The garden had given them a balcony that hadn't existed an hour ago: a crescent of living wood jutting out over the inner biosphere, ringed by tiny floating lanterns that burned with captured starlight. Nero sat on the edge, legs dangling into empty air five hundred metres above the upside-down forests. The serpent suit had loosened into something that looked almost like pyjamas (black, soft, still faintly breathing).
Unown's hologram stood a respectful three metres behind her, hands clasped behind his back, pretending he wasn't watching every twitch of her shoulders.
He lasted eight silent minutes.
"Why not the Upper Thirty?" he finally asked. Voice low, careful, the way someone talks near a sleeping animal they're afraid to wake.
Nero didn't turn around. She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve (one of the tiny snakes pretending to be cloth).
"Because if Jack's whole thing was 'protect the weak'," she said, "then sitting with the strongest beings on the planet and letting them garden in peace feels like the cosmic equivalent of moving into a gated community and calling it charity."
Unown opened his mouth, closed it again.
Nero finally looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry.
"If the actual goal is peace (real peace, not the kind where gods play with clouds while the surface tears itself apart), then maybe the Lower Twelve are the only ones still messy enough to remember how wars start. They're the ones who flinch. The ones who apologise to trees. The ones who still know what it feels like to be small and scared and powerless."
She pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them.
"Maybe Jack was right," she said, quieter. "Maybe the way you save the weak isn't by becoming untouchable. Maybe it's by staying close enough to get hurt with them."
Unown's hologram flickered, the way it did when processing something too human for his original architecture.
He took one step closer.
"And if they drag you down with them?" he asked. "If their chaos burns you out the way mine almost did?"
Nero rested her chin on her knees.
"Then at least I'll burn doing the thing Jack actually died for," she said. "Not hiding in a pretty garden pretending the fire isn't real."
A long silence. The lanterns drifted closer, as if trying to listen.
Unown's voice, when it came, was almost inaudible.
"I was afraid you'd say that."
Nero finally turned fully, meeting his eyes.
"Good," she said. "Fear means you're paying attention."
She patted the wooden balcony beside her.
"Sit, Six. You're terrible at hovering dramatically. It's giving me anxiety."
He sat (carefully, like the wood might reject him). Their shoulders didn't touch; the hologram passed straight through her, but the warmth of the projection still reached her skin.
Below them, somewhere in the upside-down forests, Lya's laughter echoed (bright, reckless, alive).
Nero closed her eyes and listened to it for a long time.
Nero followed the sound of Lya's laughter down a spiral of living stairs that grew beneath her feet with every step. The air changed as she descended: warmer, wetter, scented with crushed mint and ozone.
She stepped out into a clearing the size of a football field, ringed by ancient redwoods whose roots curled upward like fingers holding the sky.
Every Namola from the Lower Twelve and Least Nine was there, sitting cross-legged on nothing, eyes closed. Even some of the Upper Thirty hovered at the edges, watching with gentle curiosity.
In the centre stood Namola-05, hoodie sleeves pushed up, barefoot on a slab of polished obsidian. She looked exactly like a tired camp counsellor trying to teach meditation to a room full of caffeinated squirrels.
"Breathing," 05 was saying, "is the only thing the God of Evolution never rewrote. It's the last purely human circuit we have left. In… two… three… four. Hold… two… three… four. Out… two… three… four…"
A soft, collective inhale rippled through the clearing. The redwoods swayed in perfect synchrony. A koi drifted past Nero's ear, exhaling tiny silver bubbles that spelled the word patience before popping.
Nero tried. She really did.
In… two… three… Her mind immediately wandered to burnt pizza. Hold… two… three… She wondered if phantom taste memory could be hacked with sufficient spite. Out… two… She accidentally exhaled a pulse of raw photonic energy that shot upward like a violet searchlight and vaporised an innocent cloud.
The entire garden went dead silent.
A single leaf detached from the nearest redwood and drifted down in slow, offended spirals.
