The scanner operator's voice cut through the windswept silence with practiced monotony. "Movement in sector seven. Subterranean disturbance."
Commander Sareth stood on the plateau's edge, his coat snapping in the thermal updrafts that rose from the Ashmar Wastes below. Behind him, eight officers waited in formation, their suppression rods humming with barely-contained force. Four crystal pillars sat at the corners of a perfect square around a low stone mound, their violet light pulsing in sequence—one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
The rhythm of execution.
Sareth touched the control rod at his belt. The pillars answered at once, singing in harmony as threads of force wove themselves into a dome. Each strand locked into place with the precision of a master weaver, and the air inside wavered like heat over sand.
"Hold the field," Sareth said. "Maintain perimeter. If he tries to run, the dome will do its work."
Three levels below, past a rough-hewn stair that descended into absolute darkness, Ilen Korr watched a white seed hover above an obsidian basin.
His hands had stopped shaking an hour ago. Fear had a way of burning itself out when you ran out of time to be afraid.
The seed was no larger than a grain of rice, turning slowly in the air, held in place by forces that predated the Five Kingdoms by millennia. It turned and turned and never fell.
Three centuries of preparation had come down to this moment. Three hundred years of searching ruins, decoding dead languages, piecing together fragments of a lost age when extinction was a challenge to overcome rather than a natural law.
The seed was a World Cat seed—the last one. Ancient texts called them Apex Adapters. Consume, learn, reshape, survive. The ultimate survivor organism, engineered in an age when death itself was negotiable.
The Five Kingdoms had purged them three thousand years ago, when they'd realized that nothing—not armies, not magic, not time itself—could kill a mature World Cat. The extinction had been total. Absolute. A species erased so thoroughly that most people thought they'd never existed at all.
Except they had. And Ilen had found proof.
The seed floated above its basin, perfect and intact. But the guiding spark—the nascent consciousness that should have piloted the body—had thinned across the centuries, degraded to near nothing. A ship without a captain. A body without a soul.
So Ilen had done the forbidden thing.
The dimensional anchor plate sat embedded in the ritual circle, its brass surface etched with equations that made reality negotiable. He'd stolen it from a secure Authority station, committed a capital crime just to possess it. Then he'd tuned it to call across the voids between worlds, searching for a compatible mind in realities where the Authority's reach meant nothing.
Seventeen attempts. Sixteen failures.
Minds that shattered on contact. Minds that rejected the merge, or arrived as nothing but screaming static. Each failure had taken weeks to prepare and cost him something he couldn't measure—years off his life, maybe, or pieces of his sanity.
But tonight, the seventeenth attempt had worked.
A human pattern, far away across barriers that had no name in any language Ilen knew. Unknown to the Authority. Compatible with the template. And stable.
Three vials of catalyst waited by the circle's edge. Three more minutes and the merger would lock. The seed would have a pilot. And Ilen would have his life's work complete—a second chance for a species that deserved better than extinction.
The floor bucked beneath his feet.
Stone dust fell from the ceiling in sheets. The doorway rippled like water, violet light bleeding through solid rock as the suppression dome pushed inward.
"Not now," Ilen whispered. His voice was steady. The shaking had moved from his hands to his soul, where no one could see it. "Please. Not now."
He tried the west tunnel—sealed by a grate of violet force that crackled between the bars like caged lightning. The east tunnel: same. The suppression dome had pushed through solid rock like roots through soil, closing all exits.
He was trapped.
Wait and they take it. Fight and they kill me. Both paths end the same way.
But there was a third option. A stupid, desperate option that might not even work.
He could overload the anchor and reverse the polarity—turn the receiver into a transmitter. The blast would vaporize him and everything within fifty meters. The seed might slip through the suppression field in the chaos.
Might.
Better than nothing.
Ilen drew a new chalk ring around the original, his hand moving with the muscle memory of three hundred years of practice. He set the three vials at even points around the circle. Then he grabbed the brass plate and twisted, scrambling the destination vectors—sending the seed anywhere but here, anywhere but in Authority hands.
He picked up the seed. It felt warm in his palm. Alive in a way nothing else had ever felt alive. Like holding a heartbeat.
"I am sorry," he said to the seed, to the mind attached to it somewhere across the dark between worlds. "This will hurt. You will arrive small and spent, but alive."
He placed the seed back above the basin and gripped both rails of the anchor plate.
