The earth screamed at 6.2 hertz, and Elise Volkov's hands screamed back.
She knelt in the dirt at the edge of Westbrook's collapse, bio-suture gun punching ceramic needle through dead soil. She worked in the technique that had been passed down to her: Fifteen-centimeter intervals in a grid formation. Keep the thread taut but not so tight it snaps when the next tremor hits.
The bio-thread glowed faint blue-green as it fed into the ground, living filament carrying nutrients into earth that had been bled dry. Around her, strange, bright, crystalline plants - thread blooms - pushed through the crust: bioluminescent growths with translucent petals that pulsed their own unique colors.
Their root systems grew upward as easily as down, stems that branched in spirals that no plant natural to Earth had ever needed. Beautiful in the way deep-sea creatures were. Wrong in the way they moved without wind, turning toward the bio-thread like flowers toward sun.
They didn't belong here, but neither did the thread.
Elise adjusted her mask - the kind all soil surgeons wore, filtration system humming against her face, limited oxygen supply metered out in careful ratios. The comms were built into the left temple, voices from The Station fed directly into her ear.
Her mask was heritage-rank, painted black with a golden rim. The seal had worn smooth from decades of use, though proper maintenance and upgrades had kept it functional. Her grandmother had worn it during the First Stitch. Her mother had died in it. Now it was hers.
Around her, the thread blooms swayed toward her work, already learning where the thread ran strongest. Westbrook unraveled six times this year, each time worse than the last. She'd stopped counting the people. But the plants, they always came after, and her mask never stopped counting: 73,599 of them in this zone, a world record.
"Elise." Vera's voice crackled through the comms, warm and familiar and coming from two hundred kilometers straight up. "I need you to redirect to Silverlake."
"I'm in Westbrook," Elise said, needle still punching. "Critical re-stitch."
"Silverlake's water treatment plant is degrading, fast. You're the closest Class-2 certified unit." A pause, just long enough to sound like she cared. "I know it's hard, El. But infrastructure keeps more people alive-"
"Than any single zone," Elise finished. She'd heard this script before. "How many people are up there now, Vera?"
Static. Then: "That's not relevant to-"
"How many?"
"We're at capacity. 100,000. We've been at capacity for three years." Vera's voice went clinical. "But we still need the thread recycling. We still need the water. We still need the monitoring data. Earth keeps us alive, El. That's why the work matters."
Earth keeps you alive, Elise thought. The rest of us just keep Earth running so you can watch it die from a safe distance.
Infrastructure for ghosts.
Elise sealed the current stitch. "Understood. On my way."
"Thank you, El. I know you'll do beautiful work. Just like your mother used to."
Just like her mother.
The words hit like they always did. Mama, who'd called for backup during a Westbrook collapse twelve years ago. Who'd waited for Vera to come. Who'd died waiting for rescue while Vera calculated that saving herself was the better choice. Infrastructure over people. Always infrastructure over people.
Elise's hands clenched hard around the gun's ceramic casing. The thread blooms nearest her swayed like they could taste her fury. Or maybe that was just the tremor she felt running through the earth. Same frequency. Same rage.
"I'll head out now," she said. Voice steady, hands not.
She packed her kit, leaving Westbrook half-stitched. Let it unravel. Let them all unravel. Vera wanted infrastructure? Fine. Elise would give her infrastructure.
And then she'd give her so much more.
Elise broke the seal on her mask the moment the door closed behind her. The air inside tasted stale but clean. No bloom spores. No thread toxins. Just recycled oxygen and the faint smell of whatever Lena had tried to cook for dinner.
"Mama, you're home!" Lena's voice came from her room, followed by shuffling. She appeared in the doorway wearing her father's old jacket - still too big for her, sleeves rolled up three times. She'd drawn something on the sleeve cuff in marker: a tiny Earth with a heart around it.
"Let me see today's masterpiece," Elise said, because this had become their ritual. Lena drew every day. On paper when they had it, on clothes when they didn't.
Lena held up a sketch: the Station, rendered in careful detail, with a stick figure family standing in the observation deck. "That's us," she said. "You, me, and Auntie Vera, looking at Earth. For my birthday."
The figures were holding hands.
Elise's throat tightened. "It's beautiful, sweetheart."
"I made soup too. Or tried. The protein paste wouldn't-" The cough cut her off, oxygen mask hanging around her neck like she'd been trying to cook without it. Again. Her lips had that blue tinge that meant she'd been off it too long. Twelve years old and stubborn as her father had been.
