The orchard always spoke, but never in whispers.
On Elysara Prime, things did not rustle as they shivered. The vines, engineered to taste pheromones in the air, rippled like a living tide across Caer's upper terraces. Each frond glistened with dew-thick oils, their undersides tattooed with glowing sugar-veins. Orchids as wide as his chest hung in silence, opening when they pleased, not when pruned.
But today, they whispered.
Caer Avenya stood in bare feet, mud sucking between his toes, as he watched the vines recoil from something unseen. He hadn't heard the wind change. There was no drone overhead. Yet the whisper traveled faster than fire through the blossom-line—a chain reaction of leaves curling, petals paling, roots shriveling inward like worms touched by salt.
His hand twitched. The pruning blade at his hip remained sheathed, but his fingers flexed out of habit.
He stepped onto the mulch path with the grace of an animal, avoiding the spores rising in anxious pulses from the dirt. The orchard was nervous. That was new.
A gray beetle, no larger than his thumb, skittered across a sun-veined fruit. It hissed and folded in on itself before it died. Its corpse bubbled slightly.
Caer exhaled slowly. "No frost. No toxin."
He followed the distortion deeper into the vineyard basin, where the tree they called the Sensory Vine stood. It was the only living organism left from the pre-clan period, its bark threaded with titanium bones, its roots deeper than the valley's foundation. A living instrument, old and stubborn.
Today, it hummed.
A note—a low vibration in the base of Caer's teeth. He moved past the half-blooming thornplums and velvet-leaf skelters, slipping through the final wall of bio-reed canopy. The air smelled different here. Sour. Electric.
And then he saw her.
The child lay curled in the roots of the Sensory Vine, as if dropped from a careless god's hand. Mud caked her bare feet. Her knees were scraped raw. Long, damp hair, dark and tangled, clung to her cheeks and the bark beneath her. Her skin was light—not pale, not olive, but incomplete, as if the pigment hadn't finished printing.
But what drew Caer's breath short was the way the tree moved around her.
Its roots—thick as arms—had curved toward her body. Not wrapped, not constraining. Reaching. As if shielding her from something unseen.
She twitched in her sleep. The bark bloomed where her fingers brushed it—petals unfurling that should not have existed. Colors Caer hadn't seen since before the Clan Wars. Petals the shade of blood before clotting. The orchard was not capable of this.
And then, she exhaled.
The entire hillside moaned.
Birds—not real, but the drone-birds that mimicked their long-extinct cousins—lifted from every tree and scattered. A hum pulsed through the vineyard floor. Caer nearly dropped to a crouch, expecting something to rise from beneath the soil.
But it passed.
Silence again, thick as syrup.
He approached her cautiously. His training scanned for traps even when his mind didn't ask for it: No wires. No bait. No scent-lure. No pheromone mist. No skin-etched clan mark.
Just a child.
He crouched. Touched her neck. Pulse. Warm. No burns. No visible augmentations.
But... her DNA. He didn't have to test it to know. Something about the orchard's reaction made it clear.
This girl didn't belong to any clan.
She didn't belong to this moon.
And that meant one thing.
She was dangerous.
Caer rose, the blade still untouched at his hip. He looked down at her, calculating. Could he move her? Could he afford to? Could he just walk away?
The whispering had stopped.
The orchard was watching.
She weighed less than she should have.
Caer lifted her gently, cradling the child's frame against his shoulder, and immediately felt a dissonance in his muscle memory. Her bones were too light, her breathing too quiet. And though unconscious, her fingers twitched with rhythmic pulses—as if counting something he couldn't see.
He walked carefully, adjusting for the soil's elasticity. The orchard floor was responsive today, damp with responsive root-nets. The vines leaned in as he passed, reacting not to him, but to her. Their tendrils brushed her ankles like moth wings, cautious but curious.
He didn't speak aloud. There was no point. The orchard remembered sounds.
His cottage sat at the southern edge of the basin, half-swallowed by living bark. It was grown, not built—its walls spongy and veined, reinforced with fungal mycelium Caer cultured by hand. The door was a membrane that peeled away at his touch.
Inside, the temperature shifted—cooler, oxygen-thick. An artificial sun burned soft in the ceiling-dome.
Caer laid the child on the padded bench beneath the grafting basin. The scanner above hadn't worked in seven years, but he still kept it polished. She twitched once, lips parting slightly. Her skin shimmered—barely, but undeniably. Like a thin layer of something organic lived atop it.
