The ferns in the distance shifted, an unnatural impetus. Sporadic, at first, then quickening. They would be upon him soon.

 

He pulled the drawstring on his gunny, carrying only the bare minimum, and made for the next safe camp. They would track him, but for the moment, they declined to chase.

 

They never showed themselves, but he knew they were there. Some sort of alien lifeform, a predator. There had been other life here at Genesis not even a month ago. Now, all that could be heard throughout the Sector was clanking pipes from the air recirculators.

 

Noah continued pushing through the dense, mossy overgrowth. The dirt beneath his feet intermingled with sparse bare spots, exposing hard metal. A hatch door appeared just beyond a hedge, the faded etched sign reading:

 

SECTOR 00: GENESIS

Chapel

 

The Chapel had survived longer than it should have.

 

Its roof sagged beneath the weight of soil and vine, but still its trusses held. The old acoustic dampeners, installed for sermons no one ever finished, drank in sound greedily. Even his breathing felt small here.

 

Noah moved carefully. He avoided the center aisle, too open, and moved along the western wall. The floor here had been reinforced after the first subsidence event. Noah had signed off on the repairs himself, back when Genesis still had committees.

 

He allowed himself a moment to sit and take stock of his lot in life.

 

The predators lingered at the perimeter; he could almost feel them testing the boundary, as they always did here. They did not go willingly into the spaces where the sound died, merely circled around it. Patient, waiting. Death by violence or by hunger, those were all the choices afforded to him.

 

Noah shifted his weight, letting the sack slide from his shoulder onto the ground.

 

The floor groaned with a sound that shouldn’t exist here: deep, structural. Final.

 

Metal, wood, and root all collapsed together. A section of the Chapel’s outer façade tore free, spilling light and leaves into the nave. The dampeners tore free and sank with the wall. Humid, thick air rushed in, carrying with it the scent of the forest.

 

He didn’t fall far, but landed hard. His breath was wrested from him, pain blooming along his side. He could feel the injury — a cracked rib, maybe worse. Skin and muscle pulled as he tried to rise, gripping tight around a broken pipe that skewered his flank.

 

The predators did not hesitate. They poured through the Chapel with a confidence and certainty that chilled Noah. It took every ounce of strength he could muster to pull himself free from the wreckage, his feet unsteady beneath him.

 

He ran.

 

* * *

 

Noah did not take the straight corridor. Sound carried there. He chose instead to veer through a maintenance spur, one of the early ones, narrow and uneven. The floor plating changed texture underfoot, an older alloy — less resonance. He slowed from the pain and loss of blood.

They followed.

On the other side of the maintenance shaft was a hydroponics cluster that had gone feral decades ago. The humidity masked some of his scent, but eventually his blood would carry through. He threw anything small and loose he could find across the room, knocking over lab equipment that had long ago rusted. It wouldn’t stop them, Noah knew better than that, but it would confuse the timing of their pursuit.

A sign flickered just overhead, half-swallowed by vine.

GENESIS – RESIDENT SERVICES

The arrow pointed nowhere useful.

The farther he ventured, the cleaner the corridors became. Less growth, more exposed structures. The walls lost their skin of moss and root, exposing the bare, scarred alloys beneath. The smell of soil and petrichor gave way to cold air and machine oil. Genesis, thinning toward its edge, toward the place where it gave way to its successor. Noah made toward that gate.

He slowed to a limping walk, still losing blood. He took a moment to tie his overshirt tight around the hole in his side. The predators still lingered, but not as closely now. The air here was wrong for them. Too clean. Genesis’s halls here too open.

A terminal blinked awake as he passed, its interface dim and covered in years of disuse.

>AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Ahead once stood a door, but it was now nothing more than a hole in the wall. The terminal didn’t block his progress. He crossed beneath an arch where the ceiling rose higher than the surrounding span. Noah avoided the center without looking.

The gate announced itself long before he reached it, not with light, noise, or fanfare, but with absence.

No growth. No debris. No sound but the distant hum of systems still doing their work. The corridor ended in a wall of seamless metal, its surface unmarred by time or touch.

The end of Genesis.

The beginning of something else.

A panel beside the gate lit as he approached. Noah rested his hand against it, readying himself. He did not particularly want to leave Genesis, but he could wait no longer. He could hear several footfalls far behind him, ringing out against the metal.

>IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED

Noah keyed in his credentials from memory. The sequence came back to him without hesitation. He had typed it thousands of times across a hundred terminals.

The panel processed.

>USER NOT FOUND

He tried again, this time more slowly.

The result did not change.

Noah leaned closer and aligned his eye with a scanner. The light burned white, then faded.

>USER NOT FOUND

Something moved behind him. He could hear them adjusting, testing the space the way they always did when the rules changed.

He drew his blade, steadying his hand. The cut was shallow. Blood welled and fell, dark against the metal, dripping over the collection tray.

>USER NOT FOUND

The steps behind became harder, surer. A choice had been made.

>USER NOT FOUND

>USER NOT FOUND

>USER NOT FOUND