You find the painting on day twenty-seven.

You're not looking for art. You're looking for a faster route between the greenhouse and the warehouse — the scrambler's battery drains faster in the cold, and the longer you're on the streets, the more power you burn. The gallery is a shortcut. A long, glass-ceilinged corridor connecting two commercial blocks, lined with screens and displays and, in one alcove near the south entrance, actual paintings. Physical paint on physical canvas. The kind of thing that feels anachronistic in a city where every surface is a screen.

You're walking past it. You're walking past it the way you walk past everything — head down, stride steady, coveralls zipped to the chin, HENG on the pocket. You're nobody. You're going to work. There's nothing to see.

Then you see it.

The painting is wide. Two metres, maybe more. Oil on canvas — you can smell it, the old chemical richness of linseed and pigment, something handmade in a world of fabrication. It shows a coastline. Not a coastline you recognise — the rocks are wrong, the water is the wrong shade of blue, the sky has a quality of light that doesn't exist anywhere you've ever been. It's a coast from somewhere else. Somewhere lost.

But the feeling is right. The painting captures something that has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with absence. The way the light falls on empty sand. The way the water reaches for the shore and doesn't quite get there.

You stop walking.

You don't mean to. Your feet just — stop. And you're standing in the corridor with your hands in your pockets and your jaw set and something hot pressing behind your eyes that you refuse to let out. Not here. Not in public. Not when you're HENG from maintenance and HENG from maintenance doesn't cry in front of paintings.

But whoever made this — whoever dragged a brush across canvas and laid down this precise shade of blue and this exact quality of light — they knew. They knew what it feels like to miss a place you can't go back to. They painted the ache. The specific, physical ache of looking at a horizon and knowing your horizon is somewhere else.

Your throat tightens. You blink hard. Once, twice. Your eyes sting and your vision blurs for a second and you clench your jaw until it passes. It mostly passes.

You stand there too long. You know you're standing too long. People walk past. Nobody looks. You make yourself move before someone does.

When you leave, your face is dry but your chest isn't. Something shifted in there. Something you've been keeping locked since day one, since the asphalt, since you started counting days and building walls and telling yourself that survival is enough.

It's not enough.

You want to go home.

---

You write to him that night.

Not a letter you can send. There's no address, no postal service, no interdimensional mail carrier who delivers to fiancés in other timelines. But you write it anyway, in your steno, in the sixth notebook, in handwriting so small you'd need a magnifying glass to read it even if you could read the shorthand.

Day twenty-seven. I saw a painting today. Made me think of the coast near your mother's house, the one we drove to in the rain because you forgot to check the weather. You said the rain made it better. I said you were insane. You were right.

I'm eating. I have a job. I have boots. I'm learning things I can't explain in any language we share. My body does things I don't understand and I'm scared of it every time and I use it anyway because the alternative is dying in a tunnel under a city that doesn't know my name.

I'm coming home. I don't know how. I don't know when. But I'm coming home.

Please don't stop waiting.

You close the notebook. You press your palms against the cover. The composite material is cold under your fingers.

Twenty-seven days. You've been counting since you landed. Scratch marks on the inside of your notebook cover — not on a wall, never on a wall, walls belong to nests and nests get abandoned. The count travels with you.

Twenty-seven days since you woke up on asphalt in your pyjamas. Twenty-seven days since your last meal at home, your last shower with hot water, your last night sleeping in a bed with clean sheets and a ceiling that didn't pulse with blue emergency light.

Twenty-seven days since you heard his voice.

You lie in the dead section of the greenhouse with your boots laced and your scanner humming and you think about the way he laughs — too loud, always too loud, the kind of laugh that makes strangers turn their heads in restaurants. You think about his hands when he cooks, the way he holds a knife like he's afraid of it even though he's been cooking since he was twelve. You think about the ring you're not wearing because you didn't wear it to bed and you weren't in bed long enough to put it on before the universe grabbed you by the spine and threw you twenty years into someone else's future.

