Her name was at the top of the list, which was either unsurprising or deeply annoying and Max had decided it was both.
He sat in the upper canopy of Vorga’s forest with three moons throwing contradictory shadows across everything and the floating islands drifting their patient orbits above him and he looked at the Pathfinder’s Treasure Hunt tracker and he looked at the name in first position and he gave himself exactly two seconds with it.
Raze.
The timestamp beside her name indicated she had been on the floating islands for four days. Four days of positioning, four days of proximity advantage, four days of whatever operational preparation she had been running up there while he had been ten days underground having what he was privately willing to describe as one of the most eventful cave experiences in recorded history.
She had reached the islands days ago. He had reached the canopy in just under eleven days. He was willing to acknowledge the gap without performing additional feelings about it.
What the gap meant, specifically: she had either spawned closer to the island anchor-roots, or she had moved from wherever she spawned to elevation with a speed that suggested she had not fallen through a nesting ground, been chased by a ten-meter golden centipede, fought a ten-foot acid-web spider, spent five days chasing her own dissociated psyche through an ancient abandoned city, acquired the Ghost, constructed the Ghost, and then slept in a shipwreck for while a thirty-meter apex predator investigated the clearing outside.
’Her first ten days were probably more straightforward than mine,’ he said to nobody, with the equanimity of a man who had decided the word straightforward was doing significant structural work in that sentence and was choosing to let it.
He checked the second position. A species designation he didn’t recognize — the Pathfinder used a classification system for non-human contestants that gave him type and general capability range but no visual reference. This one was on the floating islands, proximity rating further from the Seal’s estimated location than Raze. Not a threat to first position yet but present and moving.
His own ranking: fourteenth.
Of ten thousand original contestants, six thousand eight hundred and forty-seven were still active. Over three thousand dead on a planet whose ground-level survival rating the briefing had called Critical, and the briefing had been conservative.
He put the phone away and looked up at the nearest floating island’s root-system trailing downward through the dark air above him. One hundred feet of open air between his current position in the upper canopy and the lowest accessible root. The roots were the kind of thick that came from centuries of growth — substantial, bark-covered, the kind of surface the Grip Enhancement understood.
He stood up and started climbing.
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The hundred feet of open air were the technical problem.
He had the canopy surface — stable, navigable, his boots finding every contact point with the confidence of something that had been designed specifically for this. He had the root-system above him, eventually reachable, eventually graspable. Between the two was a vertical distance he could not bridge by climbing because there was nothing in that distance to climb.
He sent the Ghost upward along the root-system, scanning for the lowest point where the roots descended close enough to the canopy surface to reach. The Ghost found it twenty minutes of lateral movement to his right — a section where one particularly committed root had grown downward an additional forty feet past the main system, its tip hanging in the open air approximately sixty feet above the canopy.
He moved to the position. He looked up at the root-tip.
He climbed the tallest accessible branch in reach, which gained him twenty feet. He was now forty feet below the root-tip. He looked at the branch, at the root, at the space between them, and made the calculation that there was only one way to close the gap and the calculation was not complicated even if the execution was.
He jumped.
His Strand-evolved physique handled it with the capability that the previous version of him would not have produced. His hands closed around the root-tip. The Grip Enhancement activated on contact, bark and boot sole finding each other with the immediate confidence of something that had made this arrangement before and remembered it.
He pulled himself onto the root and began climbing.
The ascent took two hours. The root-system was not a ladder — it was a forest in itself, secondary growths branching from the primary roots, surfaces available at every angle, the accumulated architecture of something that had been growing without navigational intention for long enough to produce, by sheer volume and duration, everything a determined climber needed. He moved through it with the Ghost thirty feet above, clearing each section before he reached it, the dual-feed giving him the route from two perspectives simultaneously.
He had been climbing long enough that his arms had filed several detailed reports about their current condition and he was acknowledging the reports without acting on them when the island’s underside passed above him and then he was through it, pulling himself over the edge and onto actual solid ground.
He stood up.
He breathed.
He looked at his surroundings for the first time from elevation.
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The floating island was not what the briefing’s language had made it sound like.
The briefing had said: stable terrain, contested by native civilization. Both were accurate. What the briefing had not communicated was the quality of the space itself — the specific experience of standing on ground that was floating above a forest that had nearly killed him in a dozen different ways, under a sky that was the full unobstructed wrong-green depth rather than a fragment visible between canopy layers, with moons that were large and close rather than distant.
The air was different. Thinner. Cleaner. None of the copper-and-rot layering of the surface atmosphere, none of the heavy biological density that the forest floor’s ecosystem produced at ground level. He breathed it and his body noticed the difference before he consciously registered it.
The island’s surface was cultivated. Not recently — generations of cultivation, the organized agriculture of a civilization that had been working this specific ground for long enough that the ground itself had adapted to being worked. Rock-wall boundary systems divided growing areas in patterns that suggested inherited knowledge rather than individual decision. The bioluminescence at this altitude was different from the forest floor — cooler, more silver, the species that existed up here producing a light that made the island’s surface look like something from the better version of a dream.
Structures were visible in the middle distance. Built in the angular Septur architectural tradition he recognized from the shipwreck’s carved decorations — functional, deliberate, built to last rather than to impress, the architecture of people who understood that what you built was going to be here when you weren’t.
He stood at the island’s edge and looked at the island and let it be what it was for exactly two seconds.
Then he looked at the island’s edge directly in front of him.
And at the island’s edge, directly in front of him, a Septur patrol.
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