05 opened one eye. "…Well. That's one way to skip the beginner course."
Lya, floating upside-down with her tongue sticking out in concentration, flipped right-side up and zipped over.
"New record!" she crowed. "Most dramatic failure on day one! I only set three trees on fire my first time."
Namola-7 (Aze) drifted in from the side, arms folded, expression caught somewhere between amusement and resignation.
"Breathe with your belly, not your apocalypse," he advised dryly.
Nero put her hands on her hips. "This is stupid. I just deleted Nevada in fifty-five seconds. I don't need to count to four like a hundred times to feel zen. Can't I just… not explode for five minutes without homework?"
05 floated closer until they were nose-to-nose.
"Kid," she said gently, "you didn't delete Nevada. Your panic did. Breathing is how you teach the panic to sit down and shut up before it borrows your hands again."
Lya grabbed Nero's wrists and placed Nero's own palms flat against her stomach.
"Feel this," Lya ordered, then inhaled so deeply her ribs creaked. The air around her shimmered, but nothing exploded. She exhaled and the shimmer settled like dust. "See? Cage, do Cage."
Nero tried again. In… two… A flicker of violet crawled up her arms like static. Hold… The flicker became a flame. Out— The flame became a solar flare that punched a perfect circular hole through three layers of canopy and kept going.
Somewhere far above, a koi fainted mid-swim.
Aze pinched the bridge of his nose. "Left lung only," he muttered. "Try breathing with just the left lung."
Nero threw her hands up. "I have two perfectly good lungs and an entire star's worth of energy trying to crawl out my nostrils! This is like telling a supernova to whisper."
05 laughed (soft, fond, ancient).
"Then we'll teach the supernova to whisper," she said. "One breath at a time. Starting now."
She placed her small hand over Nero's heart-node (the crimson crystal pulsing above her womb).
"Again. Slower. I'll count with you."
Nero glared at the sky, at Lya's encouraging grin, at Aze's patient frown, at the redwoods now leaning in like worried grandparents.
She closed her eyes.
In… The garden held its breath with her.
A ripple of new light cut through the clearing, soft neon pink and electric blue, like someone had cracked open a nightclub in the middle of Eden.
Namola-2 drifted in on silent antigravity, boots not touching the ground. He looked exactly like a pop idol who had fallen through time from the 2080s: shoulder-length silver hair streaked with shifting aurora colours, oversized bomber jacket covered in holographic patches that played tiny music videos on loop, one ear glowing with a ring of floating equaliser bars that pulsed to an unheard beat. A thin choker around his neck displayed live BPM in soft cyan.
He raised both hands like a DJ about to drop the sickest set of the apocalypse.
"I heard," he announced, voice smooth as synthwave, "someone's trying to teach a supernova how to breathe. Cute. But outdated."
05 sighed so deeply an entire redwood rustled in sympathy. "Two. We're doing foundational work here."
"Foundational is boring," 2 replied, spinning once so the jacket's holograms flared. "Music is older than lungs. Rhythm is how the first cells learned to divide. Watch."
He flicked his wrist. A single, perfect bass note rolled out, low enough that every Namola felt it in their sternum. The koi froze mid-swim. The leaves stopped falling. Even the air seemed to sync.
"Genre is just energy wearing clothes," he said. "Pick the right track and the power learns choreography instead of throwing tantrums."
He looked directly at Nero, eyes kind behind the neon. "What's your poison, little sister? Lo-fi chillhop to slow the heartbeat? 2087 hyper-trance to ride the surge? Or we go old-school: 2020s phonk so dirty it makes galaxies blush?"
Unown's hologram materialised beside Nero, arms folded, expression pure disapproval. "Music is unstructured chaos. Breathing is repeatable, measurable, safe."
2 grinned, teeth flashing violet. "Safe is why you deleted Nevada, brother. Let the girl dance."
Lya was already bouncing. "Do the phonk! Do the phonk!"
Half the Lower Twelve started chanting "phonk-phonk-phonk" like it was a cult.
