Chapter 24 – The Sound of Whales

  High on the Rainbow Mountain Ridge – Drift 16

  ?

  The chilled air smelled like petrichor and static.

  Cold soaked through his clothes. Through everything.

  “Wake up, kid,” Remulus barked. “This storm’s turning our mountain path into a river.”

  He tried to get up. Nothing moved. Legs refused, arms limp and heavy as soaked cloth.

  At some point in the night, he’d curled into himself, tried to warm his limbs against his chest.

  It hadn’t helped.

  Now, his hands were numb.

  “Come on,” Iliana said, already rolling up her sleeping bag.

  Still dark.

  Their shadows fractured by flashes of lightning that lit the pass like a broken strobe.

  One arm. Then the next.

  A thousand ants crawled up his skin as sensation returned. He forced himself upright, letting the rain hit his head and shoulders. Cold. So cold.

  And he wondered why he wasn’t happy, after all that heat.

  “Here.” Iliana offered a hand.

  He took it, stood slowly, and waited for the spinning to settle.

  Then bent to pack, sodden gear, everything heavy and reluctant.

  Remulus’s headlamp cast a narrow beam across the ridge. In its pale arc, Archivist’s Folly shifted uneasily behind him, as if nervous.

  “Come on, you big piece of rusted metal,” David muttered, strapping the bags to its side. “You can’t get any worse than you already are.”

  “Will the runners climb on wet quartz?” Iliana asked.

  She looked—

  Healed.

  Divinely healed of everything that had ailed her.

  Rain ran down her face like a blessing. She breathed it in like something revered, like she’d been waiting to be rinsed clean.

  “We’ll see,” Remulus replied, unexpectedly gentle. No bark. No bite.

  They started up, slow, deliberate steps along the glistening ledge.

  If he slipped now—

  “Where is she?”

  The words slipped out before he realized he’d spoken.

  Serendipity wasn’t there.

  No sarcastic comment.

  No quiet presence at the rear.

  “Up ahead,” Remulus said. “She moved during the night.”

  He looked up, forward, and saw only darkness.

  Then lightning cracked the sky, and for a moment, a silhouette stood sharp against the light.

  A heart-shaped tail swept from side to side.

  Not a dream.

  His stomach flipped, relief colliding with something stranger.

  “What is she?”

  Again, the words left before he could stop them.

  Remulus scoffed.

  “I don’t know,” Iliana said quietly. “But I believe she’s a friend. For now. She’s leading us.”

  “I have no data on such a species,” he uttered. “How is this possible?” Gaps in his vault were as many as grains of sand in the desert he crossed. He was, after all, only at 0.01 %, but for a new species to be missing it could only mean... No. She was something else. She had to be.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree, kid,” Remulus muttered. “I knew she was trouble the moment I saw her.”

  “You did not,” Iliana said, frowning.

  Her helmet was gone, scarf loose, hair damp with rain, like she’d peeled off everything between herself and the storm.

  “You look well,” he said. Couldn’t stop it.

  “Yes, water!” Iliana laughed, her eyes wide. She seemed the least disturbed by the new situation. “Maybe it’s a… what do you call it, a malformation,” she added, still catching her breath.

  “Did that seem like a malformation to you?” Remulus asked flatly.

  “It seemed like a miracle,” she answered before he could. “We should be thanking her.”

  “She doesn’t seem like she wants to be thanked,” David uttered, adjusting the load of his pack.

  “I don’t know,” Remulus said. “She feels… dangerous. And that feline, it keeps following her. When I went ahead before, it didn’t even budge. It’s only following her.”

  “We’ve met before,” Serendipity said, stepping out of the darkness and moving into the open. “The Felidae and I.”

  Everyone froze, waiting, watching like she might detonate or disappear.

  “What do you mean?” David managed to get out. “What...?” His voice came out dry, unsure.

  “A couple of drifts ago,” she said, calm but distant. “I was hunting for a silver dart. Had a trumpet-nose skinner with me, and this Felidae attacked us. Twice, actually. First, it killed the skinner. The second time... we fought. And she lost.”

  She leapt onto a nearby rock, silhouetted against the roiling sky, unhidden, unafraid.

  The way she moved, like she’d ceased pretending to be smaller, was dangerous. A little theatrical, perhaps. A touch terrifying, if he was honest.

  Almost made him laugh.

  It was like she wanted them to see what she was. In full force. No weapons but her secret.

  “I figure she feels like she owes me,” Serendipity added. “But I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”

  She dropped down lightly, boots hitting the wet ground. Then shifted her weight, back and forth, gaze lowered. For a moment, she looked like a little girl.

