The departure from Aiyra was not a march. It was a slow, rhythmic dragging of feet.
Their boots scraped against asphalt that had been maintained by years of artificial maintenance. They did not walk in formation. They walked like survivors crawling out of a shipwreck, lungs still stinging with water they had trouble coughing out.
Aiyra lay behind them, and all around them, finally dead in the way ruins were meant to be. The city no longer breathed. The flickering of the billboards, buzz of a coffee machine, noise from a lawn mower in some corner of the city. All of it was was gone, leaving a silence that wasn't peaceful or ominous. It was just… empty. Without the Warden's control, the skyscrapers looked like hollowed-out husks of glass and steel, catching the morning sun with a vacant, glittering stare. The city was how they had imagined it to be originally when they first arrived here.
And then there were the bodies.
They stood everywhere, like a forest of flesh. The living dead were frozen mid-motion, caught between roles they no longer possessed. Some leaned against storefronts with the casual grace of a person waiting for a friend who would never arrive. Others sat on plaza steps, hands on their knees, faces tilted toward a sky they couldn't see. But most of them were crowded towards the city center, following the last command from the warden, probably something to stop the team.
Mira slowed, eyes snagging on a woman collapsed beside a shop window. The woman's fingers were curled, frozen an inch from the glass, as if she had been in the middle of wiping away a smudge when the world ended. All of them were stuck, as if time had paused.
"This is… unusual," Mira whispered, her voice was loud in the vast quiet.
Taren glanced back, shifting the weight of his gear. His face was hard, but his gaze kept flicking over the still figures, searching for a twitch that never came. "Unusual how? This whole place is a nightmare."
"The living dead don't normally… stop like this," Mira said, mind already reaching for structure. "They usually remain in a passive loop. Standing. Waiting. Responding to commands or external triggers. Biological machines with a default state." She gestured at the frozen crowd. "This looks like a system that was shut down mid-process. A hard crash. I have never witnessed something like this before."
Lume walked a few paces behind them, swallowed by the folds of Eira's coat. He looked smaller than he had yesterday, skin pale, the new mark on his palm hidden under fabric. When he spoke, his voice scraped.
"A shutdown. It's quiet an apt description ," he said.
They stopped. Turned. The collective attention made him flinch, shoulders tightening. He kept his gaze on the city, on the people who were no longer even pretending to be alive.
"Warden wasn't just controlling them," he continued, words steadier now. "It was… using them. It was the OS. They were the hardware. It gave them roles. Purpose. Motion. It's what told their hearts to keep beating and their lungs to pull air." He swallowed. "When the Warden went quiet, there was nothing left to tell them what they were. The instructions just… stopped. I believe this place is a oddity in the entire world. But then again, everything is changed after the genesis, so who's to say what's possible or not."
Mira's fingers dug into the edges of her clothes. "So before we intervened, it was… kinder?" she asked. "It gave them a life?"
Lume let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "No. Just busier. You said it as well, we have never really witnessed such a gathering of living dead in the first place. Perhaps this behavior is normal?"
They started walking again. The sound of their footsteps was the only thing measuring time. And time passed thus.
Heading north, the city began to fray. The neat asphalt broke apart into jagged islands; cracks widened and roots pushed through, thick and patient, reclaiming whatever they could. Towers gave way to collapsed frames, then to piles of debris half-swallowed by a slow tide of green.
Then came the trees.
The atmosphere was different from the tightly knit swamp they had experienced earlier. This was wild growth. Damp earth and biting insects. A sense of freedom was present.
The forest did not feel hostile. But it felt heavy.
Eira was the first to put it into words. She adjusted the strap of her kit, eyes scanning the overgrowth. "This place feels different."
Dr. Korr wiped sweat from his brow, always a step behind but never out of earshot. He seemed better than before. "Different how? Trees are trees, Eira. Oxygen and wood."
"Like it's watching us," she said. She listened to the wind working its way through leaves. "But not judging. Just noticing."
"That's comforting," Taren muttered, though his grip on his weapon loosened ever so slightly. He trusted her words.
"No," Eira insisted, a small softness in her eyes. "It really is."