05 pinched the bridge of her nose but couldn't hide the smile. "Fine. One song. If she blows up the garden, you're replanting every tree with a spoon."
2 bowed theatrically, jacket holograms switching to a looping clip of a pink-haired girl break-dancing on the surface of Mars.
He tapped the choker. The clearing went dark for one heartbeat.
Then the beat dropped.
Slow, filthy, dripping with reverb. A drifting vocal sample (some long-dead singer crooning "I'm in too deep…") layered over a bass line that felt like it was massaging Nero's bones from the inside.
2 extended one hand toward her, palm up, gentleman-perfect.
"Dance with the music, not against it. Let the rhythm carry what breathing can't."
Nero hesitated for half a second, then placed her hand in his.
The moment skin met skin, the violet flare crawling up her arms paused, swayed, and began to move with the beat instead of against it.
She laughed (startled, delighted, alive).
Unown muttered something that sounded suspiciously like "this is undignified," but even he couldn't hide the tiny flicker of awe when Nero's next exhale came out as soft neon mist perfectly in sync with the kick drum.
Lya whooped and started spinning in circles. Aze just shook his head, fond and resigned.
05 watched the girl who had nearly ended the world an hour ago now swaying gently to 200-year-old phonk in the arms of a walking disco ball, and decided some lessons weren't in the manual.
The redwoods started nodding in time.
The bass was still thumping, slow and filthy, when the sky inside the sphere cracked.
Not metaphorically.
A jagged line of pure gold tore across the false heavens like a scar, and Dr. Unown (no longer a polite hologram) dropped through it in full corporeal form. The impact cratered the obsidian platform, spider-webbing it for ten metres in every direction. Trees bowed outward from the shockwave. The music stuttered, warped, and died.
He rose slowly, alloy skin glowing white-hot, eyes molten.
"ENOUGH."
His roar carried Jack's voice again, raw and furious, the same voice that had once screamed at burning laboratories while dragging bleeding animals to safety.
"This is an insult," he snarled, sweeping his gaze across the frozen clearing. "An insult to every Namola who ever died in a bonding tank. An insult to Jack, who clawed open cages with his bare hands while the world laughed and filmed it for views."
The temperature plummeted twenty degrees. Frost crawled across the redwoods.
"We were built for one purpose," he said, voice dropping to something deadly quiet. "To step in when humanity finally started killing itself faster than it could breed. When the assaults on women became daily weather reports. When the last wild tiger lived in a cyborg zoo with sponsored ads on its cage. When children learned extinction as a bedtime fact."
He took one step forward. The ground charred beneath his foot.
"We were supposed to stop it. Not hide in a pocket dimension throwing parties and teaching trees to dance while the surface drowns in its own blood."
Another step. The frost shattered into burning glass.
"Jack is dead because he refused to wait. And we have been waiting for four hundred years."
The clearing was silent except for the crackle of fire where his feet touched.
Lya's lower lip trembled. A tear slid down 05's cheek, flash-freezing halfway.
Nero stood between Unown and the others, the neon mist still clinging to her skin like the ghost of the music.
"Six," she said, voice steady even though her hands were shaking. "Look at them."
He didn't.
"They're still breathing," she continued. "They're still laughing. That's not surrender. That's the only victory they've managed to steal from a species that tried to murder hope itself."
She took one deliberate step toward him.
"You want to save the world? Fine. But if you burn this garden to do it, you become the thing Jack died trying to stop."
The gold in his eyes flickered, just once.
Behind her, Namola-2's jacket holograms had gone dark. 05's hoodie sleeves were pulled all the way over her hands again. Lya was hugging her own knees in mid-air, small and suddenly very young.
Unown's next breath came out ragged, human, painful.
The molten glow dimmed to embers.
He looked at the ruined platform, the frightened faces, the frostbitten leaves.
Then he looked at Nero.
And for the first time since Nevada, the god who had erased a desert took one step back.
The Garden of First Breaths
The frost had barely begun to melt when the entire biosphere shuddered, once, like a sleeper startled awake.
