Kota only realized how long he'd been still when standing up felt like peeling himself off the floor.
His muscles protested in a slow, stubborn way, like metal that had cooled too fast. The first attempt to rise brought a twinge from his side and a warning pulse from the half-healed gouges, but nothing ripped. Nothing went hot and wet again.
He counted that as a win.
"Careful," Aisha said automatically, even though she was the one still sitting. Her back was to the broken wall, one knee pulled up, fingers idly tracing lines in the dust.
"I am being careful," he said.
He put one hand against the sturdier section of wall and pushed himself the rest of the way up. His legs took his weight. They shook, but they held. The heat in his stomach stirred, a slow roll in time with his breath.
He lifted his arms overhead in a stretch.
His ribs pulled. The bandaged side flared in response, a bright line of pain that smoothed into something dull when he held the position. The rest of him ached with the accumulated strain of days of running, climbing, and not-dying.
He leaned to the right, away from the worst of the injury, feeling the stretch along his flank. Then the left, cautiously. His torso twisted. Vertebrae popped in sequence up his back, little ticks of sound that felt cleaner than they had any right to in this broken place.
He rotated his shoulders.
Old scar tissue along the one that had never quite healed right crackled. His collarbone sent a faint complaint. The half-healed claw gouges tugged under the bandage.
He breathed through it.
Movement had always felt like this: a mixture of complaint and freedom. Inkto's roofs had been unforgiving. You learned quickly which kinds of hurt meant "stop" and which meant "you're still alive, keep going."
He rolled his neck.
Bone slid against bone with a scrape that echoed faintly off the uneven stone.
He exhaled and dropped his arms.
Across from him, Aisha had stilled.
He hadn't meant to put on a show. Stretching was habit. Test your range. Find what broke in the last fight. Don't discover it again when you're already running. But when he turned his head to check if she was going to nag him into sitting back down, he found her watching.
Not just watching.
Her gaze tracked the line of his torso, the twist of muscle under skin that had gotten thinner but still held the wiry definition years of running and climbing had carved into it. She wasn't even pretending not to look. Her eyes were fixed, mouth slightly parted.
Kota blinked.
Dust motes drifted between them, turning in the shafts of faint morning light that had found their way through the ragged opening above.
He shifted his weight, not sure what else to do.
Her eyes flicked up.
Caught, Aisha jerked as if someone had snapped fingers in front of her face.
"I—I was just—" Color rushed up from the collar of her shirt, staining her cheeks. She scrambled for her earlier posture, dragging her gaze back to the safe territory of his bandage. "Making sure you weren't about to tear anything open again."
"Right," he said slowly. "Because staring really hard helps with that."
"Shut up." She tried for a scowl, but the pink on her face undermined it. "You almost died. Forgive me for paying attention."
He studied her for a second longer, trying to link the look he'd seen with anything familiar. He came up short. He filed it under Things To Worry About Later and let it go.
"If you're done… paying attention," he said, "you want to come see how bad of an idea it is for me to walk around?"
Her eyes narrowed. "What do you mean 'come see'?"
"Going to explore a little." He nudged his pack with his bare foot. "Stretch my legs that aren't cut open. Make sure the city hasn't turned inside out again while we were sleeping."
"Explore," she repeated flatly. "As in: leave partial cover, wander around a half-collapsed alien ruin, get your stitches-that-aren't-actually-stitches all excited, and maybe wave at the murder-orb in the middle of the square."
"When you say it like that," he mused, "it sounds unwise."
"It is unwise."
"Still going to do it." He met her gaze, steady. "If I can walk now, I need to. We don't know how long that"—he gestured vaguely at his middle—"is going to keep helping. Or what else this place is growing while we sit."
She pressed her lips together.
He could see the argument forming behind her eyes: rest, properly, another day; wait until infection either did or did not try to kill him; conserve energy.
He headed it off.
"I won't go far," he added. "Just… around. The orb. The nearby streets. No chasing beasts through buildings." He let the corner of his mouth twitch. "Not today."
She exhaled, half a sigh, half a resigned groan.
"You're impossible," she muttered. Then: "I'm coming."
He hadn't actually been sure she would, not after what the orb had done to him last time. Relief loosened something in his chest that he hadn't realized was balled tight.
"Bring Dumpling," he said. "Extra eyes."
Exactly on cue, a small, gelatinous head popped up over the broken edge of the wall.
Dumpling's big, dark eyes blinked in their slightly-too-wide way, the creature's body giving a pleased shimmy. It trilled twice—sound like a wet whistle—and jelly-hopped down the inside of the wall to land on Aisha's shoulder with a soft plop.