  “That’s fucked up,” Remulus muttered. “Seriously. You couldn’t have mentioned this before I've spent countless night drifts worrying about it?”

  “I could have,” she said, smiling. “If I’d known how to bring it up.”

  “Like that new tail of yours?”

  A long beat. Too long.

  Two lightning strikes split the sky, one after another, followed by a low, bone-deep rumble.

  “It’s not new for me,” she said at last. The smile she gave was too wide, so wide it must’ve hurt.

  They stared at her. David, most of all.

  She shifted again. Nervous.

  Waiting for something. Maybe permission. Maybe grace. She was scared, he realised. Of them. And no longer only for them. And for the first time, he thought she looked unraveled.

  No longer hiding behind sarcasm.

  Just the girl underneath, hopeful and tired and aching to belong.

  Just like him.

  Just like all of them.

  He walked forward and reached out his hand. “Thank you,” he managed, quietly and much, much too late. He pulled his hand back, unsure what he wanted to do with it. “You saved my life.”

  She swallowed. Looked past him, then back again. “Yeah… of course,” she said, plastering the brightest smile he’d ever seen across her face.

  He didn’t know much. But he knew he’d carry that smile with him, all the way to the darkest depths of the Library. He held his breath, just enough to save the moment in his vault. His very secret vault.

  “All right,” Remulus said at last. “Tail or no tail, we gotta keep moving. This storm’s here to stay, and we’ve got a long climb ahead.”

  There it was. The approval she’d been waiting for.

  He smiled at her scared, frowning face, and she returned it. Just a fraction.

  But enough.

  She would keep going. Keep guiding them.

  The climb turned hard. Then harder. Then impossibly impossible.

  Rocks slid under slick boots.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Footing vanished. But he didn’t fall again. He hoped his feet remembered the sensation of the ground disappearing from beneath them and were as scared as he was. He hoped he didn’t want her to have to reveal yet another part of herself, just to save his life. He hoped, if only a little, that he had learned his lesson.

  The runners ran out of charge beneath the heavy cloud cover, and they were forced to leave them behind, hoisting the gear on their own backs.

  Every step drained something else. Physically, he felt depleted in a way he’d never been before. Emotionally, he’d stopped trying to think and just climbed.

  The mountain never stopped rising.

  And the storm never stopped screaming.

  One drift.

  Two.

  Five.

  He couldn’t tell anymore.

  Downpour eased into light drizzle.

  Biting cold gave way to a clammy, miserable humidity.

  Then, finally, the suns broke through.

  They had reached the top. Not a peak, a plateau. Iridescent sediment gave way to rainbow sand underneath their boots.

  Shellkrats occasionally stirred below, leaving slight spirals in their wake.

  “This is it,” Serendipity said. She looked like something half-drowned, clothes soaked, skin glistening, her dark blue outfit now black with rain and spattered with fine pink dust. Her tail, coiled low, was hovering slightly above the ground. “This is as far as anyone’s ever mapped.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, huffing, dropping his backpack with a loud thud and himself next to it.

  “The electromagnetic field here is too strong. No ship can enter it. Not near it. Not above. Even satellites can’t pierce it. Whatever’s beyond this—” She motioned to the shifting horizon. “We don’t know. And beyond it: Dead Monk Valley,” she added. “Where Variant 3 is probably still dripping on a tree somewhere.”

  “Dripping on a… tree?” The confusion slipped out before he could check it.

  “I thought it was a flower or something?”

  She laughed—bright and sudden, like the sun finally rising after the storm. “Variant 3 is a resin. It seeps from a tree that only grows here. Probably because of the magnetic interference. But no one really knows.”

  They made camp near the edge of the plateau and collapsed into rest as soon as their bellies were full and wounds tended. No energy left for chatter or shared memories. Just sleep—heavy and dreamless.

  Rest and hope.

  He was so close. So very close. Where once, the Variant was just a word on his screen, now it was almost within reach. He would have liked to tell her, his sister, that he was here. That there might be a way to save her. If only he could find it and get it to Aurelion. If it would save the old Librarian. If they would bend the rules, just this once, just for his sister, just because he was so young. He didn’t need much, just a few sols more. He’d do it now if his brain were mature enough to link to the library. If only he were older...

  In the morning, the ground beneath his aching body hummed.

  He startled awake, pulled something in his neck trying to sit up, and found everyone standing still, watching.

