Chapter 7 #2
By the second afternoon, I’ve learned to read its moods.
A steady blue means the world is survivable.
When it flickers, I pause, survey the ground ahead, and nine times out of ten I find a cache of something better left untouched: irradiated waste, chemical puddle, the remains of a creature that never learned the rules. If the glow shifts purple, I turn back.
Twice, the pendant flared a warning and saved me from stepping into a miasma that would have turned my lungs to gruel in seconds.
The memory of the Ghoul sticks with me. Every shadowed gap is a waiting mouth.
I keep to high ground where I can, moving in zig-zags to make myself harder to track.
Once, I see a human shape a hundred meters off—a silhouette standing on the crest of an embankment, unmoving.
I duck behind an overturned water tank, heart racing, but when I risk another look the figure is gone, replaced by a flock of scavenger birds rising in a black, oily cloud.
Time loses shape out here. I walk until the world tilts and my knees give out.
I wake, crawl, and walk again. Food is gone by the third day.
Water, less. I ration, but the act of living in this place costs more calories than I can recover.
Hunger sharpens my senses to wire, but also makes the mind elastic.
I talk to myself, to the pendant, to the hollow in my own chest where Jackson used to be.
His voice, on loop: Trust the pendant. Don’t be a hero. Survive.
I am on the fifth sunrise when I see it: a patch of green in a desert of tan and gray, a flare of color so intense it shocks my eyes.
It’s a field, maybe a hundred meters wide, ringed by the remains of concrete barricades.
The grass is almost cartoonish, blades thick and upright, wet with dew that glimmers in the morning light.
I approach with suspicion, running the pendant in diagnostic every ten steps.
It’s blue, unwavering. The grass is not just alive, but thriving, and the air above it shimmers in a way that suggests either chemical volatility or an optical illusion.
I crouch at the edge, study the pattern.
The green isn’t uniform, there are splotches of darker, almost black, and in the middle, a lopsided tree with a trunk the color of fresh blood.
The tree is not a tree, on closer inspection.
It’s a pillar of intertwined roots, the wood braided in a double helix, each spiral lined with small, twitching leaves.
The leaves turn to follow my approach, as if tracking the blue of the pendant.
I reach out, but the air is colder near the pillar. I pull back, shiver, and circle wide.
On the far side, the grass thins to mud.
There’s a pit here, shallow but wide, and at its center a spatter of broken, mirror-bright fragments.
I use a shard to check my reflection. The face that looks back is not the one I remember, My skin, once vibrant and warm, now appears pale and sallow, a stark contrast to the dark, tangled mess of my unkempt hair.
but I have to admit the eyes are familiar—intent, focused, ringed with the kind of purple only dehydration and trauma can deliver.
I pocket a shard. It might be useful, or at least sharp enough to serve as a knife. I kneel, take a sample of the grass, and slip it into a tube. It curls and blackens almost immediately, the chlorophyll leaching into a blue-black syrup. I jot the color in my head, log the reaction, and move on.
The next kilometer is a wasteland again, but I sense something different in the rhythm.
The ground vibrates at odd intervals, like footsteps too heavy to be human, or distant artillery.
I stop, dig my fingers into the soil, and feel the tremor.
It’s not seismic; it’s more localized, a ripple through the upper meter of earth.
I scan for movement but see nothing—no animal, no machine, just the empty corridor between ruined factories.
I follow the vibration to its source: a crack in the pavement, too regular to be natural.
At first, I think it’s a vent, but then I see the glassiness on the interior walls—melted, re-solidified, as if the ground itself had burped and reset.
The pulse is strongest here, and the pendant glows hot in response.
I don’t want to risk it, but curiosity is a louder motivator than fear.
I lower myself into the crack, moving slow, testing each foothold.
The shaft is narrow but opens out after five meters.
At the bottom is a void filled with a soft, blue light.
I listen, but the only sound is the slow, wet drip of condensation from the fractured stone.
The air down here is rich, oxygenated, and smells faintly of alcohol.
I breathe deep, and the fatigue ebbs. The light comes from a series of objects half-buried in the mud: orbs, each the size of a grapefruit, emitting a low, throbbing luminescence.
They’re spaced with intent, forming a spiral that disappears beneath a slab of broken concrete.
I pick my way to the nearest orb and kneel.
The surface is glass, but softer. My fingers sink half a millimeter before the tension pushes back.
The glow is brighter at the core, shifting shades of blue, sometimes green, sometimes a pearlescent white.
I hold the pendant near it, and for the first time, the two lights sync up, pulsing together, the same beat.
I whisper to the orb, the way I used to whisper to samples in the lab—no words, just a vibration of the chest, an offering of my presence.
The orb brightens, enough to light the shaft, and in the new illumination I see dozens more, trailing out of sight.
I can’t take all of them, but I want to.
I choose the brightest, wedge it from the earth, and cradle it to my chest. It’s warm, like a living thing. The pendant cools, as if sated.
I climb out, orb tucked into my suit, and collapse on the surface. The world is brighter now, the haze thinner, the horizon more visible. I rest, watch the light play over the orb, and wonder if I’m the first to find it, or just the first to survive the attempt.
The wind shifts. On it, the sound of distant howling—animal, maybe, or the city’s dead, or a wind turbine spinning itself to shrapnel. I eat a fistful of grass, it tastes like matchsticks and rain, drink the last of my water, and push forward.
As the sun arcs toward evening, the air changes again.
The Shifting, I realize, as the world goes soft-edged.
The light bends, stretches, and in the distance, the outlines of buildings waver, reform, merge.
The landscape changes in real time, roads appearing and vanishing, trees growing and dying in seconds.
I pause, try to log the data, but it’s too fast, too much.
I sit on a curb and ride out the change. When it settles, the world has reset itself: new roads, new hazards, new possibilities. My path to the next city is now a jagged line, but the pendant stays steady. I follow it, step by step, the orb as my new compass.
At dusk, I find shelter: the hollow of a bridge, its interior blackened but structurally sound. I crawl inside, curl up, and hold the orb to my chest. The light pushes back the dark, throws patterns on the wall, enough to fool me into thinking I’m not alone.
I fall asleep to the sound of the wind, the memory of Jackson’s laugh, and the slow, unhurried pulse of the blue light.
When I wake, I have a new destination.