Chapter Nine: Shadows Above, Roots Below

  The sky over Tartarus bled gold and ash, the dusk clouds veined with the bruised colors of war not yet fought. Rizer stood alone on the high cliff above the cratered training grounds, his pulse still steady from drills, but his mind screamed.

  Something had shifted. In the air. In the silence. In his bones.

  A comms officer sprinted up the steps, wide-eyed, pale. “Sir… We didn’t intercept this. It was sent, to you.”

  The holograph fizzed to life.

  A man stood at a podium in a dim Gaia-9 classroom, walls lined with scavenged textbooks, shattered chalkboards, and flickering light panels. He had the crisp stance of a soldier and the dead smile of someone long past salvation.

  “Hope,” the man began, voice calm, almost hypnotic, “is a lie we plant in dying soil.”

  Rizer stepped closer. Caleb Nox. Former systems engineer. Brilliant. Forgotten.

  Behind him, a child sobbed. The camera panned. Dozens of children, shoeless, bruised, trembling, sat on the floor as guards in mismatched armor stood by with shock batons.

  “I was once like you,” Nox whispered into the lens, leaning in. “I believed in rebuilding. In systems. In order. But Gaia-9… we’ve been sold a lie. Rebuilding for what? To become livestock again? I saw the truth in fire.”

  He held up a device. A tracking bracelet, its blinking light steady… then flatlined.

  The screen cut to static.

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  For a full ten seconds, nobody moved. Then Commander Arlow slammed his fist against the console. “He’s executing the educated, purging the next generation. He’s a god damn butcher.”

  “No,” Rizer whispered. “He’s baiting us.”

  Arlow turned. “You think he wants you to come?”

  “He knows I will.”

  But the tension only escalated.

  That same hour, a coded signal pinged from Earth, one of the few remaining underground districts still breathing through air-scrubbers and cracked solar lines. A name surfaced in the feed. Adelpha Rae.

  Rizer’s throat went dry. “Grandma?”

  Her last known location: Delta-37, South Equator tunnels. A rebel zone. Severed from central command. Active.

  “She’s alive?” Elias asked, stunned.

  Maybe.

  But what chilled Rizer wasn’t her survival, it was the symbol her unit painted at the site of a wiped Odryix scout nest:

  A paper plane. Twisting into roots. Inked in blood across a steel blast door.

  That night, debate erupted across Tartarus. Split factions. Some demanded they abandon Gaia-9. Others wanted immediate retaliation.

  “We need to strike while Nox is exposed,” said one rebel leader. “Decapitate the traitor and reclaim the colony.”

  “No,” Rizer countered. “We lose Gaia-9, we lose the future. We lose Earth, we lose our past. But Tartarus? This is where we become monsters they can’t kill.”

  And then the power died.

  Just.. dark.

  Every screen. Every light. Dead silence.

  A backup generator hummed to life thirty seconds later. But that was thirty seconds too long.

  When the lights returned, there was a body in the mess hall, face frozen in agony, eyes blackened, veins like spiderwebs crawling across his skin. Poisoned. Deliberate.

  A message carved into the metal table beside him with what looked like a bloodied fork:

  “One root poisons all.”

  Panic spiraled. Someone had breached Tartarus’ defenses from the inside.

  But before they could lock the base down, another signal blinked onto Rizer’s private console, direct link, untraceable. A child’s voice. Young. Shaky.

  “Tell them… he’s not alone. Caleb Nox has help. From Earth. They’ve turned. They’re—”

  Silence.

  Cut off.

  Rizer stepped back from the console, heart hammering. Elias gripped his wrist, voice barely a breath: “What if the roots we’re growing are already rotten?”

  Outside, the ground trembled. Subtle, but real.

  Not a quake.

  A drill.

  Someone was tunneling.

  From below.

  And Tartarus—fortress of survival—was no longer safe.