Chapter 4 —
He didn't wake to an alarm.
He woke to warmth — a slow, golden pressure on his face that pulled him up from sleep gradually, the way good mornings are supposed to work. For one unguarded moment, eyes still closed, he simply existed in it. Then memory returned, and he opened his eyes and turned to the window.
Still there. All of it.
The trees stood full and unhurried in the early light, their canopy catching the first rays of a sun that was only just beginning to make its case above the horizon — orange and heavy and enormous in a sky that was the colour of peach skin fading into blue. A flock of birds crossed overhead in loose formation, their shapes dark against the brightening sky, their calls weaving in and out of the general chorus rising from every direction. The wind moved through the grass and the low branches in long, easy sighs. The world outside the truck window looked, if anything, more beautiful in daylight than it had under the two moons. Less dreamlike. More real.
Which was, in its own way, more unsettling.
"Good morning, Jon." Lora's voice came in warm and unhurried. "How did you sleep?"
He turned away from the window and sat up slowly, one hand finding the back of his head out of habit. The swelling had reduced overnight but the ache remained, deep and steady.
"What can I say," he said, and surprised himself by almost meaning it. "Decent. Actually decent." He pressed carefully at the tender spot and winced. "Apparently near-death interdimensional travel is good for the sleep cycle."
Lora's laugh was quiet and genuine. He had calibrated her that way — not the hollow, performed warmth of a standard assistant but something more natural, with actual timing to it.
"So," he said, pulling himself forward and rolling his shoulders. "What are we looking like?"
"Oh — almost forgot." A brief pause. "Connecting to your watch now."
The watch face pulsed once and a soft chime confirmed the link. Jon leaned back and listened.
"Surprisingly well, all things considered. The convoy is intact. The cargo is largely in good condition — beverages, alcohol, clothing, packaged food and snacks, all checked out fine. Even the bottled spirits came through the flood without losses, which I'll admit I didn't expect." She paused. "There are a few things worth noting. Truck four's engine flagged a malfunction on initial diagnostic, but it turned out to be a dead battery rather than structural damage — manageable. The cargo hold containing the seeds was running slightly warm, so I activated the ventilation system on that unit overnight. It's stabilized."
Jon nodded slowly, working through the information.
"Power is low across the board — we didn't get much solar overnight, obviously. I've been conservative with usage where I can." Another brief pause. "I should also tell you — I connected myself to the other four trucks last night and consolidated their systems under a single framework. I'm operating as the sole AI across all five units now. I hope that's acceptable."
"That's fine," Jon said. "Good thinking, actually."
"Thank you. On the connectivity side — I ran every possible attempt to reach a satellite last night. Nothing. We are genuinely off the map in every sense. But I was able to use my existing training data to build a closed local network across all five trucks. It's not the internet. But it functions as one, within our range — searchable, cross-referenced, usable."
Jon raised an eyebrow at that. "You built us a private internet."
"A modest one. But yes."
He almost smiled. "Anything else?"
"The air." Her tone shifted slightly — not grave, but precise. "I ran analysis overnight. There's a compound present that doesn't exist in any Earth atmosphere — I have nothing to compare it to. But the tests I was able to run suggest it's entirely harmless. More than harmless, actually. The preliminary data indicates it has a gradual strengthening effect on human physiology — bone density, muscle tissue, general constitution. The longer you're exposed, the more pronounced the effect appears to become."
Jon sat with that for a moment.
"So the air here is making me stronger."
"Slowly. But yes, that appears to be the direction."
"Right." He exhaled through his nose. "What about the rest of the cargo?"
"Most of it is confirmed fine. There are sections I couldn't fully assess — the tobacco and a few of the sealed surplus units are buried under other cargo, so I'd consider those unknown for now rather than damaged. The soap, detergent and cleaning supplies came through clean." A small pause, as though she were choosing her phrasing. "We did lose some of the porcelain and glassware. Not a significant portion — the items that broke were the surplus pieces the director added at the end, the ones that weren't properly secured or mounted. Everything that was properly fastened held."
Jon nodded. He thought about the director's ear-to-ear smile as he'd loaded the trucks, the way he'd added extras with the enthusiasm of someone wrapping a gift. He felt a complicated fondness for the man.
"You did well, Lora," he said. "Really well."
She said nothing, but the small sound she made carried something warmer than acknowledgment.
He cleaned himself up as best he could — fresh clothes from his bag, cold water from the cab's small utility supply on his face and neck, another two pain tablets and a fresh compress against the back of his head. When he felt approximately human again he looked out the windshield at the treeline and made a decision.
