Soahn ducked beneath a sagging conduit, the light from his wrist-lamp slicing through the dark in narrow gold bands. Dust drifted like motes of code in the beam, catching for a moment before dissolving into shadow. The deeper he went, the stronger the signal—thin, persistent, a vibration that didn’t belong to any of their usual routes.
SEER-9's voice threaded through his thoughts, calm and measured. Energy irregularity detected. Organic interference—non-emotive.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Soahn murmured, stepping over a broken length of cable.
The passage opened without warning. One moment, concrete and decay; the next, a chamber blooming with iridescent light.
He froze.
A pool of coolant stretched across the floor like a pane of fractured glass, the liquid still enough to reflect the ceiling’s collapsed lattice. Along the cracks and pipes, something had taken root—a skin of luminous moss, delicate and alive, weaving through the steel as if claiming it. The glow was soft green with hints of silver, pulsing perceptibly, an organic heartbeat beneath industrial bones.
Soahn stepped carefully into ths space and crouched at the edge of the pool, his fingers hovering just above the surface. The light rippled toward him, reacting to his movement. It should have been impossible.
Growth cycle initiated, SEER-9 confirmed. Recommendation: sterilise.
He ignored it. Soahn had seen NuYu’s sterilisation reports before. Growth meant contamination, and contamination often meant cleansing. But this… this was survival.
He could relate.
He crouched beside the glow, unclipping a small multi-probe from his kit—a habit he’d picked up from Onyx, who swore by checking anomalies before touching them. Temperature steady. No volatile readings. Just warmth, faintly alive. The moss nearest his knees brightened as though sensing attention, its tiny filaments trembling with colour.
He smiled without meaning to. “You shouldn’t exist,” he whispered.
A voice behind him answered, quiet and precise. “And yet it does.”
Soahn startled, turning.
Rayne stood in the doorway, half-shrouded by shadow. The pale light from the moss painted shifting patterns across his face, turning him spectral—part reflection, part ghost.
Soahn’s voice caught in his throat before steadying. “You followed the signal too?”
Rayne nodded once, stepping closer, boots silent against the damp floor. The light sharpened with his movement, as if the chamber recognised him.
“It’s responding,” Soahn said softly.
Rayne tilted his head, eyes reflecting the biolight. “It's as if it remembers...”
The words made something unnameable weave through Soahn’s neural link—a tiny spark of emotion that shouldn’t have been possible. His heart rate spiked for a single, inexplicable moment before levelling out again.
He reached for his scanner to hide the shake in his hands. “Maybe. Or maybe it just likes company.”
Rayne didn’t reply. He only crouched beside the pool, gaze following the way the light danced across the liquid’s surface. For a while, neither of them spoke. The air smelled a little metallic, but underneath—impossibly—something green.
Soahn set his scanner aside. “If we stabilise the temperature, it might keep growing.”
Rayne looked up, meeting his eyes with that calm, unreadable stare. “Then we should keep it alive.”
Something in the way he said it stopped Soahn. There was no hesitation, no technical calculation, just a quiet certainty that felt achingly human. For a moment, Soahn wondered what lingered behind that stillness, what fragments of thought passed through Rayne’s mind when he looked at something living.
He wasn’t sure why it mattered so much, only that it did.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. We should.”
The hum of The Ghost Lines deepened around them, a low resonance that seemed to approve.
The chamber remembered them.
Each time Soahn returned, the moss flared brighter at the edge of his light, threads of silver-green climbing higher up the fractured walls. The Ghost Lines had always spoken with a kind of restless throb, but here the rhythm was slower and steadier, almost content.
He’d logged the site as a “coolant anomaly” in his maintenance notes. It was a deliberate lie. The Hollow had a habit of decontaminating anything they couldn’t classify.
Officially, the garden didn’t exist.
Rayne had started coming with him without being asked. He moved through the dark like part of the system, soundless, deliberate, almost reverent. Soahn didn’t question it. Their silence suited the place.
He adjusted the temperature regulator, watching the readout stabilise. The luminescence dimmed slightly, then bloomed again as the system balanced. The moss didn’t just react to light or heat—it resonated. Each adjustment, each note of The Ghost Lines’ hum seemed to coax it into movement.
