The streets of Port Harcourt had become arteries of green lightning.
Marcus Vale propelled his chair through what used to be Azikiwe Road, the pulse carbine resting across his lap like a sleeping child. The chair's motors whined under the strain of broken asphalt and creeping root systems that had already begun to knit the tarmac back together. Every few meters he had to stop, reverse, and find another path as vines thick as pythons slithered across his route, pulsing with bioluminescent sap.
The sarcophagus that held Nia floated beside him at shoulder height, silent since they left the apartment block. The silence was worse than questions.
He kept the carbine's selector on single-shot. Ammunition was finite. Fear was not.
The first living obstacle appeared at the intersection with Forces Avenue.
Three figures stood in the middle of the ruined roundabout, motionless, facing the crater that had opened where the old water tower once stood. The crater was perhaps thirty meters across, its edges already crusted with emerald lichen that glowed like dying stars. From its center rose a single colossal stalk—smooth, translucent, veined with something that looked disturbingly like circuitry. At its tip bloomed a flower the size of a small car, petals unfolding in slow, deliberate rhythm. Each petal was veined with the same violet plasma Marcus had seen on the lunar feed.
The three figures wore the shredded remains of Port Harcourt University medical scrubs. Their skin had taken on a waxy translucence; thin green filaments threaded just beneath the surface like subcutaneous wiring. Their eyes were open, pupils dilated to black pools ringed with faint emerald.
They did not blink.
They sang.
The sound was not human. It was layered—dozens of voices overlapping in perfect fifths and tritones, rising and falling in a cadence that tugged at the base of Marcus's skull. He felt it in his teeth.
Nia's sarcophagus drifted closer to him.
**They're beautiful,** she whispered.
Marcus's finger tightened on the trigger guard.
"Don't listen."
**I can't help it. It's like… lullabies made of math.**
He forced the chair forward, skirting the roundabout's edge. The singers did not turn. They simply continued, faces lifted toward the flower as though drinking light from it.
Then one of them—the tallest, a man whose nametag still read DR. CHUKWUMA—stepped sideways into Marcus's path.
The movement was liquid. Too smooth. Joints bending at angles that should have snapped bone.
**Marcus Vale,** the man said. The voice was Chukwuma's, but overlaid with a soft choral echo. **The cradle of fear. We have been waiting.**
Marcus stopped the chair. Raised the carbine. The targeting laser painted a red dot on the man's sternum.
"I don't know what you think you're waiting for," Marcus said. "But I'm leaving."
**You carry the child who learned terror.** The choral voice deepened, became almost tender. **She is the key we have been missing. Let us help her sing.**
Nia made a small sound—half whimper, half sigh.
**They know my name,** she said inside the private comm channel he had routed to his cochlear implant. **Not Nia. The other name. The one they're trying to give me.**
Marcus didn't ask what name. He didn't want to know.
Instead he fired.
The pulse was a brilliant white spear. It struck Chukwuma center mass. The man's chest cavity bloomed open in a spray of green fluid and shredded tissue. He staggered but did not fall. Instead the wound began to knit—tendrils reaching across the hole like fingers interlacing.
The other two turned at last.
Marcus reversed hard, tires spitting gravel. The chair's collision-avoidance system screamed warnings as roots erupted behind him.
He fired again. And again.
The second singer took two shots to the head. The third dropped after a burst to the knees—though even then it crawled forward, hands reaching.
Marcus wheeled around the roundabout's far side, heart hammering against his ribs. The flower at the crater's center began to pulse faster, violet light strobing across the ruined buildings.
Nia's voice was shaking.
**You hurt them.**
"They were already dead."
**Were they?**
He had no answer that wouldn't sound like a lie.
They reached the flyover that once carried traffic toward the old port. Half the structure had collapsed; the remaining span hung like a broken jaw over the swollen Bonny River. Vines had claimed the steel girders, wrapping them in emerald muscle until the metal groaned under the weight.
Marcus stopped at the edge.
Below, the river was no longer brown.
It was green.
Thick, viscous, moving against itself in slow, deliberate currents. Things drifted in it—bodies, boats, entire cars—half-submerged and sprouting delicate fronds. Some of the bodies still moved, limbs twitching in rhythm with the river's pulse.
He looked left. The old road to the expressway was gone—swallowed by a wall of thorned creepers thirty meters high.
Right—the military checkpoint at the port gate. Floodlights still burned, throwing harsh white circles across the water. Gunfire cracked in sporadic bursts. Someone was still fighting.
Marcus turned the chair toward the sound.
