# Chapter 47 — Alive
He kept walking.
The corridors of the Cells Division carried their ordinary noise around him — a conversation about meal schedules, someone laughing through a half-open door, the sound of a shower running somewhere above. Singhania moved through all of it without slowing, Silver's report held at his side, Samar a half-step behind. He had a specific destination and he reached it without detour, stopping at a door that looked like every other door in the residential wing and knocking twice.
The pause before it opened was brief.
Arun Pratap filled the frame the way experienced soldiers fill spaces — not aggressively, not deliberately, just present in a way that registered. His expression shifted the moment he saw Singhania standing in the corridor rather than a message on his communicator summoning him elsewhere.
"Hi, Arun," Singhania said.
Arun looked at him, then at Samar, then back.
"Is something very concerning? Or important?" A brief pause. "If you just called me, I would have come to your office."
He stepped aside.
"Anyways, come inside."
The room was sparse in the way soldiers' rooms tended to be sparse — functional, maintained, nothing left out that didn't need to be there. Singhania sat where Arun indicated and placed the reports on the table without preamble. Not just Silver's. All of them, stacked with the quiet weight of accumulated evidence. Arun looked at the stack for a moment before sitting across from it.
Singhania explained it the way he explained things when the facts were sufficient and editorializing would only slow them down. Two hundred and forty-six separate reports. Different people, different locations, different Vestiges, different circumstances. And in every one of them, the same sequence: a Vestige died, its body dissolved, and a human close to the corpse in that moment experienced a physical improvement that remained. Arun read through several reports himself, moving from one to the next with the methodical attention of someone looking for the inconsistency that would let him dismiss the pattern.
He didn't find it.
He set the last report down.
"Two hundred and forty-six?"
"Two hundred and forty-six cases," Singhania said. "And the number increases every day."
Arun asked whether Singhania had determined the cause. Singhania answered without softening it.
"No."
He had observed the sequence across two hundred and forty-six instances. Observation alone had not given him the mechanism. What it had given him was certainty about one thing: the same experience occurring once was an anomaly, occurring several times still permitted other explanations, but occurring two hundred and forty-six times — across every variable of person and place and creature — meant the phenomenon had to be treated as something systematic. Not coincidence wearing a pattern. A pattern that coincidence could no longer plausibly explain.
"The same experience with everyone is not just a coincidence," Singhania said. "Which is why I came personally."
Arun leaned back slightly, and the shift in posture told Singhania that he had understood the weight behind the visit. A summons to the office meant routine. Singhania at his door in the evening meant something else.
"I need your help," Singhania said.
Arun looked at him steadily. "My help?"
He asked how he could contribute to what appeared to be a scientific problem. Singhania did not give him a complicated answer.
"I need two Vestiges alive inside the Horizon."
The silence that followed had a specific quality. Not shock — Arun was not someone who showed shock easily — but the particular stillness of someone recalibrating, placing an unexpected request against everything they knew about how things were supposed to work. Arun had spent years leading the Blue Veterans under one simple rule: if a Vestige reached human territory alive, something had gone wrong. Now Singhania was asking him to make sure two of them did exactly that.
"Two Vestiges," Arun said.
"Alive." Singhania let the word sit. "They must remain alive until they reach the Horizon. And they must be weak. I don't want stronger specimens."
Arun looked at him. "Why?"
"Because I need to control as many variables as possible."
Arun accepted that without pressing further. He asked why Singhania needed two rather than one. Singhania's answer was simple.
"One gives me an observation. Two give me something to compare."
The logic was clean and Arun followed it without difficulty. What it didn't do was make him comfortable. He asked whether the condition of keeping them alive was absolute — whether there was any flexibility in the mission parameters.
Singhania said, "Yes."
Arun looked at the stack of reports again. Two hundred and forty-six people had unknowingly become part of the same process without understanding it, and the number was still climbing. If the phenomenon kept expanding without anyone understanding the mechanism, humanity would eventually be dealing with something that had been operating beneath their awareness long enough to have become something they couldn't easily map. That mattered. It mattered enough to authorize something that felt unnatural.
"Okay," Arun said. "I will do this for you."
Singhania gave a brief acknowledgment — not effusive, just the recognition of one person who had asked for something necessary and another who had agreed to provide it. Singhania gave him only what was necessary for the operation. The rest of the experiment remained unexplained. Then he gathered the reports, and Samar followed him out. The door closed.
Arun stayed where he was. He looked at the place on the table where the stack had been and thought about the number — not the size of it, but the specific quality of it. Every one of those people had been standing near a dissolving Vestige without knowing that the moment would eventually become part of a pattern that reached Singhania's desk. None of them had chosen to be part of it. It had simply happened, and they had filed a report because they didn't know what else to do with something they couldn't explain, and now those reports were sitting in Singhania's files and Arun had just agreed to help him find out why.
He picked up his communicator and dialed.
The call connected quickly.
"Shogan."
"Sir."
"Take two or three of the new recruits," Arun said. "Southern Region. Gloom Forest."
A brief pause. "Understood. Objective?"
"Hollow Stags," Arun said. "Catch two of them alive. Bring them inside the Horizon."
The pause this time was longer.
"Alive?" Shogan said.
"Alive," Arun said. "Both of them. Dr. Singhania needs them."
Another pause, shorter. Whatever questions Shogan had, he recognized the kind of order that didn't come with a full explanation attached.
"Understood," he said.
The call ended.
Arun set the communicator down. He thought briefly about calling back — adding something, adjusting the parameters, doing something that would make this feel like less of a departure from every other order he had given. He didn't call back. The order was clear. Shogan was capable. Arun had made his decision.
He left it where it was.
---
Shogan gathered the team before the shift changed — three newly recruited Blue Veterans, selected for availability and physical readiness. He briefed them with the same economy of words Arun had used with him: Gloom Forest, Southern Region, Hollow Stags, two specimens, alive. He watched their faces as the last word landed and saw what he expected — the small involuntary recalibration of people whose training had oriented them entirely toward elimination and were now being handed a different objective without the instincts to match it.
He didn't explain more than the mission required.
They checked equipment. Restraints designed for Vestige containment — present in standard kit as protocol rather than expectation, used rarely enough that most members went entire careers without needing them. Non-lethal options that all of them had used in training and almost none of them had used in the field. The gear for a capture mission looked nearly identical to the gear for any other mission except in the single dimension that made all the difference.
They moved out toward the southern gate as the Cells Division continued its evening around them — people eating, resting, moving through corridors with no particular awareness of Gloom Forest or Hollow Stags or what two hundred and forty-six reports meant to the man who had spent the last hour reading them in Arun Pratap's room. The gate opened and Vespera received them the way it always received humans who left the Horizon's protection — without acknowledgment, without welcome.
The Southern Region stretched ahead. Somewhere beyond it was Gloom Forest.
Somewhere inside the forest were the Hollow Stags.
The team moved toward them carrying equipment designed for something they had rarely been asked to do.
Not kill.
Capture.
Alive.