Part I: Inside the Consortium
The conference room smelled of burnt coffee and ozone from the aging air scrubbers. The light panels overhead hummed faintly, their edges flickering whenever the HVAC cycled. On the wall, a holoscreen glowed with quarterly extraction summaries, its blue-white charts casting tired shadows across the table.
Director Halvik adjusted the knot of his tie and tried to look alert. The tie was out of date, like most things in this building, but he wore it anyway. You never knew when a feed from Central might cut in, and appearances mattered.
This was a low-prestige posting—*Terrestrial Assets, Americas Division*—but Halvik had learned long ago that fortunes turned on overlooked margins. Space was where the real power was; the trillionaires owned the Ring and everything beyond. The Consortium couldn't touch that. But down here, on Earth, scraps still counted.
"Item one," droned the analyst two seats over. "Q3 returns from biomaterial harvest are down twelve percent, but novel compound yields are up." She flicked her wrist and the chart shifted. "Three new mosses with alkaloid tolerances have hit boutique pharma lines. The gray-market neuromods division is pleased."
"Good," Halvik said automatically. His mind wandered as numbers scrolled past. Rare frogs broken down into protein strains. Coral structures ground for pigments. Fungal composites stripped and sold for designer building materials. None of it made headlines. But every cut fed the ledger.
"Item two," the analyst continued. "Obscure markets remain stable. Gastronomy's buying up the bioluminescent crustaceans. Gene-hackers in Eurasia are paying premiums for thermoresistant slime molds. We project steady demand curves."
There were nods around the table, all the weary satisfaction of clerks confirming the books balanced.
One of the younger managers, Keth, raised a hand. "Demographic reports, please."
The holoscreen shifted again: a world map with entire swathes shaded gray. Once-famous nations listed in brackets beneath:
[Han Chinese – collapsed]
[Germans – collapsed]
[Greeks – collapsed]
[South Koreans — collapsed
Others blinked orange as warnings.
"Accelerated decline, same trend as last cycle," said the analyst. "Insufficient fertility to maintain replacement. It's the same story everywhere: aging-out populations phasing themselves out of the market."
"Markets evaporating," Keth said dryly, scribbling on his pad. "Not much we can do about that."
Halvik suppressed a smile. Entire civilizations reduced to lines in a quarterly brief. Efficiency failures, not tragedies. That was the Consortium way.
"Item three." The analyst hesitated, eyes flicking to Halvik. "We've logged an anomaly."
The room straightened a little. Anomalies could mean opportunity.
She brought up satellite scans of a South American plateau. Thermal overlays, canopy irregularities, strange spectral patterns that suggested concentrated biomass.
"Not consistent with tribal remnants," she said. "Patterns of settlement without visible infrastructure. Energy dispersal curves suggest self-organizing populations."
There was a pause. Someone at the far end muttered, "That sounds… human."
"Or close enough," another replied.
Keth leaned back, smirking. "Close enough might be the point. If they're not technically human, trade law doesn't apply. That would open whole new channels. Labor markets, even."
There was a ripple of laughter, uneasy but intrigued. No one said the word *slavery.* They didn't have to.
Halvik felt his pulse quicken. If their office flagged this first—if they tagged a viable emergent population—Central would notice. Maybe even reward. For years, Terrestrial Assets had been little more than janitors, scavenging scraps while orbital industries took the crown. But this… this could be different.
He cleared his throat. "Mark it for assessment. We'll escalate with caution. No promises yet."
Nods. Action items tapped into slates. The meeting rolled on, talk returning to quotas and margins, but Halvik barely heard. His mind lingered on the plateau, on the possibility of a discovery worth more than all the moss and frogs they had scraped together in a decade.
If the anomaly turned out real, it might be the making of his career.
Part II: Hunters in the Green
The jungle stank of wet fungus and ozone, and Peralta hated every second of it. He slapped at a fat mosquito that hadn't even the courtesy to bleed red—its crushed body oozed pale green across his forearm. Behind him, the rest of the team trudged in mismatched armor, boots squelching in black mud that seemed to swallow sound.