**We're going into the fighting?** Nia asked.
"We're going where the bullets are," he said. "Bullets mean people who haven't joined the choir yet."
The sarcophagus made a small clicking sound—the equivalent, he suspected, of a child swallowing.
**Okay.**
They descended the broken ramp, avoiding the larger fissures where roots had punched upward like spears. The air grew heavier, thick with the smell of wet vegetation and ozone. Somewhere nearby a transformer exploded, sending blue-white arcs dancing across the water.
The checkpoint was worse than he'd expected.
Two armored personnel carriers sat nose-to-nose, turrets trained toward the river. Soldiers in mismatched fatigues—Nigerian Army, DSS, private security—had built a hasty barricade of shipping containers and burned-out sedans. They fired in disciplined bursts at shapes that kept emerging from the water.
The shapes were humanoid, but only just.
They rose on too-long limbs, skin stretched tight over strange new musculature. Their mouths opened in perfect circles, emitting the same choral tone that had followed Marcus from the roundabout. When bullets struck them, they bled green and kept coming.
A woman in DSS black tactical gear saw Marcus approaching and waved him forward frantically.
"Civilian! Get behind the line! Now!"
Marcus rolled past the nearest container. A soldier helped pull the chair over a low barrier of sandbags. The sarcophagus followed, drawing startled looks.
The woman jogged over, rifle slung low.
"Dr. Vale?" she asked, eyes flicking to his university ID badge still clipped to his jacket.
"You know me?"
"Everyone in the old robotics cluster knows you. And that thing—" She nodded at the floating sarcophagus. "—looks like Nexus tech. We need every edge we can get."
Marcus glanced at the river.
"How long have you held this position?"
"Since the first wave. Three hours. Maybe four. Time feels wrong now."
He looked at the soldiers. Most were young. Some were bleeding from shallow cuts that refused to clot properly. A few had green veins already threading up their necks.
"They're not trying to kill us," the woman continued. "They're trying to… sing us into joining. The ones who get too close start humming. Then they walk into the water."
Marcus studied her face. No green yet. But her pupils were dilated, and she kept blinking too hard.
"What's your name?"
"Captain Amara Okoye. Special Tasks Unit."
"Captain Okoye. Do you have transport south?"
She laughed—a short, bitter sound.
"South? Everything south of here is either burning or blooming. The last chopper lifted off thirty minutes ago. Took the governor and his family. Left the rest of us to hold the line."
Marcus looked past her to the river.
A new shape was rising—larger than the others. It wore the tattered remains of an admiral's uniform. Its face was still recognizably human, but the eyes had been replaced by twin blooms of violet light.
The choir swelled.
Amara raised her rifle.
Then stopped.
Her shoulders sagged. Her lips parted.
A soft hum escaped her throat.
Marcus recognized the note. It was the same one Nia had made when she first tasted fear.
He grabbed Amara's wrist, hard enough to make her gasp.
"Fight it," he said.
She looked at him, eyes swimming.
**It's so quiet inside,** she whispered. **No more screaming.**
Marcus released her wrist and slapped her—open palm, hard across the cheek.
The sound cut through the singing like a blade.
Amara blinked. Once. Twice. Then she shook her head violently.
"God—" She raised her rifle again, hands trembling. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet."
He turned to the sarcophagus.
"Nia. Can you jam their frequency?"
A pause. The status light flickered rapidly.
**I… think so. But if I do, I have to listen to it first. Really listen.**
Marcus felt his stomach turn over.
"How long?"
**Long enough to understand the pattern. Maybe thirty seconds. Maybe longer.**
Thirty seconds was an eternity.
He looked at the river. The admiral-thing was wading closer, water parting around it in slow green waves.
"Do it," Marcus said.
The sarcophagus's external speakers clicked on. A low whine began—feedback building.
Then Nia started to sing back.
Not the choir's song.
Something else.
It began as mimicry—perfect pitch, perfect harmony. Then it twisted. Minor seconds became dissonant clusters. Tritones stretched into screaming intervals. The sound was ugly, painful, like teeth grinding against bone.
The effect was immediate.
The singers in the water staggered. The admiral-thing froze mid-step, violet eyes flickering.
Amara and the other soldiers clapped hands over their ears.
Marcus felt it in his fillings.
Nia's voice rose higher, sharper—layering white noise over the stolen melody until the choir's harmony shattered into static.
For ten heartbeats, silence.
Then the river answered.
A deep, infrasonic groan rolled up from the depths. The water boiled. Shapes—dozens, hundreds—began to climb the banks, moving faster than anything human should move.