He wrapped himself there like an overenthusiastic scarf.
"Traitor," Aisha said, flicking him gently on the side. "You were supposed to be on lookout."
Dumpling made a noise that might have been offended.
Kota used the wall to ease himself fully upright and waited while Aisha slung on her own bag and checked the ties on his makeshift bandage, tightening one where it had loosened. Her fingers were efficient, careful not to pull more than necessary.
"You tell me if it starts bleeding again," she said.
"Right," he said. "I'll whistle."
She gave him a look that said she wasn't sure if he was joking.
He was only halfway joking.
They slipped out through the gap she'd dragged him through the night before. She'd wedged a pair of broken slabs in front of it as a crude barrier; he shifted one aside just enough for them to slip by, then nudged it back into place.
Outside, the city felt… wary.
The air held the same metallic tang, the same faint organic sweetness from the bioluminescent plants that clung to cracks and walls. The hum under his feet ran at a steady, unobtrusive level. Nothing obvious had changed.
But there was a silence that felt different from the usual stillness of abandoned places. Less like emptiness. More like waiting.
Kota scanned the street as they moved.
No silver shape lay where he remembered killing the beast.
He stopped.
The stone there was still stained—a dark, irregular patch that had dried to almost-black, sunk into the porous cracks. Scraps of fur clung to one edge where something had brushed against it and left a few strands behind. No body.
"Where is it?" Aisha asked quietly at his shoulder.
He shook his head, throat dry.
"Dragged away?" he said. "Scavengers?"
"Or something that doesn't leave bodies," she murmured.
He didn't like that thought.
He picked up their pace a little.
His side tugged in protest; he ignored it. The heat in his belly flickered, not in warning but like a muscle flexing.
They threaded their way back toward the central square.
Kota found himself automatically cataloguing paths, angles, cover points as they walked. Which broken wall could be vaulted in an emergency. Which sagging overhang he could maybe climb to get higher ground. Where the rubble would slow someone heavier than him more than it slowed him.
A corner of his mind noted that this habit had only gotten worse since they'd arrived. The other corners were busy listening for claws.
"Still weird you heal faster than Dumpling grows," Aisha muttered at one point, gaze flicking to his side.
"He doesn't fight beasts," Kota said. "Maybe if he pulled something."
Dumpling hissed softly, which for him was mostly a bubbly squeak.
"You pulled enough for all three of us," Aisha snapped.
He let that die.
The square opened up around a bend, space blooming as the enclosing buildings fell back.
The orb sat exactly where it had been.
Still hovering.
Still wrong.
It hung over the center of its narrow, circular pool, not quite touching the water's surface, suspended in a way that made the back of his thoughts itch. Its surface was the same smooth, deep not-color, its faint inlaid lines tracing shifting, organic paths that never quite repeated.
The water spilling down the sides of the raised platform into the ring below caught the odd light of the sky and turned it into liquid metal, sliding sheets of silver and pale violet.
The orb did not glow brighter when they stepped into view.
It did not flicker, or roar awake, or fire beams of death across the square.
It just… was.
That didn't make Kota feel better.
The sensation of being watched rolled over him the moment his eyes met its surface. It wasn't a sharp stab, not even a prickle on the back of his neck. More like the knowledge you picked up after years of being prey in Inkto: nooks where people could be hiding. Lines of sight you didn't cross without checking.
He knew, with a deep, animal certainty, that something inside that thing knew he was here.
"I hate it," Aisha said under her breath.
"Same," he said.
They didn't approach at first.
He circled the edge of the square, keeping to the partial cover of the low stairs and broken railings. Aisha walked with him, Dumpling half-hiding now under her hair, his round body flattened slightly against her neck.
From different angles, the orb's surface caught different slivers of the city in small, curved reflection: a twisted segment of building here, a smear of sky there. It never showed them.
He tested it once, stepping deliberately into where the reflection should include his silhouette.
Nothing.
The surface remained a smooth, featureless sheen of dark, the pattern-lines sliding within it like veins in stone.
"Maybe it only cares when you're half-dead," Aisha muttered.
"That's comforting," he said.
They completed one slow circuit.
No beasts lunged from the doorways. No hidden traps sprang from the paving. The hum under his feet stayed steady, punctuated now and then by faint, distant vibrations that might have been shifting structures or something moving far off.
Kota exhaled.
"Okay," he said. "If it was going to do something just because I was close, it probably would've."
"That's a terrible metric," Aisha said immediately.
He ignored her for the span of one step.
Then another.
Then he left the ring of relative safety and walked up the shallow steps toward the platform.
The bandages pulled. His side ached. His hand felt strangely light as he reached it out, fingers stretched. The last time he'd touched the orb, it had shoved visions into his skull hard enough to drop him.
