Rain hissed across Mereque’s helmet like static from a dead channel.

  He’d hoped the downpour would scrub the madness off the world. It didn’t.

  An hour later the drizzle quit and the colors stayed drunk: greens bleeding into bruise-purple, a boulder soft as wet clay under his gauntlet, bushes that scraped like sharkskin.

  Even the raindrops had looked wrong; too round, sliding off his amour like mercury on glass.

  He snorted. “Of course, the weather’s broken too.”

  He stopped walking. Listened. Nothing.

  Not the rain. Not wind. Not even his own footsteps until he deliberately stomped.

  The sound arrived half a heartbeat late, like the world was buffering reality.

  He dragged a gauntlet across bark. The scrape echoed back wrong (distant, underwater).

  Mereque’s skin crawled. Even the silence here was drunk.

  He whispered “Hello?” just to hear something human.

  The word came back smaller, swallowed by the bleeding trees.

  He hated how it sounded—lonely, afraid.

  He cleared his throat, opened his visor, spat, closed it, and started walking again. Silence followed like a hungry dog.

  No birds. No insects. Just silence thick enough to choke on.

  He kept walking north because standing still felt like volunteering to be lunch.

  Then the ground forgot how to be ground.

  Twenty meters off, a perfect white scar sliced through the chaos; no source, no shadow, just absence wearing the shape of a road.

  His HUD spat red it had never thrown before: PHYSICS VIOLATION. MASS NEGATIVE.

  Mereque’s hand was halfway to the Pelter before his brain caught up.

  The white scar didn’t just sit there.

  It breathed.

  Every time he blinked, the edges widened a finger-width, then snapped back.

  His HUD flashed nonsense: OBSERVED ANOMALY OBSERVING OBSERVER.

  Mereque took one step closer. The scar widened again, hungry.

  He took one step back. It narrowed, disappointed.

  He swallowed.

  “Not today, thanks.”

  He angled wide, boots sinking into colors that squelched like wet paint.

  Behind him the scar stayed open just long enough to watch him leave.

  Nothing to shoot.

  “Invisible lawnmower,” he muttered. “Add it to the list.”

  He flexed his fingers, watched the exomesh ripple like living steel cable, and forced himself to keep moving.

  Half a magazine. One smoke canister. Three ration bars that tasted like regret. No backup. No comms. No map. Just him, a sidearm, and spite.

  Mereque laughed, it was short and ugly.

  Galaxy’s most expensive soldier, reduced to caveman with a gun.

  He pictured Grace’s red curls, her impossible laugh. Wondered if she was okay. Hated himself for caring when everything wanted him dead. He rolled his aching shoulder, felt the burn settle into something useful.

  Keep moving or die. Simple math.

  He flexed his fingers around the Pelter grip, tasted copper and rain, and walked north into the drunk world.

  Prudence had kept him alive this long. He wasn’t wasting a single radioactive slug on ghosts.

  He had no idea what carved white scars into reality. Grace’s Fairylands had been wonder. This was wrong.

  His internal compass still pointed north (thank you, bio-firmware), so he walked. One boot in front of the other, because stopping felt like dying.

  A kilometer later he crested a ridge and froze.

  Twelve figures stood on the hill, motionless, staring straight at him.

  Pale didn’t cover it. They glowed like fresh bone under the noon sun, robes or armor impossible to tell. Long spears or tools rested in white hands.

  He raised a cautious hand.

  One mirrored the gesture—with half an arm missing.

  His ocular zoom revealed it in full.

  No blood. No stump. Just a clean, perfect hole where flesh should be.

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  Mereque’s stomach dropped through his boots.

  They weren’t wounded. They were unfinished.

  He lowered his hand. It copied him.

  Mereque’s reflection should have been in the thing’s single eye. It wasn’t.

  Instead he saw himself standing somewhere else (same armor, same blood on the cheek-plate), but the background was wrong: white sky, white ground, white everything. And his reflection was smiling.

  He jerked his gaze away.

  The thing tilted its head exactly the way he had a heartbeat earlier.

  Copying. Learning?

  He felt the silence press closer, thick as wet wool.

  Another step forward from the nearest creature and Mereque’s skin tried to crawl off his bones.

  They weren’t just unfinished. They were hungry to finish themselves with whatever pieces they could steal.

  The nearest stepped forward, mouth half-gone, one pitted eye flickering black-to-white like bad reception.

  Grace’s warning echoed in his skull: If you see a pure white banner with one bloody tear—run.

  He scanned frantically for the banner Grace had described. Nothing white fluttered. Yet every one of them carried the tear anyway on the torn and tattered garment that clung to their unnatural forms.

  The tear was on them. His stomach turned to ice. Grace had warned him about the banner and the mark. And every single one of these things was wearing it.

  Not a banner held high. But close enough.

  He swallowed the urge to unload the Pelter into anything that moved and forced his voice through the translator.

  “Traveler,” he said, slow and clear. “No harm. Just passing through.”

  The nearest thing opened its ruined half-mouth and wailed.

  The sound was grief dragged across broken glass.

  The wail wasn’t noise. It was memory.

  Antoinette’s last breath in the pod. The captain screaming over dead comms. Every escape pod that never answered.

  Twelve voices joined in; a chorus of broken glass dragged across bone.

  All of it poured into his skull at once, sharp as shrapnel.

  His vision greyed at the edges.

  He staggered, knees buckling under grief that wasn’t his.

  The chorus rose, dragging more ghosts up from the dark.

  He bit his tongue until he tasted blood just to stay inside his own head.

