The forest swallowed sound.
That was the first thing Kota noticed—how the noise of the wasteland behind them, the distant hum of Okala's walls, the wind across open ground, all of it died the moment they passed beneath the canopy. The silence pressed against his ears like water, thick and suffocating.
The second thing he noticed was the wrongness.
The trees weren't right. They grew at angles that made his eyes hurt, trunks spiraling in directions that shouldn't be possible, branches weaving together overhead in patterns too geometric to be natural. The bark was dark, almost black, and it glistened like it was wet even though the air was dry. Some of the trees had growths on them—bulbous, pulsing things that might have been fungus or might have been something worse.
"Stay close," Marcus whispered. His voice sounded muffled, like they were speaking through cloth. "Don't touch anything. Don't eat anything. Don't drink from any water you find. The gateway influence is strong here."
Kota nodded, his throat too tight to speak. He still clutched the torn fabric from Aisha's skirt, the blue and white checks now stained with his own sweat.
Marcus knelt, examining the ground. The forest floor was covered in a thick layer of something that wasn't quite moss and wasn't quite decay—a spongy, gray-green carpet that gave slightly under their feet. "There," he said, pointing. "See the depression? That's her footprint. Small. Running."
Kota saw it now—a slight indentation in the strange ground cover, the shape of a boot heel. His chest tightened. "She was running."
"From something or toward something, we don't know yet." Marcus stood, his eyes scanning the trees ahead. "Could be she heard something and panicked. Could be she was chasing after something she thought was safe. The forest plays tricks."
They moved forward, Marcus leading. He walked with careful deliberation, each step placed with thought, his head constantly moving as he scanned their surroundings. Kota tried to copy him, but his body wanted to run, to crash through the undergrowth screaming Aisha's name until she answered.
"Why is it so quiet?" Kota whispered.
"Because everything in here is either hiding or hunting," Marcus replied. "And the things that hunt don't make noise until they want you to hear them."
The path—if it could be called that—wound between the twisted trees. There was no clear trail, but Marcus seemed to find signs that Kota couldn't see: a broken branch here, a disturbed patch of ground cover there, a smear of something on a trunk that might have been mud or might have been blood.
They'd been walking for maybe twenty minutes when Marcus stopped abruptly, his hand shooting out to grab Kota's shoulder.
"What—"
"Quiet." Marcus's voice was barely a breath. His eyes were fixed on something ahead and to the left.
Kota followed his gaze and felt his stomach drop.
Four parallel gouges in a tree trunk, each as wide as his thumb, carved deep into the black bark. They started about seven feet up and dragged downward, leaving pale wood exposed beneath. Something had climbed down this tree. Something with claws.
"Tier 2," Marcus breathed. "Shit."
"What does that mean?"
Marcus pulled him behind a cluster of the spiral trees, his face grim. "The creatures that come through the gateways, we've learned to rank them. Tier 1 is the weakest—the crawlers, the small things that sometimes make it to the outskirts. Nuisances mostly, dangerous if you're careless but manageable. Tier 2..." He looked back at the claw marks. "Tier 2 is what the awakened hunt when they're still learning. They're predators. Fast, smart enough to set ambushes, strong enough to kill an unawakened human easily."
"You've seen them before?"
"Once. Three years ago, one got into the outskirts. Killed two people before an awakened patrol from the main city took it down." Marcus's jaw tightened. "It took three of them. Three awakened, working together."
Kota felt cold despite the humid air. "And we're not awakened."
"No. We're not." Marcus met his eyes. "Which means we need to be smarter than it. Quieter than it. And if we find Aisha, we need to get out before it finds us."
"What if it already found her?"
Marcus didn't answer. He didn't need to.
They continued, moving even more carefully now. The forest seemed to grow denser, the trees pressing closer together, the canopy thickening until only scattered beams of sunlight penetrated the gloom. Strange sounds echoed in the distance—clicks and whistles and low, resonant hums that might have been wind through hollow trees or might have been something else entirely.
Kota's shirt was soaked with sweat. His heart hammered against his ribs. Every shadow looked like a threat. Every movement in his peripheral vision made him flinch.
This is my fault, he thought. She's out here because of me. Because she wanted to find me something for my birthday. Because I turned fourteen and she wanted to make it special and now she's—
"Here," Marcus said, kneeling again.
More footprints. Aisha's boots, clearer now in a patch of actual dirt. But there was something else too—a larger print, three-toed, each toe ending in a curved claw mark. The print was fresh enough that water was still seeping into the depression.
"It's tracking her," Marcus said quietly. "See how the prints overlap? Hers first, then the creature's. It's following her trail."
"How long ago?"
Marcus touched the edge of the creature's print, feeling the moisture. "Minutes. Maybe less than an hour." He stood, his hand moving to the knife at his belt—a welding tool repurposed as a weapon, the blade worn but sharp. "We're close. To both of them."
They pressed on, and now Kota could see more signs of Aisha's passage. A broken branch at shoulder height, snapped recently. A handprint on a tree trunk, small and desperate. A place where she'd clearly stumbled, the ground cover torn up in a sliding pattern.
She was panicking. Running blind.
The forest opened into a small clearing, and Kota's breath caught.
The ground was torn up, churned like something had thrashed through it. More of Aisha's footprints, scattered and chaotic, circling the space like she'd been trying to find a way out. And everywhere, overlapping them, the three-toed prints of the creature.
"She was trapped here," Marcus said, his voice tight. "Circled. The creature was playing with her."
"Where did she go?" Kota's voice cracked. "Where is she?"
