The cave's mouth was narrow, barely wide enough for them to squeeze through with their packs. Inside, the space opened into a natural chamber about the size of a small room, carved by centuries of water erosion before the bombs fell and the rains turned to acid. The walls were smooth limestone, streaked with mineral deposits that glowed faintly in the light of their chemical lamps.
"We'll wait here," Jyn said, setting down his pack. "No point trying to navigate in that."
The acid storm raged outside, turning the world into a hissing nightmare. They could see the rain through the cave entrance, a small puddle was forming just outside.
"We were lucky," Elesa said. "Another few minutes and we'd have been caught in the open."
"Lucky," Xander repeated, pulling out his sample containers. "Let's talk about those Hollowborn while I catalog these samples. That wasn't normal behavior."
Jyn touched his side. The Hollowborn's claws had come closer than he'd admitted. The wounds beneath stung—not deep, but enough to need attention."
Let me see," Elesa said, noticing Jyn's movement.
She looked at the old wound with practiced efficiency, You haven't been cleaning it properly, Jyn! She looked at him with a side eye. and continued to get to work.
She worked with practiced efficiency, irrigating the wounds with distilled water, then applying an antiseptic that burned like fire. Jyn gritted his teeth but didn't complain. In the wasteland, infection killed more people than radiation.
"You should have said something," she admonished while working.
"When? During the fight? While we were running from acid rain?"
"Fair point." She applied patches over each gash, the material bonding with his tissue to create a sterile seal. "But these will need proper stitches when we get back. The patches are temporary."
"I've had worse."
"That's not the point and you know it."
Xander looked up from his samples. "She's right, you know. We're a team. We need to know if one of us is compromised."
"I'm not compromised," Jyn protested. "They're scratches."
"Scratches from a Hollowborn," Xander countered. "That's like saying 'only a little acid rain.' These things have modifiers that make them worse."
He held up one of the vials, the fungal tissue inside still faintly phosphorescent. "Speaking of which, this is different from standard Hollowborn infection. Look at the structure."
He pulled out a small field microscope, one of his many salvaged and modified tools. Under magnification, the fungal tissue showed unusual organization. Instead of the chaotic growth patterns they usually saw, this formed geometric patterns—hexagons and triangles that interconnected in complex ways.
"It's almost crystalline," Xander mused. "Like it's trying to organize into something more complex than simple fungal networks."
The shard pulsed against Jyn's chest, and for a moment, he thought he saw the patterns move.
Adaptation... evolution... the threshold weakens...
"We should report this when we get back," Elesa said. "The Confederacy needs to know if the Hollowborn are changing."
"Changing or being changed," Jyn said quietly.
"What do you mean?"
He hesitated. How could he explain the feeling he'd had during the fight? That the Hollowborn hadn't just detected them, but had detected the shard specifically? That something was guiding them, shaping them?
"Just a feeling," he said finally. "The way they moved, searched. It felt directed."
"The Veiled Covenant," Xander suggested. "they're always lurking in the shadows those ones."
"Maybe." But Jyn didn't think it was that simple. The whispers suggested something else, something from beyond their world. But he kept that to himself.
The storm showed no signs of abating. If anything, it was getting worse. The hissing of acid rain on stone had become a roar, and the cave entrance was obscured by a curtain of corrosive water. They were trapped, at least for a few hours.
"Might as well get comfortable," Xander said, pulling out their small camp stove. "Tea?"
"Just regular tea," Elesa specified. "Not any of your experimental blends."
"My experimental blends are perfectly safe!"
"Your experimental blend last week made Jyn see colors that don't exist."
"That was intentional! Sort of. Mostly." Xander cracked a sly smile and Jyn chuckled at the memory slightly.
Despite the banter, Xander prepared normal green tea, the ritual familiar and comforting. They'd spent dozens of nights like this over the years, waiting out storms in whatever shelter they could find. The wasteland was dangerous, but it had also forged them into something stronger than they would have been in the safety of Aegis.
The tea was a luxury—real leaves, not the synthetic substitutes that most people drank. Xander's family had connections with traders who ran the dangerous routes to the agricultural zones, where heavily shielded greenhouses produced what little real food remained.
They sat in a circle, the chemical lamp providing a warm yellow glow that pushed back the cave's darkness. Outside, the storm raged on, but in here, they had created a small bubble of civilization.
"Remember the first storm we got caught in?" Xander asked, warming his hands on his cup.