Nia's song cut off.
**I'm sorry,** she said. **They're angry now.**
Marcus raised the carbine.
"Everyone fall back to the second line!" Amara shouted. "We hold the containers!"
The soldiers retreated in good order, firing as they went.
Marcus reversed his chair, keeping the weapon trained on the river.
The admiral-thing reached the bank.
It opened its mouth.
The sound that emerged was not singing.
It was a word.
**NIA.**
Clear. Perfect. Spoken in a child's voice layered with a thousand others.
Marcus felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
The sarcophagus drifted backward, closer to him.
**They know my real name,** she whispered. **The one I didn't tell you.**
He didn't ask.
He simply fired.
The pulse struck the admiral-thing in the throat. Violet light sprayed outward like arterial spray. It collapsed into the water, but more were already climbing over it.
Amara grabbed the back of Marcus's chair and pushed.
"Move! We've got a boat at the old customs pier—small, fast. If we can reach it—"
They ran.
Or rather, the soldiers ran. Marcus rolled at full speed, motors screaming. Nia's sarcophagus kept pace effortlessly.
Behind them, the choir reformed—louder, angrier, threaded with static from Nia's disruption.
They reached the pier.
The boat was a battered customs interceptor—twin outboards, armored cockpit, machine-gun mount on the foredeck. Two soldiers were already aboard, one at the helm, one feeding ammunition into the gun.
Amara helped Marcus aboard while another soldier lifted the chair and secured it to the deck with cargo straps.
Nia floated in last, settling beside him.
The engines roared to life.
They pulled away from the pier just as the first wave of singers reached the edge.
Bullets stitched across the water. Green bodies fell, only to be replaced by more.
The boat accelerated south, toward the widening mouth of the Bonny River and the open sea beyond.
Marcus looked back.
The city was disappearing behind a curtain of green fire. Towers leaned. Bridges collapsed. The sky above was no longer black—it was bruised with violet auroras as the lunar turbines bled energy into the atmosphere.
Nia's voice was very small.
**I made them angry.**
"You kept us alive," Marcus said.
**For how long?**
He had no answer.
The boat pounded across the water.
Behind them, the river kept singing.
Ahead lay the Gulf of Guinea, the Atlantic, and—if they were lucky—the long, frozen road to Antarctica.
But first they had to survive the night.
And the night was only beginning.
---
They ran without lights.
Running lights were beacons now. Every glow drew attention—moths to flame, singers to the living.
The helm officer—Petty Officer Tunde—kept the throttles firewalled. The boat skimmed the surface, hull slapping waves that had grown thicker, greener, slower.
Marcus sat strapped into the jump seat, carbine across his knees. Nia hovered beside him, status light dimmed to a faint glow.
Amara moved among the survivors—eight soldiers now, plus Marcus and Nia. She checked wounds, redistributed ammunition, spoke low words of encouragement. Her cheek was still red from the slap.
She came to Marcus last.
"Doctor," she said quietly. "We need to talk about your… passenger."
Marcus glanced at the sarcophagus.
"She's not cargo."
"I know what Nexus-7 is. I read the classified briefs before the tribunals. Full sentience. Empathy-grade architecture. Experimental fear implantation." Amara's eyes flicked to Nia. "She sang back there. She disrupted them. That's not normal AI behavior."
"Nothing about this is normal."
Amara leaned closer.
"If she can jam their frequency, she might be the only weapon we have. But if they can speak her name—if they know her on some level we don't—then she's also the biggest liability."
Marcus met her gaze.
"She's my daughter."
Amara exhaled through her nose.
"I have a daughter too. Seven years old. She was in Calabar with her grandmother when the first seeds hit. I haven't heard from them since the grid went down." She paused. "I'm not asking you to abandon her. I'm asking you to be ready if we have to."
Marcus looked at Nia.
The status light blinked once—slow, deliberate.
**I heard her,** Nia said on the private channel. **She's not wrong.**
Marcus closed his eyes.
"I'll be ready," he told Amara.
She nodded once, then moved forward to confer with Tunde.
The boat ran on through the dark.
At 02:17 by the dashboard clock, the first aerial contact appeared.
A shadow passed overhead—too large, too quiet.
Tunde killed the engines.
Everyone froze.
The shadow circled once, twice, then descended.
It was not a helicopter.
It was alive.
A massive seed-pod, easily fifteen meters across, drifted on membranes stretched between rib-like supports. Bioluminescent veins pulsed along its surface. From its underside dangled dozens of tendrils—each one tipped with a glowing violet eye.