He couldn't drive out — the forest was too dense for the trucks to move comfortably — but there was no reason he had to stay inside.
He reached for the door handle and pushed it open.
On the ground directly below the door, coiled in the gap between the step and the earth, a snake had a small rabbit pinned beneath its jaw and was in the process of unhinging itself to swallow it. It turned one flat, ancient eye upward toward Jon as the door swung wide.
The door swung shut again at approximately the same speed.
From the watch, Lora's laughter rang out — full and unguarded, the kind she rarely let through. On the small holographic display above the watch face, her projected figure — a young woman in a simple dress, the appearance he'd chosen for her interface — was bent forward with it, one hand over her mouth.
"Not a word," Jon said.
She composed herself admirably quickly. And then, without fanfare, he felt the faint vibration of one of the trucks moving and heard the soft compression of something beneath a tire.
"Apologies," Lora said, with no particular remorse in it.
Jon counted to three. Opened the door again. The ground was clear. He stepped out.
The air came at him all at once — the full, unfiltered version of what he'd breathed through the cracked window, and it was a different thing entirely experienced without glass between them. The wet earth beneath the trees, the green sharpness of living things, the layered sweetness of the flowers drifting in from beyond the treeline. Something beneath all of it that had no name and needed none — it simply moved through him like a long, slow chord, settling into his chest and his limbs until his shoulders dropped and his breathing slowed to match it.
He stood and breathed for a moment. Just that.
Then he went back to the cab, pulled out his backpack, and packed it with the focused practicality of someone who had made a decision and was following through. Beef jerky. A handful of snack bars. Two bottles of water. One bottle of wine, wrapped in a spare shirt. A folding knife from the kit. He zipped it, slung it on, and looked up at the trees around him.
"Lora — radar. How far can you reach me if I move away from the trucks?"
"Given that I'm networked across all five units now? At least two hundred miles, reliably. Probably further if you move in the right direction."
"Two hundred miles." He shook his head slightly. "That's considerably more than I expected."
"If you positioned the trucks at intervals rather than clustered, I could extend that range further still. But for now — two hundred miles."
"Good enough." He took the knife out, unfolded it, tested the weight in his hand, then folded it and put it in his jacket pocket where he could reach it without thinking. "Talk to me if something on the radar moves toward me."
"Obviously," she said.
He picked a direction — roughly where the light seemed strongest through the canopy, suggesting open ground beyond — and walked.
The forest held him for about half an hour, and it held him well. The ground underfoot was soft and deeply carpeted with moss and fallen leaves, the light coming down in long shafts between the branches, birds moving overhead in the canopy with the easy familiarity of things that had never learned to fear anything. He walked without hurrying, the knife in his pocket, Lora quiet in his ear. The ache in his head was still present but more distant now, held back by the medication and by the simple forward motion of moving through something beautiful.
Then the trees thinned. Then they ended.
He stopped at the treeline and looked out.
The prairie opened before him like an exhale — grass stretching in every direction as far as he could see, deep green and gold where the low morning sun caught it, moving in long slow waves as the wind passed through. Dandelion heads and small white flowers bent and swayed in the current. The sky above it was enormous, the kind of sky that only exists over open flat ground where there's nothing to interrupt your sense of just how much of it there is.
Something moved in Jon's chest that had no particular name.
He ran.
Not purposefully. Not toward anything specific. He just ran — out into the grass with his arms out slightly for balance, the backpack bouncing, the ground springy and alive beneath his feet. He jumped over a small cluster of flowers for no reason. He changed direction for no reason. He laughed once, short and surprised at himself, and didn't care.
In his earbuds, music began — strings and woodwind, something medieval and unhurried and somehow perfectly pitched to the grass and the open sky and the two-mooned world he had woken up in. He hadn't knowingly added anything like it to any playlist he owned. He glanced at the watch.
Lora's hologram looked elsewhere with exaggerated innocence.
He left it playing.
He walked for a while after the running had worked itself out of him, and it was on one of these calmer stretches — hands in his pockets, the music still going, the grass brushing his knees — that he saw it. Long and low on the horizon, running roughly parallel to the edge of the prairie. A wall.
Not impressive by any military standard. Not high enough to defend much against anything determined. But it was built — shaped stone or something like it, running in a line with the deliberate geometry that only conscious hands produce.
Infrastructure. Civilization. People.
Jon's pace quickened without him deciding to quicken it, his eyes fixed on the distant line of the wall as the medieval strings played on in his ears and the grass parted around him with every step.