They moved deeper. The air cooled, smelling of wet stone and dew. Sunlight broke through in messy, shifting shards, dappling the ground in patterns no hologram would ever bother to calculate. Birds argued in the branches overhead with sharp, ugly cries. Insects hummed in a constant, off-key chorus. There was life all around them.
It was messy. Loud. Alive.
After a long patch of shared silence, Mira dropped back to walk beside Lume. "Lume, how are you holding up?"
He blinked, surprised by the simple question. "I..." He frowned, picking through his thoughts like debris. "I don't know yet. It's like there's a radio in the next room. I can hear the static, but not the words."
"That's still an answer," Mira said quietly.
He nodded, fingers brushing his palm. "It's quiet. Not empty, just waiting. Like something is about to speak, but keeps changing its mind." He glanced at Korr, who had been watching him like a puzzle that might explode. A thin, tired smile tugged at his mouth. He suddenly had an idea, as he spoke with in glee, "If it helps, I don't think it can do much right now. Although I think one day I'll be able to make illusions too. Hopefully less traumatic ones."
Taren snorted, a short bark of sound that broke the tension. But Lume laughed a little at that response. The others also loosened at the comment.
"I thought it was giving me the truth" Korr said suddenly. The words came out fast, like they had been bottling up since Aiyra. "Perfect data. Clean models. A world where every anomaly tucked itself into a neat curve." He stared at his hands. "I should've known something was wrong the moment it all finally made sense. Life doesn't make sense."
Mira nodded once. "It offered me answers" she said. "Every question I'd ever had about the Genesis, about cognition, about the living dead, all of it was there. Solved. I didn't even realize how long I'd been standing in front of it, just reading."
Eira exhaled slowly. "It gave me transparency," she said. "The Council without politics. Without evasions. Every classified file, opened. Every lie removed." Her jaw tightened. "That's how I knew it was false. The Council built itself on secrets. A version that tells the truth is not the Council, it's bait." Her eyes moved towards the now silent member of their team. No one here knew more about the lies that the Council fed its members more than her and perhaps him.
They walked in silence for a while, the weight of what they'd seen experienced shifting from raw wound to something more like scar tissue.
"It never faced us directly" Mira said eventually, eyes on Kshaya's back. "Not until the very end. Not until we forced it."
"Because it didn't want to," Kshaya answered.
They slowed, almost unconsciously. He had been a shadow for most of the walk, marked only by the occasional clink of metal. Now his hands hung loose, eyes on the path ahead rather than on the past.
"It was afraid," he went on. "Not of our weapons. Not of the Doctor. Of me."
Eira frowned. "Because of what you did to it after the Genesis?"
He gave a small nod. "And because it didn't know if I remembered. It was built to control, but you can't control what you can't predict. I was the one variable it never solved. I was the one who sealed it after the Genesis."
Lume shifted under the coat. "So it tested us instead. To triangulate you?"
"Yes."
"And the illusions?" Mira pressed.
"A buffer," he said. "Time. Distance. It wanted me busy, digging through old ghosts, while it finished with Lume. It wanted to be whole before I reached the core."
Lume's shoulders tensed. "It said it was made for utopia," he murmured. "It sounded so sure."
Kshaya stopped. The group came to rest around him in a loose circle, trunks and roots framing them on all sides.
"Maybe it was," he said quietly. "But a utopia built on stillness is just another kind of extinction. It wanted to stop the clock because it was afraid of what happens when the hands move. We're not meant to be still. Forty years in this limbo should have already taught us that."
The forest moved with them. A breeze pushed through the canopy, bending branches, scattering light across the ground in glittering fragments. Leaves rustled in a hundred different tones.
Kshaya looked up at the trees, really looked, like he had looked at the desert and the swamp and the city. "This place won't do that," he said. "Vriksh won't either."
"How do you know?" Taren asked, thumb resting on his hilt, more habit than threat.
"Because it doesn't pretend to be perfect," Kshaya said. "It just keeps going."
They started walking again, deeper into the woods. The last glimpses of Aiyra vanished behind a wall of trunks and leaves. The air felt lighter now, the oppressive, curated perfection of the city replaced by the honest smell of damp soil and rot. The trees around them swayed, perhaps in an attempt to make them forget the worst of the memories from the living city.
They continued onwards, towards their next destination. Vriksh, the haven city located in the center of a forest. Jogi forest, to be particular.