The waterfall was the first thing he saw—not just sound but silver stitched into the air, a curtain drawn from sky to stone. It wasn’t a place to rush; it was an invitation. Brubeck slowed, towel slack in his hand, glasses tucked carefully into his shoes.

  He crouched at the bank where ferns leaned heavy with spray, watching droplets gather and fall. Tadpoles flicked in the shallows. A frog no bigger than a thumbpad blinked at him from a wet rock. Beneath the glassy surface, a school of jeweled fish darted and turned as one body, catching the light like cut gems.

  Brubeck bent low, touched the water with his fingertips, and felt the cool climb into his skin. Stone, moss, the green tang of living things—he drew it into his lungs like a blessing. Every detail felt as if it had been laid here for him to notice.

  He set his towel on a rock, folded his shirt, each motion done with absentminded care, as though every crease were part of a quiet ritual. Only when the place had settled in his bones did he step forward.

  The water closed around him—first shocking, then warm—until he yielded and let himself drift beneath the silver thunder of the falls. Arms spread, ears submerged, the pond claimed him. The world narrowed to heartbeat and breath, sky bright above, and white threads tumbling down.

  The cool pressed close, yet it carried warmth too, as though the place itself had chosen to cradle him. His body slackened; thoughts slipped free. He closed his eyes. Sunlight scattered across the falls, brightness humming. His lips parted. He was almost asleep.

  The squawker shrieked.

  The sound tore the dream apart. Brubeck jolted, slipped sideways, and went under. Water rushed into his mouth and nose; he coughed and flailed, bubbles scrambling upward as he grabbed at his belt. His hand found the little red box, slick with spray. He yanked it free and dragged himself upright, gasping.

  “Still alive?” Wellsly’s voice crackled from the squawker.

  Brubeck spat water, wiped his face, and barked a laugh between coughs. “Alive,” he managed, then with a grin: “Incentivized.”

  He backstroked to the rock and reached for towel and shirt. His fingers met bare stone. No towel. No shirt. The shoes were there, though—and his glasses, exactly where he’d stowed them, scrupulously safe beneath the ledge.

  He scanned the bank once, then again, slower now, brows knitting.

  “Wellsly!” he muttered. “Saboteur.”

  He jammed his glasses on, slipped bare feet into shoes, and wrapped his arms around his gooseflesh. Without a word, Brubeck stormed past—bare as the day he was born—shoulders squared, jaw set, wet footprints smacking up the ramp. The shuttle door sealed behind him with a metallic thump that echoed longer than it should have.

  Horus watched him go, spatula still in hand, face unreadable.

  He turned back to the fire. The batter hissed, pancakes puffing up with their familiar sweet-salt smell. He flipped one, then another, patient as if he had all morning. Rage was best answered with time, and hunger never kept its secrets for long.

  When Brubeck reemerged—clothed now, hair damp, eyes still sparking—Horus simply set a plate in front of him, stacked high and dripping with syrup. He didn’t ask, didn’t prod. He let the silence sit, and the smell of food do its work.

  By the third pancake, Brubeck’s shoulders had eased. By the sixth, he was muttering details between bites, half complaint, half story. By the twelfth, the whole misadventure was spilling out of him, word by sticky word.

  Horus scratched his chin with the edge of the spatula, listening, expression unreadable. He didn’t comment, didn’t tease. He just turned the next pancake and set it down. The truth would keep coming. Pancakes always worked.

  When the plate was finally empty, Brubeck pushed back and reached for his kit. He slung it under his arm, already turning toward the trees.

  Horus stepped into his path, one hand outstretched, a narrow canvas roll balanced in his palm. Without explanation, he slid it into Brubeck’s jacket pocket.

  “Don’t lose this. You’re going to need it.”

  Brubeck frowned at the lump. “A tourniquet kit?”

  “It’s important. You do know how to use it, don’t you?”

  Brubeck gave a curt nod, tugging the pocket flat. “They trained us. I can manage.”

