The further they walked, the quieter the orchard got.
No wind. No birds. Not even the crunch of soil—just the soft drag of their footsteps and the almost-too-regular snap of branches creaking above, like knuckles being cracked by something that wasn't trying to hide anymore.
Lance pulled his jacket tighter, though the air didn't feel cold.
"Why are the trees... taller?" he muttered.
Kenton's voice came out like dry math: "They're not. You're shorter."
Lance blinked. "Excuse me?"
"You're not actually losing height. Not in any linear sense. But you're not mapping correctly onto the orchard's geometry anymore. The further we go, the more your spatial presence is... sloshing."
"Sloshing?"
"Your body's buffering."
Lance opened his mouth to argue. Then saw his arm flicker again, like a page that refused to finish loading.
"...Okay, maybe."
Dani stopped walking.
She crouched by a patch of bark.
Pressed her fingers against it.
The tree... whispered.
Only for a second. Only once.
A wet sound. Like breath caught in sap.
Lance took a step back instinctively. "Yeah, no. That tree just exhaled."
Dani didn't move. "It's not a tree."
"I don't like that sentence."
"It's doing a tree impression. Badly."
Kenton closed his eyes. "This isn't even the orchard anymore. It's a projected simulacrum. Something we stepped into instead of through."
"So what, this is like, its memory of an orchard?" Lance asked.
Dani stood, brushing her hands off on her coat. Her eyes never left the gnarled branches.
"No. It's your memory of one. Dressed up in meat and good intentions."
Lance paused. "...Mine?"
"Trace-saturated anomalies sync to anchors," Kenton muttered. "You're saturated. The orchard's reshaping around your conceptual footprint."
"Can we please stop using words like 'conceptual footprint' when I'm already dissolving?"
No one responded.
The next tree they passed had his name scratched into it.
Not once.
Hundreds of times.
LANCE
LANCE
LANCE
LANCE
LANCE
LANCE
LANCE
LANCE
Carved in different handwritings.
Some jagged.
Some childish.
One that looked just like his mother's.
He didn't stop walking.
Didn't look at Dani. Or Kenton.
Just muttered, "Guess I've been here before."
The orchard wasn't just alive.
It was awake.
Farther in, the trees thinned. Or they moved. It was hard to tell which. The spacing between trunks didn't follow physics anymore—it followed mood.
A wrong feeling settled in. Not terror. Not dread.
Recognition.
Dario whined.
Up ahead, a figure stood with its back turned.
It was peeling bark off a tree in long, curling strips. Slowly. Carefully. Reverently.
Each peel sounded wet.
Lance slowed.
"Please tell me that's not me again," he whispered.
Dani didn't speak.
The figure turned.
Not Lance.
Not... anything.
Just someone you might've passed on a train.
No face. Not really. A blur of approximation. The idea of a man.
But his body was made of bark. Or bark that bled. Where his arms ended, roots twisted down like veins—spiking into the soil. He was plugged in.
The figure raised a hand.
Waved once.
And the area shifted.
The sky then split.
Not open.
Inward.
Like a zipper being pulled through light.
A second orchard bloomed overhead. Upside-down. Mirrored. Its trees had teeth.
The ground turned rubbery underfoot. And yet it held them—just enough to walk, like skin might hold an itch.
Kenton pulled something from his bag—a vial. It screamed when uncorked.
Dani didn't even look back. "Now would be a great time to have that anti-causality grenade ready."
"I left it in my other pants," Kenton said, hyperventilating slightly.
The bark-man took a step forward.
And the trees followed.
Literally.
Branches leaned. Roots tore free. Bark snapped.
A grove moving as one.
"Run?" Lance asked.
"No," Dani said. "Too late for that."
Then:
"Scatter."
The group split—
Dani unloading two incendiary glyph-discs from a capsule under her sleeve.
Kenton ducking under roots that tried to braid together around his head.
Lance—
Falling.
The ground gave out like memory erased. He dropped through a layer of orchard that shouldn't exist, landing hard in a room-shaped hollow, lit by dozens of tiny screens embedded in the roots.
Every screen showed a moment of his life—but off.
Slightly wrong.
Some too sad. Some too happy. One of him laughing at a funeral.
All flickering.
All watching back.
The milk was in the corner.
Still sealed.
Sweating.
And behind him:
Something began to open.
Something with a thousand eyes, all shaped like his.
✢✢✢✢
Kenton hit the ground with a wet crunch.
