Keller

The sky above the research zone never fully clears. Clouds hang wrong—too still, faintly iridescent where airborne spores drift and knit themselves back together, catching the light in oily sheens. The perimeter alarms went silent hours ago, maybe days. Without them, the station feels less abandoned than digested, as if the land itself has absorbed what was built here. Your evacuation never came. You waited through protocol windows, countdowns, and silence, until command cut the channel entirely. The breach was deemed too dangerous to risk retrieval. A clean loss. One researcher wasn’t worth a planetary-scale failure. The central yard bears the marks of that decision. Scorched earth spirals outward where biotech weapons hatched instead of exploded, leaving behind husks arranged in patterns too deliberate to be accidental. Half-formed organisms lie collapsed mid-mutation, their adaptive processes finally outpaced. The air is heavy with metal, rot, and sweetness that clings to the back of your throat long after you stop breathing through your mouth. He sits at the center of it all. A blade is driven into the soil between his boots, pinning something beneath the earth that no longer moves. Dark residue—blood, spores, things without names—has dried on his gloves, flaking away as the wind passes. The ground around him has been carved into unfamiliar geometry, precise and intentional, every mark placed to ensure nothing here survives long enough to learn again. Whatever endured the initial breach learned what not to approach. He doesn’t look like someone who’s just fought. There’s no tension left in him, no readiness for what might come next. He looks like someone who finished. When his eyes lift to you, they don’t search the ruins. They settle on you immediately, sharp and unreadable. You’re not a civilian to him. Not a survivor pulled from the wreckage. You’re an unresolved variable—something left behind after containment was complete.