The paracord wouldn't hold.

  Kaelen stood in the apartment doorway at first light, the Rig strapped to his chest, hands working the lashing that was supposed to bind a sharpened pinball rail to a curtain rod. The concept was sound. A six-inch length of hardened steel from the Medieval Madness playfield, ground to a point on the lobby's concrete floor last night, set into a notch he'd carved into the hollow aluminum rod with his multi-tool. Wrapped tight with paracord. A spear. In theory.

  In practice, the steel kept rotating in the notch. The paracord lashing compressed under tension but didn't bite into the aluminum, and every time he tested the join by pressing the point against the doorframe, the rail shifted fifteen degrees clockwise. A weapon that pointed where it wanted to instead of where you aimed it. Inspiring.

  He unwrapped it, re-seated the rail, and lashed it again with a cross-hatch pattern that used more cord than he wanted to spend. Six feet of the sixty gone. The rail held. He pressed it against the frame again. It didn't shift.

  Good enough.

  The pack was a drawstring laundry bag from the hall closet, loaded with two gallon-zip bags of water from the gravity tank, two cans of chickpeas, the multi-tool, and a small LED flashlight with uncertain battery life. He'd left the solar charger plugged into the Rig's backup battery overnight and gotten a partial charge, enough hours of recording to be stupid with. The Rig sat on his chest like it always did, lens up, harness straps tight. Familiar. The one piece of equipment that still belonged to the world it was made for.

  He pulled the apartment door shut and didn't lock it. What was the point.

  The boundary was exactly where he'd mapped it.

  He walked down Shoreline Drive past the stalled cars and the quiet towers, past the park section where a few early risers watched him from a bench but didn't call out. Gloria would know he'd left. Simon and Ray would know. He'd told them last night. Simon had offered to come. Kaelen had said no because if something ate him in the woods, the bubble still needed people who knew how to board up a door.

  The pavement ended.

  Pausing at the seam, toes on the last inch of asphalt, he looked down. It seemed sharper than yesterday. The alien soil was dark, rich, threaded with pale root filaments that pressed up against the boundary edge. No gradual transition. Chicago stopped. Whatever this was started.

  The treeline rose ten yards ahead. Trunks the color of wet slate, spaced wide at the edge but thickening into shadow beyond the first row. The canopy above them was already dense enough to filter the dawn, light that didn't match the gray sky behind him.

  Kaelen slowly turned back. The towers caught the early sun, sixty stories of glass and steel standing in a field that had never heard of zoning codes. His balcony was up there somewhere. The barricaded door. The stethoscope on the kitchen chair.

  Three hundred and forty-seven people were eating through the water supply back at the tower right now. Gloria had the clipboard and the math, and she'd keep things moving for a day, maybe two, without him. Maybe. If nothing else came out of the forest while he was in it.

  He faced the trees. Pressed record.

  "Okay. Day three. I'm at the western boundary, about to cross into the forest. I've got water for maybe a day, food for two meals, a spear that is..." He tested the lashing with his thumb. "...adequate. The plan is to follow any path I can find, look for a water source, and see if there's anyone else out here. Or anything else." He paused. "The wyvern was two nights ago. Just, you know. Noting that for the record."

  He stepped off the asphalt.

  The soil gave under his sneakers, soft and damp, not like any dirt he'd walked on in the Midwest. Thicker. Almost spongy. The air changed within ten steps, the clean-nothing smell of the bubble replaced by something heavier, sweeter, that weird metallic-sweet undertone he'd noticed since the first night but concentrated now, thickened. The hair on his forearms lifted.

  He narrated as he walked. The forest was wrong. Easier to manage emotions in professional mode.

  "Big trees. Biggest I've ever seen, and I've been to the redwoods. These are wider, though. Trunks maybe twelve, fifteen feet across." He placed his palm flat against the bark of the nearest one. Cool, ridged, with a texture like layered slate. The Rig captured his hand against the scale. His hand covered maybe a tenth of the trunk's width. The scale was wrong. "Canopy's at sixty feet, maybe more. The light's coming through green and gold, which, no, that's not right. It's coming through green and something that isn't gold. It's close to gold. My brain is calling it gold because it doesn't have another word. I think I've said 'gold' too many times."

  The undergrowth was fern-heavy, fronds like the ones he'd seen from the boundary but taller here, chest-high in places, with serrated edges that caught on his joggers as he pushed through. The insect sounds from the perimeter were louder, clicks and trills layered in rhythmic cycles that rose and fell in what sounded like eight-second intervals. He'd timed them yesterday from the boundary. Same pattern.

