2025-08-14 17:51:28
Neo MoroengThe Rim was never gentle, but now it’s a graveyard. I wanted you to feel that — the streets frozen mid-life, the air thick with absence. Every overturned toy and abandoned home whispers a story that ended too soon. Amid this emptiness, small human moments slip through: Rachel and !Guruseb, Ka!ri and the General, drawn together by fear and memory. These connections are dangerous in their own way, pulling focus from the mission even as they remind us what’s at stake. Then the silence cracks — a faint Khomani life sign in Unit 4B. It’s not just a survivor. It could be someone tied to the Red Rock, someone the Rakes would kill to control. Now the ghost signal calling Rachel is no longer our only lead… and the team must decide which thread to follow first. The door to Unit 4B opens. You’ll want to see what’s inside.
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Interlude: Under the Red Sky
The meeting room felt too small, too loud, too heavy with words she didn’t want to hear anymore. Rachel pressed a hand to her stomach, willing the knot inside to loosen.“I… need a moment,” she murmured, her voice barely carrying over the low hum of voices.Ka!ri’s sharp eyes flicked to her, assessing. “Don’t wander far,” she said, then turned back to whatever point she was making to the General.Rachel slipped out into the open air beyond the council chamber.It wasn’t truly “open” — Mars’ sky was a filtered twilight beneath the city’s protective dome — but it felt vast compared to the suffocating weight of the meeting. The light of the Red Rock bled into everything, painting her skin in copper and gold. The air was cooler here, almost clean, carrying the faint tang of iron dust and the faint, electrical hum of the city’s power grid.She closed her eyes and drew in a slow breath, but her stomach still churned. The parasite’s bite was long healed on the outside, but inside… something
Chapter 47: Recon to Rescue
The silence pressed down on us like a second dome, heavier than the one above The Rim. Moments ago, Ka!ri’s lips had been against mine, the collision of past and present igniting something I thought I’d buried. Now it was smothered, stuffed deep under the weight of urgency. We moved as a unit through the corpse of the district, every step a careful test of metal and dust.The Rim was still the Rim — the jagged, patched skin of the colony. Glass domes loomed overhead like tired guardians, their edges stained with the rust-pink film of Mars. The streets were a graveyard of memory: vendor stalls shuttered mid-sale, a string of faded prayer flags tangling in the wind, and a child’s tricycle frozen in place as if its owner might return any second. But no one returned here.Ka!ri led the way, her movements sharp, clipped, almost mechanical — soldier mode fully engaged. !Guruseb followed like her shadow, spear in hand, scanning for claw marks on walls and fresh trails in the dust. Rachel, pa
Chapter 46: Reconnaissance in The Rim
The descent into the Mars colony was a ghost-ride. Our speeder drifted through the thin Martian dusk, its engine muted to a low whisper. Ahead, the polished obsidian and crystalline veins of the inner city gave way to The Rim — the ghetto, the fracture in the dome where the planet’s wildness and human neglect met in a permanent stalemate. The Rim had always been a place of noise, heat, and unashamed survival. Now it was silent, choked beneath a red shroud that turned the horizon into a smear of rust.The dome here was old, patched with mismatched alloys, its curve distorted by years of micro-impacts and cheap repairs. Beneath it sprawled a labyrinth of stacked shipping containers, scrap-metal huts, and prefab habitats tilted like teeth in a broken jaw. Even from the air, I could see abandoned stalls where holographic signs flickered weakly, casting twitching shadows over streets that no longer moved.“Thermal scans show no sign of life,” Ka!ri’s voice crackled over the comms — clipped
Chapter 45: The Council Speaks
The council chamber was not built. It was born — carved from the heart of the Red Rock itself, as though the city had grown inward, roots curling around the bones of an ancient world. The elders sat in a perfect ring, their lined faces lit by the deep, slow pulse of the walls. That glow was alive, casting shifting shadows that made the carvings seem to breathe.In the center, on a raised dais of polished obsidian, stood me, Ka!ri, and !Guruseb. Rachel waited in the shadows behind us, leaning lightly against the wall for support. The air was heavy with the tang of recycled oxygen, undercut by the faint metallic hum that always emanated from the Rock’s veins. But it was the silence that pressed most — not absence of sound, but a stillness thick enough to feel in your teeth.Elder ǂGao, his face weathered as a canyon wall, broke it first.“You have returned, General,” he said, his voice carrying the authority of decades. “And you bring news the city must hear. Speak, so all may know what
Chapter 44: The Ghost Signal
The main chamber of the Bone Archives breathed with its own slow rhythm. The walls shimmered in a deep, organic glow, like embers hidden beneath the skin of the rock, casting shifting shadows that crawled across the carvings. Every pulse of light revealed the intricate bone latticework embedded in the walls — fossilized ribs and vertebrae of beasts that had walked Mars long before human or ǂKhomani.The air was colder than the Martian wind outside, the chill clinging to my skin and sinking into my bones. My hand rested on the obsidian table where Rachel lay, its surface polished smooth but cold enough to burn my palm. That cold contrasted sharply with the warmth of her shoulder beneath my other hand — fragile warmth, the kind that could vanish in a moment.Rachel’s breathing was steady now, but I could still see it — the ghost of that sickly green glow burned into my memory.Ka!ri stood across from me, hands still stained with the stubborn residue of the parasite’s removal. She scrubb
Chapter 43: The Red Exhale
The shuttle’s landing wasn’t graceful — it was a violent, bone-rattling crash that seemed to shake the planet itself. We hadn’t landed; we had arrived. The airlock hissed, and a thin gust of Martian atmosphere rushed in — cold, metallic, and tinged with the bitter tang of red dust. Beneath it was another scent I’d almost forgotten: burnt electronics and the faint, acrid aftertaste of survival.Through the viewport, the sky was a pale, washed-out gold, and the endless plain stretched to the horizon — a vast, sun-bleached ocean of rust-red dunes.!Guruseb unbuckled his harness, his eyes locking on Rachel. The green luminescence on her arm was now a furious, pulsing glow, the veins crawling past her shoulder, snaking up her neck, and down toward her chest. She was still conscious, but every breath rattled her ribs. Her eyes were glazed, and just beneath the irises, the same sickly green light pulsed in rhythm with her failing heartbeat.“She’s not breathing right,” I said, feeling the ti
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