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Chapter Four At first the rhythm was in the dream. Not the dream itself. That had already gone to bits, the usual rubbish about being late for something that no longer made sense. What stayed was the rhythm. A tread on wood, slow and careful. Then another. Then another. Kai woke all at once. He lay rigid, eyes open in the dark, and counted them without meaning to. Seven. Eight. The wind hissed round the gable, setting something loose on the roof to a faint tapping, but beneath that the footfalls…- 13.1 K • Completed
- Chapter Three Morning arrived grudgingly. Kai woke with his jaw aching from sleep he had never quite trusted. For a few seconds he stayed where he was on the narrow bed in the desk room, staring at the strip of grey daylight leaking round the curtain and trying to decide what, exactly, he had heard in the night. Something moving in the house. That was as much shape as he could honestly give it now. In daylight it had already started shrinking. The sort of thing tiredness could build out of wind,…
- 13.1 K • Completed
Chapter Two The words sat there, dense and flat on the thin paper. Kai recognised them vaguely. Sunday school, maybe. Or a funeral. The sort of line people quoted in serious voices and expected to land. It landed now. The click the house had made behind him no longer felt incidental. In the top corner of the page, boxed in Caius’s neat hand, was the reference: Prov. 14:12. “You okay?” Ellie asked behind him. “Yeah.” He shut the book a little too quickly and slid it back into…- 13.1 K • Completed
- Chapter One By the time Mere Cross had dropped behind them, with its bus shelter, shuttered post office and the chip-shop smell still faint in the car, the road had thinned to a strip of cracked tarmac shouldering through a colourless sea of moor. Kai watched the land rise around them, swallowing hedges, houses and phone signal. Just land and sky now. Low stone walls ran in crooked lines until they disappeared into the heather. “Cheery,” Ellie said, blowing steam from her takeaway coffee. “You…
- 13.1 K • Completed
- New Sunnydale Academy rose at the end of a boulevard lined with ornamental pears that would bloom white in the spring and contribute nothing else for the rest of the year. The school itself could have been a Silicon Valley campus if Silicon Valley had decided to raise children instead of capital. Glass. Steel. Climate control so precise you forgot what season it was outside. VoreTechs logos everywhere, tasteful and insistent, like a signature on a painting you weren't allowed to touch. The company had…
- 5.2 K • Ongoing
- Abe dropped her in Old Sunnydale under a sign that looked like it had been designed by a branding team that feared irony but loved a revenue stream. VAMPIRE WEEKEND! The old drag had a curated cuteness to it in daylight. Low buildings in throwback California style. Faded charm polished into a sellable patina. Tourists in black lace buying pastries beside locals who'd either survived here too long to care or had turned caring into an identity. Costumed demons and fake vampires wandered between coffee…
- 5.2 K • Ongoing
- Nova woke choking on air. For one hard second she had no idea where she was. Just the dark. Sheets twisted around her legs. Her own breath stuck too high in her chest. Then the room assembled itself around her piece by piece, and she did what she had been trained to do years ago and could now do with humiliating efficiency: inhaled through her nose, held it, counted, let it out. Again. Again. The nightmare released its grip in stages, the way they always did. The fear was bad enough. The familiarity of…
- 5.2 K • Ongoing
- The hallway looked right. That was the first thing. Not old, exactly. Wrong in a familiar way. Trophy cases with tarnished plaques. Lockers with dented vents and combination locks. Institutional beige trying and failing to survive under fluorescent tubes that buzzed at the edge of hearing. Retro signage on the walls, the kind nobody made anymore, the kind that assumed you'd just know which way the library was. It all added up to Sunnydale High. The original. Which, unless local marketing had gone all in…
- 5.2 K • Ongoing
- The shuttle bay of the USS Trieste was a cavern of acoustic violence. Unlike the relatively clean corridors near the command deck, the bay was raw industry. The deck was scarred plasteel, scuffed by landing skids and the boots of loaders. It smelled of hydraulic fluid and hot metal. The atmospheric forcefields hummed with a headache-inducing whine, holding back vacuum while a Type-6 shuttle underwent engine maintenance beneath an open access panel. Data stood by a maintenance console, inputting…
- 3.4 K • Ongoing
- The USS Trieste did not hum like the starships in the recruitment holograms. It vibrated. It was a persistent, low-frequency thrum that travelled up through the deck plating and into the soles of the boots, a constant reminder of the dilithium intermix chamber churning three decks down. The air tasted of ozone and recycled particulates, filtered one time too many. It was the smell of a machine that had been running hot for twenty years. Ensign Data stood outside the Captain’s Ready Room. He did not…
- 3.4 K • Ongoing
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