He'd died with bloom spores in his lungs. Six years ago. Another Westbrook collapse.
Elise's eyes drifted to the wall where Dmitri had hung their old wedding photo. Behind the frame, she could see it: a hairline crack in the old plaster, already glowing faint blue-green. 47 years since the Korolev crash - since the First Stitch. 47 years since Russian scientists decided the alien vessel's ecosystem might "restore Earth's dead soil."
It had worked. For about two years. Then the blooms learned to eat concrete. Then they learned to grow in human lungs. Then they learned that Earth was just another substrate to consume.
The crack in the wall pulsed, wider now than yesterday.
Soil surgery killed everyone eventually. The gas, the collapses, the frequency that got inside your bones until you couldn't tell where the tremors ended and you began.
Lena had never stitched a single thread, probably wouldn't live long enough to learn.
"For my birthday-" Another cough. "Could we visit Auntie Vera? Just for a week? I want to see the Earth from up there."
As if it were that simple. As if they could just pack bags and take a shuttle up. As if the Station hadn't closed its doors. As if Vera would let them in.
Elise knelt down, slow, until she was eye-level with her daughter. Lena's eyes were so much like Dmitri's - that same stubborn hope that refused to see the world for what it was. That same faith that things would work out, that someone would come. Dmitri had died waiting for backup too.
"Sweetheart," Elise started, then stopped. Her hands found Lena's, fingers cold despite the apartment's recycled heat. How did she say this? How did she explain that the woman Lena thought of as family had become something else entirely? That safety existed, but not for them? That hope was a luxury neither of them could afford?
"The Station-" Elise tried again, voice catching. Lena's face was so open, so expectant. Still capable of imagining a future that involved birthday wishes and clean air and natural plants.
Elise's mask crackled from the floor between them.
"El? You there?" Vera's voice echoed through the small kitchen.
Lena's face lit up. "Is that Auntie Vera? Can I-"
Elise held up a hand, reaching for the mask. Her fingers closed around the casing, and she brought it to her ear without putting it on.
"I'm here."
"Good." Vera's tone was different now, more hurried. "New assignment. The Hollows. Zone's slum district reported structural degradation in their thread recycling plant. Class-2 priority."
Elise looked at her daughter, the oxygen mask hanging uselessly around her neck.
"How soon?"
"Shuttle leaves in forty minutes from Depot 3. I've already cleared your transit authorization."
Of course she had. Vera always moved faster than Elise could object.
"Mama?" Lena's voice was small. "Is Auntie Vera okay? Does she know it's almost my birthday?"
Elise's jaw tightened. She brought the mask closer, spoke quietly enough that Lena wouldn't hear: "My daughter wanted to talk to you."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Give Lena my love," Vera said, her voice careful, measured. "Tell her I'll call properly next week. But right now, El, I need you in the Hollows."
Elise lowered the mask. Looked at her daughter's expectant face.
"Auntie Vera says she loves you," Elise said, the lie tasting worse than bloom toxins. "She's very busy right now. But she'll call next week." She pulled her daughter close, felt the wet rattle in Lena's chest against her own. "I have to go out again, I'll be back before bedtime. Promise."
Lena nodded against her shoulder, and Elise held her for ten more seconds she didn't have. Then she stood, grabbed her kit, and headed back out into the dead air.
Elise's boots crunched through glowing petals as she made her way through the Hollows. The thread blooms here had taken over, carpeting every surface in pulsing colored light. Buildings sagged under their weight. Streets glowed with that neon twilight she'd seen in every dead zone.
And in the middle of it all, a group of people sat in a circle, breathing deep. Elise had seen thread huffers before. They sat in the bloom field, maskless, inhaling spores that they knew would kill them. Their lips stained blue and their eyes glassed over. They laughed hysterically, in their own little world, oblivious to the decay around them.
One of them noticed her. The man's head snapped up, eyes wide and unseeing. He lurched to his feet and ran toward something only he could see. His arms reached out like he was trying to catch something precious.
He ran right past Elise, and then kept running.
The ground ended where the Hollows had unraveled into a thirty-meter drop. He didn't slow down. Didn't see it. Just reached forward and stepped into nothing.
The crunch echoed up from below.
Elise stood still. The other huffers didn't react. One of them was still laughing.
