The flood came at dawn on the 111th day and it felt like the world was breaking open.
Kai woke to Scout's panicked relay shearing through Shadow's link like cold iron: Water rising. Fast. Everyone to high ground now.
There wasn't time for the kind of strategy Kai preferred—the careful, layered kind with redundancies and escape routes and fallbacks for the fallbacks. There was only the single word that mattered in catastrophe: move. Get bodies off low stone. Get heat and minds and fragile larvae—ant and cat alike—up and away from corridors that were already filling with a roar.
"Up," Twitchy ordered, voice steady because someone's had to be. "Group one with me. Dig, trigger the shutters. Scout, mark currents. Shadow—full net."
Shadow's crystal pulsed bright, and a web slid invisibly across the colony as the telepathic kit unfurled connections, skimming minds without drowning them. Left tunnel stable. Right sluice compromised. Bitey, take rear. Striker, you're point on the narrow. No heroics—clean speed, no fights.
The routes Dig had chalked and memorized paid for themselves in the first thirty heartbeats. Stone lips swung on pivots, flood shutters clacked into place, and ramps that had been nothing but notches yesterday became the only way dozens of feet found higher ground. Twitchy's presence braided through the movement like a spine; where panic gathered, the eldest kit's pheromone markers cut it clean, turning undirected fear into coordinated urgency. No one sprinted. No one shoved. They didn't have to. They had practiced this in the quiet hours when practice felt like paranoia. Now paranoia tasted like survival.
Water started threading through the den mouths with a hiss that went to a growl that went to a sound so large it made conversation ridiculous. In two corridors at once, the water overtook them—cold up to the knees in a blink, to the belly a breath later. Bitey physically hauled two stunned juveniles by the scruffs and threw them up the ramp ahead. Striker took one look at a swirl forming in a side channel and leapt past it, planting claws into a seam and hauling their weight along the wall where flow couldn't catch the body's centerline. "Like that!" Bitey barked. "Wall is friend!"
Shadow's net pulsed quick-counts into everyone's heads—*six here, eight there, Scar-Mandible's column approaching from west, hold two-by-two at the pinch, do not block the ant nursery—*and the colony folded around the information. It was messy, exhausting, blessedly competent.
They reached the upper chambers just as the main den became a throat the cave swallowed. Water poured through passages with the violence of a city's worth of stored river forced into a single pipe. This wasn't slow rising. This was a system-sized muscle spasm—geology expelling pressure it had been clenching against for longer than any memory could hold. The sound shoved into bones. Stone cracked somewhere deep and old; a tremor rippled up the walls and turned legs into singing wires.
Scar-Mandible's forces arrived moments later in brutal order: soldiers in tight files, jaws locked around wrapped larvae, escort lines flanking the carriers so no current could pry a life loose. Even fleeing, the ants were terrifyingly competent. Scar-Mandible herself came last of her core, antenna scarred, gaze bright and hard, formation a little ragged in a way that meant something had cost her.
Her pheromone markers hit like a struck bell: The deep colonies are gone. No flourish, no attempt to soften, just a line of truth laid down where it would not be tripped over. Seventeen chambers lost. Three hundred soldiers. All the development larvae. We're what remains.
Grief traveled differently for ants. It went out in a tight cone and then it snapped shut because there was still a task to execute. Kai met the cone with a countermarker of acceptance and directive. "We have room. Upper chambers can hold both our groups. Right flank, with me. Twitchy, align files. Dig—convert the eastern alcove to cradle space."
The conversion looked like chaos and was not. Dig had pre-scored anchors; three blows turned smooth wall into ladder. Five shaped wedges and a brace transformed an alcove into tiered bins where ant larvae could ride dry and warm. Whisper hurried along the edges of it, bright-hot with purposeful focus, laying down simple, unambiguous chemos for cross-species use—safe / hot / move / wait—symbols the ants' scouts had agreed to three days before when no one wanted to imagine actually using them.
