its breath.
Three shapes slid into view on the riverbank. They did not arrive. They were simply there. They were long and black and sleek, made of a material that drank the grey light and gave nothing back. They made no sound, no splash, their hulls kissing the muddy bank with an impossible gentleness. They were wrong. They were a wound in the shape of the world.
— What are they? — Kael breathed, his voice thin with a terror she had never heard in him before.
— Quiet, — Nia commanded, her own voice a low growl. She pulled him down, pressing his face into the ferns. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs, a wild, panicked rhythm in the crushing silence.
She peered through the fronds, her mind shifting gears. The hunter was gone. The scout remained. She counted. Three of the silent black craft. No markings. No people. A flicker of movement on one of the dark hulls, a reflection that stuttered, a STATIC_GLITCH that made the impossible shape seem to tear for a moment. Her breath caught in her throat.
Hatches hissed open, the sound shockingly loud in the unnatural quiet. Twelve figures emerged. They were not men. They were too smooth, too graceful. They moved with a liquid efficiency that was not born of muscle and bone. Drones. They fanned out, their metallic limbs making no sound on the soft earth, and formed a perfect, geometric perimeter around the landing site. It was the cold, dead logic of the Grid made manifest.
Nia’s mind raced, cataloging the details. Twelve drones. Three skiffs. A secured beachhead. This was not a hunting party. This was an army.
— We have to go, — Kael whispered, his body trembling.
— No, — Nia said, her voice hard as stone. — We watch. We remember.
One of the drones raised a slender appendage. A beam of piercing blue light, thin as a needle, shot out. It was silent. It struck a massive ironwood tree, a giant that had stood since before her grandmother’s grandmother was born. The tree did not burn. It did not fall. It simply vanished where the light touched it, leaving a perfectly smooth, cauterized stump that smoked with the smell of ozone and cooked sap. The light itself seemed to flicker, a digital stutter in its perfect line, a STATIC_GLITCH that felt like a shiver down her spine.
The drones began their work. They moved in a coordinated, terrifying ballet, their blue lasers erasing the jungle. Trees, vines, ferns, all of it disappeared, leaving a growing circle of scorched, sterile earth. They were not clearing the land. They were sterilizing it. They were erasing her world, one silent, efficient cut at a time.
From the largest of the corporate skiffs, more figures emerged. These were people, or things that looked like people, dressed in sterile white. They moved with the same unnerving efficiency as the drones, unloading large, white, prefabricated modules. The pieces clicked together with a series of soft, mechanical sighs. A structure began to rise from the mud, a building of seamless white polymer that reflected the grey sky with a dull, lifeless sheen.
It took them less than two hours. Where a tangled grove of ancient trees had stood, there was now a clean, white, windowless box. An outpost. A scar. As the final wall panel locked into place, a symbol bloomed on its surface, a soft blue light forming a perfect, empty circle. The mark of the Continuum Collective. It was a brand, an act of ownership, planted in the heart of a world that had never known a cage.
Nia felt a cold dread settle in her stomach, a feeling far worse than fear. This was not a raid. This was not a territorial dispute. This was a replacement. They had not come to take something. They had come to erase what was there and build their own world on its corpse. The low, oppressive hum of the spirit song she sometimes heard in her mind, the hum that Julian, the strange man in Garran’s skin, had tried to explain—it was here. It was a low, steady thrum emanating from the white building, an orderly, industrial vibration that made her teeth ache.
The sanctuary was gone. The Wild was no longer a secret. It was a target. It was a resource to be extracted, a new reality vertical to be synergized. She didn't know the words, but she understood the meaning. The price for Julian’s journey, for the connection he had forced upon their worlds, had finally arrived. And her people were the ones who would pay it.
The drizzle started, a soft, grey rain that pattered on the leaves around her. It washed the smell of ozone from the air, but it could not wash away the sight of the white wound on the riverbank.
She had to tell them the ghosts were building a house.
