I can smell the fungus growing in them now—thick, metallic, sweet. Like rot and nectar. It rides on their breath. Seeps from their pores. It’severywhere.
It isn’t just in their water.
Itisthem now.
I grab a sharp stone from the fire pit and walk outside. Find a clean surface on the boulder near the entrance to the ridge. Smooth and wide enough to hold a mark.
I press the edge of the stone into it and carve the symbol slow.
Deep.
Precise.
An old Odex rune. Rare. Sacred. It means: “Song that kills.”
No one here will understand it.
Not Ciampa. Not Darwin. Not the humans stripped of their own will.
But maybe she will.
Maybe Jill will see it.
Maybe she’ll remember what I told her under the stars, when we lay tangled and she called me hers.
And maybe she’ll get out.
CHAPTER 27
JILLIAN
Itest the water again at dawn.
There’s no pretense anymore. I don’t even try to fake a task log or cover the vials under a biohazard tag. No one’s watching in the way thatmatters—not with curiosity or caution. They watch with a kind of quiet consensus. Like I’m already the outsider.
Like they’ve all agreed and I just wasn’t at the meeting.
I unseal the newest tank, the one marked with a fresh filtration date from yesterday. The label looks clean, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore. The sample goes under the scope, and I start the molecular scan with fingers colder than they should be.
The screen flickers. Then stabilizes.
And my blood runs cold.
It’s not the same water.
The mineral balance is off. Barely—but it’s off. Sodium shifted. Trace metals nearly gone. There’s somethingadded—a protein structure I don’t recognize, pulsing faintly at the edge of visibility. Organic.Living.
The base signature is fungal.
But that’s not what scares me.
What scares me is what’smissing.
I reach into my boot and pull the hidden vial from where I taped it three nights ago. Purgonis wild water. Unfiltered. Untouched. I saved it not for hydration, but for sanity. Just in case I needed to remind myself whatreallooked like.
I run the comparison.
And there it is.