She'd heard the hallucinations from bloom toxins were intense, vivid enough to feel real. He'd died chasing something he believed in. Maybe saw someone he loved. Maybe saw the Station opening its doors. Maybe saw clean air and green Earth and hope.
He died happy. That was more than most people got.
She continued to her marked destination, where the forest of thread blooms grew even thicker - unnaturally so, even for the Hollows. The thread recycling plant must have been leaking for weeks. Why had Vera called her now? This plant seemed far beyond saving, they would need an army of soil surgeons at this point.
"Vera." Elise keyed her comms. "I'm at the plant. It's completely overtaken. This is a recovery operation, not a repair. Why did you send me here alone?"
Static.
She tried again. "Vera, respond. I need authorization to call for backup."
Nothing.
Elise approached the plant's entrance. The doors had buckled under bloom pressure, crystalline growth forcing its way through every seam. She pulled at the handle. It didn't move. The entire structure was fused shut by thread blooms that had grown through the frame itself.
She could punch thread around the perimeter, create a containment barrier, but what was the point? The plant was dead. Had been dead for weeks, maybe longer. No amount of stitching would bring it back online.
"Vera. Respond."
Still nothing.
Elise's chest tightened. Vera always responded. Always. Even when she was busy, she always maintained comms with her soil surgeons in the field.
Unless something was wrong.
The earth trembled. But this one felt different. Stronger. Or maybe just closer.
Her mask's display flickered. No incoming transmissions. No Station signal at all.
Elise turned and ran. She had to get back home.
Elise sprinted. Through the Hollows, past the huffers who didn't look up, their eyes tracking things that weren't there. Her boots hammered, each step a crunch that echoed the sound she'd heard from the crater's edge. The neon glow lit her path in that wrong twilight, thread blooms swaying as she passed like they could taste her panic.
The shuttle depot was twelve blocks north. Too far. Too slow. And something in her chest - the same instinct that had kept her alive this long - screamed that the shuttle couldn't be trusted. She cut through dead zones instead, places where the ground had collapsed into craters that had once been city blocks. She slid down edges of raw earth, kicked through thread blooms that reached for her boots, their stems snapping under her weight. When she needed to climb out, she grabbed the same crystalline stalks, using their unnatural strength to haul herself up and over.
She pulled herself over the final crater's edge, and there it was. Her building. Three blocks away. Still standing, until the earth around it began screaming. It sank into the ground that opened beneath it like a mouth, swallowing concrete and steel and twelve years of Lena's drawings in one smooth, inevitable motion. Elise opened her mouth but no sound came out. Just that frequency, vibrating through her bones, as neon light bloomed from the edges where her daughter had been.
Elise's apartment was gone. Not damaged. Not collapsed. Gone. A thirty-meter crater where her building had been, edges still glowing from fresh thread bloom growth. Her knees gave out. She keyed the comms, voice cracking: "Vera. Vera, my apartment - where is Lena? Vera, please-"
Static.
Elise's legs gave out and she fell to her knees at the crater's edge, hands scrabbling at dirt that was still warm. Still glowing.
"VERA!" The raw scream tore out of her. The kind of sound that came from somewhere deeper than lungs.
Through her rage, Elise pieced the puzzle together: the Station had known. They'd had enough data, watched the bloom count spike, calculated the collapse window down to the hour.
"I PROMISED HER! I promised I'd be home and you - you sent me there knowing-" The words stopped. Just breathing now. Harsh and ragged through the mask's filters.
The comms stayed silent. No apology. No explanation. Nothing. Elise's breathing slowed. Her hands stopped shaking. She looked at the crater. At the thread blooms already pushing through the edges. That wrong neon twilight, growing faster than she could ever stitch. Taking over. Replacing everything.
Elise stood. Her kit was still on her back. Bio-suture gun. Thread. Seeds.
They thought infrastructure kept people alive. She'd show them what infrastructure could do.
The grief was still there. But grief didn't get you onto the Station. Anger did. And Elise knew exactly where the supply shuttles docked. Depot 7 ran deliveries every eighteen hours. Elise still knew the schedule by heart - her mother had worked this route before Westbrook took her.
Her heritage-level clearance still worked. No alarms. No questions. Just a scanner beep and the cargo bay door sliding open.
The delivery shuttles sat in rows, loading containers marked with biohazard symbols. Thread recycling. Processed bloom material heading to the Station's research labs.