Water rose for three straight hours. Every low passage turned to a throat. Familiar corridors stopped being corridors and became threats: hollows that took sound and returned it wrong; side mouths that breathed in and didn't breathe out. The air changed too—wetter, sharper, charged with mineral and old rot and the acid tang of overturned life. All through it, Shadow held the net—linking without commandeering, updating without yelling, a constant gentle pressure that meant no one had to waste breath asking where are you? or do you need me?
When the water finally stabilized—below the threshold of the upper ring but high enough to turn any misstep into a swim—assessing the cost came like taking inventory after a fire.
"Lower dens are completely flooded," Scout reported, whiskers still dripping, eyes narrowed against cold. The water specialist had gone farther into the churn than Kai would have allowed any other creature to go and had come back tight and vibrating from the effort not to shake. "Won't be accessible for days, maybe weeks. We're living in the upper system now."
"Food stores?" Twitchy asked, because that was the next breath after shelter.
"Sixty percent lost," Scout said. "We'll need to hunt aggressively to replace them."
Striker was already building maps in the air with one claw. "The flood will have driven prey animals higher too. They'll be concentrated in the upper tunnels. Easier hunting but more competition."
"And more predators," Bitey added, gaze dead flat. "Everything dangerous in the system just got forced into a smaller bowl. This is going to get ugly."
Kai looked around the packed chamber and felt the shape of the new world take its first edges. Scar-Mandible's second stood near a stack of larvae, antennae touching each bundle in sequence the way a parent would count sleeping breaths. Dig had already found the two weak stones in the ceiling and marked them do not touch with an ugly cross. Whisper lay on their side for twenty seconds, chest heaving, then rolled up and started re-labeling the shared routes with simpler signage, because simple saves lives when panic eats nuance.
"We're not going back down soon," Twitchy said softly, appearing at Kai's side with that bone-level steadiness the eldest kit wore like a harness. "Everything we build next happens up here."
Kai nodded. The nod felt heavier than an order.
They divided shifts by necessity. Two hunting teams, one mixed scout team, construction under Dig, medical under Patch, liaison under Twitchy with Scar-Mandible's command, and Shadow—Shadow was simply Shadow, the net and the nerve and the quiet pulse that kept disparate minds aligned to the same forward line. The first hours of the new era passed not with speeches but with work: bodies moving, decisions small and relentless, grief placed in pockets to be opened when hands were free.
By what passed for evening this high up, the roar had settled into a presence, a constant like wind is constant on the surface. It took the first layer of silence from every conversation and made everyone lean a little closer. The air tasted of stone fatigue. Kai could feel the cave settling around them, muscles locked from bracing.
They ate. They drank boiled seep water. They slept in squares and strips across a floor that had never held this many bodies. Scar-Mandible set two watch stations at the mouth and rotated them every twenty minutes with the same precision she'd used to shepherd a fleeing army. Bitey curled around the newest juveniles like a dark shield. Striker lay down and then popped up again and then forced themselves to lie down because tomorrow required legs that weren't useless. Scout slept with their cheek against a wet wall, because that was where the information lived.
Only then—when the bodies were still and the noise of the water had moved from terror to backdrop—did Shadow dim the net a fraction and let their own breathing find a longer rhythm. The crystal at the kit's brow pulsed once, twice, slow.
It was not victory. It was not even safety. It was only the last dry footstep they'd be able to remember for a while, set down at the rim of a new map none of them had asked to draw.
They took stock again at dawn, because every new day redeals the deck after a disaster. Scout brought the numbers. Twitchy brought the lists. Scar-Mandible brought a precise, almost surgical report of losses that made the air thinner for a moment and then cleared it.
"We can't wait to hunt," Striker said. "Prey will be skittish but hungry. They'll take risks. So do we."
"Pair speed with sense," Bitey said. "I want two returns more than I want one hero."
Kai watched them shape the day and felt pressure building in the body—a different kind of pressure than water. It sat low and hot and insistent, the way a thought sits when it knows it will win the argument eventually. Not now, Kai told it, and the body answered back the way biology always did: I do not care.
Shadow's gaze found Kai's without ceremony. Later, the kit sent, soft as a hand on a shoulder. When we have hands to lend.
Later always comes.