By the time Davin got home, it was nearly dark.
He worked as a data analyst for a major company. His job was simple: turn chaos into numbers, and numbers into profit. Numbers. Models. Cold logic. That was his world. In that world, the unexpected only mattered if it could be measured, corrected, or exploited.
The silence of the house felt familiar.
His mother wasn't home. Another overtime shift at the hospital, like most nights lately. Before he even took off his shoes, Davin grabbed the small watering can by the sliding glass door and stepped into the garden.
The evening air hung heavy and still. Not a leaf moved.
Lost in thought, he turned an unfinished work project over in his head: a messy dataset, suspicious gaps, results too clean to be honest. Out of habit, he watered the plants without really looking at them.
Then his eyes drifted to the back of the yard, to the stunted little apple tree that had never produced anything worth eating.
That was where he saw it.
A single apple hung from a low branch in the dim light. Its surface was perfectly smooth, catching the fading light and throwing it back with the hard sheen of polished stone. Deep green. Unreal. Not the green of fruit, but of mineral, carved with almost obscene precision.
Davin went still.
"Looks like jade…"
His tired voice sounded strange in the empty garden.
He narrowed his eyes, searching for a logical explanation, and a memory came back to him. A few months earlier, his mother had come home from a flea market with an odd little smile on her face.
"I stopped by an old dealer's stall. Found some ancient seeds. Supposedly, they grow even in the worst soil. Look."
At the time, he had barely listened.
Now, he almost wished he had.
Davin tapped the arm of his smart glasses to activate his assistant. They were his favorite work tool, issued by his company.
"AI, run a visual search. Any apple variety with a color and texture close to mineral jade?"
A faint hum ran through the frame. A pale box tried to form in his retinal display, flickered, then vanished without a result.
No match. Not even a rough suggestion.
Davin frowned.
"Hm. Unknown species, sensor issue, or just a bug?"
He should have stopped there. Taken a picture, left the fruit on the tree, waited for his mother. Avoided touching a biological anomaly that had just appeared on a dying apple tree.
The sensible thing to do was obvious.
But his fingers had already closed around the apple.
The fruit came free without resistance, but its weight surprised him at once. It was too dense for its size. Far too dense. And above all, unnaturally cold, as if it had come straight out of a freezer. A dry chill seeped through his skin and crept slowly up his wrist.
Davin looked down at his hand.
For one second, he thought his pulse had slowed.
Then the sensation vanished.
Davin chose to blame fatigue. It was less worrying than the alternative.
A few minutes later, he was sitting on the living room couch, the fruit in his hands.
He studied it from every angle. The bluish glow of the TV slid over the green skin without ever quite catching on it. No spots, no irregularities, no flaws. Even its curves looked too clean, as if the fruit had been designed before it ever grew.
"This thing is way too perfect," he said into the silence of the living room.
He rolled it between his palms.
His analyst's mind screamed at him to wait. To put the thing in a box. To get a real analysis done. To absolutely not do what his body already seemed to crave.
But the fruit's coldness seeped under his skin and numbed his doubts. With every passing second, the idea of not tasting it became a little more absurd.
Davin shot to his feet.
The movement felt wrong, almost foreign. He walked to the kitchen, the apple clenched in his hand.
"Just one slice," he muttered. "To check."
Even he didn't believe that.
He set the fruit on a ceramic plate and picked up a paring knife. The blade scraped against the hard skin before biting in with unexpected resistance.
The flesh wasn't white.
It was translucent green, threaded with thin silver veins that seemed to hold the overhead light instead of reflecting it, as if something were shining very far inside.
A fresh scent rose from it. Not sweet. Not fruity. Pure, to the point of being unsettling.
Davin stayed bent over the plate, knife still in hand.
I'm going to end up in the ER because I ate a designer paperweight that fell off a dying tree.
A nervous laugh rose in his throat, but it caught there, weak and unconvinced.
