[POV Era]

  Morning shattered beneath the echo of megaphones booming against the concrete walls of the dam. There was no room for doubt or questions. The guards, faces hardened and index fingers brushing the triggers of their rifles, stormed into every corner of the settlement. With shouted orders and calcuted shoves, they began herding the entire popution toward the central pza, a vast stretch of cement rising above the roar of the turbines.

  It was controlled chaos. All four hundred and fifty-six of us were forced into long, compressed lines, organized by sectors. The silence in the pza was so dense it felt as if the air had forgotten how to be breathed. At my side, Chelsea trembled so violently that the brush of her worn jacket against my arm became a constant vibration. Two rows over, Sora maintained a rigid posture, eyes fixed on the ground, shielding her group with a calm I knew was sustained by sheer mental discipline.

  In front of us, beneath a gray canvas tent, three interrogation tables had been set up. They were not simple desks. Resting atop them were metallic devices with blinking lights that hummed erratically. They were pieces of hybrid technology, simir to what I had seen in the Leader’s boratory: human wiring fused to alien biotic cores pulsing with a bluish glow.

  I felt the weight of the backpack on my shoulders as if I were carrying a miniature sun. The red egg, in its scarlet rhythm, seemed to respond to the tension in the air, pulsing with an intensity I feared might be visible through the fabric.

  [Critical alert. Era, the security system is active. Those devices are short-range biotic resonance scanners. We must conceal the egg. If they detect a Css-S signature, the elimination protocol will activate across the entire perimeter.]

  "There has to be something," I insisted mentally as the line crawled forward with agonizing slowness. Each time a person stepped to the table, the device emitted a dry beep and a green light granted passage. "Search the ship’s archives. Is there any masking protocol?"

  [The ship’s protocols require an external energy source to generate a phase veil. We do not have access to that here. I can only suggest redistributing your own internal energy to create a yer of static interference around the backpack, but this will drain your reserves to 40% within minutes and may cause actuator instability.]

  "Do it," I ordered.

  A surge of heat coursed down my spine as the system diverted current toward the tactile emitters along my back. The line advanced. I watched Sora pass through the interrogation with the efficiency of someone who had nothing to hide. She answered rapid questions and moved to the waiting area, casting me a fleeting gnce heavy with suspicion I could not decipher.

  "Next! Era, the guard!" shouted a man in a bck uniform, consulting a digital tablet.

  Chelsea went just before me. Her questioning was brief; they released her after verifying her identity with Sora. I stepped forward. Each stride toward the table felt like walking toward a precipice. The guard waiting for me had a scar across his cheek and unblinking eyes fixed on my face.

  I sat in the metal chair. The device on the table, a silver hemisphere with a red crystal at its center, began rotating slowly, emitting a high-pitched tone that vibrated through my auditory sensors.

  "You worked at the university, correct?" the guard asked without lifting his eyes from his notes.

  "Yes. Private campus security," I replied, moduting my voice to sound tense yet cooperative, mimicking human fatigue.

  "Last night at 02:00 hours, where were you exactly?"

  "In my room in Sector B. The sirens woke me. I stepped into the hallway, spoke with a neighbor, then went back inside when we were ordered to shelter."

  The guard finally looked up, locking his gaze with mine. The device increased its rotation speed. The red crystal fred brightly, sweeping across my chest and backpack. I held still, waiting for arms to erupt, for guards to surround me, for the deception to colpse.

  [Maintaining interference. Energy levels at 35%. No external alert detected.]

  "Did you see anyone unusual in the housing sector? Anyone who did not belong to your unit or Sora’s group?" the guard continued, fingers tapping impatiently on the table.

  "No. Everyone seemed as frightened as I was. I only saw residents trying to understand what was happening."

  He studied me for seconds that stretched into centuries. The device emitted a long, low tone, and the red light shifted to green. The man exhaled in boredom and crossed my name off his list.

  "Fine. Move along. Next."

  I rose from the chair, my joints strangely light from the surge of simuted adrenaline. I walked toward the exit zone of the pza, putting controlled distance between myself and the tent. I could hardly believe it. I had passed. The egg, the ship’s technology, my true nature... none of it had been detected.

  "How is that possible, System?" I asked once I reached a safe distance, joining Chelsea near one of the railings overlooking the reservoir. "That scanner should have detected even my energy core."

  [I am as perplexed as you are, Era. During contact, I monitored the device’s frequencies. It is hybrid technology, but its sensitivity appears deliberately limited. It is as though the apparatus is configured to search for something we do not possess, or as though the interference we generated was sufficient to blind its rudimentary optics.]

  "Are you okay? You looked really pale in there," Chelsea whispered, stepping closer. Sora stood several meters away speaking with Leo, yet her gaze remained fixed in our direction, evaluating my reaction.

  "I’m fine, Chelsea. Just... the tension. I don’t like interrogations," I answered, forcing my shoulders to rex, masking the lingering heat radiating from my back after the strain.

  I drifted a few steps away from them, moving toward the edge of the walkway to stare down at the raging water below, needing a moment for my circuits to cool. I did not notice, and my sensors, partially clouded by the energy drain from the masking, failed to register the subtle shift among the stacked supply crates behind me.

  But the system had glimpsed it briefly.

  There, crouched between the metal containers, a creature was watching me.

  It was not a Ganut, at least not one I had seen before. It was small, the size of a young child, yet bore the same gray organic armor and angur limbs of the monsters. Its eyes were not the narrow yellow slits of the city beasts, but two deep bck orbs reflecting light with malevolent intelligence. It moved with liquid grace, making no sound, keeping its distance yet never looking away from my backpack.

  The small being tilted its head, observing the invisible biotic trail I left behind, a trace the Leader’s scanner had not "seen," but which to it was as clear as the scent of wounded prey. It was no beast of burden. It was a tracker. An eye in the dark someone had unleashed to find what machines could not.

  I turned to rejoin Chelsea, and for an instant the wind carried the scent of ozone and rotten flesh. I paused, my eyes sweeping the crate sector.

  "Era, is something wrong?" Sora asked, approaching with determined steps, breaking my concentration and forcing me to look away from the shadows.

  "Nothing," I replied, forcing a smile. "Just the noise of the water. Let’s get out of here. I don’t like how the atmosphere feels after that assembly."

  We walked back toward the housing blocks, Sora and Chelsea speaking in low voices, unaware that behind us, leaping from shadow to shadow with terrifying precision, the small creature followed, marking each of our steps.