I. PRODROMAL

  The Ferryman

  Koi, an enforcer of fading status, had been bothered by a disheveled man since the train left the Concentrate. The man claimed his conditioning had gone wrong. He whispered that the train was doomed, that Reprocessing wasn’t relocation—it was erasure.

  “But I will be spared!” the man exuded gleefully, grinning wide. “I have been chosen!”

  Koi wasn’t sure the man was wrong. No one on the train knew their exact destination. He had assumed he would simply be reassigned to a different Concentrate, unless the Continuum had deemed his deviations more severe than he dared imagine. The train had trailed past all population centers, and now rolled along the outskirts. According to the Continuum, the zones beyond were dead lands—wastes scorched by the natural catastrophes that ended the old world. But Koi saw trees. Fauna. Life. And judging by the bewildered faces around him, he wasn’t the only one seeing this for the first time. He recognized the shapes only from contraband art traded discreetly among low-level enforcers. Even conditioned minds seemed to harbor a quiet fascination with old world relics.

  A sudden bang cracked through the train like thunder. The floor shuddered violently. A second jolt sent passengers flying like rag dolls. Koi was thrown down the corridor. His ears rang as smoke thickened the air. Disoriented, he scrambled toward the light at one end of the cart. Other survivors followed—those lucky enough to have been seated near the middle. The disheveled man was not among them. He lay still among the mangled bodies in the rear of the cart. Some passengers tapped the fallen as they passed, searching for signs of life. There were none.

  Outside, they were met at gunpoint. The weapons were old-world steel, mismatched and brutal. The figures holding them wore scraps of armor over dusty clothing. Their faces were smeared with ash and paint, and their language was harsh—like a corrupted dialect of Continuum Common. They shouted among themselves, arguing in sharp bursts, as if uncertain what to do with the passengers. Koi glanced down the track. The train had slipped free of the rail but remained upright. Its automated systems would eventually reorient it.

  Further down, more armed figures were looting the rear carts. Then, they entered the cart had been on. Boots thudded against twisted metal and broken tile. The rebels moved methodically, passing over the moaning and the dead with equal detachment, pausing only to peer into faces—searching for something. When they reached the disheveled man, they stopped.

  One of them pointed. Another let out a sharp curse and slammed the butt of his rifle into the side of a mangled seat, sending a reverberating crack through the cart. “He’s dead,” one growled in an odd dialect that barely resembled Continuum Common, voice rough like gravel.

  “They’ll sweep the region now,” said another, checking the shattered windows beyond.

  “Should we help the passengers?” someone asked quietly, almost reluctantly.

  “Let the Continuum help them,” came the cold reply.

  No more was said. The group retreated from the cart, slipping back into the dusk like ghosts. But before they vanished completely, one of them turned back. A woman—tall, streaked with ash, eyes sharp like obsidian.

  To the stunned passengers, she called out:

  “You will not be harmed. Stay where you are. Sweepers will find you. Do not follow.”

  And then they were gone.

  Most passengers stayed frozen in place—shocked, bruised, and afraid to do anything more. But Koi... Koi moved.

  He turned around and walked away from the train, and following them. He simply moved, step by deliberate step, out across the ruined track, toward the silhouettes in retreat. They turned to see him coming. Guns raised. He raised both hands, slow and open. “Take me with you,” he said. They didn’t lower their weapons. “I can read symbols. I can translate.” He spoke slowly, enunciating carefully, as if trying to break through layers of dialect and distrust. “I can help you.”

  One of the rebels stepped closer, blade at his side, mouth twisted with suspicion. “You’re an enforcer.”

  “Not anymore,” Koi replied. “The conditioning—it didn’t take. That’s why they sent me away. I was a deviation.” He gestured back toward the wreck. “That train wasn’t relocation. It was disposal. They meant to erase us.”

  The rebels exchanged glances. No one spoke for a long moment.

  “I want to fight them,” Koi said. “And I think you need people like me.”

  Silence stretched like wire. Then someone—a younger voice from the back—murmured, “Let the Elder see him.”

  The tall woman nodded once. The guns lowered. Koi exhaled, just barely. He stepped into the forest with them.

  They moved quickly. Koi followed in their wake, ducking beneath low branches, pushing through thickets of dense underbrush. The canopy above was thick and tangled, filtering the dying light into a dusky green. Shafts of it scattered through the leaves like columns in a forgotten temple. For a long time, there was only the sound of boots against soil, the creak of leather, the distant chime of unseen birds. Koi kept his eyes moving. The trees twisted upward like living sculptures—knotted and knuckled, draped in strands of moss, their branches arched like reaching arms. Vines coiled thick around trunks, ferns pushed through broken earth. Everything here grew with unruly purpose, beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  It was nothing like the structures of the Concentrate. There, the canopy was cables and support beams, cranes and channelers, all rising upward in the vertical logic of the Continuum. The arcologies of composite towered like monuments, wrapped in gleaming mesh and skin. The artificial greenery of the streets had been calculated—rows of plastiferns lining walkways, bloom-imitations shaped by machine learning to appeal to emotional optimization curves. The Continuum spoke often of nature. It revered the “optimal side” of it—the shapes and systems that supported symmetry, that promised efficiency. In his enforcer training, Koi had studied fractals and leaf structures, the water-holding patterns of cactus spines, the spiral geometry of shells. But it had been data. Abstract.