Instead, he brought a slice to his mouth.
His teeth pierced the flesh, and his pupils widened at once.
"God…"
The burst of flavor swept everything else away.
It wasn't tart. It wasn't sickly sweet. A freshness so pure it almost felt alive flooded his mouth, like ice water drawn from a spring that had never touched soil. Something clean, violent, and beautiful.
His rational mind cracked.
He ate one piece, then another, then the rest.
Davin devoured the apple with an almost shameful hunger. He ate the flesh, then the core, and even crushed the black seeds between his teeth without really knowing why. Every bite erased a little more of the day's exhaustion, drowning his caution in a soft, deep euphoria that felt dangerously safe.
Then silence fell again.
The plate was empty.
Davin stood in the middle of the kitchen, his fingers tight around the edge of the counter. The euphoria vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving a strange hollow space in his chest.
He looked down at the plate.
"Is that it?"
The words unsettled him at once.
He shook his head, embarrassed by his own greed, then went back to the couch and dropped onto it.
"Alright, AI, find me a decent movie for toni…"
The sentence died in his throat.
Heat bloomed in the pit of his stomach.
He realized almost immediately that the word was wrong.
It wasn't heat.
It was burning him. Sharp, deep, and spreading from the pit of his stomach.
A spasm tore the air from his lungs. Davin doubled over, both hands pressed to his stomach.
The pain didn't feel like indigestion. It didn't feel like an allergy either. It started in his stomach, dense and burning, then spread through his insides like molten metal being poured into him.
"AHHH!"
He toppled off the couch and hit the floor hard.
His breathing locked up. His lungs refused to expand.
The burn spread from his stomach to his rib cage. Beneath his skin, his veins bulged, dark and taut. Davin tried to crawl toward the kitchen, to drink, call emergency services, do anything, but his legs no longer obeyed him.
He collapsed onto his back, convulsing.
The pain became absolute.
Every cell in his body, from the marrow of his bones to the tips of his fingers, felt as if it were being crushed, dissolved by an invisible force, then rebuilt raw only to be destroyed again.
"Help… Please…"
His cry had become a choked rasp.
He tried to reach for his smart glasses, lying near the coffee table.
Too far.
"SOMEBODY HELP ME! AAAAAH! IT BURNS!"
His eyes rolled in their sockets. The fire reached his brain, boring through his skull like a burning drill. His body arched to the limit, like a bow about to snap. He thrashed on the floor, slamming his head against the wood without even realizing it, searching for any way to escape the torture.
There was none.
The last thing his brain processed was the absolute certainty of his own death.
Then there was nothing.
The silence returned all at once.
Total.
With Davin's last breath, the combustion stopped.
From his rigid body, a ghostly flame rose. It burned bright jade green, a cold fire that consumed neither his blackened flesh nor the living room floor. The glow pulsed once, then a second time, like a foreign heart learning how to beat.
Then it shot toward the sky.
It passed through the ceiling as if it weren't there, tore through the atmosphere, and plunged into the emptiness of space. At a speed that defied all logic, the jade comet streaked through the cosmos, devouring distance and ignoring the dark, until it reached the orbit of a distant world.
Once there, it fell.
It plunged toward an unknown planet, tore through the clouds, cut across the night air, and came down without a sound on a wretched camp.
In the mud, beneath a broken cart, a gaunt young beggar slept fitfully.
The emerald light sank into his chest.
The body arched.
His eyes snapped open in terror. His jaw opened on a silent scream. Something deep inside him tried to resist: a weak, starving presence, already cracked by years of fear and hunger.
It didn't last a second.
The jade energy crushed that fragile soul, scattered it like a spark beneath a wave, then sank deep into the stolen body's core.
The light faded little by little. The bright green shrank to an ember, then went out.
A heavy silence settled beneath the cart.
Mud dripped slowly from a broken wheel. Somewhere in the distance, someone coughed in their sleep.
After a long moment, the body moved again.