He wanted that again.
Not the pain. Not the helplessness.
The information.
If this was built by whoever had left those scraps of language, if it had watched whatever had come before them, if it was older than the Domains and the Academy and every lie they told about how Rifts "just happened," then it knew things no one on Earth did.
It knew more than he did, at least.
He hated that.
He had spent his whole life making sure he knew enough to live.
He was done being the dumbest thing in the room.
He reached.
Aisha grabbed his wrist.
"Are you insane?" she demanded.
Her fingers dug into his skin, tight enough to bruise. Dumpling lurched with the sudden motion, giving a little affronted chirp.
Kota looked back at her.
She stood one step below him, face tilted up, eyes wide and bright with something that was not curiosity. Fear sat there, sharp and clear.
"You just—" She gestured with her chin at his side. "That thing did—something—to you. You almost didn't wake up. And your bright idea is to touch it. Again."
"It healed," he said. "Mostly."
"That's not the point," she snapped. "We don't know what it did. Or why. Or if that was supposed to happen or if you just… broke in a way it liked."
He swallowed.
He could still feel the echo of those voices in his head, the ancient syllables scratching against the inside of his thoughts. The threaded light. The way the hum had cut out.
"I need to know," he said quietly. "If it's… connected. To whatever this is." His free hand brushed his stomach unconsciously, fingertips ghosting over the spot where the warmth circled. "If it's going to do more."
"So we… test it on your brain?" Her grip tightened. "Kota, if you go under again, I might not be able to drag you back this time. I don't even know if you'd come back."
He met her gaze.
There were arguments he could make. Risks vs. rewards. The likelihood that the orb would react again, given it already had. How information was the only thing keeping them from stumbling blind into the next beast's teeth.
None of them mattered in the face of the way her fingers shook around his wrist.
He dropped his hand.
"Okay," he said.
Surprise flickered across her face.
"Okay?" she echoed warily.
"Okay," he repeated. "No touching the unknown alien artifact that tried to scramble my head. For now."
She didn't let go immediately.
"Promise," he added.
Only then did her fingers loosen.
"You're an idiot," she muttered.
"Working on being a live idiot."
She huffed, some tension easing from her shoulders.
They stood there a moment longer, the three of them—two humans and one quivering, gelatinous lump—staring up at the still, silent orb.
Nothing changed.
No patterns rearranged themselves in sudden, catastrophic ways. No beams lanced out. The pulsing lines under the surface kept tracing their slow, unknowable circuits.
Kota felt watched.
He stared back.
You're not the only one paying attention, he thought.
Then he turned away.
Searching the surrounding buildings stripped the last of his early adrenaline and replaced it with a bone-deep, practical tiredness.
Many of the structures around the square had already collapsed beyond anything useful. The first two they checked were mostly hollow shells—walls half-gone, roofs fallen in, insides choked with rubble and invasive, reaching plants that had slithered through any available crack.
They picked their way through anyway.
Kota kept an eye on footing, weight distributions, the way certain chunks of material shifted when stepped on. Aisha, as usual, saw different things.
"Look at this," she said softly in the third building, voice edged with awe more than fear for the first time since they'd arrived.
He ducked under a sagging doorframe to join her.
Inside, light filtered through a long, vertical break in the far wall, cutting the dimness into sharp bars. Dust floated, stirred by their presence. The room had some old structure to it—rows of low, flattened platforms along one side, a wide, central strip of floor worn smoother than the rest.
On the wall above each platform, shapes had been etched into the once-smooth surface.
Kota didn't recognize any of them.
Thin lines looped and crossed, some forming complex knots, others spreading out into branching, almost-plantlike forms. Where the material hadn't cracked away, faint traces of inlaid color remained, dulled with age but still stubborn: blues, deep greens, a rusty red that might once have been brighter.
"Writing?" he guessed.
"Maybe." Aisha's eyes were moving fast, drinking in each symbol. Her fingers twitched at her sides, wanting to touch and not daring to in case the whole thing decided to tumble down. "Or… diagrams. Or both. Look at how these repeat." She pointed to a sequence of three interconnected shapes that appeared at regular intervals between others. "Like… anchors in a sentence."
"You don't know their language," he said.
"No." She sounded almost offended by that reality. "But structure is structure. Old Inkto signs, Sagacity's rune sets, the Reverence Domain's charms—they all have pattern logic. This…" She trailed off, brow furrowing. "This feels…"
"Familiar?" he supplied before he could stop himself.
She shot him a quick look.
"Yeah," she admitted. "A little." Her hand went unconsciously to her own stomach. "I keep… getting flashes. Like if I stared hard enough, some of these would snap into meaning."
