Everything hurt in ways that had nothing to do with physical injury. Kai lay in the den, and the aftereffects of the battle were settling into something worse than the fighting itself. The adrenaline crash. The weight of having killed creatures who were just following orders. The realization that seven bodies didn't come home to their colony because the traps worked exactly the way he built them to work. It was success measured in silence and empty space.
Bitey was curled in a corner, finally asleep after spending three days riding a high that looked less like victory and more like fever. The combat specialist's chest rose and fell in jerky fits, as if even sleep couldn't smooth out what the battle had shaken loose. The usual pacing was gone. The need to strike was buried for now. But the afterimage of that speed still clung to Bitey's muscles. Even the tail twitched through dreams like it was finishing attacks that hadn't been thrown.
Whisper had barely left the black moss samples. The kit had set up a neat line of preserved clumps in warm and cool chambers and kept checking them like a ritual. Recording decay. Noting color shifts. Scoring potency loss by hour. It wouldn't balance the moral equation, but Whisper was trying anyway, as if enough careful data could make what happened sit cleaner in the mind.
Scout was the problem. The sensory-plus-water specialist had been pacing for two days straight, pressing against the water seeps with increasing desperation. Pheromone markers swung from clipped analysis to jagged panic and back again. It was like watching a metronome speed up.
"Something's wrong," Scout said for maybe the hundredth time. The kit pressed the entire side of the body to the main seep, eyes half closed, breathing shallow. "The pressure is different. The flow is different. I can feel it building."
"You're probably picking up residual stress from the battle," Twitchy said, gentle as possible. The eldest kit had been trying to keep routine alive: food shares at the same time, quiet checks at the same intervals, a few lines of stone markers kept in order. It didn't change the air, but it made it feel like there was still a shape to the day.
"No." Scout's thought-pattern came through sharp and certain. "This isn't stress. This is water. This is geological. This is real."
Something cold moved in Kai's genetic memory at those words. The stones. The carved warnings from the ancient chambers. Flood markings, depth marks, scratched measurements that repeated across walls like a mantra. The civilization that came before had tried to leave a message for anyone who could still read. The message was simple: water wins.
"Show me," Kai said, sitting up despite muscles protesting. The den spun once and then locked back into place.
Scout led Kai to the seeps. The moment Kai pushed pressure-sense into the flow, Scout's anxiety made clean sense. The water wasn't just faster. It was deeper. There was a push from below that wasn't there days ago. The system under the stone had shifted. Something vast was moving, and the tunnels were only now feeling the edge of it.
"How long?" Kai asked.
"I don't know." Scout's markers shaded from crisp analysis into plain fear. "Days maybe. Or weeks. It's building, but I can't read where the break happens."
Twitchy joined, quiet steps, eyes taking in more than the surface. The eldest kit didn't touch the water. Just watched the patterns in the trickle, the throw of droplets against the stone face, the small changes in sound. Twitchy had lived through the stone discovery and understood what warnings meant. "The flood," Twitchy said, voice low. "It's starting."
They stood with that for a while. No planning. No solutions. Just the fact of it. The den hummed with small noises—Bitey's sleep-hitch, Whisper tapping a sample jar, distant tunnel drips that had been background for weeks and now sounded like a countdown.
Kai went back to the main chamber and sat. The body felt heavier, as if the air itself had more weight. He looked at the kits. All of this had started because survival needed teeth and plans and bodies that could fit into roles fast. Now those bodies were here, and water was coming, and Scar-Mandible still existed beyond the mapped margins. There was no single direction to push. Everything needed attention in the same moment.
Whisper moved closer with a simple update. "Warm-chamber spores hold potency longer than expected. Cold-chamber spores disorient faster but clear faster too." The kit hesitated. "None of that helps against water."
"Not directly," Kai said. "But chaos stacks. If the colony tries to press during a flood shift, we can worse their day."
Whisper made a small sound that could have been agreement or simple acknowledgment. "I'll keep refining."
Bitey woke with a start and looked around like expecting to be mid-fight. When there was only stone and den and family, Bitey's posture eased a fraction. "We good?" the combat specialist asked, like the word "good" had any place here.
"We're alive," Twitchy said. "And the water's wrong."
Bitey absorbed that. Didn't comment on the flood. Didn't ask for numbers. Just nodded. "Say where you want me."
"Rest for now," Kai said. "If we have to move the den fast, we'll need you strong."
Bitey didn't like rest, but the body overruled pride. The kit lay back down without argument. A small mercy.
Scout paced again, slow laps that circled the seeps and came back to the same point. "It's getting worse," the kit said, more to the stone than to anyone. "I can feel a deeper current underneath. Like the system below these channels is full and pressing up."
"Mark it," Twitchy told Scout. "Every shift you feel. Even if it's small."
Scout nodded and started leaving thin pheromone lines along the rock next to the seep. Time marks. Pressure marks. Not data that could fix anything, but signal that someone was watching.
Kai closed his eyes and reached for the genetic memory that had carried him since waking in this body. Normally it gave clean shapes: point teeth here, place ambush there, build kit with this trait for that need. Now it kept swinging between two unhelpful commands: defend and climb. Fight the colony. Get higher than water. The mind wanted to split into two bodies to run both tasks at once.
"Eat," Twitchy said, setting a portion of meat near Kai. "You can't plan if you crash."
Kai ate because Twitchy was right. The taste was flat. The body accepted the fuel without thanks. There were a dozen things to do and none of them could be done here sitting on smooth stone. But moving without plan was how you got pinned.
Whisper returned to the samples. Bitey drifted back to sleep. Scout watched water. Twitchy settled with a stack of markers and started laying out thin paths on the floor of the chamber: den, seeps, side tunnels, the fast routes out. It looked like a puzzle in the first stages. No solution, just edges.
Kai lay down but kept pressure-sense tuned to the drip, the sound of the den breathing. He tried to rest and couldn't. The mind kept counting bodies in formation and bodies in the water line and bodies not yet born. He thought about the seven that didn't come home and how Scar-Mandible's maps would adjust now that they'd felt the moss. Thought about the stones and how neat lines of text had failed to save the carvers. Thought about the den and how it was only shelves cut into a riverbed that hadn't woken up yet.
He let the breath slow. He let the aches sit without fighting them. He listened to Scout's footfalls, Twitchy's careful scraping of stone, Whisper's small clinks, Bitey's uneven sleep. He let this be what it was: not a battle, not a hunt, but a holding pattern with a fuse under it.
When he opened his eyes again, the den hadn't changed, and everything had.
As the water kept rising, and something inside Kai began to knock back on the 85th day.