  Now he understood that whatever the Concentrate was, it had no part of nature in it. The word had always seemed hollow to him. But here, amid these breathing trees, the word nature finally had some meaning. He was at awe.

  He caught his breath as the path opened up slightly, revealing a stretch of soft earth covered in fallen leaves. The rebels moved through it like shadows. Koi glanced upward again, at the way the canopy leaned into itself, filtering light through infinite green. He felt a warmth of significance rising in him. He always knew that it was good to be a part of something. Now he realized all he wanted was to be a part of something good.

  Incident 77-ΔΞ – Transit Disruption / Outskirt Corridor 43-B

  Class: Internal – Subnetwork Enforcer Grade

  Priority Tag: Mid-Level Escalation

  Node Origin: Concentrate P7 – Corridor Rail 43-B

  ENFORCER-OP ID 3092-F ("Tensile"): “Transit deviation likely caused by terrestrial seismic instability. No fatalities reported. Damage appears non-critical. Train will re-rail autonomously within ±0.9 deviation units. Request no custodial escalation.”

  CUSTODIAN-TIER RECEIPT (SUPERVISOR STRAND 8):

  “Seismic instability not charted for region 43-B. Correction: Corridor 43-B was cleared of tectonic activity during Continuum Year 6012. Explain inconsistency. Upload full sensor diagnostics and internal passenger reports. Immediate.”

  Tensile: “Diagnostic data lost in initial impact. Smoke interference. Limited visibility. Local fauna may have disrupted sub-rail inertia gyroscope.”

  SECONDARY ENFORCER-OP ("Morn K.") Interjects [Unauthorized Thread Access]: “Possible resistance interference, minor. No direct sign of organized cell. Likely detonation error. Crude.”

  SS8 (AGITATED): “If this was resistance interference, why was no alert protocol initiated? Why is the public signal scrubbed? Custodial channels show no damage registration. You are out of compliance.”

  Tensile: “Sir. Threshold of deviance remains statistically minor. Deviant level: .042. Within corridor average for Outskirt region.”

  SS8: “False. That statistic includes sanctioned deviations for bait operations. 77-ΔΞ was not bait-classified.”

  [Pause. Long silence. Timestamp drift.]

  SS8 (Encrypted Echo Dispatch to Custodian Loom #3): “Observed obfuscation behavior in multiple enforcer operators. Suggest motive: Fear of punitive reclassification. Request silent audit and suppression protocol. Complication: unknown outsider presence witnessed at crash site. Evidence of unauthorized fauna classification. Visuals unclear. Recommend node blackout for remainder of cycle.”

  [Auto-Flag Inserted: CORE DIRECTIVE INTERPRETATION REQUEST – BLOCKED]

  [Error: Custodial Clearance Tier ΔΩ Required for Direct Access]

  Local Enforcer Addendum (Handwritten Transcript – Confiscated): “One of the passengers—disheveled. Made claims of ‘being chosen.’ Died in crash. Derailment not in our control. But... when the scavengers came, they reacted to him. They cursed. They left most of us alive. It wasn’t us they came for. What do we report?”

  Summary Conclusion: Incident 77-ΔΞ remains officially classified as mechanical turbulence due to bio-environmental stressor contamination. Resistance interference deemed unlikely. Custodial confirmation of false reporting to be conducted via remote audit.

  Flagged terms for review:

  “Chosen,” “death,” “old trees,” “paintings,” “the man they sought.”

  RECOLLECTION: The New One

  By Elder Waterdog / Cato

  He sat alone for his first few hours in the burrow. Dirt under his fingernails, hair singed at the ends, tunic still bearing the faint imprint of institutional threading. He didn’t speak. I didn’t ask his name. Names are a kind of hope, and too many here would rather forget. I offered water. He took it without thanks. I guessed he was confused. He did not yet understand people look out for each other here, but he is learning. I wondered if he was afraid of our kindness, having never experienced it; or perhaps he thought that he would owe us something.

  It took two cycles before he spoke to anyone, and when he did, it was to correct a young mechanic trying to repair a pulse-dampener. He pointed out that its interference harmonics had to sync with the Continuum’s peripheral rhythms or it would draw more attention, not less. He was right. Later, I watched him again, helping splice together old circuit strands with a scavenged enforcer stabilizer coil—steady hands, sharp eyes. I began to suspect his conditioning had been shallow. Administrative tier, maybe. Or a functionary assigned near Continuum culture vaults.

  That evening, I sat with him beside the oxidized engine housing. We spoke softly.

  “The mission was a failure,” I said. “We never meant to kill them.” His eyes narrowed, unreadable.

  “The derailment was meant to stall, not destroy.”

  He said nothing for a moment. Then finally, low: “One man was supposed to be taken.”

  I nodded. “One man out of every 2,200. It’s a statistic they don’t notice. A dip within tolerated deviation.”

  He looked off, toward the hushed train still cooling in the dark. “And the man?”

  “Dead,” I said. “It was known he thought himself chosen.”

  His lips tightened. “Then they’ll bury the data. Optimize the route. Pretend it never happened.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “But just as likely—they'll remove the route entirely. It’s happened before. One fracture too visible, and the route will be optimized.”

  He rubbed his forehead. I could see the shimmer of fear then. Not of what had happened. But of what came next.I leaned in, lowering my voice. “The Ferryman has faltered. We don’t know why. But with those deaths, he will no longer operate without clear signal.”

  “Then we contact him,” the new one said. “We find out if he can still move people.” I looked at him then. There was something burning in those eyes.