  “Good.” Horus turned back to the stove, spatula still in his other hand. “Go. Specimens first. Return when you’re done.”

  Brubeck licked the last trace of syrup from his thumb and grinned. Whatever else the morning had thrown at him, the forest still beckoned like a dare. He had specimens to collect, notes to make, and mysteries to chase. With a whistle under his breath, he snatched up his kit and strode toward the tree line.

  Brubeck moved beneath the trees with his kit tucked against his hip, the last mist of the waterfall still cool on his shoulders.

  At first, the forest was steady ground—hum of insects, trickle of water, the crisp scratch of stylus across page. He bent to sketch a beetle, measured the veining of a fern, and noted the fibrous husk of odd seedpods scattered in the loam. The stillness comforted him. This was the work he knew, the work that steadied his hands.

  The squawker at his belt crackled; Horus’s voice came thin but solid. “Specimens first, then return. Don’t lose line of sight.”

  Brubeck thumbed the reply switch, grinning. “Copy. Safe as houses.”

  He went back to his plants, content.

  The forest shifted. At first, it was nothing—a twig falling clean through still air. A rustle. He glanced up, shrugged it off, and bent again to his notes. Minutes passed.

  The next sound was sharper, closer. He paused, stylus mid-stroke. Another sound answered it—a murmur, thin and broken, like a voice tugged by the wind. His stomach pinched. He thumbed the squawker.

  “Horus? Say again?”

  Only static. Horus’s voice returned a moment later—chopped, indecipherable. Then gone.

  The murmur came again. Not words. Just cadence. It prickled his spine. He bent closer to his kit, pretending calm, scratching notes too fast, letters spidery and uneven.

  A hat lifted clean from his head—not brushed off but taken. He spun, saw nothing, snatching at empty air.

  More murmurs, farther ahead. Almost like… someone in pain.

  Training screamed inside him: stay put, report, don’t engage. His hands clenched, loosened, clenched again. He looked back toward the waterfall, then forward into the forest shadows—a groan carried through the trees—human, unmistakable.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, and chose.

  He plunged forward.

  The forest closed around him. Vines forced him to crawl, then sprint. Roots snagged his boots; shadows doubled back. The murmurs stopped, started again in another direction, luring him on. His breath turned ragged; sweat blurred his sight. He halted, listened, doubled back. A cry to the right—he bolted, branches lashing his arms.

  Then he saw it.

  A figure, high in the trees, bound in vines, limp, swaying. A strangled cry breaking air into syllables. His stomach twisted. He had to reach them.

  He gathered himself, sprinting full tilt. The branch swayed above. He set his foot hard into the loam, muscles coiling for a leap upward—

  —and the ground vanished.

  The earth beneath his stride split away, flimsy as bark paper. His foot punched through the false cover. His own momentum did the rest. The leap never began. The branch never came near. The forest swallowed him in a roar of snapping twigs and tearing earth.

  He fell.

  vvv

  Brubeck lay still, lungs aching, the branch he had meant to seize framed above the pit like a mockery.

  Shapes moved around the jagged rim, blotting the light in restless patches. Hair hung in dusty ropes, shoulders narrow beneath scraps of hide and woven bark, ribs showing pale through skin the color of baked clay. The air tasted of ash and salt; a dry wind combed the edges of the pit and left its whisper in his ears.

  They shifted constantly, weight never settling, a tremor in each movement—as though perturbed by hunger, driven. Breath rasped in their throats. When one swallowed, he could hear it, a hard click like pebbles knocking together. Their eyes gleamed above cracked cheeks, a glint of life caught between thirst and fear.

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  They looked down at him as barn cats might—both desperate and unwilling, drawn by the warmth of the fire but never daring a hand’s touch. A figure bent forward, and his breath caught.

  Not a creature. Not quite a man. A biped, an anthropoid—something between.

  His own hat, tilted askew, crowned the figure’s head.

  Under the leaning cedar, Horus found the story in pieces.