"You tried to calculate how long we could survive if the cave flooded with acid rain," Elesa recalled.
"It was a legitimate concern!"
"It was morbid," Jyn corrected. "Also, your math was wrong."
"My math is never wrong. My assumptions, occasionally, but never my math."
They fell into comfortable silence, each lost in their own thoughts. The samples sat in Xander's pack, waiting for proper analysis. The wounds on Jyn's ribs throbbed in time with his heartbeat. And always, always, the shard pulsed its patient rhythm.
"I've been thinking," Elesa said suddenly. "About what Chen said. Three settlements going dark."
"Millbrook, Ashford, and Greenvale," Jyn remembered.
"All in the past two weeks. All in the southern territories."
"You think they're connected?"
"Three settlements don't just go silent randomly. Either something destroyed them all, or they were targeted."
"By who? The Covenant?" Xander asked.
"Maybe. Or maybe by whatever's controlling those Hollowborn we just fought."
Jyn found himself speaking without conscious thought. "They're searching for something. The Hollowborn. They're not just spreading randomly anymore. They have a purpose."
"How do you know that?" Elesa asked, studying him carefully.
He hesitated, then pulled out the shard. In the lamp's light, it seemed to glow with its own inner fire, the surface covered in script that flowed like water.
"Because this reacts to them. And they react to it."
His friends stared at the artifact. They'd known he carried it—everyone knew about Jyn's inheritance, the thing his parents had died studying. But he'd never shown it to them directly, never admitted that it was more than just a crystalline curiosity.
"It's beautiful," Elesa said softly.
"It's impossible," Xander corrected, leaning closer. "The way it refracts light... it's like it exists in more dimensions than three. And that script—is it moving?"
"Sometimes. And sometimes I hear... whispers."
"Whispers?" Elesa's hand moved unconsciously to her blade.
"Not voices exactly. More like... impressions. Fragments of meaning." He put the shard away, suddenly uncomfortable with their scrutiny. "It's been getting stronger lately. The sensations, the connections."
"Connected to what?" Xander asked.
"I don't know. Somewhere called Nepheos. Something about thresholds and echoes." He shrugged, trying to seem casual about information that terrified him. "My parents thought it was a key to something. Maybe that's what the Hollowborn are sensing."
"We should tell someone," Elesa said. "The Confederacy, the Grovekeepers—"
"And say what? That I have voices in my head from a crystal my parents died studying? They'd either lock me up or hand me over to for experimentation."
"We wouldn't let that happen," Xander said firmly.
"You couldn't stop it. Not if the oligarchy decided I was a threat to trade stability."
It was true and they all knew it. The Confederacy's tolerance for anomalies extended only as far as their profit margins. Anything that threatened the careful balance of trade and survival would be eliminated or exploited.
"So what do we do?" Elesa asked.
"What we've been doing. Survive. Scavenge. Try to understand what this thing wants from me."
"And if what it wants is dangerous?"
Jyn didn't answer. He couldn't. Because the truth was, he didn't know if he'd be able to resist when the time came. The shard was becoming part of him, its whispers mixing with his thoughts until he couldn't always tell them apart.
The storm continued for three more hours. They passed the time with equipment maintenance, checking their weapons, cleaning them and checking gear wear damage. It was routine work, the kind that kept your hands busy while your mind wandered.
Jyn dozed despite himself, exhaustion from the fight catching up with him. And in his dreams, he was somewhere else.
He stood in a vast space that had no walls, no ceiling, only endless geometric patterns that folded in on themselves. The patterns were made of light—or something like light. His parents were there, but they weren't quite right. Their forms shifted and wavered, like reflections in disturbed water.
"You're not ready," his mother said, her voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere.
"Ready for what?" Jyn asked.
"The choice that's coming. The echo has sounded, but you don't understand what that means yet."
"Then tell me!"
His father stepped forward, or seemed to—distance was meaningless in this place. "We can't. We're not really here, Jyn. We're patterns, Echoes of who we were."
"But you're talking to me."
"The shard is talking to you, using our patterns. It knows you'll listen to us."
"What does it want?"
"To fulfill its purpose," his mother said. "To find the one who can walk between worlds without losing themselves. To prevent the convergence."
"What convergence?"
But the dream was already fragmenting, the geometric patterns collapsing into chaos. He heard one last whisper, maybe from his parents, maybe from the shard itself:
"Nepheos calls. The blade awaits. The threshold weakens."