The trees knew.
They had stood for centuries, their roots drinking deep from the black soil, their branches cradling generations of birdsong and storm winds. They had watched as the first roads cut through the wilderness, as villages rose and fell like the breath of the earth itself. And now, they stood silent witness as the world unraveled at its seams.
The Rifts did not come with thunder.
They came like thieves in the night—a shimmer of air where no heat haze should be, a whisper of sound that prickled the skin but left no echo.
At first, they were small things. A farmer would find his crops twisted into spirals overnight. A hunter would return with wide eyes, speaking of a deer whose antlers gleamed like polished metal, whose eyes held a depth no animal should possess.
Then the Rifts grew bolder.
Germany had forgotten what peace looked like.
The cities still pulsed with life, but it was the frantic rhythm of a creature trying to outrun its own shadow. Neon signs flickered over streets where military checkpoints had become as common as bus stops. Children played in parks surrounded by sonic fences that hummed at frequencies meant to deter things with too many legs.
Beyond the urban glow, the countryside had become a tapestry of fear and forgetting. Vine-choked ruins of villages no one would rebuild. Highways where convoys of armored vehicles moved like armored beetles, their guns always scanning the tree lines. Farmers whispered of shapes moving through the barley at dusk, of livestock returning from the woods with new scars and strange hungers.
The government called them "border zones." The people who lived there called them something else.
---
Kai remembered the fire.
Not as a single moment, but as a living thing—the way the smoke had coiled around the rooftops like a lover, the way the screams had risen and broken like waves against cliffs. The raiders had worn the faces of men, but their hands... their hands had been wrong. They had too many joints and fingers that curled the wrong way.
His mother had pushed him into the dark.
Into the wet earth beneath their home. And there, in the suffocating black, something had answered when he whispered.
With the slow, deliberate uncoiling of something that had been waiting.
---
The scientists in their sterile labs spoke of quantum fractures, of dimensional membranes stretched too thin—cold, clinical terms that could not capture the way the air itself held its breath when a Rift shimmered into existence. They measured the energy spikes, charted the electromagnetic distortions, and pretended this made them masters of something far older than their instruments could comprehend.
The soldiers knew better. They had seen what came through.
How the light bent wrong around certain shapes, how bullets sometimes passed through creatures like they were made of smoke and spite. They kept their fingers tense on triggers, their eyes scanning not just the trees but the spaces between them, where the world sometimes...twitched.
But it was the border folk—the farmers, the scavengers, the ones who had nowhere else to go—who understood the deepest truth.
The Rifts didn't just bring monsters. They changed things.
A well that started singing at midnight in a voice like breaking glass, a child born with eyes that reflected colors no one could name, and forests where the trees grew in perfect geometric spirals, their bark warm to the touch.
The world was becoming something else.
---
The morning air bit at Kai's skin as he passed through the wrought-iron gates of Wolfram Institute, the frost-kissed grass crunching faintly under his boots.
Autumn had painted the campus in shades of fire and gold, but the beauty was lost on him—his attention was reserved for the way shadows pooled too deeply between buildings, how the wind carried whispers from places it shouldn't.
His hood was pulled low, but strands of ash-blond hair escaped anyway, tousled from the restless night he'd spent wrestling with dreams that weren't entirely his.
Steel-gray eyes flicked across the courtyard—assessing, always assessing. The scars along his arms itched beneath his sleeves, thin silvery lines where his skin had split and reknitted itself too many times.
Little reminders, the voice in his skull murmured. Of what you really are.
Kai ignored it.
His uniform was a patchwork rebellion—standard-issue Wolfram jacket tailored to fit tighter, sleeves rolled to the elbows to show the faint traceries of old wounds.
The leather straps crossing his chest weren't regulation, but no one stopped him; half the students here wore modifications, whether for function or flair. His boots were scuffed from miles of uneven terrain, the soles thick enough to muffle his steps.
Camouflage. Blend in. Don't give them a reason to look closer.