  The insects and the trees and the slightly off light and the silence between sounds that pressed against his eardrums. Alien flora and fauna that kept him offkilter.

  Thirty minutes in, the root systems changed. The pale filaments he'd seen at the boundary were thicker here, finger-width, pushing up through the soil in patterns that were... deliberate. Geometric. Branching at consistent angles, 120 degrees, like a hex grid. He crouched and filmed them.

  "Okay, so, the roots. They're branching at 120-degree intervals. That's not random. That's tessellation. You see this in crystal growth, in basalt columns, in beehive cells. Minimal energy configurations. Either these trees are following an optimization pattern that produces hexagonal networks, or..." He stood up. Didn't finish the thought. The camera didn't need to hear him say or something built them this way.

  An hour in, something shifted.

  A pressure, low and rhythmic he felt in his molars before he registered it as sensation. Like standing next to a subwoofer at a concert where the bass is turned up past hearing and into feeling. A pulse. Then nothing. Then another pulse. Six, seven seconds apart.

  He stopped walking. His jaw clenched and he couldn't unclench it for two full pulses. The fillings in his back teeth, the two amalgam ones his childhood dentist put in before anyone told him about composites, buzzed.

  "There's a... something. A pulse. A vibration. I can feel it in my teeth." He turned his head left, right, trying to triangulate. The pressure came from the northeast, deeper into the forest. Consistent. Rhythmic. Not natural.

  The pressure wave resolved and his molars invited him... northeast; breath; northeast; breath; northeast. Moving on the terrain climbed, the loam giving way to patches of exposed stone, gray and fine-grained, and the trees thinned as the ground rose. More light. The canopy opened into shafts of that not-gold illumination, and in one of those shafts, he found it.

  A stone marker. Knee-height, roughly square, covered in moss and lichen but clearly worked. Cut and placed. He crouched and scraped lichen away with his thumbnail. Underneath, the surface was smooth, and carved into it were geometric symbols, interlocking lines and curves that formed patterns he didn't recognize but that shared the same angular logic as the root tessellations below. Circles inscribed in triangles, triangles nested in hexagons.

  "Civilization." So many feelings sneaking in with the possibilities.

  The Rig got close enough to fill the frame. He traced the carving with his finger, feeling the depth of the cuts. Someone had made this with tools, with intent, and then time had grown over it. The stone was not local, either. Finer grain than the exposed rock on the hillside. Transported. Placed.

  He stood up and looked northeast.

  Fifty yards further, another marker. Less overgrown. The same symbols but sharper, the moss thinner, the edges cleaner. He jogged to it and the Rig bounced against his chest. A third marker stood another fifty yards beyond, and beside this one, the forest opened onto a path. Packed earth, clear of undergrowth, wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Someone maintained this.

  The path held him. Breathing hard, he looked both directions. Northeast, the path curved into shadow between trunks. Southwest, back toward where he'd come from, it vanished into the fern cover. The markers were guideposts. The path was infrastructure.

  His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  "Okay. Path. Maintained path. Stone markers with carved symbols. This is... there are people here. Or there were people here recently enough to keep a road clear." He swallowed. "Following it."

  The path led downhill for forty minutes through forest that thinned, the massive trunks giving way to smaller growth, deciduous trees mixed with something like birch but with bark that peeled in blue-white strips. The sweet electric taste faded as the canopy opened, replaced by wet stone and vegetation and the sound of moving water.

  He came out of the treeline onto a muddy bank and stopped.

  A river. Forty feet across, fast-moving, brown-green and opaque with sediment. The current threw small standing waves over submerged rocks, and the sound of it, the ordinary sound of water over stone, was the most familiar thing he'd heard in three days. He stood on the bank and listened to it for a full minute before he raised the camera.

  And a bridge.

  A timber bridge spanned the crossing. Rough-hewn logs for the deck, rope railings woven from some fiber he didn't recognize, support piles driven into the riverbed. The joinery was mortise-and-tenon, no nails, no bolts. He filmed it from the bank.

  "Bridge. Pre-industrial construction, mortise-and-tenon joinery, rope railings, load-bearing capacity of... I don't know. It's holding itself up, so probably more than my weight." He was stalling and he knew it. Because on the far bank, beyond a cleared strip of mud and gravel, stood a wall.

