Day 186
Striker found Kai in the stone chamber doing what he had been doing for far too long: moving rocks as if a new arrangement could keep the flood from finding them.
"You moved this one," Striker said, tapping the eleventh stone with a claw, "forty eight times."
"Forty nine," Kai said.
His voice sounded normal. His eyes did not. They had the distant shine of someone who had not slept and no longer trusted what his own mind was doing.
"When did you last eat?" Striker asked.
"Not relevant."
They both knew what that meant. It meant I don't remember, and underneath that, I am afraid of what forgetting means.
Striker placed a cave beetle on a flat rock. It was still warm from the kill.
"I'll leave this here," he said. "You will eat because your body will make you. It will be worse if you wait."
Kai kept staring at the eleventh stone. The carvings were cleaner than the first ten. Newer. The cuts held a different rhythm, like the hand that carved them had worked faster. He traced the grooves with one claw and felt the shape of panic pressed into the work.
The problem was not that he was wrong. Scout had returned hours earlier with readings that locked every suspicion into place. Water pressure was rising in patterns that were no longer seasonal. The deep chambers were emptying. Creatures that never moved were moving. The system itself looked afraid.
The problem was what being right did to him.
Somewhere between learning about the predators and accepting what they meant, he had slid from planning into obsession. He had kept moving the stones because the stones were the only things he could move. Everything else felt too big to touch.
"Shadow wants to talk," Striker said. "He is alarming everyone in range. Twitchy has checked the same exits so many times he has worn the marks darker. Whisper is analyzing texts that do not need it. The whole den feels it."
"Seven predator species," Kai said softly. "Seven bodies. Seven ways to hunt. All on one stone. Whoever carved this knew they were losing."
"Then stop arranging rocks," Striker said. "Gather the council."
Kai looked at the stones one more time and stood. Standing looked like work. He swayed, caught himself, and breathed until his paws remembered the floor.
"If I'm wrong about the stones," he said, "I'm sleep-starved and counting scratches."
"And if you're right?" Striker asked.
"Everyone is going to hate what I suggest."
They met under the vent light in the main chamber. Twenty-eight bodies made the air feel small. The colony had grown into its problems. Whisper's ledgers said they could keep pace for a month. Twitchy's instincts said otherwise. Patch's face said sooner.
Kai stood in the center. His posture was not the posture of a hunter explaining a plan. It was the posture of a surgeon explaining risk.
"The eleventh stone was buried deeper than the rest," he said. "It is newer. The ten show patterns and warnings. The eleventh shows what the warnings meant."
Scout shook her head even before he finished the sentence. "It is not only water," she said. "Everything below is leaving. It is not migration. It is running."
Current drifted closer to her, as if proximity could hold back a tide. "From something," he added. "From many somethings."
Whisper stepped forward. Her eyes had the dangerous brightness of fast pattern work. "The predators," she said. "The tenth stone hints. The eleventh counts. Seven species. Seven anatomies. Seven strategies. All aquatic. All documented with details you learn while you are dying."
Bitey did not smile. Her whiskers tilted, the closest she came to approval when horror made sense. "The flood does not just move them," she said. "It loads them into our halls. They will hunt where we breathe."
Archive's tone was cool. It made everything worse. "Simultaneous multi-species pressure. Catastrophic water surge. Scarcity during movement. The last builders faced this stack and they failed."
"They failed because they could not prepare while drowning," Patch said. "They had to improvise. You cannot improvise a solution to a problem you have never seen while your walls collapse around you."
Twitchy completed a check. Left exit. Right exit. Vent. Lower access. He narrated nothing. He did not need to. His face said the same thing the walls said. Hurry.
"How long until surge?" he asked.
"The genetic memory says thirty to forty days," Kai said. "Scout's timings suggest faster. The twin moons align every forty-two cycles. Alignment unifies pull. Every alignment leaves scars in the record. We are thirty-eight cycles out. Maybe less."