He exhaled through his nose.
Protocol Red-13:
Report anomaly to the Genetic Tribunal within six hours.
Secure subject in isolation.
Initiate bio-lockdown of contaminated environment.
If contamination is irreparable—burn.
The words came unbidden. From deep in his spine.
He moved to the cabinet, unlocking a drawer of preserved diagnostics. Swabs. Vintage DNA wands. A neural stim-set—primitive, but it would have to do. He drew blood with a sterilized thorn-tip and let it bead on the sensor pad.
The pad shivered.
He stared at it. It wasn't meant to react. The old systems weren't even powered.
But it glowed faintly, pulsing once.
"…Nope," he muttered. "Not possible."
He ran another test. This time with a saline wash, hoping to dilute whatever exotic signature the blood carried. The pad pulsed again. This time brighter. Then fizzled and sparked out.
Caer leaned against the wall, arms folded. His breath came slower now. Controlled. But beneath the control, something shifted in him.
A memory.
Training room. Metal walls. Voices in unison:
> "Report all bio-deviants. All seeds unsanctioned are poison. All flesh unlicensed is rot."
A hand on his shoulder. His commander's voice:
"And if they look like children, soldier?"
"Children rot fastest, sir."
His jaw clenched.
He looked at the girl again.
No. Not this one.
He stepped away from the bench and knelt at the floor. There was a loose panel under the root tapestry. Peeling it back, he reached into the earth-storage and drew out a small, dust-covered capsule.
An old drive. Military issue.
He hadn't plugged it in for fifteen years.
He did now.
The scanner lit up with a faint, flickering interface. The orchard's node barely interfaced anymore, but this port still responded to hardline data. The drive loaded.
AUDIO LOG: CAER A07-DELTA
"If you're listening to this, it means you broke code."
"Means you found something. Something you're not supposed to."
"Don't report it."
"Don't trust the clans."
"They're not the same anymore. Hell, neither are we."
"If it looks like a child… protect it."
Caer sat still for a long time.
Then he moved.
He picked her up again and carried her through the back corridor, past the fermentation tank, past the preserved seeds of extinct tea-hybrids. Down to the root-cellar—cool, dark, lined with preserved mycelium mesh.
He laid her on a raised leafbed, adjusted the humidity dial manually, and set the interior locks.
No signal could leave this room. Not even the orchard could hear.
He sat beside her, silent.
Her eyelids fluttered once. Her lips moved.
And then, in a voice no louder than falling dust, she spoke:
"…bloom."
"…bloom."
It wasn't a plea.
It wasn't even quite speech. It was as if her lips had merely caught a wind that had been waiting to escape her chest since before she was born. The syllable hovered in the damp cellar air like mist.
Caer froze.
The humidity dropped five degrees. His grafting wall, a bank of stacked roots and nutrient-threaded moss, twitched. He looked up sharply.
Then—movement.
From above. The orchard groaned. A deep, rolling flex that vibrated through the soles of his boots. The house structure—part wood, part nerve-root—sagged, shifting, responding. Leaves outside rasped as if in sudden wind. His fermentation vat cracked audibly upstairs.
He stood up fast, his back hitting a lamp vine. The child had gone still again, lips parted, chest rising with slow breaths.
Caer climbed from the cellar like a man expecting gunfire.
He passed into the central room of the cottage and stopped cold.
The window.
Every petal on every tree outside had opened—fully, all at once. Midnight orchids, day-thorn sunbuds, even the glassleaf vines that only bloomed during lunar eclipses—everything stood in full, impossible bloom.
That wasn't all.
The petals were wrong. Their symmetry too perfect. Their colors: bleeding across unnatural spectrums. Leaves quivered in spiraling patterns. The soil itself shimmered like dew-drenched ink.
The orchard wasn't in bloom.
It was in ritual.
Caer slammed the shutter down.
This was biofeedback on a level not even Miren had theorized. He gripped the edge of the table, breathing shallowly. What the hell had he brought into his orchard?
His orchard…
He bolted out the back.
He needed to see the Sensory Vine again.
The orchard greeted him with silence—but a dense, unsettling kind. Like the calm in a cathedral that had just witnessed heresy. The canopy overhead was dimmed by twisting leaves, yet the ground was glowing faintly beneath his boots.
He reached the tree.
The roots had extended. Not just a meter or two—ten, fifteen, curling outward like veins from a heart. The bark had grown glossy. The petals that ringed its sensory node now shimmered in hexagonal layers, as if mimicking insect eyes.
