The tribal council was a circle of hard faces lit by a single, spitting fire. Julian sat outside the ring of elders, a guest who was still a ghost. He was the Map-reader, the man with a tangled spirit, but tonight he was just a witness to a slow poisoning. The debate was not loud. It was a quiet, grinding thing, the sound of a tribe chewing on a piece of bone it could not swallow. The silver-wrapped nutrient bars and the promise of easy water had done their work. The young hunter, Kael’s friend, who had taken the first gift, sat with his head down, the object of a dozen quiet, disappointed stares.
He had eaten the fruit of a tree with no roots. Now the sickness was in the soil. The elders argued in metaphors of river currents and herd migrations, but the subject was the same. Some argued for caution, for the wisdom of Inara Zale. Others, their voices low and pragmatic, spoke of the coming dry season, of the failing hunts. The white-suited men offered a full belly. Was that not a kind of strength? Julian watched the fractures form in the firelight, the subtle shifts in posture, the glances that were sharper than any spear. This was how a world ended. Not with a bang, but with a quiet, reasonable negotiation.
He felt a familiar ache, the phantom limb of his old life. It was the feeling of watching a system optimize itself for a collapse he was powerless to stop. He was just an observer, a man wearing a dead man’s face.
Then the air tore.
It was not a sound. It was a pressure change, a sudden vacuum in the fabric of the night. The firelight flickered, the flames stuttering as if starved of air. A violent STATIC_GLITCH rolled through the clearing, a wave of visual noise that made the world look like a corrupted data file for a half-second. In the center of the council circle, where moments before there had been only empty space, two figures now stood, stumbling into existence. They were pale, thin, and blinking against the firelight, their strange, dark clothing a smear of wrongness in the circle of hide and bone.
One was a tall, gaunt man with the haunted eyes of a creature who lived in tunnels. He clutched a small, metallic device in one hand. The other was a woman with streaks of grey in her dark hair, her face sharp with an intelligence that felt as alien here as the nutrient bars. Rory Phelan and Dr. Hollis Grant had arrived. Julian’s heart hammered against his ribs. He had guided them here, a desperate whisper across the void during the last swap. It was a plan born of desperation. It was insane.
The tribe did not hesitate. There was no debate, no committee meeting. There was only the clean, simple logic of survival. In the space of a single heartbeat, twenty spears rose as one, their obsidian tips catching the firelight, a ring of black thorns aimed at the two impossible figures. The hunters moved with a fluid, terrifying unity, a circle of death closing around the newcomers. Rory Phelan, a man who had faced down corporate auditors and network tracers, looked at the wall of spear points and went a shade of white Julian had never seen before.
Rory held up his empty hand, a gesture he must have seen in some ancient historical file. It was a pathetic, useless motion. These men did not care about gestures. They cared about threats, and two people appearing from thin air was the greatest threat they had ever seen.
— We are not them, — Rory said, his voice a dry rasp, the sound of stones scraping together. He was trying to project calm, but Julian could see the tremor in his hand. He was a creature of static cocoons and shielded cables, a man whose power was in his ability to hide. He was not built for this. He was not built for a world where a disagreement was settled with sharpened stone.
— We offer no gifts, — Rory continued, his eyes darting from one impassive face to the next. He was trying to differentiate himself from the corporate liaisons, to show he was not a smiling snake. — We offer knowledge. We know who they are. We know why they have come.
He was using the only currency he had: information. It was a good tactic. It was the right tactic. It would not work.
From her place at the head of the circle, Inara Zale rose. The firelight carved deep shadows into the lines on her face. She did not look at the spears. She looked only at the two newcomers, her gaze stripping them down to their essential parts.
— You are more spirit-song people, — she said, her voice quiet but carrying the weight of absolute authority. The term was a judgment, a classification of their entire existence. It meant they were from the world of noise and ghosts, the world that was poisoning her own. — The song in your heads is just a different tune. Why should we trust one ghost over another?
The question hung in the smoky air. It was the heart of the problem. To the tribe, the Continuum Collective and the Free Feed were indistinguishable. They were both from the other place, the place of unnatural things. Rory opened his mouth to reply, probably with a torrent of facts about network architecture and corporate malfeasance. It would have been like trying to explain calculus to a wolf.
Julian saw the negotiation failing before it began. He saw the spears tightening in the hunters’ grips. He saw the fragile hope of an alliance dying in a puddle of misunderstanding. He had been a spectator his whole life, watching systems fail from the safety of his screen. He had watched his own Dynamic Quotient bleed out. He had watched Garran’s world get targeted for consumption. He was so tired of watching.
He stood up.
The movement drew every eye. He was the Map-reader. He was the man with the tangled spirit. He was a known quantity, if not a trusted one. He stepped from the shadows and into the firelight, placing himself between the spears and the two terrified broadcasters. The price of the action was immediate. He was no longer an observer. He was a participant. He was choosing a side, and in doing so, making himself an enemy of the other. His neutrality, his greatest shield, was gone.
— I will speak for them, — Julian said, his voice steadier than he felt. He looked at Inara Zale, meeting her ancient, unblinking gaze.
— They are spirit-song people, yes, — he began, trying to find the words, the concepts. He tried to explain the Grid, the endless city. He tried to explain attention currency, the idea that looking at something gave it value. The words were ash in his mouth. The hunters’ faces were blank stone. He was failing. The firelight seemed to flicker, a brief, ugly STATIC_GLITCH dancing in the flames, a visual stutter between two incompatible operating systems.
He stopped. He took a breath. He abandoned the language of his world and tried to speak in the language of theirs.
— The men in white, the Continuum Collective… they are not a tribe, — he said, his voice finding a new, harder edge. — They are a hunger. They do not see your world. They see a dead animal. They see something to be carved up, portioned out, and consumed. Every tree, every river, every one of you… is just a number on their ledger. They are here to eat your world until the bones are clean.
He paused, letting the brutal, simple image settle. He had translated corporate strategy into a language the tribe understood perfectly. He had turned "attentional resource extraction" into a pack of hyenas circling a kill.
— We, — he said, gesturing to Rory and Hollis, — are not like them. We are the runts of their litter. We are the ones who were cast out because we would not eat. We see your world not as meat to be eaten. We see it as a fire to be guarded. And we know how the hunger works. We know how to poison their watering holes.
Silence. The only sound was the crackle of the fire. The hunters had not moved, but the tips of their spears were no longer aimed at Rory’s throat. They were aimed at nothing, their focus now entirely on their matriarch. Inara Zale’s eyes had never left Julian’s face. She searched his expression, his posture, his soul, looking for the lie. She was the river-runner, and she was looking for the false current.
After a silence that stretched for an entire lifetime, she gave a single, slow, deliberate nod.
It was done.
The spears lowered. Not all at once, but one by one, a reluctant, grudging acceptance. The circle of death dissolved into a tense, watchful circle of potential allies. Rory let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since he arrived, his shoulders slumping in relief. Dr. Grant’s face remained a mask of scientific curiosity, but the tightness around her eyes eased.
A fragile pact had been made. It was an alliance of the desperate, a treaty between ghosts and hunters, brokered by a man who was both and neither. Julian felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him, heavier than any physical fatigue he had ever known. He had not just translated words. He had translated worlds. He had become the bridge.
Nia caught his eye from across the fire. Her expression was unreadable, but her message was clear. Words were easy. Now came the work.
