The orchard knew the scent of strangers.
Caer felt it before he saw it—rot that didn't belong, sweat too alkaline, carbon traces from off-moon starch-leathers. His boots moved through the moss trail without sound, long strides broken only when his left leg spasmed from an old shrapnel scar.
Lioress slept in the cellar below. The orchard had dimmed its light-vines for her.
He hadn't slept.
Now, just before dawn, the petals on the west terrace puckered shut—not from cold, but from threat. It wasn't wind. It wasn't weather.
It was hunger.
The kind that walked on two legs and whispered into foreign comm-links.
He crouched near the mushroom wall at the edge of the upper orchid bed, pressing his palm into the myco-net woven just beneath the soil. A strand of golden threads lifted like hair from the ground and brushed against his temple. He closed his eyes.
Spores bloomed.
Sound flooded in.
> "—c'mon, this place is dry. Told you it was a bait drop."
"Nuh uh. Look at the fruit node samples. This orchard's got spliced chloroferrin in the bloomline. You know what that means?"
"Means I don't care unless we find the girl."
"You didn't see the feed? The one with the kid opening orchid shells with her mind?"
"That was fake. Deep-fake. Clan-porn."
"Then why'd the buyer send us with two clean slicers and a null-serum?"
Caer's jaw clenched.
They weren't just after hybrid fruit.
They were after her.
He exhaled slowly. Whispered into the root net. "Where?"
The myco-net quivered.
A single orchid, fifty meters to his left, opened.
Confirmation.
He moved fast now, staying low, skirted the koi-fern pond without disturbing a ripple. The vines obeyed his pace, opening silently for his passage. Ahead, he spotted them.
Three figures.
Not clan, not military. Just rag-clad mercs with offworld gear and hungry eyes.
One was crouched near the base of his third pollination tree, slicing a sample pod and feeding it into a scanner. The scanner blinked red, then green.
> "Yeah. Yeah, it's real. Whoever owns this place's sitting on a gold-spliced orchard and they don't even know it."
The speaker turned—and stopped.
Because Caer had already moved behind him.
One movement.
The merc never saw it coming.
Caer drove a vine-blade through the man's neck, turned, and caught the second with a stun-pod to the chest. The third tried to scream—but the orchard gagged him.
A silken vine slithered down his throat, quiet as fog, and closed.
They didn't bleed.
The orchard hated mess.
He dragged the bodies beneath a root-wall that had once housed bee colonies. The soil welcomed them. One of the vines wrapped around the ankle of the man with the scanner and squeezed, not enough to snap—just enough to break the joint.
A warning to the rest of the system.
Caer stood over the corpses, breath calm, ears tuned for more.
None came.
This wasn't a large team. It wasn't an army. Just three idiots hired by a whisper, hunting for proof of something the clans were still pretending didn't exist.
But the question remained: who sent them?
He pulled a data-shard from the dead man's satchel and slotted it into his portable reader.
The file was encrypted, but the title wasn't.
AUCTION ENTRY: ORCH-BLOOM (UNCONFIRMED)
Item Description: Female, pre-clan genotype, zeroed ID trace. Organic source node—orchard terrain. Projected sale value: 3.2m SP.
There was an attached image.
Fuzzy. Stolen from high above.
It showed a girl.
Her back to the camera.
Standing at the center of his orchard.
Petals open.
Head tilted back.
Arms raised.
As if she were praying.
No.
As if she were growing.
Caer powered down the shard.
He burned it in the soil.
He looked to the east.
The orchard would be bright soon.
And he had pruning to do—not of trees, but of ghosts,
The bodies were gone by morning.
The orchard didn't bury them. It used them.
And now it wanted more.
Caer stood atop the ridge line above the second tier of vineyard, staring down into the sector he had sealed long ago—Quadrant 5C. Marked in his maps as dormant. Left untouched since the end of the siege. Left hungry.
The blood vines grew there.
He had not walked among them in over a decade. No need. They were born of desperation—bio-engineered during the last war from carnivorous creepers and hybrid hemorrhage-thorns. Back then, they hadn't simply killed—they had recorded.
Names. Faces. Voice-prints. Each meal left a memory in the root brain.
And Caer knew… the vines remembered him.
He stepped beyond the caution markers, brushing aside a curtain of fungus-thread. The temperature dropped four degrees. The sunlight dimmed—not from cloud cover, but from the leaves themselves, thickening overhead to choke the light.
Something exhaled beneath the soil.
And the whisper began.
"Caaaaerrrr…"
He ignored it.
The name passed from vine to vine, like a child's game of secrets whispered behind palms. Some had human tongues preserved in petal folds—literal, wet, twitching remnants of their last victims. They licked the air as he passed.