Marcus pointed to the far side of the clearing, where the undergrowth was crushed in a clear path. "That way. But Kota—" He grabbed the boy's arm as Kota started forward. "Look at the tracks. Really look."
Kota forced himself to focus. The creature's prints led away from the clearing in the same direction as Aisha's, but they were different now. Deeper. The spacing between them longer.
"It's carrying her," Marcus said. "See how the prints are heavier? How there's no sign of her footprints anymore? It caught her. And it's taking her somewhere."
The words hit Kota like a physical blow. "Then we have to—"
"We have to be smart," Marcus cut him off. "If it's carrying her, she's alive. Dead weight would leave drag marks. It wants her alive, which means we have time. Not much, but some."
"Time for what?"
"To figure out how to kill it."
They followed the trail deeper into the forest. The trees here were even more twisted, some of them growing in complete spirals, others branching and rebraiding like woven rope. The light was dimmer, filtered through layers of leaves that weren't quite the right color—too purple, too blue, shot through with veins of luminescence that pulsed slowly like a heartbeat.
Kota's legs ached. His lungs burned. But he kept moving, kept following Marcus through the nightmare landscape, because somewhere ahead was Aisha and he would not leave her.
They'd been tracking for what felt like hours but was probably only forty minutes when Marcus stopped again, this time crouching low and pulling Kota down with him.
"What—"
Marcus clamped a hand over Kota's mouth and pointed.
Ahead, through a gap in the trees, Kota could see movement.
At first, he thought it was just shadows shifting. Then his eyes adjusted, and he realized he was looking at something alive.
It was roughly the size of a large dog, but that was where any resemblance to anything natural ended. Its body was low and sinuous, covered in overlapping plates of something that looked like chitin but moved like muscle. Four legs, each ending in those three-toed claws he'd seen in the prints. Its head was elongated, almost serpentine, with no visible eyes but a mouth that split its face nearly in half, lined with rows of needle-thin teeth.
And on its back, bound with what looked like organic webbing, was Aisha.
She was unconscious, her head lolling, but Kota could see her chest rising and falling. Alive. She was alive.
The creature was moving slowly, deliberately, weaving between the trees with an unsettling grace. It would pause occasionally, its head swiveling as if listening, then continue on its path.
"It's taking her to its nest," Marcus breathed directly into Kota's ear. "They do that. Tier 2s. They store prey."
"We have to—"
"Not yet. Look around it. Look at the trees."
Kota forced his eyes away from Aisha and scanned the surrounding forest. At first, he didn't see anything. Then he noticed the marks on the trees—more of those claw gouges, dozens of them, scoring the trunks in regular patterns. Territory markers.
"We're in its hunting ground," Marcus whispered. "It knows every tree, every shadow, every sound. If we attack now, in its territory, we die. And then Aisha dies."
"So what do we do?"
"We follow. We wait for an opening. And we pray."
The creature moved on, and they followed, staying low, moving from cover to cover. Kota's entire body was shaking—from fear, from exhaustion, from the desperate need to run forward and tear Aisha away from that thing.
But Marcus was right. They had to be smart.
The forest grew darker as they went deeper. The trees here were massive, their trunks wider than Kota was tall, their roots breaking through the ground in twisted coils. The air smelled wrong—sweet and rotten at the same time, like fruit left too long in the sun.
The creature stopped.
Kota and Marcus froze, pressing themselves against a tree trunk. The creature's head swiveled, that eyeless face turning in their direction. Kota held his breath, certain it had heard them, certain this was the end.
Then it turned away and continued forward, disappearing around a massive root system.
"It's close," Marcus whispered. "The nest. It's taking her to the nest."
They crept forward, every muscle in Kota's body coiled tight. Around the root system. Through a narrow gap between two trees. Into—
Kota's breath stopped.
They'd found the nest.
It was a hollow in the base of one of the massive trees, the opening wide enough to drive a car through. Inside, Kota could see more of that organic webbing, strung between the walls in complex patterns. And caught in the webbing, like flies in a spider's trap, were shapes.
Bodies.
Some were old, just bones and scraps of clothing. Others were fresher. Kota saw a man in the tattered remains of a scavenger's gear. A woman with long hair matted with dried blood. And there, being added to the collection, was Aisha.
The creature was securing her to the webbing with quick, efficient movements of its clawed feet, wrapping her in more of the sticky strands. She stirred slightly, a soft moan escaping her lips, but didn't wake.
"There's more than one," Marcus breathed, his voice barely audible.
Kota's blood turned to ice. "What?"
"Look. In the back of the nest. See the movement?"
Kota looked and saw it—another shape, smaller than the first creature but with the same sinuous movement, the same chitinous plating. It was feeding on something in the shadows, its head buried in what might have once been human.
"Two of them," Marcus said. "Maybe more. Kota, we can't—"
A sound cut him off. A low, resonant clicking that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The creature that had brought Aisha turned its eyeless face toward their hiding spot.
It had heard them.
For a moment, everything was still. Kota could hear his own heartbeat, could feel Marcus's hand gripping his shoulder, could see Aisha suspended in the webbing, still unconscious, still alive.
Then the creature's mouth split open, revealing all those needle teeth, and it screamed.
The sound was like nothing Kota had ever heard—part shriek, part roar, part something that made his bones vibrate and his vision blur. It was a hunting cry. A challenge. A promise.
The second creature's head snapped up from its meal, gore dripping from its jaws.
Both creatures turned toward them.
Marcus pulled Kota backward, his voice urgent and low: "Run."