You don't let yourself feel it again. Not like the gallery. Not like the painting and the burning behind your eyes and the jaw you had to clench to keep yourself together. Here, in the dark, with the plants breathing around you and the city humming above, you just miss him. Quietly. Completely. The way you miss a limb.

Day twenty-seven.

---

The Wanderer finds you on day twenty-nine.

Not in the metro this time. On the surface. Broad daylight. Intersection of two commercial streets in the northern edge of District 7, forty minutes into your walk to the warehouse. Your scanner goes red and the sky — the actual sky — tears.

You've read about this. Deep-space rifts. Weak points in the dimensional barrier where Wanderers push through from wherever they come from. The city has entire military infrastructure built around it. Containment zones. Response teams. The Hunters Association deploys within minutes.

You don't have minutes.

The Wanderer drops out of the rift like something being born — wrong, violent, too large for the space it's entering. This one is bigger than the tunnel creature. Much bigger. The size of a vehicle, angular, its geometry shifting as it moves. It lands on the intersection and the pavement cracks under its weight and the people on the street start running — organised, practiced, the particular choreography of civilians who've done evacuation drills.

You should run too. You should disappear into the crowd, use the scrambler, become another face in the exodus. The Hunters will handle this. That's what they're for.

The Wanderer turns toward a woman who didn't run fast enough. She's on the ground — tripped, fell, her wrist-screen shattered. The creature's head orients on her with the mechanical precision of something that hunts by signal, by heat, by the particular frequency of human fear.

You don't run.

Your body decides for you. Again.

This shift is the quietest yet. No muscle rewriting. No structural cold. No vision change. Instead, something in you — something electromagnetic, something that lives in the space between your cells rather than inside them — reaches out and wraps around you like a second skin.

You disappear.

Not visually. You're still standing in the intersection, still solid, still wearing HENG's coveralls and stolen boots. But electronically — to scanners, to cameras, to the Wanderer's signal-hunting senses — you're gone. Your body has matched the electromagnetic frequency of the city itself. You're broadcasting on the same wavelength as the traffic lights and the transit system and the wall-screens, and to anything that perceives the world through energy signatures, you've become background noise.

The Wanderer loses you. Its head swivels, searching for the signal that was there a second ago. It can't find you. You're standing three metres away and it can't find you because you're not you anymore — you're the city. You're the hum.

You grab the woman. Pull her up. She can't see what you did — she sees a maintenance worker in coveralls hauling her to her feet, not a human radio tower impersonating a traffic grid. You push her toward the crowd, toward the evacuation route, toward the Hunters who are already arriving.

The Wanderer swings toward the movement. Not toward you — toward the woman. You're still invisible to it. But the effort of maintaining the camouflage while moving, while touching someone, while your heart is hammering at a rate that wants to break through the electromagnetic mask — it's like holding your breath underwater. You can feel the edges fraying. Your cells are burning through something you can't name, faster than the Wanderer fight, faster than the chase.

The Hunters arrive. Three of them, armed, coordinated, moving with the fluid precision of people who've done this a hundred times. The Wanderer turns toward them. Toward a real fight, with real opponents, on terms it understands.

You let go.

The camouflage drops and the world slams back into you — colour, sound, signal, your own body suddenly visible to every system in a half-kilometre radius. Your scanner screams. Your vision whites out. You stagger sideways, hit a wall, slide down it.

The Hunters engage the Wanderer. The crowd is gone. Nobody saw you. Nobody saw a maintenance worker in coveralls go invisible in the middle of an intersection and save a woman's life.

Your nose is bleeding. Both nostrils. The blood is bright red against HENG's dark blue coveralls and you can taste copper in the back of your throat and your hands are shaking so hard you can't unclip your scanner from your waistband.

You make it four blocks before you collapse. An alley. Narrow, dark, the kind of place the city has a thousand of. You curl up behind a dumpster and your body shuts down — not sleep, not unconsciousness, something more fundamental. A system restart. A hard reboot of cells that pushed too far past their operating parameters and need to remember what baseline feels like.

---

Three days.

You lose three days this time.