"Another goddamn snipe hunt," muttered Krieger, the squad's self-proclaimed optimist. He jutted his rifle at the pulsing glow ahead. "Tell me that doesn't look like something cooked up in a boutique lab."
The glow came from a clutch of bulbous fungi clustered at the base of a strangler fig. The caps swelled and dimmed in lazy rhythms, like lungs drawing breath. Peralta kicked one on reflex. It burst with a hiss, spraying cold vapor. The rest of the cluster shifted color, bruising purple, then green, as though offended.
"Don't touch the weird shit," Ortega barked. She was nominally in charge, though the Consortium paid her no more than the rest of them. "File it. Mark the coordinates. Move."
"Yeah, yeah." Krieger flicked a note into his slate. "Luminescent mushrooms, possible metabolic value, blah blah. Not exactly the jackpot."
The forest pressed closer as they advanced. Vines hung thick as ropes, furred with moss that sparked faintly when disturbed. The air was filled with a constant low drone of insects, but every time the team entered a clearing the pitch shifted as one—an invisible chorus modulating to some hidden cue. No one mentioned it aloud.
They found the first troop an hour later. Small figures scurried across the path ahead, bare-scaled feet slapping the earth. They were quick, chittering in a language too sharp and fast for human ears. Their eyes glowed like polished coal as they ducked into a hollow trunk, dragging bundles of nuts and bone charms.
"Monkeys?" someone whispered.
"Too many teeth for monkeys," Krieger said. He raised his rifle.
"Don't waste ammo," Ortega snapped. "Whatever they are, they're vermin. Leave it."
But unease lingered. Peralta swore he heard them whispering just beyond the tree line for the next kilometer, voices like knives on stone.
They stopped at midday by a massive trunk that split into a parasitic bloom of saplings. Resin oozed down its bark in slow amber drips. Gonzales, the youngest of them, leaned close and rapped his knuckles against the wood. The bark flexed, almost soft, and a slick tendril recoiled into the hollow with a wet sound.
"Jesus," he muttered, stumbling back. "It's alive."
Krieger laughed. "It's all alive, rookie." But his voice shook more than he liked.
They moved on quickly after that.
It was Sanchez who saw the moths first. Pale wings fluttered between the trees, catching stray sunbeams in iridescent flashes. At first he thought them insects. Then one banked close, and for an instant he swore he saw a woman's face—small, perfect, with hair like silver flame. Tiny human women with wings, drifting just out of reach.
"Fairies," he breathed.
"Say again?" Ortega shot him a glare.
"Nothing. Just—fairies. Little women."
The laughter was immediate. Krieger slapped his shoulder hard enough to stagger him. "Jungle fever already? We're not even a week in. Malaria, or maybe you licked the wrong mushroom."
"I saw them," Sanchez insisted. But even as he spoke, doubt gnawed at him. The moths were only moths again, nothing more. Still, he caught them watching him, and the hair on his arms rose.
The storm hit without warning. Peralta's boot landed on a patch of churned earth, and the ground sizzled. He yelped as blue-white arcs snapped up his leg. Capacitors. The nest erupted, beetles the size of fists spilling into the open, their shells ridged with living copper. They cracked like static generators, discharging bolts that lit up the undergrowth.
"Contact!" Ortega shouted, though it wasn't an attack anyone could fight. The team stumbled back, firing reflexive bursts into the dirt as beetles scattered in all directions, their hum rising to a furious buzz. Peralta's calf smoked where the current had kissed him, armor scorched.
"Goddamn it!" he roared. "What the hell was that?"
"Local pests," Ortega snapped. "Keep moving. Log it. Central'll want the schematics."
No one wanted to linger near the nest.
By dusk they were ragged, nerves strung tight, uniforms streaked with resin and mud. Ortega called a halt on a ridge. She tapped her slate, frowning. "Got something. Heat sigs, humanoid."
The team clustered around the display. A single figure glowed faintly on the scanner, moving unhurried through the forest below.
"Not one of ours," Krieger said, grinning. "Not even close."
"Could be tribal," Gonzales offered.