Elise chose one near the back. Checked the manifest: scheduled departure in eight minutes. Arrival time: two hours, fourteen minutes.
She climbed inside. The container was packed with sealed canisters, she picked one up, and cracked it on the container, causing a hairline fracture along the seal. Neon liquid pooling at the bottom, already starting to evaporate - this was raw, unprocessed, thread bloom concentrate.
Elise looked at the cracked canister. At the neon liquid pooling. At her mask's oxygen reserves: six hours.
Her mask's filters were rated for atmospheric bloom spores. Not concentrated extract in an enclosed space.
She'd heard the stories. Bloom toxins didn't just make you see things, they made you feel things. Made pain feel like purpose. Made murder feel like mercy. The huffers in the Hollows died happy because the spores rewrote what happiness meant.
Elise reached up and adjusted her mask's filter settings. The intake valve could be manually overridden. Could be set to draw from the cargo hold instead of her oxygen reserves.
Her fingers hesitated on the switch.
If she did this, there would be no coming back. No clarity. No choice. Just the spores deciding what she saw, what she felt, what she became. She'd arrive at the Station as something else. Something that believed its own hallucinations.
She thought of Lena's drawings. Three figures holding hands.
She flipped the switch.
She felt the first tickle in her lungs twenty minutes into the flight. Her lips began to turn blue.
Her fingernails had turned blue-green at the tips. Or maybe they'd always been that color. The walls breathed in rhythm with her lungs - or her lungs breathed in rhythm with the walls. She couldn't tell where she ended and the cargo began.
The neon glow was spreading. Crawling up the walls in grid formation. Her grandmother's stitches. Her mother's stitches. Her stitches.
Three generations of trying to stitch together a dying world. Elise laughed at the thought. The sound echoed wrong in the enclosed space.
The container door opened. Clean air and white light poured into the box. After two hours in the dark with that neon glow, The Station felt far too bright.
Elise stepped out.
Someone was shouting. A security guard in uniform. He reached for something at his belt but Elise was faster. She pulled the trigger. Thread fed, needle punched ceramic through his chest.
He fell, then bloomed. His uniform split open and crystalline petals pushed through. He was laughing, that same laugh Elise had been cackling the whole time. The sounds overlapped like they were coming from different dimensions.
Elise moved forward. Her boots on the Station's floor sounded like boots on crystalline growth. Crunch. Crunch. Everything was Earth now. Everything was dead zones and thread blooms.
Another person. Woman in a lab coat. She was holding something. A tablet? A sandwich? Elise couldn't tell - the hallucinations were too intense. She pulled the trigger. Thread through the neck. The woman reached up, clawed at it, but the blooms were faster. They grew through her fingers. She looked at Elise as she fell, beginning that same laugh.
She smiled.
"Thank you," the woman said, or maybe Elise imagined it. She was gone. Collapsed and blooming.
The hallway stretched forever. The Station was screaming now. Or maybe that was the alarm. Red lights flashing. Or were they blue-green? Neon twilight. Everything was neon twilight while Elise's brain spiraled with spores.
She heard a voice - "Mama?"
Lena was walking beside her now. Oxygen mask around her neck. Blue lips.
"Are we finding Auntie Vera?"
"Yes, sweetheart."
"Good. I want to show her the Earth from up here. It's so pretty. All those lights."
Elise looked through a viewport to see the Earth below. Thread blooms covering everything. Continents of light, the planet was a corpse lit from within by the things eating it.
"Beautiful,"
The Station's infrastructure gleamed around her. Life support. Water recycling. Air filtration. Ventilation ducts running through every section like veins. Elise found a junction. Opened the panel. Started punching thread into the system itself.
The Station was unraveling now. She could feel it in the same way she felt Westbrook unravel. Same way she felt every zone collapse. The frequency got inside your bones.
More people. A whole corridor of them. She couldn't tell if they were running towards her or away from her. Elise moved through them like a soil surgeon through a dead zone. Working. Stitching. Not people anymore. Just infrastructure. Just systems that needed correction.
"Elise."
The voice stopped her. That voice. Warm and familiar, and coming from two hundred kilometers-
No. Right here. Five meters away.
Elise turned.
Vera stood at the far end of the corridor, one hand on the wall panel - the emergency lockdown controls. Her other hand was raised, palm out, and her eyes tracked the bio-suture gun with focus.
"Elise, please. Stop this."
Not Vera. Something wearing Vera's voice. Something that had borrowed it. Stolen it. Used it to give orders while people died.
