24
KAVOR
The thing beneath the pool opens its eye.
White-gray light is held inside a shape that has no name in my people’s teachings. Angular ribs fold away beneath the water, revealing a hollow center where blue pours inward.
Epis light. Sera’s blood-light. The sample’s frantic pulse. The unfinished bond between us. All answer. All are seen.
Sera turns in my arms, one hand still braced against my chest, her bandaged arm held tight against her ribs. Blue light glows through the blood-soaked cloth and spills into the sample pouch like a thread pulled between wounds.
The pool shudders. Far beneath the water, something moves again. Long. Vast. Not zemlja.
The zemlja has weight. Pressure. Hunger. A body that belongs to Tajss, even when it kills. This is different. This motion has no breath in it. No instinct. No life I understand.
Sera whispers, “Kavor.”
I hear what she does not ask. Yes, I see it. No, I do not know what it is. Yes, it has noticed us. No, we should not remain here when it finishes waking.
The wrong rhythm returns through the channels. Once. Pause. Again.
The eye beneath the pool pulses faster. It is not only calling zemlja now. Calling the reservoir. Calling the source. Calling whatever the glow found in us.
The sample at my chest flares so brightly the cloth cannot hide it. Sera flinches, and I feel the answer in her body before I understand the movement. Pain. Cold-bright and sharp, cutting through her wounded arm.
I shift my hand from her waist to her shoulder, steadying. Not holding. Not trapping.
She grabs my wrist anyway. Choice. A fierce little claw in the dark.
“What is that?” she asks.
Her voice is thin but steady. I look at the eye under the pool, at the blue light pouring into it, at the blackened channels around the reservoir starting to wake one by one.
“A heart,” I say.
The word tastes wrong.
“Machine heart?”
“Network heart.”
Her fingers tighten around my wrist. “Of the reservoir?”
“Perhaps.”
“Useful perhaps, or panic perhaps?”
“Old perhaps.”
She swears under her breath.
The cavern shivers again. High above, strands of epis turn toward the pool in slow waves, all blue-purple light bending to the white-gray eye. Where the pull is strongest, tips blacken. The drain we slowed begins to re-form through other channels, smaller now but multiplying.
We broke one tooth. The mouth has many.
“We need to leave,” I say.
Sera does not argue. That frightens me more than refusal.
