The North-Western quadrant of the Blackthorn wastelands was called, on Zero's maps, Sector Nine. The soldiers called it something considerably shorter and considerably less printable, which Jack took as a reliable sign that Zero's briefing had done its job.
The screaming trees were not, technically, trees.
They were the calcified remnants of a forest that had stood here before the mana-sour event that had turned this entire region into the grey-green desolation it was now. Whatever process had preserved them had also, in some deep structural way, changed them—the crystalline formations growing through their trunks acted as resonance chambers, and when the wind moved through their hollow branches at any speed above a gentle breeze, the sound they produced was a sustained, human-pitched wail that started at the edge of discomfort and climbed steadily toward something closer to weaponised grief.
