Anastasya Orlova led them east, away from the cold security of the Vigil-Stone Outpost, under the thin guise of a routine patrol. The lie felt brittle in the damp air. Every step was an act of treason, a deliberate stride away from the Order that had defined her entire existence. She had traded her career, her safety, and the loyalty of her men for the word of a broken Silvanus and the grim certainty in her own gut. The price was her entire world. Lauri Vatanen walked beside her, no longer a prisoner but not yet an ally, his status as ambiguous as the grey drizzle that slicked the leaves around them.
He moved with a newfound purpose, his pathfinding skills returning as the chemical haze of the nectar finally began to clear from his system. The withdrawal had not vanished; it had settled into a constant, low-grade tremor inside his muscles, a hum of instability that was now a part of him. His navigation efficiency was perhaps seventy-five percent of what it once was, but it was enough. He saw the deadfalls before they became a problem, felt the subtle shifts in the terrain that spoke of unstable ground. He was functioning. It was a strange, painful kind of progress.
They reached the hidden canal entrance an hour after leaving the outpost, a place marked only by a specific arrangement of river stones that would be meaningless to any Regalis patrol. Dmitri Volkov, his face a mask of grim pragmatism, moved ahead to the water’s edge. There, half-hidden by reeds, rested a Myxoid Barge. It was not a constructed vessel, but a living one, a massive, semi-sentient colony of protoplasm grown for transport. It was a dull, mottled green, its surface slick and cool to the touch, and it pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light.
— It’s dormant, — Dmitri reported, his voice low. He knelt and opened a container of thick, nutrient paste. — It will need credentials.
He smeared the paste onto a specific node on the creature’s flank. The barge shuddered, its internal light brightening as it tasted the offering and recognized the specific biotic signature mixed within the nutrients. It was a key made of life, a password the Silvanus had provided. The living boat was now awake and ready for their journey.
The barge slid into the dark water of the Reedway Canals with a soft, wet sigh. The ancient waterways were a lattice of precursor-built channels, now overgrown and wild. As they moved through the water, Lauri trailed his hand over the side, letting the cool liquid flow through his fingers. He closed his eyes, focusing past the tremor, reaching out with a sense he had not truly used in years. He was passively gathering data, his connection to the world’s life-song slowly, painfully healing. The water felt wrong. Sick.
He could feel the network of Photosynthetic Myxoids that lined the canal banks, the countless filaments that should have been humming with the clean, quiet energy of life. But they were not humming. They were screaming. It was not a sound he heard with his ears, but a feeling, a pained, high-frequency vibration that grated against his senses like a shard of crystal being dragged across stone. The biotic song was discordant, a chorus of agony. The distress level was a palpable thing, an eight out of ten on a scale he wished he had forgotten.
— We’re getting close, — Lauri said, his voice rough. He pulled his hand from the water as if it had been burned.
Anastasya did not look up from the data-slate resting on her knees. The device, a thin sheet of glowing crystal, displayed the map the Silvanus ambassador had provided. Her focus was absolute, a pillar of Regalis discipline in the chaotic, dying landscape. She trusted her map, her data, her objective. But she was beginning to trust the warden’s senses to interpret the world that existed between the lines on her screen. Her reliance on him had grown by a quiet ten percent, a fact she would never admit but that was evident in the way she no longer questioned his sudden commands to change course. Their roles were becoming defined, a codependent system of logic and instinct.
The journey felt like a descent. The further east they traveled, the more tortured the song of the Myxoids became. The water turned from murky brown to a sickly, opaque green, and the air grew thick with the smell of decay, a scent that reminded Lauri of his own ruined grove. He felt a familiar pang of self-loathing, but pushed it down. That was the past. This was the now. This was active maintenance, the duty he had abandoned.
He saw the pattern on Anastasya’s gauntlet, the intricate, repeating geometry of the Weft of Vigil, the symbol of the Regalis Regime. It represented a perfect, interconnected system, every part in its place. He looked from the symbol to the dying Myxoids on the bank, their living weft of interconnected life now a tangled, shrieking mess. Two philosophies, two versions of order, one dying and one killing.
— There, — Lauri said, his voice cutting through the drone of the barge. He pointed ahead, to where a plume of discolored water bled into the main channel. — The song is loudest there. The vibration is strongest. Whatever is poisoning the water, it’s close.
Anastasya looked up from her slate, her eyes following his gesture. She saw nothing on her map but a standard water-flow regulator. But she had learned to trust the Silvanus’s senses when they screamed of danger.
— Dmitri, slow us to one-quarter speed, — she commanded, her voice crisp. — Approach with caution.
Dmitri nodded, placing his hand on a control node of the barge. The living vessel slowed, its movements becoming more deliberate. The discordant hum grew louder, a physical pressure against their skulls. It was the sound of a wound in the world, and they were heading directly for its source.
