Chapter Six: The Orchard Bleeds
Sublevel B-6 Collapse Site – 2:13 a.m.
The first alarm didn't sound like a siren.
It sounded like a scream.
A low, mechanical wail, rippling through the flesh-woven halls of the Orchard, echoing from bone-caged chambers and through iron wombs.
It didn't alert anyone.
There was no one left alive.
It was a reflex.
The Orchard was in pain.
---
Mara ran.
Golden light still pulsed through her veins, crackling at her fingertips. Her hand, now fused with something other, left a trail of cauterized tissue wherever it touched the wall.
She was changing.
Faster now.
Every step came easier, every movement more precise. Her bones didn't creak. Her breath didn't catch. But her heart —
Her heart wasn't beating anymore.
She paused at a junction.
Looked down.
The clone — her not-self — lay twitching on the floor, skin sagging, lips wet with sap.
> "Why do I feel you in me?" it whispered.
"Am I still yours?"
Mara turned away.
She didn't need to answer.
The body would be dust in minutes.
---
Containment breached.
Subjects awakening.
Neuromesh compromised.
The words scrolled across the walls in scar-tissue script.
Doors hissed open.
Cages unfolded like forgotten mouths.
And what the scientists had stored — what they'd folded away — began to crawl free.
---
The Spindle-Men came first.
Once-human researchers twisted into spider-like husks, their heads split open and replaced with listening stalks. They moved by sound alone, clicking and skittering down the walls on limbs made of bone and surgical rods.
One of them passed within inches of Mara.
It didn't see her.
But it paused. Sniffed.
> "Version Nine," it rasped in a chorus of split throats.
"She has bled the Mother."
"Must rebind. Must reseed."
She tore open a panel beside her and plunged her glowing hand into it.
The corridor lit with fire.
The Spindle-Men burst into screaming cinders.
---
Further in, the Birthing Pits had cracked.
Mara didn't mean to look — but she did.
Rows of soft pods had ruptured. Each one contained a malformed life: arms on the inside, heads that grew inward, tongues like stalks reaching for nothing. They pulsed. Some tried to walk, despite no legs. Some sang.
All were failures.
A mural on the wall, done in dried blood, depicted Mara's silhouette.
Over and over and over again.
Nine versions. Nine attempts.
All of them crowned with roots.
All of them dead.
---
But Mara wasn't one of them.
She was the first to break the song.
And because she had, the Orchard was bleeding.
Everywhere she went, the walls sagged. The vines wilted. The hum dimmed.
The parasitic god inside this place was dying, and it knew it.
---
She reached the central relay — a vertical shaft of pulsing memory, where the Orchard's backups lived. DNA archives. Clone templates. Failed emotions.
It looked like a tree made of spines and glass.
And at the root of it, something human-shaped waited.
Mara approached slowly.
It was a man — or once had been.
His eyes were pinned open with thorns. Tubes ran from his mouth into the relay tree, feeding it data through his screams. His hands had fused with the console, fingers flayed and stretched into living wires.
> "Are you… Mara?" he gasped.
She nodded. "The last one."
He smiled with a broken jaw.
> "Then finish it. Kill me. Burn the tree."
> "End it before it… before it spreads."
She stepped closer.
But paused.
The screens lit up.
ORCHARD NODE UPLOAD COMPLETE.
TRANSMISSION: GLOBAL.
SEED HAS BEEN SHARED.
---
"No," she whispered.
The man wept.
"Too late," he said. "It's in the satellites. It's gone beyond. We're just the roots. The real orchard is in the sky now."
Mara screamed.
The golden light burst from her chest, tearing open the walls. The relay tree snapped, splinters of memory-code raining across the floor.
The man smiled as he died.
She left nothing but fire behind.
---
The escape shaft led upward.
Toward the surface.
The first real air she'd smelled in days — cold, pine-sweet, and sharp.
But as she reached the surface hatch and stepped into the woods…
She looked up.
And saw the stars were blinking.
No — not blinking.
Winking.
Like eyes.
And behind her, in the ruins of the Orchard, something bloomed.