Side Chapter: Roots and Betrayal

  Gaia-9: The Traitor's Hand

  The corridors of Gaia-9 once pulsed with quiet purpose, soft lights, recycled air tinged with hydroponic citrus, and voices that carried the weight of hope. Humanity’s last civilized breath lived here, teachers retaught algebra, farmers reimagined soil, and children played in artificial sunlight beneath reinforced domes. Then came the breach.

  Dr. Kael Moran had been hailed as a genius, a war-time savior. Now, he was a ghost walking among the damned. No one saw the moment he changed, not even his protégé, Dr. Lenya Rell. But something in that Dominion artifact lodged within Gaia-9’s geothermal well... awakened something. Not in the artifact. In him.

  He began isolating DNA strands, running sequences that didn’t match any Earth record. Psionic markers, fragments of ancient code embedded in a select few bloodlines. Then came the voices. Not dreams. Direct transmissions. Calculated, seductive. Promises of shared dominion. He responded.

  When Garter received Kael’s signal, he didn’t see a man. He saw a doorway.

  The night of the attack, Kael initiated Protocol Red, a full shutdown of Ark-3, Gaia-9’s defence grid. Lights fell. Doors unlatched. In the silence, the sky tore open. Dominion beasts swarmed like locusts. Lenya watched friends reduced to ash. Only 20,000 made it off-world or into bunkers.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She fled with encrypted files, and a scar Kael left on her neck, a gift for saying no.

  Weeks later, a signal was sent to Tartarus. Fragmented. But it arrived.

  "They made him a mirror. We thought we saw genius, turns out, it was just the reflection of something older... and monstrous."

  Earth: Roots Beneath Ruin

  Beneath what remained of District 7 in tunnels warped from the last tremors, Rootkeeper Hale adjusted his hearing aid. Static again. Damn Dominion waves. A child walked past him holding a salvaged toaster like it was treasure.

  The District 7 Root Network held 400,000 souls, barely a spark from the fire they once were. But they were alive. And they were learning. Hydroponics grew kale and fungus. Rain catchers provided drinking water. Language was often signed now. Words were dangerous. Sound could kill.

  But they had Mila Green. 23, a physicist, daughter of a postman, and now the Resistance’s lead tech. She cracked a signal scrambler to cloak tracker bracelets. Dominion scouts passed over without noticing.

  There were whispers in the dark.

  That somewhere out there, in the stars or the black, children had survived.

  Children with fire in their blood.

  The Grandparents: Echoes of the Tree

  It wasn’t supposed to land. The pod was supposed to disintegrate. But by some mix of luck, angle, and divine spite, the old man’s final repairs held. Rizer’s grandfather woke in a ravine near an old quarry, his wife beside him, bleeding but alive.

  They were found by tunnel scouts a day later. Since then, he’d built heat-sinks into old wristbands. His wife sat with children, telling stories of Kiera, of the Sky Tree that burned across the clouds, and how every branch meant someone survived.

  She didn’t know her grandsons lived.

  Yet.

  Some roots never die. They burrow deeper. Waiting to rise.