"Could be pay dirt," Ortega corrected. "Law's clear—if they're not human, they're not protected. This is what Central sent us for."
They moved fast, spreading into a loose crescent, floodlights and nets ready. Hearts pounded as the figure stepped into the clearing. 5'6", fine-boned, hands raised in calm surrender.
For a heartbeat, none of them moved. The moths swirled around the figure like a halo, their pale wings luminous in the dusk. Then Krieger whooped and fired a net round.
The cables wrapped tight. The figure did not resist.
"Bagged us a prize," Krieger crowed, hauling the line. "Central's gonna pay out for this one."
They laughed, rough and triumphant, dragging the captive toward their camp. None of them noticed the faint smile on Valinor's lips as the moths wheeled overhead, silent witnesses to a capture that was no capture at all.
Part III: The Captive's Work
They shoved Valinor through the reinforced steel door with the graceless force reserved for cargo or livestock, his bare feet skidding on the slick concrete as he stumbled forward. The cell was a conversion, a former storage room walled by chain and mesh rebar, but they'd retrofitted it with a floor drain and a welded bolt for shackling purposes. The air was a swamp of old sweat and mildew, layered with the sweet-sour taint of antiseptics, as if the place were a wound that routine scrubbings could never heal. A fresh, sharp note of ozone hovered above it all, from ad hoc repairs to the jury-rigged lighting that flickered in the ceiling.
A guard—broad, jowled, eyes glazed with the boredom of a triple shift—hooked Valinor's arms in a practiced motion and ratcheted his wrists down to the bolt. The cold iron bit into skin, a contrast with the radiant fever that always seemed to pulse off his own body. He measured the tension of the cuff and calculated the stress lines in the anchor; he'd mapped the room before his knees hit the floor.
Out of view, a second guard snickered. "You see his hair? Looks like he's been eating out of the compost again." A third, younger than the others, hovered at the threshold with a cluster of medtechs in tow. They wore their curiosity openly, eyes flicking from Valinor's face to his hands to his shins, as if cataloguing a new species for the autopsy instead of the zoo.
Valinor sat absolutely still. Inside, his lace was already alive with work. He let his pupils dilate, registering the pattern of the electrical grid as it bled through the walls: the weak pulse where a camera had been spliced in, the subtle flex of a pressure sensor beneath the eastern corner of the cot, the heartbeats of the three guards and four medtechs, all overlaying his vision with the simple certainty of numbers. The lace—Ancient's gift—skimmed data, parsed it, presented it as dynamic overlays in the corners of his sight. Potential escape vectors. Structural weaknesses. Emotional states, inferred by language and gait and the microtremors in the hands of those who dared approach him.
The guards began their ritual of assessment. The largest—Cap, by the insignia on his collar—squatted to Valinor's left, scanning his torso with a cheap-grade thermal imager. "Barely even registers," Cap grunted, showing the feed to the others. "All the heat's in the chest, nothing in the extremities. Like a lizard."
The younger guard, Mirin, leaned in closer. "That's not right," she said, voice softer, threading a line between professional and morbidly fascinated. "He's been in the box for two hours. Should be shivering. Look at him—he's not even goosebumped."
"Maybe he likes it cold," Cap said, and prodded Valinor's shoulder with a callused thumb. The muscle flexed, then relaxed. Valinor let his body go slack, a study in passivity. His lace noted the pressure, the oil in the guard's thumbprint, the faint sharpness of metal filings embedded in the skin. The man was a machinist, or more likely, a former prison tech repurposed for this remote facility.
The medtechs now entered in force. A full scan unit, a basic blood panel, none of the high-end gear that Central kept for their real assets. The lead tech, Ruiz, tried to keep his hands from shaking as he swabbed Valinor's cheek. "Hasn't said a word yet," Ruiz reported, not looking up from his slate. "Are we sure this isn't some kind of advanced decoy?"
Cap snorted. "He walked into the net. Not much of a decoy. Look at those stripes—they glow when you touch them. Some kind of warning, like on a poisonous frog. I say we keep him here until the boss shows up."