He bent closer. His own breath steamed visibly. Heat waves rolled from the base.
And there—beneath a cluster of nodules—was a birthmark.
A shape in the bark he had never seen before.
It was not random.
Three twisting lines—spirals—curled around a seed-like core. Etched deep. Alive with iridescent color.
Caer stumbled back, hand at his blade, breath shallow.
He'd seen that symbol once before.
During the war.
On a data-fragment from the pre-terraform age. One that had been destroyed. Erased from all clan archives. A symbol forbidden by the Genome Tribunal.
It had a name.
"The Orchard of Bloom."
Not a place.
Not a tree.
Not even an event.
A person.
A myth wrapped in prophecy: the being whose presence could awaken the dormant DNA of Elysara itself—the backup code embedded in the moon's first growth algorithms. A catalyst. A biological omega.
Caer turned back toward his house, moving faster now.
Inside the cellar, the child hadn't moved.
He stood in the doorway, watching her chest rise, fall. Her fingers curled faintly. She murmured something—just a breath. No words. Her skin gleamed faintly in the dark.
Not artificial.
Not infected.
Something else entirely.
He stepped toward her. Raised the scanner wand again. The military-grade one. Plugged it into the emergency port. Set it to raw sequence analysis. No buffers. No translation.
Let the genome speak for itself.
It began to scroll.
He watched for familiar markers: clan signatures, mutation flags, splicing markers, or proprietary strands. He saw none.
Instead:
DNA FORMAT: UNKNOWN SEQUENCE LENGTH: INVALID ROOT SIGNATURE: ARCHIVE-ORIGIN (EARTH) TRAIT ENCODING: NULL – NULL – ACTIVE LIFE PATTERN: ORCH-BLOOM
He stared.
The machine stuttered. Tried again.
LIFE PATTERN: ORCH-BLOOM
The code wasn't just rare. It wasn't just forgotten.
It was extinct.
Erased three centuries ago.
And yet, here she was. Breathing. Blooming.
He shut off the scanner.
He shut off the lights.
He sat on the floor, back against the damp wall of his cellar.
There would be no rest tonight.
Outside, the petals stayed open.
Waiting.
It began as a hum.
Low, bone-deep. Not from the cellar. Not from the orchard. It came from beneath them both—from a place Caer hadn't thought about in years. A place he'd buried.
He stood.
The child hadn't moved, but her pulse was steady. The light from the ceiling filament made her skin glisten like biowax. For a moment, he considered leaving her—but he didn't.
He carried her.
Up through the layers of vine-wrapped corridors, through the back of the cottage, past the root-drum where he fermented signal moss, and out the northwest exit—where the orchard ended and the stone began.
There, hidden behind a veil of native ferns, was the vault.
No one on Elysara had working nodes anymore. The clans had long since stopped using hardlines. But Caer was old-fashioned. He kept one powered, buried deep inside a geothermal well, behind a hundred meters of silicate and fail-leaf plating.
It hadn't made a sound in ten years.
Tonight, it called him by name.
The ferns parted easily. The rocks beneath his boots were slick with condensation. A series of hand-seals let him in through the stone door, hidden behind old camouflage vines. He activated the generator crank, muscle-powered, and opened the inner hatch.
Cold air breathed out like a ghost.
Inside: black walls. Shelves of backup nutrient gel. Hardened drives. Memory spores in containment glass. And in the center, like a rusting heart, the data-node.
A physical relay. Wired into the bones of the old military network. A relic.
Its light pulsed softly now—yellow-orange, blinking in uneven rhythm. As if struggling to breathe.
He laid the girl down on a cot in the corner.
Walked to the node.
Pressed his palm to the core plate.
The machine vibrated, then hissed.
A crackling voice broke the stillness:
> "Caer Avenya. Node echo authorized. Voice replay—three of six. Year mark: 07. Sent under Red Silence Protocol."
Static. Then:
> "If you're here, you found it. Or she did."
Caer flinched. The voice was his own. Younger. Sharper. Laced with a kind of defiance he hadn't tasted in years.
> "This message was recorded for when the Orchard bloomed. Yeah, that orchard. The one the clans say never existed. The one I helped destroy."
More static. Then:
> "You'll want to run. You'll want to report her. You'll think about putting a blade through her heart because the war made you into something too obedient to trust yourself."
> "Don't."