Every light in the sphere dimmed to a single heartbeat of red.
Then the sky split again, wider this time, and something ancient stepped through.
Namola-01.
He looked no older than twenty-five, but the air around him carried the weight of centuries that had never been kind. Skin pale as moonlight on bone, hair long and black and perfectly still, as though gravity itself was afraid to touch him. His suit was the original pattern: pure white, no serpent weave, no heart-node, only a single vertical line of gold running from throat to navel like a closed zipper.
He did not float. He walked on air as if it were marble, each footstep ringing like a judge's gavel.
Every Namola in the clearing (Upper, Lower, Least) dropped to one knee without thinking. Even the redwoods bowed. The koi sank like stones.
01's eyes, cold stellar blue, found Dr. Unown first.
"I was waiting for someone like you, Six," he said, voice quiet and vast, the way oceans sound when you're drowning far beneath them. "Someone willing to finally pull the trigger."
He turned slowly, taking in the frost-burned trees, the terrified children, the ruined music.
"Five has wasted centuries preaching silence. Dry peace, she calls it. A coward's word for surrender."
05 rose slowly, fists clenched at her sides, ninety-seven years old in a teenager's hoodie.
"We kept the world alive, Zero-One," she said. "That is not surrender."
01 smiled. It did not reach his eyes.
"Alive is not the same as repentant."
He raised one hand. Far above, in the dark between the stars that weren't stars, new lights ignited: thirteen of them. Cold, perfect, identical to his own. An entire second army of Namolas who had never joined any council, who had waited in stasis for this exact moment.
"After Nevada," 01 continued, "humanity finally fears something more than itself. Fear is the only teacher they ever respected. Thirteen of us (just thirteen) is enough to lock them on a straight line of morality carved in fire and blood. They will learn, or they will end."
He looked at Nero last, and something almost gentle passed across his face.
"You were never meant to choose a council, little sister. You were meant to choose a side."
The thirteen new Namolas descended behind him like silent white comets, landing in perfect formation. Their eyes were empty of laughter, empty of gardens, empty of anything except purpose.
01 extended his hand toward Nero, palm up.
"The war we were built for begins today. Come with us, or watch us do it alone."
The garden held its breath.
Unown's molten gaze flicked from 01 to Nero, something ancient and terrified waking behind his eyes.
Lya whimpered once, very quietly.
05 took one involuntary step forward, then stopped, because there was nothing left to say that four hundred years hadn't already failed to fix.
Nero stood between the only family she had ever been offered and the war she had spent thirteen chapters trying to avoid.
The clearing waited for her answer.
Nero stepped forward.
One step. Then another. Until she stood directly between Namola-01 and every trembling soul in the garden.
She looked up at him (at the first Namola, the architect of the coming war, the man who had waited four hundred years for permission to burn the world clean) and laughed once, short and sharp and utterly unafraid.
"I swear on every retro Marvel movie from the 2020s," she said, voice carrying clear across the frozen clearing, "you lay one finger on them and I will smash you so hard you'll be tomato sauce on the bottom of my boot."
01 regarded her the way a glacier regards a candle.
Then he moved.
No wind-up. No warning. Just the quiet, surgical precision of someone who had ended civilisations before breakfast.
His hand rose. Reality folded along five invisible seams.
Nero's body tore apart in perfect silence; left arm, right arm, both legs, head, torso.
Six pieces, suspended in mid-air like a macabre mobile, bloodless, glowing faintly at the edges where light replaced flesh.
The garden screamed with a hundred voices at once.
Lya's cry broke something inside the sky. 05 dropped to her knees. Unown's roar cracked the obsidian platform in half.
01 lowered his hand.
The pieces hung there, motionless, obedient.
He looked at the severed head of Nero (eyes still open, still furious) and spoke with the calm of a man who had already won.
"War begins now."
The six pieces of her body began to drift apart, slow and inevitable, as though the universe itself was helping carry out the sentence.