"Boss wants a full panel," Ruiz answered, swabbing again, this time using more force. Valinor tasted copper. He allowed the arm to be manipulated, observed the latexed hands for tremors, and catalogued the curiosity that always came before fear.
Their eyes kept returning to his body. The stripes—those fine, bioluminescent lines that traced his ribs and arms—drew their gaze like a slow fire. He could feel their uncertainty, the nervous edge to their laughter. Two more guards drifted in, summoned by the novelty; one whistled softly, the sound carrying down the corridor.
"Light as a girl," said one, the same as before. This time he jabbed a knuckle into Valinor's thigh, as if expecting the flesh to recoil or bruise. Valinor's flesh absorbed the insult, only the lace registering the microtrauma. "Bet he weighs less than a sack of flour."
A braver guard, or perhaps a more desperate one, grabbed the collar of the damp shirt they'd left on him and yanked. The fabric tore. Valinor felt the material shear away from his skin; gooseflesh prickled, though not from cold. He'd been stripped before, in other places, under other circumstances, and this time he performed the ritual of helplessness, head bowed, eyes vacant, hands limp at the end of the chain. Observation: humans had a script for captives. If you did not resist, they grew restless, improvising their cruelty in the absence of conflict.
Now the room buzzed with a low, almost collegial laughter. The guards compared his arms to those of Mirin, the youngest, who blushed but made no move to intervene. Two medtechs took up Valinor's hands and measured the length of his fingers, the callus patterns, the state of his cuticles. "Heals fast," muttered the older one, as if it were a point of professional rivalry.
Another crouched, peering between Valinor's legs as if expecting to find proof of a different species there. "Nothing but a nub," he announced, with a grin aimed at the other guards. "Maybe he's the female. Hard to tell."
Valinor let them catalogue his body as they wished. It cost him nothing. The lace recorded every word, every touch, every flickering emotional exchange. The data streamed back through the moth cord at his wrist, broadcasting short pulses up through the concrete and into the air. The cord looked like a simple woven band, but its filaments reached through the electromagnetic spectrum, riding the faintest frequencies. Above, outside, somewhere in the night, the signal would be caught, amplified, interpreted.
He sent everything: the names on badges, the cadence of footsteps in the corridor, the composition of the chain-link mesh (recycled alloy, brittle at the welds), the intake schedule for water and food (16:00 daily, 18:00 supplemental for "specimens"), the emotional posture of each guard (mockery overlaying anxiety, dominance assertion masking a deeper confusion). Influence opportunity: 17% this cycle, but trending upward.
Once, a guard flicked a finger across the glowing stripe at Valinor's waist. The skin there was particularly sensitive. The touch sent a flare of blue-white up his side, and the man yanked his hand back with a sharp oath. "It's alive," he said, voice higher than intended. "It's like—fuck, it's like jellyfish."
The laughter that followed was sharp and a little desperate. The guards did not say the word *uncanny*, but it hung in the space between their remarks, a filament too delicate to grasp. They preferred their captives to be either dangerous or broken. Valinor, being neither, upset the equilibrium.
Through all of this, Valinor did not flinch. Instead, he watched. When their attention wandered, he carefully flexed his wrists, testing the play in the cuffs: three millimeters, enough to rotate but not enough to slip free. He sensed the tension in the bolt and calibrated the angles required to leverage his own weight if needed. The lace ran silent simulations, mapping each possible avenue of release.
The session ended as abruptly as it began. Cap barked a command, and the guards retreated, leaving Valinor shirtless and shackled, the pooling light of late afternoon filtering through the barred window. Ruiz lingered, slate in hand, and spent a few moments making notes before sparing Valinor a final, speculative glance.
Valinor waited for the precise moment when the door latch clicked, then exhaled. Each breath was slow, even, feeding data back to his kin. He could sense them on the far end of the lace, parsing his experience, deliberating. Somewhere in the green, Eira and Talen sorted through these impressions, weighing the odds, extracting meaning.
He braced himself for the next visit. They would escalate—he had seen that in their eyes. But he was ready.