> "They lied to us. The prophecy, the DNA cleansing, the extinction events—they weren't about protecting the moon. They were about control. About keeping the real seed from waking up."
> "She's not a weapon."
> "She's the reset."
Caer stared at the node.
Then glanced back at the child.
The words in his memory stung harder than the voice in the room. Words from commanders. From clan leaders. From tribunal briefings that had turned his squad into glorified janitors for genetic murder.
The girl shifted in her sleep.
The air in the vault changed.
He turned back to the node. It was still glowing. A new signal now. One he hadn't programmed.
A pulse.
Binary stream—raw, ancient Earth code. So old it didn't match Elysara's translation threads. The relay spat it onto the screen:
> Orch-Bloom-Root—awake.
> Orch-Bloom-Root—begin propagation.
> Seed-Prime—status: stabilized.
Caer stared at the final line.
> Guardian imprint—locked: CAER A07.
His blood ran cold.
The orchard had chosen him.
Not by mistake.
Not by chance.
He stepped back, breath shallow, as the walls began to glow softly with chlorophyll light—seeped in from the orchard above.
And then a second voice echoed through the room.
Not the node.
Not the speakers.
From the cot.
A voice like wet leaves whispering in moonlight.
> "I dreamed of this place," the girl said, eyes still shut. "The orchard brought me here."
Caer turned to her.
Her eyes opened.
They were no color he'd seen before.
Her eyes.
They weren't glowing. There was no unnatural shimmer, no artificial lens. And yet, Caer felt something pull in his chest the moment he met them. Not magnetism. Not memory. Something deeper.
Recognition.
As if somewhere, long ago—before his cloning, before his deployment, before war had carved him into a tool—he had seen this girl. Not her face. Not her shape. But the presence of her.
The girl blinked once, slowly. She sat up with the quiet grace of an animal, not groggy from sleep but moving as if she'd only closed her eyes to wait.
"You said 'bloom,'" Caer said. His voice felt strange in the stillness.
She tilted her head slightly. "Did I?"
"Yes."
"I didn't mean to."
"Who are you?"
"I… don't know yet."
Outside the vault, the orchard moaned.
Caer's breath caught.
He was already moving. He flicked off the node—unplugged the battery coil, silenced the inner lights, sealed the data feed. A full lockout. There couldn't be any sign it had been active.
"Get up," he said, sharper than intended.
The girl obeyed without question. He scooped the old scanner pad and a satchel of roots and slung them over one shoulder. Then he paused.
That sound again.
Not the orchard.
Above it.
The whisper of something skimming the canopy.
Caer reached the surface silently, eyes scanning the dusk-thick sky. The sun had dropped low behind the ridge, casting long shadows across the orchard. The petals remained open—unnaturally still.
And then he saw it.
A drone.
Not his.
A slick, black eye-bug model—outlaw tech. Independent scavenger, not clan-marked. But worse—its transmitter was up. Which meant someone was watching a feed. Right now.
Caer drew his weapon for the first time in years.
Not a blade.
A vine-spike rifle. Grown, not forged—barrel made of bone-reed, chambered with thistle-cartridges laced with nerve-sap. He'd buried it under the first terrace vine three years ago, swearing he'd never touch it again.
He fired once.
The drone dropped without a sound. The rifle recoiled with a wet shudder, ejecting its seed-bolt. The orchard leaves shivered in approval.
But he knew better than to feel calm.
Drones didn't scout alone.
He turned fast, motioned the girl down behind a stalk wall.
"Eyes closed. Don't speak."
She obeyed.
He scanned the ridge. Nothing yet.
Then: movement.
Tracks.
Not booted. Soft.
A single set of footprints pressed into the outer pollen field, leading from the northwest. Half-obliterated. But there.
Someone had already walked through the orchard perimeter.
Not clan troops. They would've tripped a dozen spore-alerts and announced it with protocol.
This was stealth.
Scavenger. Hunter. Possibly ex-military.
Possibly one of his kind.
He pulled the camo cloak over himself and the girl, motioned for stillness.
Five minutes passed.
Ten.
Then:
The orchard shifted.
Not violently. Not audibly.
But deliberately.
One of the older sensory roots lifted from the soil near the tree line, snapped, and collapsed loudly.
A decoy sound.
A lure.
Someone was trying to draw them out.
Caer kept still. He had only seen this tactic once—on the battlefield during the Fungal Siege. A method designed to make enemies reveal their positions by simulating bio-collapse.
This wasn't just a scavenger.
This was a trained operative.
