Suspicion, Kael had learned, weighed more than armor.

  It clung to him through briefings and patrol routes, through half-slept nights and meetings that ended with too many unanswered questions. It crept into the margins of maps, into supply tallies that no longer balanced, into the slight pauses before officers responded to his commands.

  The earth’s pulse—the deep, subterranean rhythm that had begun answering him since the Fall—no longer felt steady.

  It stuttered.

  As if something poisonous had seeped into the world’s veins.

  Someone was undermining him.

  The knowledge settled into Kael’s bones with quiet certainty.

  Over the following days, he moved carefully.

  Supply manifests were reviewed twice, then a third time under different metrics. Patrol rotations shifted by minutes instead of hours—small enough to look procedural, large enough to expose patterns. Communications logs were re-indexed for delays that made no tactical sense.

  Each anomaly alone was negligible.

  Together, they formed a lattice.

  At the center of it stood Major Valen.

  Valen had survived the Fall alongside him.

  They had bled together in the early years, when the New Regime was nothing more than scattered battalions holding barricades in drowned cities and radioactive dust storms. Valen had once been quick-smiling, sharp-eyed, loyal to a fault.

  Now—

  He was wrong.

  Not in anything that could be charted. Not in numbers or performance reports or disciplinary records.

  In posture.

  Too rigid. As if braced for impact even when seated.

  In speech.

  He spoke less during councils, but when he spoke, his words nudged blame sideways—away from failed operations and toward phantom external threats, unseen insurgents - logistical ghosts.

  In proximity.

  He avoided prolonged eye contact with Kael, nonetheless, lingered near restricted corridors with just-plausible excuses: data audits, equipment inspections and clearance verification.

  Most unsettling of all was what Kael couldn’t sense.

  The gravity around Valen felt… muted.

  Not heavy.

  Not warped.

  Flattened.

  As though the man existed half a step out of phase with the world.

  Still, there was no proof.

  And accusing a decorated Major without evidence would fracture the Regime faster than any enemy ever could.

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  Ashar noticed the change long before Kael said a word.

  The tension lived in Kael’s shoulders, in the way his gaze lingered half a second too long on exits, in the way silence had replaced his usual dry commentary during late-night briefings.

  Ashar did not press him.

  Whatever Kael carried was not ready to be spoken.

  Instead, Ashar turned his attention outward—

  and inward, in the way only he could.

  He felt the compound like a living thing.

  Most nights, its emotional currents were predictable: exhaustion, cautious hope, grief carefully packed into sealed compartments so people could function another day.

  Lately, something sour bled through the air.

  A thin, oily sensation that prickled along his nerves.

  Deception.

  It didn’t anchor in one place.

  It moved.

  Ashar followed it gently, never directly. While passing soldiers in narrow corridors. While tending the perimeter gardens, coaxing fragile crops from irradiated soil. While lingering in council chambers after meetings had adjourned, fingertips brushing the cool edges of tables still warm from argument.

  Every time he thought he’d isolated the source—

  it slid away.

  Only once did it sharpen.

  Valen.

  Ashar felt it as the Major passed him in a corridor—a sudden spike of tightly leashed intent.

  Not guilt.

  Not fear.

  Anticipation.

  Ashar did not turn.

  Some truths were more dangerous spoken too soon.

  Arek turned five that week.

  The celebration was small: ration-sweetened bread, a flickering string of salvaged lights, laughter that felt almost illegal in a world still learning how to breathe again.

  The boy darted between soldiers with reckless delight, tugging sleeves, climbing crates, demanding stories from people who hadn’t told one in years.

  Kael watched him constantly.

  Not out of paranoia.

  Out of awe.

  Arek was… different.

  Not simply because he existed—because children born after the Fall were rare enough to be whispered about like blessings.

  The world leaned toward him.

  Small stones rolled subtly in his direction.

  Vines twitched when he passed.

  Once—just once—Kael could have sworn time itself slowed when Arek laughed.

  Ashar noticed too.

  A child not born after the Fall—

  but of it.

  That night, after Arek finally collapsed into sleep amid tangled blankets and abandoned toys, Ashar stood at the narrow window of their quarters.

  The shared dream - space tugged at him insistently.

  He resisted for several minutes.

  Then exhaled.

  Sleep claimed him at once.

  The dream was wrong.

  Not loud.

  Not violent.

  Wrong in the way a room feels when furniture has been moved in the dark.

  Ashar stood in the ruins of the old capital, but the streets were too clean. Ash drifted downward in slow, deliberate spirals that never touched the ground. The towers leaned inward as though listening.

  He took one step.

  The earth sighed beneath his feet.

  Black roots threaded through shattered concrete thick as cables, pulsing faintly, swollen with something that moved when he looked directly at it. When he knelt, the stone was warm. Wet.

  A child laughed somewhere ahead.

  Ashar turned.

  The sound came again—closer this time—but warped, as if filtered through water. Through soil.

  “Arek?” he called.

  The name slid away from him.

  He tried to move and found the air resisting him, heavy as syrup. Each breath tasted metallic.

  The sky had no stars.

  It was layered with veins.

  Pale light crawled through them, branching and recombining, a nervous system stretched across heaven itself. With every pulse, the roots beneath the city twitched in answer.

  Then he saw the tower.

  It was the one Kael had stood on earlier—except it was upside down, embedded tip-first into the earth like a nail driven through the world. Cables and roots wrapped its length, feeding from it.

  Something stood at its base.

  A man. Valen.

  Or the shape of him.

  His uniform was intact, but his shadow lagged several seconds behind his movements, peeling itself off the ground in thin strips before reattaching. His face blurred whenever Ashar tried to focus on it, features rearranging between blinks.

  In his arms was a bundle of light.

  A child.

  “Don’t,” Ashar whispered.

  Valen smiled. His mouth opened too far.

  Inside, there were no teeth—only darkness folded into careful geometry, spiraling inward like machinery.

  Ashar lunged.

  The ground seized his ankles.

  Roots burst upward, wrapping his calves, his wrists, his ribs—cold and alive, vibrating with distant heartbeats. The more he struggled, the tighter they drew, thorned filaments digging into skin that did not bleed.

  The child began to cry.

  Light leaked between the roots.

  Valen lowered the bundle toward the earth.

  The soil parted.

  Not cracked—opened.

  Like a mouth.

  Rows of pale stone ridges lined its interior, slick with condensation.

  “You can’t have him,” Ashar said, voice shaking.

  Valen tilted his head.

  “We already do.”

  The roots tightened.

  The sky pulsed.

  The child’s light dimmed—

  — Ashar woke choking.

  Sirens screamed through the compound.

  Red emergency lights flared against the walls.

  The future had begun moving.