They came at dawn, two guards and a civilian this time. The civilian was a woman, older, hair pulled back in a severe bun, face unadorned. She wore the insignia of a mid-tier manager, the kind who rose to power on the misfortunes of others. The guards stood at attention behind her, a pair of meat slabs with no more imagination than the boots they wore.
She spoke first, her voice clear, bored, professional.
Part IV: The Instructor
The woman's voice was clipped, professional, with just enough contempt to sting.
"Well. The prize specimen. And quiet as a doll." She stepped into the cell with the unhurried gait of someone who never expected resistance. Her hair was drawn into a severe knot at the nape of her neck, her uniform immaculate despite the mildew that clung to everything in this facility. A slate rested in one hand, stylus already poised. She did not look at Valinor as a person, only as an entry waiting to be catalogued.
"Does it understand?" she asked the room, not him. "English? French? Anything at all?"
The guards shifted uncomfortably. Ruiz, still lingering in the doorway, shook his head. "Not a word, ma'am. Just sits there. Maybe some kind of trained mute."
Her mouth thinned. "Inconvenient. We'll need to accelerate conditioning. Ruhr."
From the corridor, heavy steps approached. Valinor turned his head and felt the lace bloom with detail before the man even entered. A broad frame. Limp on the right side, metal brace squealing faintly. Heartbeat accelerated, not from exertion but anticipation. Emotional posture: hostility masking hunger.
Then he stepped into the light. Ruhr. His skin was dark, eyes hard as chipped obsidian. The brace on his ankle clamped with every step, a visible echo of the pain written into his body. He carried the weight of someone who had been ground down in tunnels and risen from them warped, convinced cruelty was the only currency of power.
"This one," the woman said, gesturing with her stylus, "doesn't speak. Make it speak. Begin with simple commands. Demonstrate consequences. You know the routine."
Ruhr's mouth curled in something not quite a smile. He pulled a chair from the corner and sat down directly across from Valinor, leaning forward so close their knees nearly touched. The smell of old iron and sweat clung to him.
"Listen, fairy," Ruhr said, his accent thick, consonants bitten. "You will learn my words. You will answer. Or I will teach you the way I was taught." He rapped his knuckles on the iron brace of his leg with each phrase, the sound a steady drumbeat. Clang. Clang. Clang.
Valinor remained still, his face calm, eyes lowered. The lace overlaid data: 92% probability that Ruhr sought to provoke fear; 78% chance he would escalate to violence if unacknowledged; 64% likelihood of deeper fracture rooted in personal trauma.
"Say this," Ruhr commanded, voice sharp. He jabbed a finger at Valinor's chest. "Say: 'Yes, sir.'"
Silence.
The woman raised an eyebrow, expression unchanging. "Proceed."
Ruhr's hand shot out, gripping Valinor's chin hard enough to bruise. "Yes, sir," he hissed, spittle flecking his lips. "Say it or I break your teeth one by one."
Valinor let the grip hold. His lace recorded the tremor in Ruhr's fingers, the uneven rhythm of his breath. Pain was a mask; beneath it flickered recognition — the recognition of someone who had once been forced into this very same ritual.
He whispered instead, so softly that only Ruhr caught it: "I see you."
The words were not in English, not in French. They were in the common Elven tongue, a melodic phrase that translated poorly but carried weight through tone. Ruhr stiffened, uncertain whether it was defiance or something else. His grip tightened, then faltered.
The woman tapped her slate impatiently. "Well?"
Ruhr scowled, releasing Valinor's chin with a shove. "It's mocking me. Give me time."
"You'll have it," the woman said coolly. "Document the progress. I expect obedience within the week. Otherwise we escalate pharmacological conditioning."
She turned on her heel and left, the guards trailing in her wake. The door clanged shut, leaving only Ruhr and Valinor in the stale air.
Ruhr leaned back, rubbing his jaw, eyes narrowing. "I don't know what you are," he muttered. "But I'll break you down to bone if that's what it takes. That's how power works. That's what they taught me."
Valinor met his gaze then, calm and unblinking. The lace whispered probabilities across his vision. This cruelty is borrowed. This man imitates the pain once given to him. Probability of fracture: rising.
He bowed his head, not in submission, but in patience. The work begins.