Forty-eight hours. That's how long the pod needed.
Forty-eight hours until the thing in Kai's den became real, conscious, hungry, his.
Hunting didn't help. His pressure sense kept drifting back to the den, tracking the pod's steady pulse like a second heart he could not ignore. Every stalk turned into math, calories, growth curves, feeding schedules for a life that had not hatched.
By hour thirty-six, the Devin voice had been quiet long enough to feel imaginary.Almost.
His mother came to him in fragments, hands that never stopped moving, a back that straightened only when she thought no one watched. She had given everything without asking. He could do the same, even if this time the child was not human. The thought did not hurt. It balanced.
He surveyed the tunnels as if checking the set of a stage. Low ceiling, warm stone, a clean line from water to den. Mineral air, slow drafts, the faint sweetness of algae where the pools skinned over in the night. He brushed his whiskers against a corner seam and felt the map answer. Pressure lines sketched the world in invisible ink. Safe here. Thin there. Sound carried along one rib of rock like a taut string. He filed each note into a quiet ledger that lived beside his pulse.
Twenty-one hours before hatching, something crossed his boundary. Confident, or stupid. The scent was acidic, edged with old blood. Kai slid through stone, weight spread across pads and claw, and angled to drive it off without drawing attention to the den.
The intruder was scarred, its jaw healed wrong, its eyes too close. It looked at Kai and decided he was food worth testing.
It did not live long enough to be wrong twice.
He cached the body in a cold fissure until the stone smoked, stripped his fur of the intruder's stink, and returned to the den with iron on his tongue and the pod's warm rhythm in his ears. He lay beside the pod without touching it, felt heat gather under his chest, and let the small, steady sound tell him to keep breathing.
He studied the pod as a craftsman studies a tool he forged himself. The outer film still milk-opaque, the nutrient veins pulsing in a slow braid, the micro-channels he carved to carry waste fluid away. Endocrine beads he'd set at the base glimmered faintly. When the blue dimmed and the amber rose, he knew the final turn had begun. He memorized the exact shade, the way a parent memorizes a fever number.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The den smelled of warm mineral and clean water. Far away, a drip kept time. Every three drips, his own breath. Every five, the pod's. He found himself syncing to it without meaning to, as if his lungs wanted to rehearse the rhythm the kit would soon bring into the room.
Hour forty-seven, the pod cracked.Hairline fissures webbed the surface. Fluid beaded and ran, pooling into the tiny channels Kai had carved. Endocrine markers peaked, then fell. The shape inside turned, then pushed. Not words yet, but insistence.
He leaned close and kept still. The membrane thinned to milk glass. A paw pressed against it, delicate pads splayed, claws like written commas. A nose followed, dark, wet, patient. The shell parted with a soft sigh. Warm scent hit him, sweet and mineral, the smell of rain on new stone.
The creature that pulled free was small. A third of Kai's mass. More leg than balance. Eyes unfocused but searching. It found his heat and chirped, high, confused, hungry. Recognition flared. Imprinting locked. It was his.
He gathered the newborn with careful teeth and set it where his chest was warmest. The kit trembled the way a leaf trembles when wind does not know how to be gentle. He curled around it, breathing slow until living became less expensive.
Archive Note — Birth and ControlBirths occur in engineered birthing pods, not in Kai's body. Kits are reproductively capable at emergence by default. Early on, Kai imposed a Colony Reproductive Lock, a pheromonal and epigenetic suppression keyed to his living bio-signature, to prevent runaway growth while food and training capacity were fragile. The World-Cat genome holds a failsafe: if the Anchor, Kai, dies, is actively dying, or becomes biologically unable to continue or survive in the anchor role, the lock dissolves and reproductive capacity restores across the colony.
Kai pulled a strip from the feed bundle he'd prepared—meat broken down, gristle trimmed, nothing a small throat could choke on. He touched it to the kit's mouth. It mouthed first, then bit with serious intent. The first swallow was clumsy. The second worked. Hunger learns fast when the alternative is not learning at all.
Its eyes cleared to the color of old smoke. It watched his face like the world held more than one. The tail flicked, once, twice, a bright little spark that announced itself and refused to be ignored.
"Twitchy," he said. Names were promises. This one fit.
Twitchy chirped once, as if signing the contract, then reached for the food again with a confidence too big for his small body. Kai let him eat until the tremor in his limbs softened to a drift. He licked the kit's face clean and arranged the broken shell across the floor so it would dry flat instead of curling. The shell would be useful: lining, tools, lessons.
He set three scent markers at the den mouth—home, warn, return—braided so finely that even a nervous animal would read them right. He placed a shallow stone cup near the warmest wall and filled it with water so still it turned into a mirror. He checked the vents, eased one pebble free to slow an annoying whistle, and tugged a thin growth of fungus from a crack to keep spores down where lungs were new.
Twitchy tried to stand. One paw found the ground, then another. He swayed, blinked at the world with solemn focus, and took a step that was almost a fall. Kai lowered a foreleg without touching him and watched the kit use the presence of strength to find his own balance. The next step worked. The one after that looked like a plan.
Kai felt the map of the den the way he always did, a pressure-field drawn across stone and air, but now a second map unfurled alongside it, smaller and louder and made of obligations. Safe. Unsafe. Edible. Teachable. Mine.
The pod cooled behind them. He pressed his whiskers to it in farewell and tasted the last of the work. Good work. Right work. He lay beside Twitchy until the kit's breath steadied and the room's sounds slid back into their usual places. He let fatigue take him one muscle at a time, the way a tide collects pebbles but leaves the shoreline intact.
Outside, the tunnels held their breath for them. Inside, the future turned over once and slept.