  The plateau had become crowded. Shellkrats. Thousands of them. Covered the plateau in shifting, living spirals. Some burrowed. Others crawled in circles, their trails overlapping like a breathing pattern engraved in red-shaded sand.

  He wasn’t sure when they’d arrived, whether he’d slept through the first waves, or whether they’d waited for dawn.

  “One by one,” Remulus said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “They came one by one until I lost count.” He remained motionless, hands hanging loose at his sides, gun discarded near his water canister.

  Their shells gleamed in the rising light, violet, rose, bone-white, like wrinkled parchment balls discarded on the floor. They vibrated softly, releasing a murmur like a sigh. Almost artificial. Like the hiss of a door sealing. They stretched across the ridge and beyond, covering the ground between their camp and the faraway valley.

  He’d never seen a gathering like this.

  Never read about it either.

  “No data?” Serendipity asked, suddenly at his side.

  “None.”

  And he wasn’t sure what unsettled him more—The quietness or the certainty that it meant something he couldn’t understand. And none of them knew what.

  “Why didn’t you wake anyone?” Iliana asked. She looked better. Rested. Her color was back.

  “These guys are peaceful, right?” Remulus said. “Didn’t feel necessary.”

  “Maybe we’re intruding on their breeding grounds?” Iliana asked, already packing.

  She moved carefully around a few that didn’t seem to mind.

  “Maybe,” Serendipity said, though she seemed unsure. She moved between them easily, like she’d done it a hundred times, tiptoeing through their spiral paths, leaping over one, sidestepping another, until she found a patch of clear sand where she could stand without touching any. “In any case, I don’t think they mean harm,” she said, picking one up and holding it in her palm. The shellkrat's delicate legs, hidden underneath the round shell, grazed her skin as it shifted, its shell gleaming in the dim light. Serendipity watched it closely as it exuded a fine, shimmering dust. "They feed on the minerals in the sand," she explained, "sifting through it methodically, leaving trails behind." She smiled, reminiscing. "I’ve played with them since I was a child."

  She crouched, watching them quiver like white teeth poking through red sand.

  “But I’ve never seen this many.” Her voice dropped, reverent. She placed the shellkrat down and watched it burrow deeper. “And the hum... It’s mesmerizing. Coming from so many.”

  “Don’t know about mesmerizing,” Remulus muttered, nearly stepping on one. “I hear something, sure, but it could just be wind scraping the rock.”

  “You don’t hear that?” Iliana turned to face him fully. “It’s like... hmm.” She hesitated, massaging her jaw, a habit she picked up the night of the campfire and hadn’t shaken. “They sound like the ocean mammals on SulSul. Have you heard of echolocation?”

  He nodded. “Of course. Earth had something similar. You mean whales, right? Whales used echolocation,” he added quietly. “And bats.”

  “Right. I don’t know what whales actually sounded like,” Iliana said, her voice tender, thoughtful. “But this reminds me of that. Like echolocation underwater. Only… not as loud. Clearer. Softer. More like your B1 musical note.”

  David wasn’t sure what he heard or felt. His ears seemed useless. But something landed in his chest somehow. A low, pulsing resonance, gentle and deep. He searched his Vault, feeling the familiarity tug at the edges of his memory. It reminded him of something aquatic, yes. And it seemed to match the sound of whales underwater. Not exactly the sound, but the vibration.

  “I don’t hear any whales,” Remulus muttered. “Can we go now? They probably came to get away from the storm.”

  “To hide down the slope?” Iliana muttered back.

  They left the singing crustaceans behind and continued on, following Serendipity and Holland’s map.

  “How was the resin discovered if this area isn’t mapped?” he asked, adjusting the weight of his overstuffed pack. “You said last night you didn’t know what was out there.”

  Most of his supplies were jammed into the oversized backpack Hayam had given him. The rest he’d stashed in a tree near their summit camp. Even so, under 1.3 gravity, the thing was trying to crush him into the ground.

  He dragged his feet across the dry terrain, every step heavier than the last.

  So close.

  Too close.

  His mind was crawling with anxiety.

  “It’s not mapped, but it’s not untraveled either,” Serendipity called from the front. “Plenty of people used to come here.”

  He picked up the pace to reach her. Managed it. Barely.

  “And they don’t anymore?”

  “Some do,” she said, slowing to let him keep pace. “But it’s rare. The area isn’t exactly… encouraged. It’s not advertised. Locals know it exists, but no one makes maps.”

  “Why not?” He was already breathing too hard.

  “The Dead Monk Valley?” She arched a brow at him. Waited.