  Patrick’s communicator lay face-down in the loam, its grill packed with damp grit. A few paces away, a drawing pad hid half under a rotted limb, the top page furred with leaf dust—a fern vein rendered there in his precise hand. Beside it, a clean depression where a bag had been dropped hard, then left. The strap had been dragged through wet leaves, but the weight hadn’t come with it.

  He crouched. A thumbprint of heat still clung to the communicator’s edge; a warm smear lingered on the page where fingers had pressed. Farther on: scuffed leaves, a crushed mosaic of tread and bare sole.

  He lifted the communicator between forefinger and thumb and rolled it once, listening to the silence where Patrick’s breathing should have been.

  “Spencer,” he said quietly.

  The link clicked. “Go.”

  “Patrick’s line is down. His field pad is here. I have scuffing and a drag in the leaves—more than one runner. Heat decay says minutes, not hours.”

  A beat—air moving in a room far above the sky. “Copy. You’re alone on ground. Report as you move.”

  “I will.”

  He set the communicator back exactly where he’d found it. No need to muddy the picture.

  The forest waited, listening back.

  He rose, letting his breath fall in step with the wind, and sent color sliding through his skin—bronze into bark-brown, then into the green-black dappling of shade. Light struck him and scattered, unsure where to land. He tasted the air. Wet bark. Crushed fern. A thread of human salt fading into the deeper rot of the forest floor.

  Downwind. Good. He shifted a few steps until the breeze settled on his cheek, then angled his path until he and the wind were of one mind. The trail ran not by sight, but by what the earth remembered: ovals of warmth stamped into humus; a whisk of reed broken and still exhaling sap; a knot of vine parted, its fresh cut glistening in the dim light.

  He moved without menace, each step meant to belong rather than threaten. His weight stayed low, hands loose at his sides—the posture of one who came to help rather than to fight. At his hip, the small kit swung light and silent: strips of linen for bandaging, tape for splints, a pouch of compressed granola for quick food. Nothing of war. Only the tools of care and survival. The rest of him did the work without a sound.

  A click of something ahead. Not speech. Not animal exactly. A short whistle answered by a grunt, like stones tapped softly together. He lowered himself, let his breath sink, and inched forward under fern and limb, keeping the wind where he needed it.

  The trail broke into a tangle of roots and reed mat. Prints doubled and circled, always returning to the same few spots as if drawn there by a fixed point in the air. The heat held strongest there.

  He looked up. The forest thinned into a rough clearing under a canopy knot. In the center, the earth sagged oddly, its crust re-thatched with loose reed and dust.

  Voices again. A soft skitter of grit sliding.

  He slid to his belly and ghosted the last meters until the clearing opened in a ragged circle ahead. He stopped where the shadows lay thickest and let the scene sharpen.

  The ground inside had been worked—pit dug, cover broken, edges raw. Heat bled upward through the loosened soil, faint but steady; the shape beneath told him Patrick lived.

  Around the rim, figures moved in restless arcs: small frames and taller ones together, all thin to the edge of hunger. Hair unkempt. Shoulders draped in scraps of hide and twisted fiber. Hands quick and precise, made more for grasping and climbing than for long throws. Flint glinted at one hip; another carried a net of vine. Ash smudged their fingers where they’d tended fire.

  Their posture sealed it. Upright. Sure-kneed. Balanced on two feet, even when they crouched to peer into the pit. Their heads—broad domes over narrow bodies—told the quiet truth: cranial volume outpaced frame. Minds carried in starving bodies. Not beasts.

  They circled with a feral grace, weight never settling, eyes bright and wary—the look of creatures tugged by two masters: fear and hunger. Noses lifted often, testing the air; a turn of wind made them shift as one. Horus held his breath and kept the breeze on his cheek, downwind, invisible.

