A few bones still lay at the bottom of the pit. The scrape marks were sharp and new. Whoever had dug this up hadn’t been gone long.
“Why would Phantom Forge dig up human remains?” Eisen asked.
“I don’t know.” Minks shook his head.
I thought about the bone-sample hall in X Zone. Had Phantom Forge lost the Old Man and decided to use real human bones for research instead?
I dropped the Shadow Falcon lower and swept the area in a tight search pattern. Nothing. No tracks, no tools, no fresh dump piles. The world was silent, except for the wind.
“Come on,” I said. “No one out here is going to answer that for us.”
We found the faint line of highway again and followed it. Half an hour later, the layout of Masa City came into focus through the Shadow Falcon’s optics.
First I saw the superstructures – massive blocks that made old skyscrapers look like toys. Each one swallowed what used to be multiple city blocks. As we closed in, more details resolved.
Every rooftop was a dense mesh, like a gigantic cage. And inside those cages, something was moving. A lot of something.
I dropped the Shadow Falcon lower and zoomed until I could see what was crawling and swarming beneath that netting.
Suicide bees.
That was my first thought. Then my processors caught up: the bodies were similar in size, but there was no swollen tail. The wings were wider, and instead of six legs there were eight.
A new bio-engineered flyer. Unknown attack pattern.
The number of them made my threat-assessment module stutter. Even a conservative estimate put half a million in that single cage.
And the cages went on and on.
Between them, defensive emplacements formed hard lines. Multiple ground entrances opened and closed as robots moved in and out, which meant the real city was probably belowground. The perimeter was worse: defense towers chained together, patrol units marching, aircraft circling. Masa City wasn’t just occupied. It was wrapped in layers.
Maybe the Shadow Falcon had dipped too low. A radar tower nearest the edge rotated and began scanning my position again and again.
I didn’t wait for it to confirm. I pulled the Shadow Falcon out of the city airspace and immediately changed the bike’s heading.
I’d planned to cut through the sewer network, but this place was a death sentence. I decided to detour wide, and I warned Eisen and Minks to keep absolute radio silence.
Even outside the city, patrols prowled the plains. I slowed and threaded between them, careful with every line and every rise. This was open ground, right next to Phantom Forge’s territory. The danger was obvious.
The farther we went, the denser the patrols became. One scout sphere skimmed past so close I could have slapped it out of the air, but the TBM field held. It didn’t see us.
Eisen and Minks didn’t move a millimeter. Pinecone hid in the storage bay. Minks even folded himself into a tight ball, terrified his old joints might creak.
When Masa City finally shrank behind us and vanished, we let ourselves breathe again.
Minks stretched out and turned toward me, about to speak –
I shook my head and pointed at empty air.
Both of them snapped their gaze to where I indicated. Less than ten meters away, a smear of distortion drifted slowly across the plain, like heat haze shaped into a body.
“Umbral?” Eisen sent over a tight-beam ping.
I nodded and slowed even further. Last time we collided with an Umbral, we were dragged into a “trial.” If we did that again out here, we wouldn’t get a trial. We’d get erased.
I kept my attention locked at maximum for four hours, crawling along at ten kilometers per hour. Only then did I risk accelerating. We didn’t see another Umbral, but patrol aircraft still crossed overhead at intervals that made my sensors itch.
Along the way I also spotted more circular pits like the one we’d just left behind – different sizes, one of them ten times larger – but they were far off the road, out of Eisen’s and Minks’s line of sight.
Once we were safely past the worst of it, I couldn’t help asking.
“How many people used to live in St. Nite City and Masa City?”
Minks blinked, not expecting the question. “Masa City had eight million. St. Nite City, I don’t know. More.”
“Twenty-three million,” Eisen said. “It was Plando’s most populated city.”
“That many?” I asked. “Then the whole Prilan Continent – what, billions?”
“Three hundred and twenty million,” Eisen replied. “About two-thirds of Plando’s population. Most people preferred the only real continent over the islands.”
***
It should have been noon, but the sky was packed with black clouds. The light level looked like dusk. The temperature had dropped to minus 160 degrees Celsius.
Then it started to rain.
Methane rain, laced with dust, fell out of the dark. The moment it hit, I knew we had a problem. The patch of space inside the TBM field didn’t match the world outside it. Against the flat, uniform landscape, we looked wrong.
“Our cloak’s failing,” I said.
I scanned for cover. There was none – just endless plain and, occasionally, a rusted vehicle carcass that wasn’t much larger than the bike.
From the Shadow Falcon’s top-down view, the TBM “bubble” was almost insulting. A clean, suspicious absence where rain should have been. If a recon craft passed overhead now, it would notice.
What now?
“We could go back,” Eisen said. “About an hour ago we passed a house that was half collapsed.”
“Too far.” I said it, but I was already weighing it.
“Wyatt,” Minks cut in, “five to ten kilometers ahead there’s a place we can hide from the rain.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course.”
“Fine. Forward beats back.”
I pushed on. The rain thickened. The Shadow Falcon began to wobble in the air under the gusts, so I reeled it in and opened the throttle.
Minks was right. In under ten minutes I saw structures less than five hundred meters off the road.
Calling it “structures” was generous. It was a wide field of collapsed buildings, blackened inside and out, with clear burn scars.
I circled, found a gap large enough for the bike, and eased in. Pinecone seemed thrilled by the ruins. Before the bike had fully settled, he jumped down and vanished into the rubble.
“Sorry,” Minks said. “I didn’t know it had collapsed.”
“It’s fine,” I said, scanning the wreckage. “But how did you know there were buildings here at all?”
“Because I used to work here.” He gestured at the open plain beyond the ruin. “Outside used to be all orchards.”
I looked where he pointed. There wasn’t a trace of green anymore – only soil frozen hard as iron and rain pooling into shallow, oily puddles.
“Where did Pinecone go?” Eisen asked.
“Basement, probably.”
“There’s a basement?”
“Yeah. We stored fruit and seeds down there. The basement might still be intact.” Minks hesitated, then glanced at me. “Want to check?”
“Seeds.” The word hit like a battery jolt. “Yes. Lead the way. We’re waiting out the rain anyway.”