“Don’t do it,” I mutter at the unit as another spike jumps across the screen. “We just talked about this. No more drama.”
The needle flicks again—hard—then settles like it’s pretending nothing happened.
I stand in the middle of the half-graded lot, wind whipping hair into my lip gloss, and take a slow breath.
The air smells like diesel, wet mud, and that weird chemical sweetness new asphalt always has. The ground beneath my steel-toe boots is a patchwork of compacted fill, exposed clay, and one very, very cranky fault line.
“Last reading before I go home, shower, and pretend this day didn’t happen,” I tell myself.
I glance back at my Jeep parked along the gravel access road—mud-spattered, dented, absolutely perfect—and then return my attention to the long, jagged crack running diagonally across the site.
They’ve already had two pieces of equipment partially sink in the last week. A skid steer listing at a thirty-degree angle like a drunk sailor, a drill rig that somehow tipped despite being on “stable” ground.
That’s why I’m here.
Environmental geology, foundation assessments, sinkhole risk surveys.
Translation: when the earth starts eating expensive toys, they call me.
I crouch at the edge of the fissure and run my gloved hand along the broken asphalt and fill. The crack isn’t just surface-level.
It’s deep.
I can feel the emptiness beneath, a hollow place that doesn’t match the boring logs, doesn’t match the bedrock maps, doesn’t match anything.
“Talk to me, sweetheart,” I murmur, staring into the dark cut in the earth. “What are you hiding?”
A faint tremor shivers up through my palm.
My instruments don’t lie—usually.
And I’ve been getting small, weird spikes here for days.
Micro-tremors with no traffic correlations, no blasting schedules, no nearby rail.
Sometimes the readings jump when I’m standing still.
Sometimes they jump when I’m dreaming.
I close my eyes just for a second.
Black feathers.
Obsidian wings blocking out a sky I’ve never seen.
Hands—huge, callused, inhumanly strong—catching me as the world cracks open.
And eyes.
Green-gold, inhuman, molten with something that should terrify me but doesn’t.
I snap my eyes open, shoving the images away.
I haven’t been sleeping. Not well, anyway.
The nightmares have been getting worse.
Shadows, storms, a voice like thunder saying my name. Alina.