Rayne stood beside him, eyes fixed on the luminous surface. “It’s growing faster.”
“Maybe it likes our music.”
Rayne glanced at him. “Our music?”
Soahn smiled. “Sound frequencies alter bioluminescence patterns. You of all people should appreciate that.”
Rayne tilted his head. “Show me.”
Soahn connected his portable speaker to an old relay port. A soft, experimental tone filled the chamber: one of Kairo’s unfinished mixes, stripped down to a skeleton beat. The moss responded instantly, filaments moving in sync.
Rayne’s reflection rippled across the pool. His mouth moved, barely audible. “It's listening.”
Something in Soahn’s chest skipped. His AI caught the spike immediately. Neural interference detected. Emotional index elevated.
“I’m fine,” he muttered under his breath.
Clarify: ‘fine.’
“Shush.”
Rayne had moved to the edge of the pool and dropped to a smooth crouch, his hand hovering over the light. The moss swayed toward him. The reaction was unmistakable, delicate tendrils reaching out as if drawn by recognition.
Soahn knelt opposite him, trying to capture the readings, but the data meant nothing. There was warmth here that his sensors couldn’t chart—an impossible pulse that wasn’t heat or code.
For a moment, their reflections met in the liquid: Rayne’s eyes lit with biolight, Soahn’s haloed by the flicker of his own readout.
“Does it hurt you?” Soahn asked quietly.
Rayne looked up. “No. It feels… familiar.”
His voice wasn’t quite steady.
SEER-9 murmured a note he ignored. He found himself watching the subtle tremor in Rayne’s fingers, the way his synthetic skin caught the glow like living marble. He shouldn’t have felt anything about that—not the ache of recognition, not the quiet beat beneath his ribs—but the feeling was there anyway, small and stubborn.
He forced his attention back to the console. “If we keep stabilising the humidity, it’ll stay healthy.”
Rayne rose, gaze still on the walls where light crept upward. “Then we should come back.”
Soahn nodded once, committing the reading to memory, though the numbers didn’t matter. What mattered was the sound: the uncanny melody the moss made when Rayne was near, like a note resonating through the quiet.
When they left, a halo lingered behind them, softer but still alive, painting the walls in slow, undulating light.
A low tremor moved through the metal bones of the tunnels, making the moss shiver in waves of light. Soahn noticed it the moment they entered the chamber. The rhythm was wrong. Too fast, too bright.
He crossed to the regulator, reading the incoming flow. The numbers scrolled upward like a countdown. “NuYu’s grid is pushing current through the lower network again,” he said, voice tightening. “They’re rerouting energy from the relay hubs.”
Rayne stood at the threshold, gaze fixed on the growing flare across the walls. The moss was brilliant now, luminous veins crawling toward the ceiling.
“Can we stop it?”
Soahn was already typing commands into his wrist display. “Maybe. If I can bypass the coolant feed—”
The surge hit before he finished.
The entire chamber blazed white, accompanied by a sound like thunder compressed into a heartbeat. Soahn threw up an arm against the glare, stumbling backward. The moss flared in an agony of colour, shivering in the damp air. Not dying, but burning.
“Rayne!”
He reached for the control board, but SEER-9's voice cut across his thoughts, suddenly sharp and clinical. Warning. Voltage critical. Evacuate.
“I can’t leave it.”
Override not recommended—
A movement broke through the blaze. Rayne stepped forward into the light.
“Rayne, don’t—”
But he was already there, pressing one hand to the wet metal of the conduit, grounding the current. The air exploded with the scent of ozone and heat. Sparks leapt through the liquid, dancing like fireworks before falling away.
For a breathless moment everything stopped. Then the glare began to fade, dimming from white to silver, from silver to soft green.
Soahn moved before thinking, dropping to his knees beside him and settling a hand on Rayne's shoudler. Smoke curled up from Rayne's sleeve; fine arcs of energy crackled up his arm like tiny forks of lightning. His expression was calm, distant, as if listening to something beyond hearing.
SEER-9 spoke again, quieter now. External emotional input detected. Confirm?
Soahn looked down at the man beside him—the muted glow still travelling through Rayne’s skin, the strange peace in his face—and hesitated.
Confirm?
He swallowed. “No anomaly.”
Logged.