  Hierarchy showed itself without a word. The tallest of them—lithe and watchful—kept close to a slight, long-haired figure and pivoted toward her at every new sound. Near them, a gray-maned giant sat with a carved staff across his knees, still as a carved god; the others’ glances brushed him before each move. At the nearest rim, a narrow form leaned out, studying the captive below with bright calculation—Patrick’s hat sat jauntily on that head, claiming both prize and name.

  Horus did not move. He measured breath, distance, and a path that would not startle them into teeth.

  He kept to the shadows, ten paces back from the circle of trampled earth. Any nearer and they would be on him in three heartbeats. Hunter’s logic ran through him without words: stay downwind. Weight low. Hands open. No threat.

  Every time his breath stirred a leaf, heads snapped toward him—not random, not animal. A formation, the circle of wolves closing in. In their fists they carried reed-shaft pikes tipped with knapped flint, edges micro-flaked to a cruel brightness. When he shifted his toe, the spearheads slid together as if drawn by a string and leveled at the dark where he hid.

  No space to parley. Not yet.

  vvv

  Pat lay below, spine against the pit’s hard wall, face turned up into the ragged square of light. He had made himself small, calm on purpose—a man breathing against panic. Above him, the young ones circled, eyes bright, nostrils working.

  One girl edged forward, hair falling into her eyes. Tookku’s hand brushed her elbow—steadying, reassuring. She leaned closer to the rim; her trust had strength, the ledge none. It gave way beneath her.

  She slipped. Tookku’s hand snagged leather and belt, and for a heartbeat the whole grove stilled with them. He did not let her go. He heaved, hauling her back onto solid ground—then his own footing went. Arms flailed at air; he plunged over the edge.

  The fall was short and brutal. He struck the earth with a thud that emptied his lungs. For an instant, the grove was silent. Then his cry split it wide open.

  Pat was already moving. He threw himself across the floor, rough stone tearing his palms, and saw the wound at once: bright, arterial—a red fountain bursting across thigh and ground. Tookku’s breath came ragged; every beat sent another spray.

  Pat’s fingers closed around the little canvas roll Horus had pressed into his pocket at breakfast. You’re going to need this, the voice echoed. He snapped it open, looped the strap tight and high, and worked the windlass until the gush stuttered and slowed to a dark ribbon. Tookku’s body shuddered; his hands dug into earth, shock blurring his face. The strap held. It felt like a minute stolen from the gods.

  “Stay with me,” Pat breathed, fighting to keep the strap tight, fighting the rush of warmth that wanted to escape past it. The dark ribbon slowed, but his hands shook with the strain.

  The pit held its breath. Above, the air changed.

  Roona’s cry broke raggedly into the sky. She lunged toward the edge, but Tok caught her as if catching a child’s whole world. She twisted in his grip, soundless with fury, but his face was a mask carved from famine and command.

  On the rim, spears shifted toward the shadows where Horus knelt.

  He stepped out by a pace. The points swiveled as one, a living wall of stone teeth aimed at his lungs. He lifted both hands, palms out, fingers empty.

  “Let me help.”

  Nothing answered but the flick of eyes and the scrape of feet. A low, braided growl rose from their chests, the sound of men who had learned to be a wall. The flint edges did not waver.

  He did not step closer. “He’s bleeding,” he said evenly, voice pitched to carry without threat. “He will die without me.”

  The answer came in movement, not words: pikes leveled harder, shoulders locked, jaws set. A boy hissed; another snapped a reed against his teeth and spat the splinter. Their meaning needed no translation.

  They will not let you in, he thought. They would keep a prize and lose a man rather than show their throat to a stranger.

  The wind lay cool against his cheek. Downwind still. Good. They smelled only themselves and fear. What would they see if he gave them something truer?

  He had always dreaded showing what he was.

  He let the silence stretch until it sang, until even the leaves seemed to hold their breath. Then he took the tether off the thing he usually kept folded tight.

  Light rose in him.

  Not fire. Not torch-flare. Something older. A molten radiance unfurled until every line of him shone. Skin gave way to hammered gold; his eyes flared like suns behind smoke; the long planes of his face gleamed as if carved from living metal.

