They found the mining outpost two days later—a cluster of decaying buildings huddled against a mountain like supplicants. Soviet-era architecture, brutal and functional, half-buried in snow. But the location was perfect: a natural bowl sheltered from the worst winds, with the mountain at their back and a view of the approach for kilometers.
They stood on a ridge, looking down at their future.
"It's… bleak," Pierre said, trying to sound hopeful.
"It's a start," Kael replied.
They descended. The first task was clearing—not with machinery, but with hands and will. Kael lifted a collapsed roof beam, tossing it aside like kindling. Erika and two others pushed over a unstable wall. Leila organized teams to inventory usable materials.
Aris set up her lab in the most intact building—the former administration office. She powered her equipment with solar panels from the trucks, supplemented by a wind turbine they assembled from scrap.
"The aquifer is here," she announced after her first surveys, pointing to a map. "Two hundred meters down. Pure, filtered through kilometers of rock. We'll need to drill."
"I'll do it," Kael said.
They fashioned a drill from a salvaged engine and hardened steel bits. Kael operated it, his body absorbing vibrations that would have shattered normal bones. For three days, he drilled, stopping only to eat and sleep briefly. On the fourth day, water erupted—a geyser of clear, icy liquid that tasted like time itself.
With water secured, construction began in earnest. And here, their abilities revealed new dimensions.
Thomas, the carpenter, discovered he could feel the stress points in materials. He'd run his hands over a beam and say, "Here, reinforce here," and they'd find hidden rot or metal fatigue. His grief was channeled into creation, each joint perfect, each structure sound.
Erika organized the physical labor, her teacher's mind creating efficient systems. She noticed that the Longevos worked in bursts of incredible productivity followed by periods of deep rest—a biological rhythm optimized for their new metabolisms.
Pierre, despite his youth, had an intuitive understanding of geometry and physics. He designed their first permanent structure—a communal hall with arches that distributed weight in elegant curves, beautiful and strong.
And Leila… Leila became their diplomat with the outside world. Using the satellite communicator, she made cautious contact with other Longevo groups she'd known from the dark web. She learned of enclaves forming in the Canadian Rockies, the Australian Outback, the Patagonian steppe. She shared their principles, listened to theirs, began weaving a fragile network across the globe.
One month after their arrival, the first attack came.
It began with the drones—small, quiet, painted white for camouflage against snow. They appeared at dawn, a dozen of them, circling the settlement.
"Ephemeral League," Leila said, watching them on a monitor hooked to motion sensors. "They've found us."
The drones didn't fire weapons. Instead, they dropped leaflets that fluttered down like malignant snow. Kael caught one. The paper was high-quality, the printing precise:
MORTALITY IS THE SOUL'S CONTAINER. YOU HAVE SHATTERED YOURS. RETURN TO HUMANITY OR BE RETURNED TO DUST.
On the reverse, images of the Gobi aftermath, captioned: THE FIRST PRUNING. MORE WILL FOLLOW.
"Psychological warfare," Aris said, crumpling a leaflet. "They want us afraid."
"It's working," Pierre whispered, looking at the circling drones.
Kael felt anger, hot and clean. He picked up a rock—a piece of granite the size of his head. He judged the wind, the drone's trajectory, the physics of it all in a flash of instinct. Then he threw.
The rock became a projectile, crossing the distance in a blur of motion. It struck a drone dead center, smashing it into fragments that rained down.
The other drones scattered, but now the Longevos were moving. Erika threw a steel rod like a javelin, piercing another. Thomas used a slingshot made from truck suspension components, his carpenter's eye calculating trajectories perfectly. Within minutes, the sky was clear.
But the message was received. They weren't hidden anymore.
That night, Kael made a decision. He gathered the Compact. "We need walls. Not just against the cold. Against what's coming."
"Walls won't stop determined enemies," Leila said.
"These will," Kael said. And he explained his idea.
They would build not just a settlement, but a fortress. A Chronopolis. Using the mountain itself as material, they would construct walls ten meters thick, with internal passages, watchtowers, and gates that could withstand anything short of sustained bombardment.
"It would take years," Thomas said. "Decades, with normal people."
"We're not normal people," Kael replied. "And we have time."
The scale of the vision silenced them. Then Erika smiled—the first real smile Kael had seen from her. "I'll start on foundations tomorrow."
The work began. And as they built, something remarkable happened. Their bodies adapted further.
Kael, spending hours lifting and placing massive stones, found his strength increasing not linearly, but exponentially. Where he could lift ten tons the first week, he could lift twenty the second. His muscles didn't just grow—they reconfigured, fibers aligning in patterns Aris's scanners couldn't interpret.
"It's like your body is learning," she told him, examining biopsy results. "Your cells are communicating, optimizing. It's not just mutation—it's continuous adaptation."
Others experienced different evolutions:
Pierre's spatial awareness became so precise he could visualize complete structures in his mind, down to the molecular stress points. Erika developed a kind of kinetic empathy—she could feel the forces moving through a structure just by touching it, knowing where it would fail before it failed. Leila found her senses expanding beyond the physical. She could read micro-expressions, hear the subtle tremors in voices, detect deception in the slightest hesitation. She became their human lie detector. Thomas… Thomas began to remember differently. Not just his own memories, but skills, knowledge. He'd never studied architecture, but he now understood vaulted ceilings. He'd never worked metal, but he could smelt and forge. It was as if his brain was accessing… something deeper.
"Genetic memory," Aris theorized. "Your ancestors' knowledge, encoded in DNA, now accessible. The mutation might be unlocking more than just physical potential."
Six months after their arrival, they faced their first real winter. Temperatures plunged to minus sixty. The wind scoured the plateau with teeth of ice. And they… thrived.
Their bodies generated immense heat. They moved through blizzards in light clothing, their metabolisms burning like furnaces. They worked through the endless night, illuminated by the aurora borealis that danced across the sky in curtains of green and purple.
It was during one such aurora that Kael found Aris in her lab, looking at a genome sequence with an expression he couldn't read.
"What is it?" he asked.
She turned the screen. "I've been comparing our DNA samples. Yours, Erika's, Pierre's… all of us." She zoomed in on a section. "There are differences. Not just from baselines. From each other."
Kael studied the colorful bands. "We're not all the same?"
"No. You're diverging. Already." She pulled up two sequences side by side. "Look at your telomerase regulators. And Erika's. Different activation patterns. And Pierre's myostatin inhibitors are unique." She leaned back. "The mutation isn't a single thing. It's a… a palette. And each of you is painting with it differently."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're not just a new branch of humanity." Her eyes met his, filled with wonder and fear. "You're the trunk of a new tree. And from you, different branches are already growing."
Kael absorbed this. They were changing, individually. Becoming not just a new species, but multiple new species.
Outside, the aurora shimmered, casting everything in unearthly light. In the distance, the walls of New Alexandria rose—stone upon stone, built by hands that could crush rock, shaped by minds that could see through time.
They were no longer hiding. They were declaring. And the world was watching.