Chapter Fourteen – The Mouthless Wake
The body was still breathing when they found it.That was the first problem.
The second problem was that it had no mouth.
The patrol had been posted here two days earlier. Six Dominion soldiers, one communications officer, one combat drone. All registered alive and operational until thirty-seven hours ago, when their signals blinked out. The Dominion expected jamming. They did not expect this.
Selene crouched first, her armor's servos whispering as she ran a scanner over the corpse. The readout glowed pale green. Respiration: active. Neural function: partial. Auditory response: none. Vocal capacity: absent.
"Choir work," she said, voice clipped.
Kaelen ignored her words at first. He studied the dirt beneath the corpse's boots. Soil compressed in even steps. No drag marks. No scuffing from resistance. Whoever this was—or had been—had walked here. Alive. Possibly willing.
"No," Kaelen said. "This isn't Choir."
Choir kills were brutal but deliberate, meant to unsettle, to send messages in bone and blood. This lacked the artistry. It wasn't a performance. It was a function.
"This is older," Kaelen continued. "And older things aren't interested in messages. They're interested in outcomes."
Older meant pre-Dominion systems. Weapons and doctrines that had refined themselves over centuries—not by doctrine, but by survival. The older the mechanism, the less it resembled war and the more it resembled a law of nature.
Lira, the youngest of the group, shifted uneasily. "You're saying it's awake now?"
Kaelen didn't look at her. "It never slept. We just stepped into range."
He turned his attention to the surrounding trenchlines. They weren't war relics—Kaelen knew the difference. These were too precise, too deliberate in their angles. The earth was layered with ash mixed into the sediment, fine and gray, as if organic matter had been burned without flame.
No Dominion record marked this region for a sterilization sweep. That meant one of two things: either the event predated the Dominion's existence, or it was deliberately erased.
By the time they reached Selene's marked coordinates, the sun was low, and the wind carried no scent of life.
"Tomb Node Seven," Selene announced.
The bulge in the earth wasn't natural. Beneath the crust of dead vines lay a hatch—concealed but accessible. Kaelen noticed something else: no insect movement. No animal tracks. Nature itself avoided this ground.
When the hatch came free, there was no exhalation of stale air, no scent of rot. Just a sudden drop in temperature, as if the heat had been drawn away.
They descended in silence.
The corridor was narrow, metallic—but not alloy. Kaelen felt the wall through his glove: no welds, no joins, no seams. It had been shaped in a single continuous process. Maybe poured and hardened. Maybe grown.
Every ten meters, etched notations appeared. Not decorative. Calculations. Numerical sequences, chemical ratios, unfinished formulas. Some deliberately scraped out, the way one might hide the final step of a weapon design.
At the corridor's end, they entered the chamber.
It held the Mouthless.
Dozens stood in perfect rows. Breathing in unison. Chests rising and falling as one, the sound so faint it could be mistaken for air shifting through a hollow cave.
Their skin was pale but taut, like paper stretched over wire. Eyes open, but unfocused—pupils reacting slowly to light. The lower half of their faces was smooth flesh, no scar tissue, no sign of removal. It was as if mouths had never existed on them.
Lira's voice wavered. "What are they?"
"Witnesses," Kaelen said. "They saw what they weren't meant to. So something made sure they could never tell anyone."
Selene's scanner confirmed the worst. "Conscious. Neural patterns stable."
"They're alive because they're still needed," Kaelen replied. "Which means whoever—or whatever—did this has plans for them."
The chamber layout wasn't random. The formation, the exact spacing between each Mouthless, was too precise. A pattern designed for activation—whether by sound, light, or something else entirely.
Kaelen moved to the perimeter, scanning dust patterns. Most had settled decades ago. But one set of footprints was fresh. Smaller. Lighter. Leading to a shadowed alcove.
He followed them.
Inside, a pale sphere was half-embedded in the wall. Its surface pulsed faintly, in perfect rhythm with the Mouthless' breathing.
When Kaelen touched it, the chamber vanished.
He stood under a black sky, its surface cracked with glowing red fractures. A figure towered on the horizon, its outline fractured, shifting between multiple positions at once. No sound reached him, yet his bones vibrated. This wasn't language. It was command.
The vision ended when he released the sphere.
Selene was waiting. "What did it show you?"
"Not a vision," Kaelen said. "An instruction."
He glanced back at the Mouthless. "This isn't a prison. It's a reserve. When the signal comes, they'll move. And whatever they serve knows we're here."
They turned to leave.
The hatch was gone. No sound of closing. No seal. It had simply ceased to exist.
The way back was slower. The silence became heavier, oppressive, as if the walls themselves were listening. Lira began glancing at Kaelen as though expecting him to explain how they'd escape. He didn't.
When they emerged to the surface, the temperature was wrong—colder than the descent. Kaelen marked the coordinates on his datapad, then burned the record.
Some locations weren't worth remembering.