Rayne opened his eyes, the faint whir of his overheated fans cutting through the quiet. His vents glowed dull red, skin still warm from the surge. “Did it survive?”
Soahn glanced at the walls. The moss still emanated light, softer but alive. It reflected off the coolant, trembling like something scared but slowly settling in the aftermath.
“It did,” he whispered, unable to keep the relief and ache of wonder out of his tone.
Rayne looked at him for a long time, as if weighing something unspoken. Then, quiet: “Good.”
The word landed heavy in the still air. The silence that followed wasn’t empty, but but full of residual charge, of everything Soahn couldn’t explain.
He realised his hand was still braced on Rayne’s shoulder. Slowly, he drew it back.
The light steadied, and with it, the tremor in Soahn’s chest.
As the heat faded and the silence gathered, he felt something subtle shift between them. A fragile thing that had survived the surge, and somehow, come back stronger.
Soahn sat against the wall, knees drawn up, his heart finally steadied enough to parse through what had just happened. The air was warm with leftover energy; tiny motes of dust drifted like starlight through the moss's glow.
Rayne crouched by the pool, turning one burnt piece of conduit over in his hand. The light from the moss played across his face in restless gradients—green, silver, then blue. It made him look almost alive.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Soahn said.
“You would have,” Rayne replied.
He wasn’t wrong.
SEER-9 cut in softly. Mild neural interference detected. Elevated emotion levels. Soahn dismissed the alert. “You could’ve shorted out your central drive.”
Rayne set the blackened metal aside. “Maybe. But it was worth it.”
The moss nearest them pulsed brighter, a soft wash of colour that passed over the walls like neon over glass. Soahn stared at it, caught between wonder and unease. “You ever think about the world trying to live, even where it shouldn't?”
Rayne tilted his head. “You mean like us. Growing where we shouldn’t?”
“Yes. Living because no one told us not to.”
A small pause, then: “Maybe that’s all life is.”
Soahn’s throat tightened at the simplicity of it. SEER-9 murmured—emotional distortion persists—but he tuned it out. All he wanted to hear was the quiet between them and the hiss of coolant below.
Rayne’s gaze moved over the moss again. “It’s beautiful.”
Soahn almost said so are you before the thought caught and burned away. “It’s unstable,” he said instead. “It could fade any time.”
Rayne’s mouth curved, just slightly. “Then we keep it alive for as long as we can.”
For a moment, the biolight softened around him, blooming gently where the energy had touched his skin. The reflection danced over Soahn’s hands, too, tracing their shapes until he couldn’t tell which of them was shining.
He felt it again then, that flicker of warmth, tender and entirely impossible. Not his. Not the AI’s. Something else.
And this time, he didn’t deny it.
Days slipped through the tunnels like low tide.
Above, the muffled sounds of the Hollow moved through the concrete — voices, footsteps, the distant clatter of scavenged tools — the thrum of people making lives in the dark. And deep below, the light continued to breathe.
Soahn kept returning, always alone at first. He’d calibrated the filters, cleared the air vents, built a small regulator to keep the temperature constant. When he logged the entry in the maintenance system, he hesitated over the final note, then typed:
GARDEN 01 — DO NOT RESET.
He never marked it complete.
The next time he came back, someone was already there.
Rayne stood at the pool’s edge, half-lit by the glow. The moss had crept higher, spilling across the cracked wall like a slow-motion bloom. He was still, hand outstretched, letting the light gather around his fingers.
“You said you wouldn’t touch the system,” Soahn said, voice quiet so it wouldn’t break the air.
Rayne didn’t look at him. “I didn’t. It just needed… a soft reset.”
“Ah.” Soahn joined him at the edge of the pool. “And what does that mean, exactly?”
Rayne turned his head then, eyes reflecting the green luminance. “Not deleting. Just reminding something that it can live again.”
The words settled deep. The hum of the chamber wrapped around them, low and warm. The surface rippled as their reflections met, a shimmer of human and synthetic, indistinguishable in the colour.
For a long while they said nothing. There was only the rhythm of the moss breathing, the faint cadence under the floor, and the sound of their own quiet existing.
When they finally left, the moss continued to bloom, casting a trail of light along the tunnel walls, like memory choosing to remain.