"Survive," he whispered. "Adapt. Become what they feared."
Then he poured in everything.
Not the controlled trickle of a proper transfer. Everything. All at once. All the power he'd stored for three centuries of life, channeled through a system designed to handle a fraction of that load.
The runes on the floor went from green to yellow to white to something past white that hurt to look at. The hum climbed and became a scream. The seed began to vibrate so fast it became a blur.
On the plateau above, the crystal pillars whined like dying animals.
"Power spike," the scanner operator said, his voice finally showing emotion. "Catastrophic. He's overloading—"
White light tore up through stone and sand like a flower blooming backwards. The dome clenched inward, trying to contain it. Reality opened and closed in a heartbeat—a wound that bled light and sound and something else, something that tasted like metal and felt like falling.
When it ended, glassed rock smoked in a bowl-shaped scar thirty meters across. The air tasted of ozone and burnt copper.
Sareth descended carefully, boots crunching on fused stone. His officers spread out with practiced efficiency, scanning for remains.
They found none. Ilen Korr had stood too close to ground zero to leave anything recognizable as human.
"Report to Council," Sareth said quietly, looking at the crater. "Ilen Korr succeeded. Seed uncontained. Location unknown."
He allowed himself a moment of something that wasn't quite respect.
"Wherever you sent it, old man, I hope it was worth dying for."
Across a distance that had no measure—through spaces that existed between the cracks of reality—a man sat in an old Honda Civic on the south side of Chicago.
The passenger window had a crack he kept meaning to fix. The check engine light was on. It was always on. The air smelled like the Indian restaurant downstairs from his apartment—curry and cumin baked so deep into everything that he'd stopped noticing months ago.
Kai Vale stared at his phone screen in the parking lot outside his building, the glow illuminating his face in the dark.
One hundred million dollars.
He'd checked seventeen times already. Then eighteen. Nineteen.
Still real.
Illinois Lottery. His numbers—the same ones he'd played for six years, his mom's birthday mixed with the address of their old apartment. His ticket, purchased at the Shell station on 47th Street where the cashier knew his order by heart: two scratchers, one Powerball, coffee so bad it tasted like punishment.
One hundred million dollars.
Kai was thirty years old. He'd spent six years driving for rideshare apps, pulling seventy-hour weeks because the algorithm punished anything less and he'd learned you either danced to the app's tune or you starved. A studio apartment that was really just a bedroom with delusions of grandeur. A mother pulling double shifts at Rush University Medical Center because her knees were shot and retirement was a joke they'd both stopped laughing at years ago.
Tomorrow, everything changed.
Tomorrow, he'd walk into the lottery office. Tomorrow, his mom could finally rest. Could finally stop killing herself for a system that didn't care if she lived or died. Tomorrow, he'd tell her she never had to work another shift. Never had to choose between rent and the knee surgery she needed. Never had to pretend the pain wasn't killing her.
Tomorrow—
White light detonated behind his eyes.
Not light. Something else. Something that wrote itself into his consciousness like acid on steel, burning through neurons and leaving paths that shouldn't exist. Pressure. The sensation of being pulled through a hole the width of a nerve, compressed and stretched and folded in directions that had no names.
His last thought was clean and sharp: I'm dying in a Honda Civic the night before I fix everything.
His consciousness tore loose from his body like roots ripped from soil.
The seed was waiting.
It had been hollow for three thousand years, a shell without a mind. His consciousness struck the template and fused—human memory meeting ancient design. Chicago met sand and root and survival patterns older than cities, older than humans, older than the concept of civilization itself.
For one moment he existed twice. A body slumped against a car horn in a parking lot on Chicago's south side, setting off a blaring sound that would bring the neighbors running. And a white speck falling between worlds, tumbling through the spaces between.
The transfer burned everything it touched. The seed spent three thousand years of stored energy to shield the foreign mind, to keep it intact through the crossing, to deliver it alive to whatever waited on the other side.
When it landed, it was a fraction of what it should have been. Depleted. Diminished. A shadow of the apex predator it was meant to become.
But alive.
STATUS UPDATE - DAY 0
MASS: 0.3 grams (ant-sized)
CONDITION: Critical. Energy reserves at 2%. Immediate sustenance required.
ABILITIES UNLOCKED: None
THREAT LEVEL: Prey
End Prologue