  The glow spilled outward in waves, casting long, sharp shadows between the trees, gilding bark and stone, licking along spear shafts until flint glittered like embers pulled from a forge.

  The villagers reeled as the brilliance pressed into them, searing sight and nerve alike. Arms flew up to shield their faces; spears clattered from fingers gone slack. One by one, they dropped to their knees, then flattened to the ground, faces hidden, not daring to move.

  Horus stood above them, the radiance unrelenting, until the clearing itself seemed to bow.

  He walked two paces, then a third, hands still raised. Faces at the rim did not bite this time; they broke. Knees hit the earth. Palms spread. Foreheads lowered. The gray-maned old man did not kneel, but the staff across his knees dipped with the weight of his silence.

  Roona tore free of Tok and lunged to the rim, her cry breaking as Horus gathered himself and leapt—a controlled arc, precise as a hawk’s strike—into the pit.

  Tookku lay crumpled on the floor, breath rattling, eyes rolled back to white. Pat knelt at his side, one hand steady on the tourniquet strap, the other at his wrist to see what the binding had bought them. The cloth bit high into the thigh where it belonged; the bleeding was checked, slowed to a seep, but the minutes still ticked against them.

  Horus landed beside him with the unstartling grace of someone who has learned how not to frighten small creatures.

  “Let me see,” he said to Pat. Not a command. An offering.

  Pat’s jaw worked as if to make words and give permission at once. Inch by inch, he lifted his hands, leaving the strap firm across the thigh.

  Horus set his palm just above the wound, not touching yet, measuring the heat of his own body against the air. Calibrate. Regulate. Microspheres loosened within him like grains shaken from a pouch, their number chosen by feel, their drift tightly contained.

  With the next breath, he let them seep through his skin in a fine, invisible stream, carried by warmth into the torn tissue.

  First, the vessels. The spheres threaded into the severed artery, urging the walls to draw together. Ragged ends puckered, met, and fused—not perfectly, but enough to hold a column of blood. The pulse that had once sprayed outward now beat inside again.

  Then the muscle. Fiber by fiber, torn strands folded shut, weaving themselves into a corded band. Strength returned in slow ripples, like rope being rewound.

  The fat layer—meager on a starving man—sealed next.

  At last, the skin. Deep layers knitted first, then lighter tissue. Horus drew his fingers close, and as the new pink stretched beneath, he peeled away the dead flap above. It came loose in his hand, replaced by fresh dermis, tender but whole.

  Tookku’s chest rose—shallow at first, then steadier. His lashes fluttered once, though his eyes did not open. Pat pressed two fingers to his wrist and, for the first time, felt a pulse with rhythm—faint, but certain.

  The last threads of skin sealed, paling from raw pink to the faint shine of new tissue. Horus steadied his breath, then drew the spheres back. They returned through his palm with a faint crawling heat, bringing their report: tissue stable, blood flow steady, clotting secure. The deeper repairs would hold, though weakness and fever would linger until the boy ate and slept.

  Horus dropped the flap of dead flesh aside. What remained was a clean seam, a pale line where blood had been. He left a narrow gap, not from failure but intent—skin must breathe, and poison must escape.

  Tookku’s breathing evened. His chest rose in shallow, regular lifts; his lips gained shades of life. His body trembled, then eased into stillness—the kind that meant exhaustion, not collapse.

  Horus flexed his fingers once to test their steadiness and let the warmth ebb back into himself. His reserves were diminished; he could feel the hollow tug where the spheres had worked. But he had given only what was necessary.

  Above, movement resumed: rope uncoiling, orders called, the groan of wood as ladders were dragged forward. Tok’s voice cut through it all, iron and clipped.

  “Ladders. Ropes. Move.”

  Feet scuffed. Commands snapped down the line. The spell of stillness cracked into motion as the tribe rushed to obey.

  And in the pit, the three of them waited—Tookku held safe between them—while the world above began to shift.