The bell on the western wall marked the third watch, its dull clang swallowed by the fog rising off the river.

  Sergeant Rellan tugged his cloak tighter and walked the parapet, boots whispering on damp stone. The river below murmured against its banks, thick with silt and moonlight. Somewhere along the dark bank, a frog croaked.

  His HUD floated around the peripherals of his vision, in nighttime mode – a soft amber text overlaid the world in front of him, providing his marching orders for the evening.

  He liked the nightshift; it was generally peaceful and nothing ever changed. He had only made it around the first section of wall though, when a boom echoed through the night.

  It wasn’t loud, almost as much pressure as sound, but it echoed through the village, breaking the silence. The lantern on the gate flickered; ripples ran through the puddle near his boot. For a heartbeat the night felt alive, listening.

  Rellan turned toward the sound, staring at the village, wondering what it could have been.

  Below the wall, squat roofs hunched along the street in uneven lines, thatched and smoke-stained. The sound had come from somewhere near the tavern, down waterside road.

  “Tell me you heard that,” he muttered as he peered into the misty gloom.

  His partner, a younger guard named Tilo, squinted into the dark beside him. “Probably a brawl. Lot of outsiders in town tonight.”

  “I told you not to call them that,” Rellan said, staring down at the shorter man who lowered his gaze in response. “Anyway, we wouldn’t be able to hear furniture breaking from here. It was something else.”

  “A stove backfiring maybe? You want to check it?”

  A stove backfiring? What did that even mean? Rellan shook his head. He pulled up the security feed on his hud and flipped through camera views. After a few minutes he closed it again and minimized the screen.

  “Nah. We’ll give it five minutes. If nobody’s screaming, it's not our problem.”

  They leaned on the wooden rail, watching the rows of rooftops sink back into the night. The mist thickened into a proper fog even as they watched; soon even nearby chimneys were just lumps of shadow.

  “Well,” Tilo said, yawning. “Peace restored I suppose.”

  Rellan grunted. Tilo was probably right, but he couldn’t put a finger on what might have made a sound like that in this village. And that bothered him. He scanned the rooftops one more time.

  Something moved, fast and fluid, across the top of a nearby roof. Just a flicker, darker than shadow. He blinked, and it was gone. The fog seemed to curl in the area.

  He waited, breathing deeply to keep his pulse steady. “You see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Movement on the roof there.” He pointed

  Tilo laughed. “Theres nothing there now. Maybe it was a bat?”

  Rellan exhaled, long and slow. He forced his shoulders to drop and keyed in a note.

  The HUD blinked green and faded. He turned back to the path that led down the top of the wall. As they walked his lantern halo fractured into brief rainbows in the mist around him.

  Behind him, the tavern quarter lay quiet.

  If he had looked back again, he might have noticed how the mists swirled against the wind, as if stirred by something leaping silently from roof to roof.

  But he didn’t.

  After a minute the swirling fog slowed, then stopped, then was just fog once more.

  And Rellan walked on towards the North Watch Tower, recording nothing of consequence.

  The hum from the server racks was the heartbeat of the night shift on the data floor.

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  Rows of slim towers blinked in steady blues and greens, their lights washing the narrow room buried deep beneath the main village watchtower. Two operators sat in the glow; one nursing a cup of coffee that smelled like burnt caramel, the other half-asleep behind a bank of hovering feeds.

  Lira, the more senior of the two operators glanced at the shift info on her HUD again and sighed. They were always behind.

  “Riveting stuff,” Lira said with a yawn, dragging a new clip into a highlight queue. “Guy falls off log during balance drills. Again.”

  “Post it with a caption,” her partner Juno muttered. “‘Fallen Hero, Day Three.’ It'll get a ton of views." They both laughed softly–the sound of people who’d been awake too long and cared too little.

  The main wall was covered in flat panel screens scrolling muted footage: trainees trudging through mud, laughing, arguing, collapsing on cots. Cameras hidden in rafters and helmet rigs fed constant streams through the network. The AI trimmed, tagged, and indexed; the night team just made it watchable.

  Lira yawned and flicked open what was left of the day’s anomaly list; everything the day shift hadn’t gotten to, which usually meant the scraps that nobody cared about.

  “Four thousand flagged moments, and every one’s some idiot tripping. We should get hazard pay.”

  A thin warning tone cut her off.

  On the central panel a large LED light started flashing red.

  Juno blinked. “That’s… not a tripping hazard.” He started punching keys on the panel in front of him. On the monitor wall, two screens started flipping through the hundreds of cameras installed around the village.

  “Could be a sensor echo.” Lira zoomed the map until a pulsing ring showed the tavern district. “Maybe lightning.”

  “There’s no storm. It’s cool out tonight, look at all the fog on the monitors.”

  “Maybe one of the generators blew? Pull up the Underground camera feed on Monitor 12.”

  They flipped through all of the camera views, then started again from the beginning. The warning light faded to amber, then green. Normal again. All vitals read steady.

  Juno frowned. “Heart rates spiked across the bar.”

  “Something happened.” Lira toggled playback. “Let’s see what the cameras caught.”

  The tavern feed loaded as static for half a second, then the image cleared. There was nothing unusual: patrons were drinking and laughing exactly as you would expect to see. No burst, no fire, no panic. Then, the cameras faded out, the images warped. Just for a moment.

  Then the footage stabilized. Everything was ordinary again. People in the bar were clearly looking around, but no one got up, no one reacted in panic.

  Juno leaned back. “The world sneezed I guess.”

  “Mark it false positive?”

  He hesitated. “Weird pattern, though. Look at the telemetry graph… The waveform. It’s symmetrical.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the signal, the energy spike came in and then went back out. It echoed in some way.”

  “System glitch. You getting philosophical on me, Juno?”

  He snorted and made a note on the system flagged event.

  The entry collapsed into the log and the hum of the servers filled the silence again.

  Lira stretched, joints popping. “One day they’ll automate us out of this.”

  “They already did. We’re just the meat-based failsafe.”

  She smiled at that, set down her empty mug and went back to the day’s flagged clips – slow-motion footage of trainees hauling packs through lake mud.

  “Alright, let’s find something inspirational before marketing sends us an angry text.”

  ***

  The original contract was for six months.

  Exploration, security, first contact contingencies. Get in, map it, make sure nothing eats the scientists, get paid, go home. I didn’t think about the word 'home' much back then.

  Now I run the west wall seven days a week. I know which stones settle after rain, which watch posts creak when the wind shifts and which of the new guards need their asses kicked so they don’t fall asleep on shift.

  After the original contract, I brought Mara and Eli through the gate. I really wasn’t sure how Mara was going to take to life on a new planet so only renewed for three months at the time.

  Turns out Mara’s happier than I’ve seen her in years. She loves the slower lifestyle the village offers. She says the air feels honest here.

  Now she’s teaming up with two of the other staff wives and a former tailor from Earth-side and they’re opening a dress shop near the main square. Says there’s demand for clothes that make sense for this place, not costumes pretending it’s somewhere else. They have big plans and I’m so proud of her.

  Eli’s already arguing with the other kids in two languages and thinks the glow-moss is the best thing he’s ever seen. Just don’t get me started on all the salamanders he’s bringing home...

  I miss Earth sometimes. But this place hasn’t felt like an assignment in a long time.

  Personal Journal

  Sergeant Frank Rellan