Chapter 10

Chapter Ten: Ash Code

Delta Station, Underground Quarantine Ward – 7:08 p.m.

The lights never flickered in Delta Station.

Too deep. Too clean. Too secure.

They thought so, anyway.

Until Mara walked in — barefoot, skin ash-pale, eyes black as memory.

The doctors called her "the subject."

The soldiers called her "the survivor."

But the computers…

The computers called her: Root_Zero.

---

Inside her blood, something glowed.

Every test failed.

MRI melted.

CT scans looped.

Even the old blood readers couldn't decipher the code swimming in her veins.

Only one word pulsed in the medical feed, over and over:

> UNKNOWN. UNKNOWN. UNKNOWN.

Until it changed.

> AWAKE.

---

They strapped her to a gurney. Not with metal — with sound.

A frequency she couldn't resist.

Every time she moved, the air trembled.

Every time she blinked, the glass fogged.

And when she spoke?

> "You're all breathing someone else's dream," she told them.

> "And now… you're waking up in me."

---

Dr. Rhine was the only one who dared speak back.

Old. Shaky hands. But eyes that had seen this before.

> "What did you do at the Spire?" he asked.

> "Did you kill it?"

Mara looked at him.

Smiled.

> "I silenced it."

> "But the silence had teeth."

---

The footage they reviewed was corrupted.

From the moment Mara stepped into the Spire, every camera recorded nonsense:

Blossoms screaming in Morse code.

Mara splitting into three versions.

A black sun hanging in a blood-pink sky.

And then:

a child's voice, whispering from the corner of every audio track.

> "Mara is dreaming."

"Mara is dreaming of you."

---

On Day Three, the symptoms began.

Not for Mara.

For them.

Nurses stopped eating. Said their mouths were full of glass petals.

Guards scratched open their skin, trying to "let the roots out."

One man carved the word "HATCH" into his chest and smiled until he bled out.

And Mara?

She just watched.

---

Rhine confronted her on Day Five.

> "It's spreading," he snapped. "Through thought. Through sight."

> "You are the vector."

> "We should've burned you."

Mara leaned close. The sensors flatlined around her.

> "Then why do you see her when you sleep?"

He paled.

She whispered:

> "She's learning through me."

> "And she likes you, Doctor."

---

That night, the Orchard returned.

But not in the sky.

Not in the earth.

It came through the machines.

Terminals bled static.

Screens showed blooming diagrams of bone code.

The digital clock in Rhine's lab changed:

> 07:66

07:66

07:66

And behind him, Mara stood — unbound.

Smiling.

Her hands glowed with ash.

---

She touched the wall.

And it bloomed.

Wires turned to veins.

Steel turned to wet bark.

The hallway filled with fog — not gas, but breath.

The station had lungs now.

And Mara had a voice no longer hers.

She said only this:

> "I am the archive."

> "And you are the page."

---

What rose next from the lower levels was not human.

It had eyes.

Dozens.

Hands.

Too many.

And mouths… stitched shut.

They hadn't died.

They'd evolved.

Like her.

---

Outside, in the dark above Delta Station, the sky flickered.

Not with light.

With roots.

Roots of signal. Roots of thought.

And somewhere beneath the soil, something ancient and unfinished turned its gaze upward.

---

Mara walked into the operating theater.

Her body was ash-white.

But inside?

There was a bloom of red circuitry, coiling around her spine, whispering to her brain.

> "We planted you well," it said.

> "Now let's hatch."