But they looked anyway.
A first-year nodded at him with something like awe—rumors traveled fast at Wolfram, and Kai's reputation for surviving things that should've killed him had taken on a life of its own.
A group of upperclassmen glanced his way, their laughter stuttering for half a heartbeat before resuming. And then there were the ones who didn't bother hiding their unease—the ones who edged aside when he walked by, as if his very presence disrupted some invisible balance.
Smart, the parasite mused. They sense it, even if they don't know what it is.
Kai moved like a ghost between the clusters of students. Not rushing, not lingering—just there, enough to be seen but never remembered.
He knew the rhythm of this place: the way conversations hushed when faculty walked by, the way certain doors were always locked after sundown, the way the air near the east wing sometimes buzzed with a frequency that made his teeth ache.
Wolfram was a gilded cage, but it was also a hunting ground.
The Rift-touched weren't just studied here.
They were ranked.
Kai had made sure to stay in the middle—skilled enough to avoid suspicion, unremarkable enough to avoid attention. It was a careful dance, one misstep away from disaster.
"You could show them," the voice whispered. "Let them see what you're capable of."
His fingers twitched at his sides.
His face gave nothing away.
Years of practice had sanded his expressions into something smooth and unreadable—lips neutral, brows relaxed, a carefully constructed calm that hid the storm beneath.
It was the only way to survive in a place like this, where weakness was a currency, and everyone was trading.
But inside?
Inside, he was a live wire.
Every laugh too loud set his nerves on edge. Every sidelong glance was a potential threat. The parasite coiled and uncoiled in his ribs, a second pulse thrumming in time with his heartbeat.
You're not one of them, it reminded him.
Kai exhaled slowly, pushing the thought away. For now, he just had to play the part.
Beyond Wolfram's walls, the world was changing.
The Rifts weren't just anomalies anymore—they were landmarks. Cities built pulse towers to repel them. Farmers set up shrines to ward off the things that slithered from the cracks.
---
The Wolfram Institute had many unspoken rules, and Kai had learned them all.
Rule one: Never ask where the Rift-touched cadets went when they disappeared from their dorms at night.
Rule two: Always check your food for bio-tags—those shimmering, almost invisible tracers the staff sprinkled into meals to monitor nutrient absorption in "enhanced" students.
And rule three: Candy was currency.
In a place where the air always smelled faintly of antiseptic and the vending machines dispensed protein gels instead of chocolate, sugar was a rebellion. A comfort. A tiny spark of normalcy in a world that had forgotten what that word meant.
And Kai?
Kai was the rebellion's silent architect.
They found him in his usual spot—a dimly lit alcove near the cafeteria's back vents, where the security drones' blind spot lasted exactly twenty-three minutes during lunch hour. The vents hummed with the low-grade purr of the Institute's air filtration system, a sound Kai had long since tuned out.
Aria arrived first, sliding onto the bench beside him with the effortless grace of someone who'd never had to hide. Her dark braid was perfectly coiled, her uniform crisp despite the chaos of morning drills. Leader vibes, through and through.
"Ration bars again today," she sighed, eyeing the foil-wrapped brick in her hand with disdain. "I swear, if I taste another 'chocolate-flavored nutrient supplement,' I'm hacking the dispensary."
Kai wordlessly slid a caramel across the table.
Aria's smirk was instantaneous. "And this is why you're my favorite."
Lani appeared next, quiet as a shadow, her glasses reflecting the glow of her wrist-terminal—a sleek, government-issued device that tracked vitals, assignments, and, if the rumors were true, emotional stress levels. She adjusted them with one finger, her voice soft but precise.
"Mutation chatter's up on the student feeds again. That patrol near the eastern Rift zone came back with footage of something... off. Deer with bioluminescent veins. Trees shedding bark like scales." She didn't look at Kai as she spoke, but the pause was deliberate. "They're saying it's spreading faster now."
