METALSTAR

Jayk navigated the barren wasteland like a passenger in a body that still knew how to walk, even if his mind had forgotten why.

His lips were cracked and dry as the desert stretched before him, a litany of dust and ruin repeating toward every horizon. A single drop of rain struck his forehead, a cold communion, and he lifted his face to the purpling sky. Storm coming.

The land offered no reprieve. Broken structures rose from the earth in the distance like gravestones. Wind carried hard granules of sand through the atmosphere, scouring what remained of the old world.

The destruction had been nearly complete. There was very little left of how things once were.

As he drew closer to the city, the silence gave way to sound. Bent metal frames and twisted signs banged out their tormented beats against empty buildings; hollow rooms inhabited now only by warm weather.

The air swirled between abandoned vehicles and along cracked sidewalks, playing out the soft mewls of a despondent tune.

This was the city's vespers: a service for the dead, conducted by wind and rust, attended by no one.

Twilight caught the few surfaces still intact and threw the dying light back at the sky. The storm swelled to a startling magnitude.

The deluge came.

The sky opened and rain poured down in sheets, a baptism he hadn't asked for but wouldn't refuse. Jayk stood in the downpour and tilted his head toward the heavens, and a smile crept across his face.

He reached into his pack and withdrew a folded square of bright yellow plastic. As he blew air into it, the object expanded: an inflatable wading pool, banana-yellow, with the words "Lemonade Seahorse" printed along the inside in sky-blue and magenta.

A forgotten children's cartoon from a bygone era... some tiny horse-headed aquatic creature that once made children laugh, that once meant summer afternoons and innocence and cold drinks sweating in the sun.

Now it would collect rainwater. That was all. That was enough.

He found an open structure and stepped inside as the storm began to play its own discordant melody. The walls were chipped where time and poor construction had weakened the plaster, revealing the metal bones beneath.

Rusted bars probed through brick and mortar like the ribs of a cathedral left to rot. A portrait of destruction, preserved in time.

A quick survey told him this place had once been a post office. Letters that were never delivered. Messages to people who had stopped waiting. He understood something about that.

He lay down on the cold floor, listening to the rain conduct its requiem against the roof, and let himself drift toward sleep.

Even here, in this profane sanctuary, something like peace could be found... borrowed, brief, and fragile as breath.

It was at that exact same moment that Sarah was preparing to be born.

ROGER stood before a cloning unit, examining the vital signs of a young man suspended in dark fluid. The name on the digital readout: John D'Arby. Heart rate steady. Fluid levels optimal.

ROGER was a Robotic Genetic Engineer, designed to shepherd the preborn through their long gestation: tracking vitals, preparing neural downloads, guiding each clone from data to flesh.

This was the Protogaia Project. A failsafe. A final hope encoded in frozen cells and patient machines, an ark built against the day when catastrophe would silence the world above.

Human and animal DNA catalogued, preserved, waiting for the climate to forgive. Waiting for ROGER to bring them back.

Sarah hung between sleeping and waking, suspended in warm opacity.

Through the glass she could see almost nothing; just the faint geometry of the room beyond, shapes without meaning. The amniotic fluid pressed against her skin like an answer to a question she hadn't learned to ask.

She floated in a silence so complete it felt like frequency zero, the flat line before signal.

And if she could have named what she felt in that moment, that strange calm, that absence of self, she might have called it peace. A resonance with something larger. No boundaries, no separation. Just current flowing through current, continuous and whole.

It didn't last.

The memories came like voltage.

They crashed into her brain in a single devastating pulse: childhood, growth, experience, personality... decades of living compressed into one brutal download.

Sarah Greene, the original, the donor, the double-nought, had been scanned and mapped and copied, her entire existence rendered into data and stored until this new brain was ready to receive it.

Now the transfer was complete. Sarah 01 woke into a life she had never lived but would remember as her own.

The peace shattered. The unity collapsed. She was suddenly someone, specific, bounded, alone.

She opened her eyes.

Elsewhere in the facility, something was wrong.

The roots had come quietly, burrowing through reinforced walls, searching for minerals and moisture. They belonged to no earthly tree.

Where they pierced the structure, they bled; a dark sap streaming down and pooling on the concrete floor. Unlike the gentle amber of oak or willow, this ichor was sour, corrosive, hungry.

It dissolved metal. It ate through cable housings. It dripped onto the miles of wiring that connected two thousand sleeping souls and began to unmake them.

The chamber doors began to open.

One by one, the glass enclosures whirred and shifted, spilling their precious fluid onto the floor. Clones not yet ready. Bodies not yet formed.

The project was failing, and ROGER could calculate the loss but not prevent it.

Sarah felt the change before she understood it. The liquid around her pressed harder, then gave way. The hatch unsealed. She was falling...

The tubes tore from her body. The cables ripped from her skull. She hit the ground in a flood of fluid, and the pain was everything, and then there was nothing at all.

Jayk woke to judgment.

A woman crouched over him; scruffy, tousle-haired, her grimace poking out from beneath thick sandy features. She dangled a heavy chain in one hand. In the other, a claw hammer, gripped tight.

Behind her stood a rugged man in a loose vest and dark hard-woven trousers. Beside him, another; roguish, wild-eyed, gaunt cheekbones over a wiry frame. Two more flanked them, making them five in all.

None of them looked happy to see him.

He sat up on his elbows. "Did I forget to pay the rent?"

The museum.

He hadn't thought of it in years, maybe longer. But now the memory surfaced unbidden: an enormous structure of stone and tile, vast interlocking rooms, a labyrinth of artifacts and relics from the old world.

He had called that place home. He and the other children would spar through its halls, bounding from room to room, between dioramas and display cases. It was there he learned to wield a sword. There he prepared to fight the enemy.

Projectile weapons had died with the old world; no factories to mass-produce bullets, no refineries to make the powder. The survivors fought with what remained: axes, bats, bricks, sticks, hammers, knives.

The utilitarian devices of a forgotten civilization, repurposed as instruments of survival.

"You wear the alb of a practitioner of Omaha," the rugged man growled. "Which means you are an enemy to us. Defend yourself like a man."

Something in Jayk shifted. The reluctance burned away. "Oh, you're a cocky one. Alright. Let's see what you've got."

The blade sang through the air. Jayk twisted aside, barely, and felt the wind of it pass where his stomach had been.

In one fluid motion, Jayk thrust his arm into the open sleeve of Po's vest and spun, sliding his back against Po's chest. His other arm found the second armhole. Now they were bound together.

He snapped his head backward into Po's face. Again. Again. Blood sprayed from nose and mouth.

"Anyone else?"

ROGER's hand found hers, cold, precise, steady, and she let him pull her upright.

They moved through darkness. Her feet found ground she couldn't see; her body trusted a guide she couldn't verify.

Steel doors groaned open. Hot air rushed against her face.

"What do you see?"

All she could make out was brightness; yellow, searing, total. The sun she had never met, filling her vision like a wall.

"Something is terribly wrong," he said quietly.

Colors sharpened into objects. Objects into creatures. Something was close. A smell hit her; rank, animal, wrong, and then something cold and hard pressed against her temple.

She batted it away.

Then lost consciousness.

End of Chapter One