The city had learned to glow against the void. Lagos—new Lagos, rebuilt and reborn—rose like a jeweled archipelago across the lagoon, its spires rising from reclaimed land, its skybridges shimmering with neon veins. The estate cars that flowed through its arteries whispered on magnetic tracks, their glass facades showing citizens inside as though they were moving exhibits in a gallery of progress. Above, swarm-drones cast patterned light across the haze, choreographed by some unseen civic intelligence. The world outside was restless, alive. The world inside was curated, safe. In one of these cars sat Ike Nyowe. His face, projected briefly on a news ribbon threading across the skyline, was familiar to every household: Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the man who spoke of calm in chaos, who counseled patience when the skies shook with alien fire. The feed replayed his speech from earlier that afternoon. His voice had been measured, unfli

The air in the club was a thick soup of synth-smoke, sweat, and bass so heavy it felt like a physical pressure. In a shadowed booth, Clayton leaned forward, his eyes burning with a fervor that the cheap neon light couldn’t explain.“They walk among us, N/aa,” he hissed, his voice cutting through the thrum of the music. “You look, but you don’t see. Your people, with all your history, you’re still blind to the truth.”Across the table, N/aa, a Khomani woman whose sharp eyes missed nothing in the club’s chaos, took a slow sip of her beer. Her expression was a mask of cool skepticism. “My people see many things, Sitchinite. We see fools most clearly of all.”Clayton’s cult—the ‘Tablet Seekers’—were a laughingstock in the Rim. They scoured data-streams for corrupted fragments of pre-Collapse texts, piecing together a mythology where the Rakes weren’t a new horror, but an ancient one. Returning gods from the mythical 12th Planet, Nibiru, come to claim what was theirs.“You think this is new

The Thirst Land was a country of bones. Red dunes stretched like dried blood, cracked and grooved by ancient winds. Silence pooled in the gullies, broken only by the slow hiss of dust against the domed glass of Benson’s module. Inside, it smelled of rust and old sweat, the way unwashed grief does when it sinks into walls. He sat alone, visor on the table, palms pressed to his temples. For three days, maybe four—time bled here—he had seen no other settlers, no lights, not even a shuttle cutting the sky. The Thirst Land had swallowed them all. And then she returned. N/aa stood in the doorway, her body slack, her helmet fused to her face like the skin of a cicada that never shed. Her breath rattled, shallow but real. A faint luminescence, sickly and shifting, pulsed beneath the cracked visor where her eyes should be. Benson rose, his throat sealing up in terror and relief at once. “N/aa?” His voice cracked. “By God, you’re alive.” Her head tilted, slow, mechanical, like a doll’s. She s

The door was half-open. Neon from the hall slanted across the velvet drapes inside, bleeding colors that didn’t belong in warzones or barracks. Hayes stood still, hand on the frame, his chest rising slow and steady despite the electric wire of tension in his muscles.“Yes,” the voice had said. Soft. Feminine. Certain.The sound hung in the stale air like perfume, making the silence after feel even heavier.Hayes glanced back once, just enough to catch Miller’s wide-eyed stare, Sloane’s nervous hand on the rifle strap, and the faint smirk playing on another man’s lips as he vanished into one of the side rooms with a girl on his arm. The rest of the squad was dissolving into velvet alcoves and neon shadows, leaving Hayes at the edge of something else.He pushed the door the rest of the way.The hinges whispered, and the room revealed itself: low light, thick carpet, and a couch upholstered in red fabric that drank the glow. A decanter and glasses waited on a low table. Against the far wa

Da’kar stood on the observation deck of the crystalline citadel, his silhouette carved against the endless void. His arms were clasped behind his back, spine rigid, a statue carved of command. For minutes or perhaps centuries, he had been silent. The silence itself pressed outward, heavy, oppressive, unnatural for one whose presence normally filled space like a chorus. A faint tic worked in his forehead, the only Khomani betrayal of the strain spiraling through his hive-consciousness.Below him, his dominion stretched: the forge-world bled green fire into orbit, birthing ships of sleek cruelty; the gas giant’s rings hid silent daggers; the infected ocean moon pulsed faintly like a diseased heart. His Golden Family thrived. Yet the harmony had a flaw, a discordant note. The human woman. Nancy. The survivor.She was not supposed to endure. She was not supposed to hunt back. And yet she had. That anomaly gnawed at him.Da’kar parted his lips. What escaped was not a word but a click — rap