He watched her profile.
The last time she'd had "flashes" around runes, the walls themselves had lit up. He remembered the shock of seeing the faint, ghost-glow of old scripts responding to her focus back in the first shelter they'd found. The way Dumpling had gone very still on her shoulder, all his usual jiggling forgotten.
"Maybe don't try too hard while we're standing under a compromised ceiling," he said.
She huffed, but she stepped back a pace all the same.
"Killjoy."
"Living killjoy," he corrected.
He turned his attention to more practical prize.
Most of the room was useless—rotted fabric remnants, half-fused lumps of some old synthetic, broken containers whose contents had long since dried into unidentifiable crusts. He kicked aside a small drift of fallen plaster, looking for glints of anything that might be metal.
Something caught the light near one of the low platforms.
He crouched, careful of his side, and pushed debris aside.
His fingers brushed something that felt more solid than stone, colder. He curled his hand around it and pulled.
Half a handle came up, the rest of whatever it had been attached to lost to time.
It fit awkwardly in his palm, heavier than its size suggested. The grip was wrapped in a material that had once been smooth but was now cracked and flaking. The end where something else had connected was jagged, torn rather than cleanly broken.
Kota turned it in his hand.
It wasn't just any handle.
Even worn and separated, it had the balance of something meant to be held in motion. The weight distribution felt right for a weapon, not a tool—centered a little ahead of the hand, as if to carry the momentum of a swing.
"Aisha," he called.
She tore her gaze from the wall etchings with visible reluctance and came over.
"What did you find? Please say it's something that isn't poison, cursed, or both."
He held it up.
Her eyebrows went up.
"Part of… something," she said, taking it from him. She tested the grip, frowning as the old wrapping flaked under her fingers. "Feels like…" She mimed a short, instinctive cutting motion. "Blade-hilt. Maybe."
"Thought so."
"It's very broken," she pointed out.
"So is my sword." He shrugged. "And this used to belong to people who built murder orbs. Might be better than scrap if we can find the rest."
She weighed it a moment more, then handed it back. "Into the junk bag, then. Placeholder of future weapon glory."
He slipped it into his makeshift sack alongside their other finds: a couple of reasonably intact metal fasteners, a length of wire, a small, sealed container that still sloshed when shaken and therefore counted as a potential reward or disaster.
A low, very human sound interrupted the inventory.
Aisha's stomach growled.
Loudly.
She went rigid.
Color flared across her cheeks again, brighter this time.
Kota blinked at her, then at her midsection as if it had personally offended him.
"Hungry?" he asked.
"No," she said with immediate, reflexive denial, then winced as her treacherous body answered for her with a smaller, complaining noise. "Maybe."
Dumpling let out a sympathetic warble, patting her collarbone with one stubby appendage.
Kota's own stomach answered in kind, a dull ache that hadn't fully left since they'd stepped through the Rift.
"We should head back," he said. "Eat something that isn't mystery container goo."
"Yes, let's avoid glowing in the dark from the inside," she muttered, glancing with suspicion at the sealed jar in his sack.
"Maybe it's seasoning," he offered.
"Maybe it's acid."
"Could be both."
She made a face at him.
They worked their way back through the ruined neighborhood, pockets of bioluminescence flickering as they passed, faint spores of light drifting lazily in their wake. From time to time, Kota thought he saw movement at the edges of his vision—small, scuttling shapes slipping between cracks, eyes reflecting faint glows.
Nothing big.
Nothing that scraped the ground like claws with the mass to break a building.
He still kept his hand near his sword's hilt.
The pitched, ringing echo of the last beast's scream hadn't left his head.
By the time they reached their chosen shelter again—a half-collapsed building with only one real entrance and a good vantage on the street—Kota's side had gone from muted ache back toward sharper complaint. He let himself sag against the inner wall with more relief than he showed.
Aisha noticed.
"You pushed it," she said.
He shrugged. "Had to know how far I could go."
"That's never going to be a fixed number," she muttered, but she didn't press.
They shared out the meager food.
Aisha had collected another handful of the small, firm berries from the safer vines, the ones they'd tested on Dumpling first and watched for three hours with increasing anxiety until he'd just fallen asleep, perfectly content. They split things without comment.
Kota took a little less than half, as always. Aisha pretended not to notice, as always, even though he absolutely saw the flicker of annoyance and worry cross her face when she caught the exact division.
The berries snapped between his teeth with an oddly satisfying pop, their taste a mix of tart and faintly sweet.
Dumpling happily absorbed the pulp of a couple of berries, his surface flushing an almost-luminous shade of soft