Deep in the sub-basement of the Hotel Cendana, where the city's electricity had never reached and the red emergency glow bled through air ducts like distant, dying suns, a new root system had taken hold.
It was a banyan tree of flesh and alien intent.
It dominated the vast, dark space of the underground parking garage and service vaults. A central trunk, thick as a bus, pulsed with a slow, venous rhythm. From it erupted branches that were not wood, but bundles of slick, muscular cords, the color of a freshly exposed heart. They didn't grow upward seeking light, but spread in all directions—punching through concrete floors to snake into the building's guts, slithering along walls to digest pipes and wiring, plunging back into the cracked foundation to drink from hidden aquifers.
The air was hot, humid, thick with a coppery, organic stench. The sound was a low, wet susurrus—the sound of the tree breathing.
Hanging from the larger branches were the fruits of this terrible harvest.
Cocoons. Hundreds of them. Human-sized sacks of the same translucent, red membrane, suspended by thick, umbilical vines. Some were swollen and heavy, swaying gently with hidden, sluggish motion inside. Others were smaller, taut, seemingly dormant. And several were limp, deflated—empty husks peeled open from the inside, their contents absorbed or crawled away.
At the base of the monstrous tree, nestled within a cradle of its largest roots, sat the Gardener.
It was vaguely humanoid. Naked. Its form was stripped of skin, revealing glistening, deep red musculature and tendons that gleamed under the faint bioluminescence of the tree. Its face was a horror of absence: no nose, no ears, only smooth muscle converging around a lipless gash of a mouth and two deep, hollow sockets where eyes should have been.
From the base of its spine, a thick, corded tail—a primary root—snaked out and fused seamlessly with the trunk of the fleshy banyan. Along this cord, a visible, rhythmic pulse of crimson light traveled from the tree into the creature, a continuous transfusion of whatever nutrient or data sustained it.
The Gardener sat perfectly still within its half-shell of a broken, membranous egg. It was a node. A consciousness distributed through the root-vines that now permeated the entire hotel. It felt the vibrations in the pipes. It tasted the air in the vents. It sensed the residual heat of life in the abandoned rooms above.
It was waiting. The transformation wasn't complete. The connection was still stabilizing. To move now would be to sever the sacred transfusion, to abort the glorious becoming.
A tremor passed through the root network. A subtle vibration. Then another.
Footfalls. On the fifteenth floor. Then descending. Heavy, living footfalls, not the mindless shuffle of the unmade.
The Gardener's head tilted upward, though it had no eyes to see. The hollow sockets seemed to peer through ten floors of concrete and steel.
Two heartbeats. Strong. Stressed. Rich with unmetabolized potential. Prey.
A ripple passed through the creature's exposed facial muscles. The lipless gash stretched, pulling wide, exposing rows of small, needle-like teeth. It wasn't an expression of joy, but of a terrible, gnawing need finally sensing satisfaction within reach. A smile that was purely hydraulic, a reflex of anticipation.
It couldn't go to them. Not yet.
But the tree was its body. The vines were its nerves and limbs.
The Gardener settled back into its cradle. The smile didn't fade. It simply became a fixed, silent promise in the dark.
Above, in the stairwell, the creeping red vines that had been passively observing Theo and Pras's descent suddenly grew purpose. They withdrew from the walls ahead of the men, clearing a path. Simultaneously, behind them, they thickened, subtly closing off the way back up. A faint, sweet, almost floral scent—mimicking the hotel's former luxury air freshener—began to seep from vents, gently guiding downward.
The environment itself was now a gentle, insistent hand on their backs. The prey was right where it needed to be. Now, it just had to walk itself into the larder.