Shadow's presence moved through them. Understanding came with it.
"The moons," Shadow said. "You saw them aligned when you reached the surface. The pull is the trigger."
Kai nodded. "Forty-two cycles between full alignments. Every time, pressure spikes. The eleventh stone marks those spikes and what came with them."
Silence thinned the air. Silence counted. Whisper broke it first because facts are sometimes mercy.
"We have less than six weeks," she said. "We have twenty-eight to feed. We have fewer supply lines as levels rise. Our defenses favor ground threats. We do not have a plan for water."
"The old city had knowledge we do not," Bitey said. "It did not save them."
"They tried to adapt as it happened," Kai said. His voice changed on the word tried. It took on a weight that did not belong to strategies. "They hoped nature would keep up. It didn't."
Shadow looked at him. "You are not going to suggest hoping."
"No," Kai said. "I am going to suggest we do what they would not."
Patch understood first. She had seen too many choices you make when you do not want to, but you do anyway. "You want to breed specialists," she said. "You want to design what we need."
"I want to avoid their failure," Kai said.
"That is slavery," Shadow said. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "Genetic slavery. Making minds for uses."
Kai swallowed. Somewhere under the layered instincts a human memory stirred, thin and far away. Devin, hospital corridors, the idea that a person's choice mattered. That version of him did not belong here. This was a different world and the water was coming.
"They refused," Kai said. "They died."
"So do we," Twitchy said, very quietly. His pattern stopped. The stillness made everyone look at him. "We are arguing about whether we become monsters first."
"If we do nothing," Kai said, "we drown and leave no warning. If we build what we need, if we accept that some choices are ugly and buy survival with them, then maybe someone learns from our line. Maybe someone lives to hate what we did."
Bitey made a low sound. It was not approval. It was recognition. "You want swimmers who fight underwater. Eyes for murk. Gills. Pressure tolerance. You want minds that track motion in slurry. That does not happen by hoping."
"Yes," Kai said.
Patch stared at him and shook her head once. "It is monstrous," she said.
"Yes," he said again.
They stood inside that word and felt what it asked them to be.
"When," Shadow asked, "if we agree?"
"Tonight," Kai said. "If I wait, my body will do it without me. I would rather choose on purpose."
"That is not comfort," Shadow said.
"I know."
Current pressed against Scout. Small warmth against older strength. "So we accept it," he said. "We live because others will live as tools."
"We accept that survival is complicated," Scout said. "We accept that all choices are bad and we pick one. If we live long enough, we answer for it later."
"Later has a way of never coming," Patch said. "People learn to live with what they hated."
"Then we argue about it after we breathe," Bitey said. "Now we plan."
Twitchy's checking resumed. Slower. Deliberate. The room felt like it had tilted. It had. The colony had been a shelter. Now it was a workshop. Different rules apply in workshops. The cost is paid up front.
"If you do this," Twitchy said, "we are not only fighting predators and water. We are becoming people who forge people."
"Yes," Kai said.
"And you are fine with that?" Shadow asked.
Kai heard what Shadow already knew. He was not fine. He was frightened. He was tired. He would justify almost anything if it meant his people were still alive tomorrow.
"I am fine with living," Kai said. "I will answer for the rest later."
"No," Shadow said. "We will just pretend we can."
"Is that a yes?" Kai asked.
"That is 'I do not have a better way,'" Shadow said. "That is not approval."
Kai nodded. Approval was a luxury they could not afford.
The council dispersed into assigned tasks. Striker stayed with Kai. He did not say I will stop you and he did not say I will help you. He simply positioned himself where he could see the entrance to the deep chambers.
He understood what was about to happen. He understood that the fragile web they had woven together was about to harden. He understood that hardness might be the only way a web survives a storm.
Kai picked up the beetle because his hands were shaking and he would need the energy. He ate without tasting it. He moved to the passage that led down.
The stones kept their answers. The den kept its breath. The water under the world kept climbing.
He went anyway.