Kai's fingers tightened around a lollipop.
They have no idea.
Then—chaos.
Yona exploded into the space like a firework, her neon-orange sleeve (definitely not regulation) flapping as she brandished a stolen lab pipette like a sword. "THEORY!" she announced. "What if the Rifts aren't tears in space but, like, alien saliva? And we're just crumbs stuck to the universe's teeth?"
Emil, materializing behind her with the lazy grin of a predator, flicked her ear. "Or maybe you're just hungry." He dropped into the seat across from Kai, propping his boots on the table. "Speaking of—you got any of those sour strips left, or did the Candy King finally get busted by the nutrition narcs?"
Kai tossed him the packet without looking.
For a moment, it was almost easy.
Yona's ridiculous theories. Emil's sarcastic commentary. Aria rolling her eyes as she divided the caramel into mathematically precise portions. Lani quietly pulling up hacked surveillance feeds of the so-called "glow-deer" on her terminal.
Kai even laughed once—a short, startled sound when Yona attempted to balance a gummy bear on her nose and immediately sneezed it into Emil's hair.
But beneath it all, the parasite coiled and uncoiled, a living shroud wrapped around his ribs.
They don't know, he thought, watching Emil try to shake the gummy loose. They don't know what's under my skin.
Aria nudged him with her elbow. "You're zoning. Play a round?" She slid a holodice across the table—a contraband relic from the pre-Rift era, its surface flickering with illegal augmented-reality projections.
Kai forced a smirk. "Only if you're ready to lose."
---
Beyond their little circle, Wolfram hummed with hidden tensions.
The cafeteria's walls were embedded with bioscanners, their faint blue pulses checking for unauthorized mutations. Outside the windows, a mechanized harvester droned through the campus's "sanitized" garden, its metal pincers plucking genetically stable vegetables while incinerating the rest.
And in the distance, barely visible through the smog, the Pulse Towers loomed—monolithic structures erected at every Rift zone, their electromagnetic fields the only thing keeping the worst of the anomalies contained.
Public organizations like the Global Containment Coalition (GCC) insisted the towers were foolproof.
The students at Wolfram knew better.
---
The bell rang, sharp and artificial, cutting through the laughter.
Yona groaned, slumping against Emil. "Ugh, why do we have to learn calculus when the world's literally unraveling?"
Aria stood, tucking the holodice into her pocket. "Because post-apocalyptic societies still need architects. Or something." She shot Kai a look. "You good?"
Kai nodded, already reassembling his mask. "Always."
But as they dispersed, his chest ached with the weight of the lie.
This was the game: laughing while the world cracked beneath his feet. Pretending he wasn't counting the seconds until the parasite, the thing inside him—
—finally pulled them all under.
The hallway was emptying fast when she appeared—a small girl with cotton-candy pink hair and a bored look that didn't match the sharpness in her eyes. She moved like she owned the shadows, slipping between straggling students until her hand shot out, fingers tapping Kai's elbow with deliberate lightness.
"Hey. You."
Kai tensed. She barely came up to his shoulder, but something in her posture screamed *predator*.
"Talk to me," she said, not a request.
Before he could react, she yanked him into an alcove, her grip stronger than it had any right to be. The scent of synthetic strawberries clung to her, clashing with the sterile tang of the Institute's air filters.
Then she leaned in, her whisper a blade between his ribs:
"I saw you earlier. When you changed."
Kai's blood turned to ice.
She smirked, twirling a pink strand around one finger. "Relax. I'm not here to scream 'monster.' I'm here to recruit you." A pause. "Join my music band, and your secret stays secret."
Music band? Behind them, a drone whirred past. Kai didn't blink.
"Or don't," she added, shrugging. "But good luck explaining those bone ridges to the GCC when I upload the footage."
She pressed something into his palm—a crumpled slip of paper with a single word:
MIDNIGHT.
Then she was gone, leaving only the ghost of strawberries and a threat wrapped in bubblegum pink.