Still, he moved forward.
He reached the spike bed, where the oldest of the vines lay coiled, dormant. A pit of thorned roots, folded tight like a clenched fist. The air here smelled of copper, pollen, and something sour—like rotted citrus.
Caer knelt. Planted his hand in the moss.
"Protocol Red-Rot," he whispered.
Nothing.
He repeated it louder.
"Protocol Red-Rot. Reauthorize: Guardian imprint—Caer A07."
The ground shifted.
Something deep beneath groaned awake.
A massive central vine—wide as a man's chest—uncoiled. It moved toward him, not aggressively, but with recognition. It slithered across his boots, paused at his knee, and rose up slowly.
Its skin was scarred. Old burns. Blade marks. Bullet scabs.
Memories.
It touched his chest.
Then retracted, almost reverent.
In his ear, the whisper returned—this time not a name.
But a question.
"Hunger?"
He answered without thinking.
"Yes."
A pulse ran down the vines.
They moved.
Branches split. Tendrils reached toward the quadrant's edge—where new footprints had just appeared in the pollen field. Another group. Smarter than the last. Moving in formation. Testing ground temperature. One scanned spores.
Too slow.
The blood vines erupted from beneath their feet, dragging two down before they could scream. The others fled, tripping sensors embedded in Caer's oldest security path—motion roots that detonated spores with a scent designed to disorient.
One merc—a young woman with half-shaved hair and rusted armor—made it farther than the rest. She almost reached the ridge.
Caer raised his rifle.
Paused.
Lowered it.
Let the orchard decide.
The vines didn't hesitate.
They caught her mid-step, curling around her leg and whipping her sideways into a thorn-hedge. She hit hard. No scream. Just a gasp, then silence.
He walked down slowly.
The vines retreated as he approached, dragging corpses into the soil behind them. The pit pulsed once. Pleased.
Caer crouched by the last body. The woman's eyes were still open.
He closed them gently.
"Your choice was bad," he murmured. "But not yours alone."
He stood, looked around the orchard edge.
Who had sold his location?
His orchard had been erased from the clan maps after the war. Only four people had the coordinates. One was dead. One was him.
That left two.
He touched the base of a nearby root. Whispered.
"Send pulse trace. Look for off-node pings in the last twenty-four hours. Origin."
The orchard replied—an image bloomed in his mind: a faint blue light arcing southeast.
Toward the ruins of Miren's old lab.
He exhaled.
"Miren," he muttered. "What the hell did you do?"
Behind him, the blood vines shivered. Content.
For now.
The blood wouldn't come off.
Caer stood hunched over the edge of the basin, both hands submerged in the sap-water, pinkish-red fluid swirling where the dried gore had once clung to his skin. He scrubbed harder than necessary, but the red wouldn't fade entirely. It never did.
Above the basin, the reflective resin mirror rippled.
He paused. Watched.
The resin—grown into the wall from a polished tree-flesh—didn't reflect like glass. It shimmered in layers, like peeled memory. Sometimes, when the orchard felt… tense, it would show things he didn't want to remember.
Today, it showed his younger face.
Hard-jawed. Clean-shaven. Eyepatch still fresh from a wound sustained in the siege at Garlot Ridge. The Caer in the mirror wore black-plated warclad and bore the insignia of Genephage Squad A07.
He was kneeling.
Behind him, a village burned.
And at his feet… a child.
No older than Lioress.
Naked. Shivering. Covered in sap burns.
The Caer in the mirror raised his rifle.
Present-Caer slammed his fist into the basin edge.
The reflection shattered.
He staggered back, breathing hard.
The memory returned anyway.
His squad had been ordered to purge the last bio-divergent enclave in the lower ravines. Resistance was minimal. Most had already succumbed to the gas. But this one child—a girl—had been found hiding beneath a sensory root.
She hadn't spoken. Just looked at him. Not with fear.
But with the same calm Lioress had.
He'd frozen.
His squad commander had ordered a clean extraction.
Caer disobeyed.
He faked the shot.
Told them she'd been incinerated.
Two weeks later, the girl vanished from the hidden cell where he'd stashed her. No trace.
Until now, he hadn't thought about her in over a decade.
But now, his mind whispered a chilling question: Was that girl… Lioress?
No. Couldn't be. The timeline didn't work.
And yet…
The orchard had been dormant since that operation. For twelve years, it had refused to bloom, despite perfect conditions. It had yielded fruits, yes—but not a single flower beyond what he forced through stimulation.
And now, within days of Lioress's arrival—it bloomed with abandon.
He turned back to the mirror. It had calmed now, returning to its root-sap shimmer. His reflection stared back—aged, scarred, and uncertain.