  “Yeah, the—oooh.” He startled. “Why do they call it that?”

  “I’m not sure. Something about early settlements. Monks. Dead monks. I just know people avoid it. Even here, it’s barely spoken of.”

  “That sounds about right,” Remulus muttered behind them.

  He’d lost contact with Dice since they started crossing the plateau, and he was extra moody.

  “I hope this doesn’t mean more danger for any of you,” he said, meaning it.

  “This trip’s already been cruel to everyone,” he added, dropping his voice, “especially you.”

  “I’m sorry you had to reveal your—”

  His eyes lowered behind her, where her tail shifted in step with her stride. Thick as his arm, the heart-shaped tip curved like a blade, textured with matte violet scales. He swallowed tightly, his mind racing with unanswered questions. Where had she come from, this girl with secrets woven into her very being? And what mysteries still lay hidden in her origins that defied the logic of his archives? And what would the library do to acquire such data?

  She looked dangerous now. Even without that blue blade in her hand.

  “Your… tail,” he finished.

  Serendipity sighed but didn’t look at him. She fixed her eyes on the horizon and the constant cover of bruised clouds.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” she said at last. “Sometimes that reason is David falling off a cliff.”

  He was supposed to laugh, he could tell. But at the look on her face… proud and worn and a little sad, he didn’t know how to answer that.

  So he stayed quiet.

  And tried not to ask.

  Tried.

  Still, curiosity flared again. What was it? What was she? Was she born with it? Implanted?

  There were no records. No data.

  None.

  “DAVID!”

  Iliana’s voice rang out from behind.

  “I can feel you fretting all the way back here. Just ask her already before you give me a headache!”

  “Did you start perceiving thoughts too?” Remulus called from the middle of the group.

  “Not yet,” she warned through gritted teeth. “But I’m getting close. And David thinks as loud as a propulsion engine.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered, cheeks heating.

  Serendipity sighed again, then glanced his way, a look he wished she hadn’t spared. His face was definitely red now.

  “You can ask,” she said.

  But he didn’t get the chance.

  The flat plain fractured ahead, into uneven ledges and sharp, sudden drops. Deep gullies split the terrain into rugged terraces. Colored sediment kept the illusion of rainbow mountains, green and rust layered like painted opal.

  In the distance, the ground dropped away entirely.

  A vast, twisting canyon opened beneath them.

  Dead Monk Valley.

  Curving trenches descended into shadow. Storm clouds were finally pulling back, letting soft light spear through and touch the stone. The light shimmered on the cliffs like cascading tongues of fire.

  He stopped walking.

  Couldn’t help it.

  Couldn’t breathe. His skin warmed instantly in the light, prickling his skin. He’d forgotten just how cold he had been, and now that warmth seeped back in, it was hard to ignore his wet clothes and blue fingertips.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Iliana said, stopping next to him and bringing him out of his trance.

  “Is this it?” Remulus asked, squinting. “I don’t see any trees.”

  “From Holland’s map, I think we’ve got another drift or so,” Serendipity said, consulting the worn paper. “But yeah. This is the valley.”

  “Great. Let’s get the damn thing and get the hell out,” Remulus muttered. “Those shellkrats are back.”

  He pointed at the slope ahead.

  A few dozen shellkrats were sliding down the slope.

  They walked in silence for the next few hours. Neither he nor Serendipity seemed to mind. She stayed focused on the map, often rubbing her sternum when she believed no one was looking. From the few glimpses he caught, the route ahead proved a straight shot.

  The farther they went, the more the shellkrats came.

  From high above, left and right, narrow water-carved channels fed into the canyon floor, bringing more of the creatures. Some crawled. Some scurried. Some dragged themselves like they’d been crawling forever.

  And they didn’t stop.

  Dozens became hundreds.

  Hundreds became more.

  Until the entire valley floor was moving.

  Each shellkrat kept a precise distance from the others, like buttons on an ancient console, spaced in quiet equilibrium. Just enough room to shift and turn. Just enough room to hum.

  He wasn’t afraid.

  Not exactly.

  But something in him twisted. Quiet and low.

  The valley narrowed ahead into a gap. Wide enough for their group to pass shoulder to shoulder.

  And for the shellkrats to follow.

  No one spoke.

  No one dared.

  He didn’t know if they were afraid to disturb the creatures or the moment.

  Or both.

  He looked behind, and for the first time, with his slowly returning vision, he caught a glimpse of what was following them

  The Felidae. Standing tall at the top of the ridge behind them. Long, forked shadows keeping her company.

  Watching.

  ?