Not bone. Not flesh.
Just moss. Saturated, red, and pulsing like a nervous system.
He grunted, pushing himself upright. His bag of tools—labeled, padded, alphabetized by threat category—was still clutched to his chest.
"Dani?" he called.
No answer.
Only that warm silence again. The kind that made him itch beneath his skin. Like he'd been slotted into a dream someone else had already half-forgotten.
He turned in a slow circle.
The orchard here was wrong. Not just in shape—wrong in category. The trees were bureaucratic. Seriously. Their trunks were stamped with departmental seals, their roots filed in triplicate. One tree had a drawer in its chest, and it was labeled:
"RECLASSIFIED: UNWORTHY / ECHOES"
He didn't want to open it.
So of course he did.
Inside was a folder.
His name was on it.
Kenton Abel Ward.
He almost vomited.
No one was supposed to have that name.
He hadn't used it in years—not since that meeting, not since Dr. Karrow had looked him in the eye across a polished steel desk and said:
"You're not meant for this work, Kenton. You're a footnote. That's all. You'll never survive in the field."
He clenched his fists.
Karrow was dead now. Mauled by a sentient spreadsheet that consumed departments alphabetically.
But the sting never left.
He shoved the folder back into the drawer, slamming it shut hard enough that it hissed. The tree groaned.
Kenton spun, looking for an exit—but the orchard had changed again.
Now it was a library.
Twisting rows of bark-shelves, filled with books that bled light when opened.
He knew this place.
Not real—but based on somewhere that had been.
The Division's Archive Wing E. Redacted and destroyed a year ago. But the memories stuck. Like mold.
He moved carefully now.
Eyes sharp. Hands shaking, but steady. He reached into his bag, pulling out a glass cylinder filled with what looked like tangled red yarn—suspended in liquid, slowly twisting.
It wasn't yarn.
It was neurally responsive metaphor thread.
One of the few things that could bind a misremembered entity to its root narrative.
He didn't know what he'd face, but he always came prepared.
He paused. Looked up.
One of the books on the shelf had no title. Just a post-it:
"You didn't save them, Kenton."
He flinched.
"No," he whispered, "because I didn't try to."
Another voice answered.
From the shelf beside him.
Dry. Calm. Familiar.
"That's the worst part, isn't it?"
Kenton's breath hitched.
Dr. Karrow stepped out from between two rows of memory.
No gore. No horror. Just the man, exactly as he remembered—polished, precise, eyes like a locked filing cabinet.
But his shadow stretched wrong—longer than it should. Reaching.
Kenton backed up.
"You're not real."
"Neither are half the things you catalogued."
"I'm not here to fight you."
"You never were."
Kenton reached for the cylinder again.
Karrow didn't move.
He just stared.
"The others pity you, Kenton. Even her. The artifact in the woman suit? She laughs, but she doesn't expect you to last."
"I know what she is," Kenton snapped.
His voice cracked.
That did it. The shadow behind Karrow's legs slithered, smiled without a mouth.
The fake Karrow took a step forward.
And began to peel.
Skin folded back like paper.
Words—actual words—crawled out of his veins like centipedes. Definitions. Footnotes. Memos. All handwritten in Kenton's own panicked scrawl.
"Observation: 7V-K displays compatibility with..."
"Subject L-0428's ocular shift accelerating."
"Note to self: Reevaluate field placement—if they find out I lied on the psych eval—"
The thread burst free, snapping tight in midair like a noose of meaning.
The anomaly screamed.
Not Karrow.
The thing behind him.
The shape that had worn his memory like a badge.
As it lunged—
Kenton yelled.
"NO!"
The thread caught its form, wrapped around it like a question mark closing shut.
And the creature collapsed into itself.
Whimpering like a memo that was never read.
He fell to his knees.
Breathing hard.
The cylinder flickered—half cracked, barely holding together. But the metaphor held.
For now.
He stood.
Shaking.
Afraid.
And quietly—furious.
He wasn't built for this.
He knew that.
He wasn't Dani with her glitch-guns and emotionless smirk. He wasn't Lance with his unknowable tether to something ancient and screaming.
He was Kenton.
He remembered things other people wanted to forget.
And he wasn't dead yet.
He took one more breath.
"Okay," he muttered to the still air. "I matter. Just enough."
Then he turned.
And headed deeper into the orchard.
Where the pages of the world were still waiting to be rewritten.