"What do you want from me?" he asked aloud.
The orchard didn't answer.
But in the floor below, where Lioress slept, vines curled slowly inward—closer, protective, content.
And somewhere in the heartwood of the orchard, deep in its ancient genetic memory, the image of a child knelt beside a root.
Waiting.
For him.
The cellar was quiet, except for the scrape of fingers through soil.
Caer stood in the doorway, watching Lioress draw.
She'd cleared a circle in the packed earth with practiced care, exposing the root-vein network that pulsed faintly under the surface like capillaries beneath translucent skin. Her hand moved slowly, deliberately, her eyes half-lidded.
He didn't disturb her.
She was murmuring softly.
Not words at first—just sounds. Cadences. Like ritual songs or old interface commands from a lost language. Then the sounds shifted.
Became names.
"Vaylen… Rux… Thon-Devir… Latchmere…"
Caer's breath caught.
Those weren't children's words.
They were battlefield aliases. Forgotten call signs from the worst days of the Genephage Campaign. He had seen those names tattooed on the inside of clone skulls. He had written some of them on kill orders.
The dirt took shape.
Her fingers etched winding lines—curves and intersections that matched nothing from this generation of mapmaking. No grid coordinates, no trade routes, no clan demarcations.
But Caer knew what he was looking at.
A war-era recon chart.
Hand-drawn. Layered in root-network logic. The kind used by field teams operating without satellite support. Only those who fought in the Dead Zones ever learned this code.
And Lioress was sketching it perfectly.
He moved closer. Crouched low.
"Where did you learn this?" he asked softly.
She didn't look up.
Her voice—when it came—was not her own.
Deeper. Older. Laced with a gravity that didn't match her age.
"They buried the names. But the orchard remembers."
Caer's heart thudded.
"Who remembers?"
She stopped drawing. Tilted her head. Her pupils narrowed to vertical slits for a brief moment—like a cat's.
"Not who. What."
The map beneath her hand glowed faintly—only for a moment—but long enough to confirm what Caer feared.
The orchard wasn't just reacting to Lioress.
It was using her.
Or—worse—it had imprinted onto her as a vessel. A translator. A mouthpiece for memories buried in DNA-encoded bark.
He reached out, gently grasped her hand.
Her eyes focused again.
And for a moment—just a moment—she looked terrified.
"I didn't mean to," she whispered.
"I know," he said. "It's not your fault."
She turned, burying her face into his chest.
He held her in silence as the roots around them pulsed faintly, matching her heartbeat.
And on the dirt floor, the map remained.
A forgotten world.
Drawn by a child who had never seen it.
The orchard slept restlessly that night.
The petals never fully closed. The vines twitched like they were dreaming.
Caer didn't sleep.
He stood beneath the old glimmer-root tree—tall, pale, and scarred. He had planted it with Miren Solvyr ten years ago. She'd shown him how to bond the myco-spores to the root cluster, anchoring the tree to the orchard's pulse.
They had shared tea beneath its branches once.
Talked about freedom. About what they would protect. About guilt.
That was before she vanished into the Southeastern Pale.
Before she became a rumor.
Now, standing here again, something felt wrong. Not just nostalgia. Not just loss.
The orchard pulsed oddly around this tree—like it couldn't decide if it welcomed it or feared it.
Lioress stood nearby, barefoot, tracing a spiral pattern in the moss with her toes.
"There's something under here," she said suddenly.
He turned.
"What?"
She didn't point.
She just looked down.
"I hear it. It's calling your name."
Caer's spine chilled.
He knelt. Brushed aside the moss. Dug with his fingers.
Ten centimeters deep, he hit something hard.
Metal.
But not clan-forged. Not wartech.
A pod.
Sleek. Black. Glossy.
He recognized the make.
A Mark IV Audio Shard Core. Illegal outside tribunal hands. Used for recording high-value interrogations. Or betrayals.
Caer pried it from the soil. The tree groaned faintly, but didn't resist.
The pod was warm.
He powered it on.
The device clicked once. Then began to whisper.
Over and over.
"Caer… Caer Avenya… Caer… I see you… I know you…"
His blood ran cold.
No interface screen.
No menu. No logs.
Just the voice.
Feminine. Familiar. Repeating his name with eerie precision—intonation slightly off each time. Like something was learning how to say it correctly.
He dropped the pod. Stepped back.
Lioress stared at it, then at him.
"Is it her?" she asked.
Caer shook his head.
"No."
"Then who?"
He looked to the orchard. The vines were pulling back, away from the glimmer-root, retracting like frightened fingers.
"It's not who I'm worried about," he muttered.
He turned to Lioress.
"It's what she left behind."