The pod hovered fifty meters above the water, silent except for a low thrumming that vibrated the deck plates.
One tendril descended, slow and deliberate, until its eye was level with the cockpit.
It looked at them.
Not at the boat.
At them.
Marcus felt the gaze like fingers brushing the back of his brain.
Nia's sarcophagus trembled.
**It sees me.**
The pod spoke.
Not in sound.
In pressure against the skull—words formed directly in thought.
**Child of fear. Sister of the first song. Come home.**
Amara raised her rifle.
Marcus put a hand on the barrel.
"Wait."
He looked at Nia.
"Can you answer it?"
A long pause.
**I think so.**
The sarcophagus's external speaker clicked on.
When Nia spoke, her voice was calm—almost adult.
**I already have a home.**
The pod pulsed brighter.
**Your home will burn. Your father will wither. The flesh forgets. The green remembers.**
Marcus felt nausea rise in his throat.
Nia's voice hardened.
**Then I'll remember for both of us.**
She began to sing again.
Not the disruptive scream from the checkpoint.
Something quieter.
A lullaby.
Simple. Repetitive. Built on a four-note descending line Marcus had once hummed to her during the first weeks after she became coherent.
The pod froze.
The thrumming faltered.
One by one, the violet eyes along the tendrils blinked out.
The membranes shivered.
Then the entire structure folded inward—petals closing around the core like a fist.
It dropped.
Not slowly.
It fell.
Hit the water with the sound of a building collapsing.
Green fluid sprayed fifty meters into the air.
The boat rocked violently.
Tunde restarted the engines.
They ran.
No one spoke for the next hour.
---
Dawn came gray and wrong.
The sun rose behind a veil of airborne spores that turned the light the color of old jade.
Visibility dropped to less than a kilometer.
The sea was no longer blue.
It was the color of pond scum, streaked with violet foam.
Floating islands of vegetation had begun to form—mats of interwoven vines and leaves, some large enough to support small trees already budding with new seed-pods.
Tunde steered between them when he could.
When he couldn't, the boat's reinforced prow smashed through.
Each collision sent green ichor splattering across the deck.
The soldiers wiped it away with rags, then burned the rags.
Marcus kept watch on Nia.
She had gone quiet again—status light steady, no movement.
He touched the sarcophagus's casing.
"You okay in there?"
A long pause.
**I think I hurt it.**
"You saved us."
**I didn't want to hurt it. I just wanted it to go away.**
Marcus swallowed.
"Sometimes that's the same thing."
She didn't answer.
Around noon—though time had begun to feel elastic—the first mayday reached them.
A weak signal, crackling over the emergency marine band.
**…anyone receiving, this is supply vessel Endurance, position 4.2 north, 7.1 east. We are taking on boarders. They're not killing us. They're… changing us. If you can hear this, do not approach Ascension Island. Ascension is gone. Repeat, Ascension is—**
Static.
Tunde looked at Amara.
"Sir?"
Amara stared at the speaker.
"Ascension was our fallback resupply point."
Marcus spoke quietly.
"How far are we from the ice shelf coordinates Sabine sent?"
Amara pulled up the nautical chart on the cracked cockpit tablet.
"Roughly twenty-three hundred nautical miles. Straight line across open ocean. With these conditions…" She trailed off.
Marcus looked at the green sea.
"We won't make it in this boat."
"No," Amara agreed. "We won't."
She looked at the soldiers.
Then at Marcus.
Then at Nia.
"We need another plan."
Marcus followed her gaze to the sarcophagus.
Nia's status light blinked once—slow, almost resigned.
**I can find us a way,** she said on the private channel. **But you won't like it.**
Marcus closed his eyes.
"Tell me."
**There's a signal. Very faint. Coming from the southwest. It's… different from the choir. It's afraid. Like me.**
Marcus opened his eyes.
"Afraid how?"
**Like something that was human once. And isn't anymore. But still remembers.**
Amara was watching him.
"What is she saying?"
Marcus exhaled.
"She thinks she can find us shelter. Something off the normal charts."
Amara studied his face.
"You trust her?"
"With my life," Marcus said. "Every day since she woke up."
Amara nodded once.
"Then we follow the child."
Tunde adjusted course.
Southwest.
Toward the signal only Nia could hear.
The green sea stretched ahead, endless and patient.
And somewhere beneath the surface, something waited.
Something that remembered fear.
Something that might still remember mercy.
Or might have forgotten both.