Chapter 11: The Committee Votes on SnacksLuis Navarro had, in the last few hours, redefined what he considered a "bad commute." Back in Panama City, a bad commute meant sitting in traffic on the Corredor Sur while some guy in a pickup truck blasted reggaeton loud enough to loosen his fillings. Now, a bad commute meant trudging through a jungle that occasionally forgot the laws of physics, with a dried mango in one hand and three ancient spirits arguing about geopolitics in the other."So let me get this straight," Luis said, chewing slowly as he followed Valeria along a trail that shouldn't have existed an hour ago. "The Talamanca site is two days away, on foot, through terrain that's actively trying to redecorate itself. And the only map you have is a notebook that smells like a swamp.""Correct," Valeria said without turning around. Her braid swung with the rhythm of someone who had clearly done a lot of fieldwork in places that wanted her dead. "Unless you'd like to fly there. I h

Chapter 13: The Imitation GameThere is a very specific kind of panic that comes from being attacked by a creature wearing your own powers like a poorly tailored suit, and Luis Navarro discovered it in real time as the amalgam-thing's shadow-wing scythed toward his head.He didn't so much dodge as get yanked sideways by Sombra, his spine bending at an angle that would have made a chiropractor weep, and the wing passed close enough to ruffle his hair with a gust that smelled like ozone and, disturbingly, like wet feathers that had never actually touched a real bird."That's cheating," Luis wheezed, scrambling upright. "You can't just — you don't even have real wings! Those are workshopped wings! Focus-grouped wings!"The creature didn't respond in words, exactly, but the three overlapping voices in its throat warbled something that sounded uncomfortably like Viento's screech blended with Sombra's hiss, as if it were trying out Luis's own spirits' vocabulary and hadn't quite gotten the

Chapter 15: Camp Rules for the Recently TraumatizedNight, as it turned out, still existed in the new version of the world. It just came with extra features Luis had never asked for — a sky the color of a fresh bruise, stars that occasionally rearranged themselves into shapes that made his eyes water if he looked too long, and a chorus of jungle sounds that were either ordinary insects or something significantly less ordinary pretending very convincingly to be insects."I've decided I'm not going to think about that," Luis announced, staring up at the canopy from his spot beside a small, carefully shielded fire. "The bug question. I'm shelving it. Filing it under 'problems for a version of me that has already gotten a full night's sleep,' which, at this rate, may never exist again.""Wise policy," Valeria said, feeding a twig into the flames with the efficient, unhurried motion of someone who had built a hundred campfires in a hundred worse places. "Most survivors don't last long enou

Chapter 17: A Very Suspicious Welcome CommitteeThe trouble with avoiding a "hostile human presence," Luis discovered, was that hostile human presences had an inconvenient habit of avoiding being avoided."Stop right there!"The voice cracked out from the tree line, sharp and frightened in a way that made it more dangerous, not less — Luis had learned enough in two days to know that scared people with weapons were significantly worse than confident ones. He froze mid-step, hands raised on pure reflex, Valeria going still beside him with the careful, controlled stillness of someone who'd been in this exact situation before and survived it through sheer patience."We're not looking for trouble," Valeria called out, her voice pitched calm and clear, the kind of voice that had probably talked down worse things than nervous survivors. "We're passing through. Heading south."A pause. Then, from the shadows between two massive ferns, figures emerged — five of them, ragged, thin, carrying an

Chapter 19: The Settlement That Called Itself EsperanzaThe settlement, when they finally reached it as the violet sky was beginning to deepen toward something like dusk, was not what Luis had expected.He'd pictured, somewhere in the exhausted, sunburned back of his mind, something grim and fortified — barbed wire, watchtowers, the particular architecture of desperation. What he found instead was a cluster of buildings built into the bones of an old agricultural cooperative, its walls reinforced not with metal but with something that looked, on closer inspection, disturbingly organic — living wood grown deliberately into barricades, vines woven tight enough to stop a rift-beast's charge, a perimeter that looked less like a wall and more like a garden that had been asked, very firmly, to defend its people."Someone here has a Tree bond," Luis said, staring up at the living barricade with something between professional curiosity and genuine awe."Several someones," Rosa said, a note of