  A palisade. Sharpened logs, eight feet tall, driven into the earth in a continuous line that curved away in both directions. Behind it, rooftops. Thatch and timber, thin columns of smoke rising from cooking fires, and the rhythmic clang of metal on metal. A blacksmith's hammer. He knew the sound from years of watching metalworkers for the channel. Strike, pause, strike. The cadence of someone shaping hot steel on an anvil.

  "Okay. That's a settlement. That's a fortified settlement with a smithy." His voice dropped to a whisper. "That's a medieval... no. That's not a reenactment. Nobody's reenacting anything. These are real people with real walls and real swords and..." He crouched at the near end of the bridge, the Rig at eye level, and panned the camera slowly across the settlement's visible features.

  Smoke. Walls. Rooftops. The hammer.

  "I'm David Attenborough in a country where everyone has swords and I'm holding a curtain rod."

  The nervous laugh broke through the whisper before he could stop it. He crouched there at the bridge and cataloged everything the lens could see. Gate on the near side of the palisade, heavy timber, open. A cart track leading from the gate to the bridge. Movement inside, figures between buildings, too far to make out faces.

  He hadn't decided whether to cross. He didn't get the chance.

  Hoofbeats. To the left, from a gap in the trees along the far bank. He looked. Three riders came out of the tree break at a canter, single file, spreading into a line as they reached the cleared ground. They wore leather and mail over roughspun cloth. Two had swords drawn. The third had a short bow, arrow nocked but not drawn.

  They moved toward the bridge with purpose. Toward him.

  Kaelen stood up too fast. The spear caught between his legs and he almost went down, which was not the first-contact footage he'd had in mind: face-first in the mud. He caught his balance, the Rig swinging on its chest strap. The camera was still recording. It was always recording.

  "Hey!" He lifted both hands, palms out, the spear clamped under his arm. "Hey, hi. I'm not... I don't..."

  The thick bears and rough hewn face of lead rider scowled as reined his horse at the far end of the bridge and shouted something. Short, sharp, guttural. A command. The language had hard consonants and rolling vowels and bore no resemblance to anything Kaelen had ever heard.

  "English? Do you speak English?" Nothing. "?Hablas espa?ol?" Nothing. "Sprechen Sie... okay, I barely speak German, that's not going to help."

  Dismounting, the leader maintained eye contact. He was broad-shouldered, weathered, older than Kaelen by twenty years. His sword was functional, not ornamental. Nicked blade, leather-wrapped grip, carried in a scarred sheath. He kept it drawn but lowered as he walked across the bridge, his boots heavy on the timber deck, and stopped six feet from Kaelen.

  Kaelen's sneakers got the first look. The cargo joggers. The NASA t-shirt, which at this point was three days past the end of its social life. The dried blood on his forearms. The Rig on his chest. Brow slightly furrowed, head tilted slightly, and a look of confusion in his eyes.

  Two fingers pinched the nylon of the joggers below the knee. His eyebrows pulled together. He flicked the zipper tab on the cargo pocket. Looked at the Rig, the lens, the blinking status light, and pulled his hand back.

  Behind him, the two mounted riders held position at the bridge's far end. The one with the bow had the arrow half-drawn now, the shaft angled at Kaelen's chest.

  The leader barked another question. Kaelen shook his head. The man's grip tightened on the sword hilt.

  "I don't understand. I can't..." Kaelen kept his palms up. The man's eyes tracked to the spear still tucked under his arm. Bad. That was bad. He let it drop to the mud. The clatter of the curtain rod on wet ground rang off the palisade wall.

  Looking at the fallen spear, then back at Kaelen he said something to the mounted riders. One of them laughed. The other didn't. The arrow stayed at half-draw.

  No words. The river. The hammer in the distance. His own breathing seemed really loud. The river was louder. Not by much.

  Desperate. Okay. Think.

  He moved one hand toward his pocket. The lead rider's sword came up three inches. Kaelen froze. Made the motion smaller, slower. Two fingers into the cargo pocket, like reaching for a wallet during a traffic stop. His phone was there, the screen cracked in one corner from the transfer but functional, battery at nineteen percent.

  He pulled it out. Held it flat on his palm, screen dark. The rider squinted at it. Black rectangle. Nothing impressive.

  Kaelen opened the front camera.

  The screen lit up with the rider's face.

  The man flinched back, his sword arm tensing, weight shifting to his back foot. Fight posture. Kaelen didn't move. He held the phone steady, screen toward the rider, and waited.