The girl whispered, voice feather-light against his sleeve: "They smell like copper."
Caer blinked.
"What?"
"They're close. But… they don't feel right. Like something copied wrong."
His blood chilled.
She was sensing pheromones. Distortions in airborne genetic markers. She smelled spliced blood.
Clones.
Illegals.
Possibly rogue factions seeking dormant tech or unique strands—just like her.
They'd come for the orchard.
For her.
Caer stood slowly, pulled the cloak away, and whispered:
"If I tell you to run, follow the west wall. The orchard will show you the exit path."
"But—"
"No sound."
She nodded.
He stepped out from behind the stalk wall.
The rifle raised.
And from the ridge—
A single figure stepped into view.
Wrapped in dusk-woven fabric, face covered in a respirator. But Caer recognized the stance. The posture. The way the head tilted slightly, analyzing. Calculating.
A war-clone.
Just like him.
But not from his generation.
Newer.
Faster.
Probably unstable.
And behind the clone—
Three more.
No insignia.
Just the cold, precision gait of things bred to kill efficiently.
Caer exhaled slowly.
He raised his rifle higher.
And said one word into the orchard wind:
"…bloom."
"…bloom."
The moment the word left his mouth, the orchard answered.
The canopy quivered—not with fear, not with wind—but with purpose. Leaves folded inward along unnatural seams. Flowers unfurled into fractal spirals. Vines that had not moved in decades retracted, revealing pathways previously sealed by years of growth.
The war-clones paused.
Even they felt it.
Caer kept his rifle aimed, but his eyes flicked left—toward the girl, still crouched behind the wall of stalkleaf. She hadn't moved. But she was glowing.
Subtle. Soft.
Just around the edges—her fingertips, her scalp, her chest. Her skin shimmered with a faint bioluminescent pattern, like algae reacting to moonlight. It pulsed in time with the shifting rhythm of the orchard.
She wasn't afraid.
She looked like she belonged here more than he ever had.
And then the vines struck.
Caer didn't command them.
No one did.
But they moved—perfectly.
Three serpent-thick stalks burst from the soil, snapping toward the intruders with whiplash speed. One clone fell, legs caught and crushed in an instant. Another leapt backward, drawing a pulse-blade. But the vines twisted mid-air, absorbed the blade's energy, and redirected it. A shimmer of blue light arced into the trees, disintegrating a drone hidden in the branches above.
The orchard was… fighting back.
No. Not just fighting.
Defending her.
Caer hadn't moved. His instincts screamed for action—shoot, run, engage, reposition—but something deeper held him rooted. A memory that had not yet formed. A truth that hadn't yet been told.
The girl stepped out from cover.
She walked slowly, barefoot, into the orchard.
Toward the clones.
The vines parted for her.
The trees leaned inward.
One of the remaining intruders—a female-model war-clone, tall and silver-eyed—hesitated. Her blade lowered a fraction. "Genetic match," she murmured. "Signal confirmed. Target—"
Her voice stopped.
Not because of Caer.
Because the earth beneath her feet cracked.
A root emerged.
Not a normal one.
A white root—thick, braided, smelling of salt and sky. It coiled upward, twisting through the air, and gently touched the woman's cheek.
Her body convulsed.
Her mouth opened in a scream Caer never heard.
She dissolved.
No fire. No blood.
Just disintegration, like old paper touched by flame.
The remaining clone ran.
The orchard let him.
Caer finally breathed again.
The girl turned back to him.
She looked exhausted now, trembling slightly. But her eyes still held that impossible calm.
He stepped toward her, rifle low.
"You… you did that?"
She shook her head. "I didn't. It did."
He crouched, gently taking her wrist.
The pulse was strong.
He studied her face. "What's your name?"
She blinked. "I don't know."
He hesitated.
Then said it aloud.
"Bloom."
She smiled, just a little. "That sounds right."
The petals rustled in quiet agreement.
He stood, lifting her again. Walked back toward the house as the orchard slowly began to darken.
Petals curled inward.
Roots sank again into the soil.
The flowers remained—unnaturally bright, perfectly ordered, glimmering under the deepening dusk.
A pattern now emerged across the vineyard.
A design made of shape, bloom, and symmetry.
One that had no place in natural flora.
A glyph.
From the old archives.
Carved once into the vault doors of pre-Elysaran terraforming ships. A symbol lost to history.
Caer stared at it from the hill.
And whispered the words again, tasting their weight:
"The Orchard of Bloom."