"You sent me away," Elise said. The words felt thick in her mouth, like speaking through water. "You knew."
"I calculated." Vera's hand moved fractionally toward the panel. Her face was doing something. Shifting. Or maybe that was the spores. "El, I had to make a choice. The Hollows plant serves eight thousand people. Your building was-"
"Eight thousand people versus one." Elise's finger tightened on the trigger. The gun felt impossibly heavy. Or maybe impossibly light. The spores were making it hard to tell. "Is that how you did the math?"
Vera's hand was on the panel now. "If I lockdown this section, I can save the other wings. I can save three thousand people. You know I have to-"
"Infrastructure over people." Elise raised the gun. "You taught me that. You taught all of us that. Systems matter more than lives."
"Elise, please-" Vera's finger hovered over the lockdown button.
"I became what you made me," Elise said quietly.
Vera pressed the button.
Nothing happened. The doors didn't seal. The lights didn't change.
Elise had already stitched thread through the panel housing three corridors back. Had already watched the blooms consume the circuitry.
Vera looked at the panel. Looked at Elise. And for the first time, something in her face broke.
Vera pressed the button again. Again. Her finger jamming down with increasing desperation as nothing happened. No seal. No lockdown. No escape.
"Lena wouldn't want-" she started, voice breaking.
"DON'T." The scream tore out. "Don't say her name. You don't get to say her name. You let her die-"
"I'm sorry," it said in Vera's voice. "El, I'm so sorry-"
The apology should have meant something. Should have changed something. But Elise was long past the point where words could reach her, past the place where sorry could undo the crater where her daughter had died alone.
Elise pulled the trigger.
The first shot took Vera in the chest. She staggered back, hand coming up to the wound, neon petals erupted from the wound.
The second shot, fifteen centimeters up, caught her throat as she tried to speak. Her mouth opened, closed. No sound came out except a wet gurgle that might have been Elise's name.
The third shot was precise and clinical. The way her mother had taught her - find the critical point, make the stitch count. Vera's head snapped back and she dropped.
For a heartbeat, she was just a body on the floor. Just a woman Elise had once called family, bleeding out on sterile white tile.
Then she bloomed.
The change started at the wounds, thread forcing its way through torn fabric and flesh. Vera's body split open like a seed pod, and what poured out was that same neon glow, spreading across the floor in branching patterns. The thread didn't grow wild. It grew organized. Deliberate. Each filament finding its place in a grid that Elise's hands knew by heart.
Perfect stitches. Textbook form.
"Beautiful work," Vera's corpse whispered, mouth full of crystalline petals. "Just like your mother used to."
Then it was gone. Just blooms. Just light.
Lena sat down beside her. "Mama, I'm cold."
"Me too, sweetheart."
The Station shuddered - 6.2 hertz - the same frequency as Earth. Everything screaming together now.
And then, the colors started fading. Not all at once, but slowly, like paint washing off in rain. The neon twilight became just darkness. The thread blooms on the walls became just cracks. The pulsing lights became emergency strobes.
Elise blinked. She looked down. Bodies. Not blooming. Not glowing. Just bodies. People in uniforms. Lab coats. Coveralls. Blood on the white floors. Real, red blood.
Her hands were shaking. The bio-suture gun was empty. Cartridges scattered around her feet. How many had she-?
"Lena?" Her voice cracked.
No one answered.
Elise looked at the viewport. Earth below. Not glowing. Not covered in light. Just dark. Dying. And the Station-
The Station was dying too. She'd stitched thread into the life support. Into the air systems. Into the hull itself. And now they were growing in the vacuum and the walls were splitting and-
"Oh no," Elise whispered.
The Station lurched, metal screaming, everything unraveling. She'd killed them. All of them. Everyone on the Station. For infrastructure. For revenge. For-
"Oh no." Quieter now.
The floor tilted and gravity began failing. Elise floated, weightless, watching through the viewport as the Station came apart. Pieces spinning away into the void. And below, Earth kept dying. Kept unraveling.
She hadn't saved anything. Hadn't fixed anything.
She'd just made sure no one survived to try.
The viewport cracked.
"I'm sorry," Not to Vera, not to the bodies, but to Lena. To the drawing of three figures holding hands. To the future her daughter would never see. "Baby, I'm so sorry. I promised I'd come home."
The air rushed out.
And Elise Volkov's hands finally stopped.