The alley. The dumpster. The cold that seeps into your bones because your body can't spare the energy to regulate temperature. You eat the emergency rations from your pack and they're not enough. Nothing is enough. Your body burned through three days of calories in ninety seconds of pretending to be a traffic signal.

On day thirty-two, you crawl back to the greenhouse. Your boots drag on the pavement. Your coveralls are stiff with dried blood from your nose. You look like a wounded animal and you feel like one and the only thing keeping you vertical is the knowledge that your nest has three exits and food growing in the walls.

You make it. You eat everything. You sleep for fourteen hours.

When you wake up, you add another line to the notebook:

Don't. Again. Unless dying. Or unless someone else is.

You underline it once. You stare at the first rule — the one from the Wanderer fight. Don't. Again. Unless dying. You added a condition. You didn't mean to. But the woman on the ground, the creature turning toward her, the choice that wasn't a choice —

You're not the kind of person who watches.

You've never been the kind of person who watches.

That's going to be a problem.

---

Zayne opens the file at 11:47 PM.

He shouldn't have a file. Not this file. Not a separate, encrypted, password-protected directory on his personal server with a name that means nothing — "Project Theta-7" — and contents that mean everything.

The data comes from MC. Not directly — MC doesn't know. But MC's Aether Core broadcasts passively, and the residual signature from the stabilisation event carries traces of the polymorph cells that caused it. When MC visits Akso Hospital for her routine checkups, the sensors pick up both signals: MC's baseline, and the ghost of someone else's biology embedded in it.

Zayne has been separating the two for weeks. Filtering. Isolating. Building a profile of cells he's never examined, from a body he's never touched, belonging to a woman whose name he doesn't know.

Her metabolic rate is extraordinary. He's mapped it across twenty-three data points — each one corresponding to a fluctuation in MC's residual signature, each one telling a story about what the polymorph's body was doing at that moment. The spike on day twelve: massive cellular restructuring, energy expenditure equivalent to running two marathons simultaneously. The pattern on day twenty-nine: electromagnetic reconfiguration, her entire nervous system temporarily retuning to match the city's frequency grid.

He knows what she did. He doesn't know her name, but he knows what she did. He knows the Wanderer fight cost her two days. He knows the electromagnetic shift cost her three. He knows that her baseline metabolic rate has increased by seventeen percent since the first data point, which means her body is adapting — not just in the moment, but permanently. Each shift leaves her slightly different. Slightly further from whatever she started as.

This is fascinating.

This is medically fascinating.

He saves the latest data point. Closes the analysis window. Opens the encryption settings and adds a second password layer. Then he sits in his office, lights off, and looks at the screen.

MC's file is on the main server. Properly logged. Properly documented. Accessible to any authorised physician at Akso Hospital. Everything transparent. Everything by the book.

This file is not on the main server. This file is not logged. This file is not accessible to anyone but him.

He tells himself it's because the data is incomplete. Preliminary. Not ready for peer review. Publishing unverified findings would be irresponsible. A good scientist protects his data until it's robust enough to withstand scrutiny.

That's true.

He tells himself it's because the subject is sensitive. An unidentified Evol with unprecedented cellular adaptivity, connected to the Aether Core's most significant stabilisation event in recorded history. This data in the wrong hands could be weaponised. A responsible physician protects his patients — even the ones who aren't his patients yet.

That's also true.

He doesn't tell himself the third thing. The thing about the metabolic data at 3 AM, when the hospital is quiet and the screen glow is the only light and he sits in his chair and reads her cellular signature the way someone else might read a letter. The way her metabolism drops when she sleeps — steady, slow, the rhythm of a body that has finally stopped running. The way it spikes when she wakes — sharp, alert, a system that goes from zero to operational in seconds. He knows her sleep pattern. He knows her caloric intake. He knows the exact moment her body begins to fail after a shift, the precise threshold where adaptation becomes self-destruction.

He knows her better than he knows most of his patients.

She is not his patient.

He closes the laptop. He does not delete the file. He locks it, and he locks the lock, and he tells himself: research.

Research.

He almost believes it.