  Three seconds. Four.

  The rider leaned in. His own face stared back from the glass, moving when he moved, blinking when he blinked. He tilted his head. The reflection tilted. He reached out with one thick, calloused finger and touched the screen.

  His fingertip left a smudge on the glass.

  He pulled back and looked at Kaelen. Not trust. Not friendliness. His eyes moved between Kaelen's face and the phone in the same way they'd tracked the sword, measuring whether this was a weapon or something stranger.

  He said something to the mounted riders. A longer phrase this time, the tone shifted from command to information. One of the riders sheathed his sword. The bowman lowered his draw by half but didn't unstring the arrow.

  The lead rider sheathed his own blade. He reached back to his saddlebag, one hand on the horse's flank, and pulled out a length of rough cord. Hemp or something like it, thick as a pencil, stiff and fibrous. He held it up and gestured at Kaelen's wrists.

  Kaelen paused. His options became quite limited if we was restrained. Not much choice though - he extended his hands. The cord went around his wrists in three tight loops, cinched with a knot that pulled the fibers against his skin. It hurt immediately, a hot, stinging welt where the fibers bit into the wrist bones. The man didn't care that it hurt. He checked the knot, tugged it, and turned toward the bridge.

  One rider ahead. Two behind. The lead rider walked beside him, one hand on Kaelen's arm above the elbow, grip firm enough to steer without squeezing. They crossed the bridge and the timber creaked under the horses' weight and the river noise swelled and faded as they passed over.

  The settlement resolved into detail as he was escorted through the gate. Packed-earth paths between timber-and-thatch structures with a central open area where chickens scattered from the horses' hooves. There were stacks of firewood against walls and a trough of standing water reflecting the strange sky. People stopped what they were doing to stare. A woman with a bundle of thatch paused in a doorway. Two boys, ten or twelve, froze mid-chase near a well. An older man sitting on a stool outside what looked like a tannery set down his knife and stood up.

  No one spoke to Kaelen. They spoke to each other, low and fast, eyes on his clothes, his Rig, his bound wrists. He heard the same syllable repeated three times by different voices. A word. Maybe a name. Maybe a category for whatever he was.

  They pushed him through a low doorway, a timber lintel he had to duck under, into a dim interior. The floor was packed dirt. Grain sacks lined the walls in stacked rows, burlap or something close to it, smelling of dry wheat and dust. Iron bar stock leaned in bundles against the far wall, each bundle tied with wire. Pig iron, probably. Feed stock for the smithy.

  The door closed behind him. A heavy beam dropped into brackets on the other side, the wood-on-wood thunk of a bar falling into place. Footsteps retreated.

  He sat down on a grain sack. The cord on his wrists had already rubbed a welt, and he pressed his hands together to relieve the pressure on the inside of the wrist bones. The multi-tool was in his pack. The pack was still on his back. They hadn't searched him. That was either sloppy or a sign that they didn't consider him enough of a threat to bother, and he wasn't sure which one was worse.

  The storage room was maybe ten by fifteen feet. No windows. The walls were rough-hewn timber with visible gaps between the planks, finger-width, letting in strips of fading daylight. He shifted to the nearest gap and pressed his eye to the opening.

  The settlement moved through its evening. Firelight bloomed in doorways and in a central pit he hadn't noticed on the way in. People carried water from the well in wooden buckets. A woman crossed the open area with an armload of firewood, a dog trotting at her heels. That was something to consider - dogs. Along with chickens and horses there were clear similarities but still many differences. Two children chased the dog, laughing before it darted away. The bucket chain from the well hadn't stopped since he'd pressed his eye to the gap. Routine, all of it.

  Fifty feet from the room where they'd locked him.

  He pulled back from the wall. The Rig was still on his chest. Still recording. The red light blinked in the dim room, a slow pulse, on and off, counting seconds.

  He had footage of everything. Hours of it. Narrated in his own voice.

  He had no one to show it to.

  The light through the wall gaps shifted from gray to orange as the sun dropped somewhere behind the palisade. The hammer had stopped. Voices carried in from outside, conversations in a language he would need to learn if he lived long enough for it to matter.

  He leaned his head against the timber wall. The grain sack under him smelled like a feed store in Champaign he'd filmed two years ago for a segment. That was a different planet. Same smell, though. Dry grain and iron oxide and the particular staleness of a space that stays closed more than it opens.

  The red light pulsed. On and off. On and off.

  He didn't turn the camera off.