  The Pelter was in his hand before he remembered drawing it.

  The first monster charged, spear raised, barbed tip hungry for his chest.

  Three shots. Two punched clean through its torso—black sand poured out like it had never been solid. The third took the head. It dropped.

  Five more came screaming.

  He worked the trigger like the old days: one round, one skull. Five bodies hit the ground, leaking tar that hissed and vanished before it touched grass.

  Every shot was a name.

  Ruger. Antoinette. Captain Hyderbrach. Three more he couldn’t remember because the faces were gone.

  Black sand sprayed. Bodies dropped. The air filled with the smell of burnt sugar and old graves.

  He moved like a man who’d done this in nightmares long before he ever did it awake.

  When the last six broke and ran, he didn’t chase. He just stood in the drifting smoke, chest heaving, listening to the echo of twelve gunshots and twelve names he’d never speak again.

  The Pelter clicked empty.

  He reloaded on reflex, then crouched beside the nearest corpse.

  Black grains still leaked from the holes, dissolving with a stench like burnt sugar and old graves. The rags they wore were the same white as their skin—impossible to tell where cloth ended and flesh began.

  In a shredded pocket he found silver coins stamped with a fat, weeping face.

  The fat, weeping face on the coin looked inhuman. Monstrous.

  The eyes were pin holes, the toothless mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. A single tear hung frozen halfway down the cheek, carved so deep it looked wet.

  Mereque turned it over.

  Same face on the back, only now the tear had fallen and the mouth was twisted. It reminded him of suffering and sorrow.

  He turned one over between his fingers.

  “Payment for the ferryman?” he asked the corpse.

  The corpse didn’t answer.

  The six survivors were fleeing north—the exact direction he needed.

  Mereque stood, wiped the coin on his thigh plate before pocketing it, and followed.

  Because answers were north. And apparently so was whatever passed for the next hell on this planet.

  He checked the compass in his head (steady, unforgiving).

  Then he looked at the six white shapes disappearing over the ridge, still howling like lost souls.

  He could let them go. Should let them go.

  Instead he started walking.

  Because north was where he needed to go, with or without monsters in his way.

  And because the coin in his pocket felt heavier with every step.

  He didn’t know if he was hunting them or if they were leading him.

  Didn’t matter. He’d followed worse things for worse reasons.

  Their howls were a broken siren he could follow blind.

  He let them pull three kilometers ahead, then five. His chip painted them in ghost-green, audio pings and thermal ghosts. No chance of losing them.

  He ghosted over the terrain like a bad memory (twenty-five meters a second when he opened up, lungs barely working). Higher gravity on Leopold had been hell. Right now it felt like a gift.

  He ran. Twenty-five meters a second, boots barely kissing the ground. Leopold’s gravity had carved him into a weapon; this planet just handed him the trigger.

  But speed had a price.

  Every leap sent fire through his stitched arm. Every landing jarred ribs that were definitely bruised (if not broken).

  His HUD flashed warnings in polite red: INTERNAL BLEEDING POSSIBLE. IGNORE?

  He ignored.

  The howls ahead were a compass made of grief. He followed because stopping meant thinking. Thinking meant remembering five hundred pods burning across a night sky. Thinking meant admitting he was chasing ghosts to keep from becoming one.

  So he ran.

  And the planet ran with him, colors bleeding, ground shifting, reality drunk and laughing.

  Twenty kilometers later the howls dropped to murmurs. The six had rejoined something bigger.

  Mereque bellied down behind a ridge and peered through a break in the trees.

  Four wagons the size of houses rolled into view, iron cages bolted atop them. Inside: everything the planet had decided shouldn’t exist in the same zip code. Elephant sized wolves pressed against neon peacocks. A thing with too many joints and not enough eyes blinked at him through the bars.

  The creature in the nearest cage didn’t blink. It had no eyelids. Seven joints where elbows should be, three where knees belonged. Skin like wet parchment stretched over something that had never been born.

  It pressed a face (if you could call it that) against the bars and stared.

  Mereque stared back.

  For one heartbeat he saw himself in those lidless eyes: cracked armor, blood on the cheek-plate, a man who’d outlived his own story.

  The thing opened a mouth with no tongue and exhaled frost.

  His breath caught in his chest.

  He stepped back to conceal himself better.

  The creature followed, joints bending wrong, until the bars stopped it.

  It kept watching.

  Dozens more of the white things moved between the wagons (chains, spears, mouths open in silent song that made his teeth ache).

  A voice rose above the rest, calm and commanding.

  “A foreigner? Good tidings. We’ll bring a bounty for the new sacrament.”

  Mereque’s blood went cold.

  He felt like he was looking at a death-cult road trip. And they’d just put his name on their guest list.

  He tasted something metallic again. It was bitter.

  Not from the stitches this time.

  He knew that taste: the moment before everything went sideways. The moment the universe decided today was the day it tried to kill you again.

  He’d tasted it in the Cazues when the hull cracked. Tasted it when he gazed into Antoinette’s lifeless eyes. Tasted it every time he woke up still breathing on this planet.

  Now it was back, thick on his tongue, telling him the guest list wasn’t a metaphor.

  He smiled the thin, ugly smile of a man who’d just realized the party had started without him.

  Good.

  This wasn’t the kind of party he wanted to be on-time for.

  He crouched lower, fingers tightening on the Pelter grip.

  Answers might be in those cages. So was someone who might still be breathing.

  He checked the magazine: a full clip.

  Enough.

  He started moving.