Crosses on the Wall — The Polymorph

You find the first one on day seventeen.

Three small crosses, scratched into the concrete next to the drainage pipe — your second exit, the one you use when you leave for the warehouse at night. They're fresh. The dust around them is disturbed, the concrete pale where something sharp — a nail, a key, the edge of a blade — scraped through the surface grime.

Three crosses. You stand in front of them for a long time.

They could mean anything. Graffiti. Maintenance markers. A countdown to something you don't understand. But your gut says none of those things, because your gut has been keeping you alive for seventeen days and it hasn't been wrong yet.

Your gut says: someone was here.

You check your scanner. No Evol signatures within fifty metres. No Wanderer static. Just the city's green hum and the particular silence of the scrapheap at six in the morning.

You check the exits. All three, in order, the way you do every morning and every night. Maintenance gap in the fence — clear. Drainage pipe — the crosses, but no one inside. Open lot — empty, the early light catching the edges of broken machinery like teeth.

Nothing. No one. Just three scratches on concrete and the cold feeling that your nest has been found.

You don't leave immediately. That would be reactive, and reactive gets people caught.

You go to work. Normal shift, normal route, scrambler on. Dao pays you at the end and asks if you can do an extra shift on Thursday. You say yes. You walk home — not home, never home, the scrapheap is a position, not a home — and you check the crosses again.

Still there. No new marks. No disturbance in the dust around your nest. Whoever left them didn't go inside. They stood at the exit, scratched three lines, and left.

You sit in your nest and you think.

The crosses weren't random. They were at your exit — not the main gap in the fence, not the open lot, but the drainage pipe that only someone who'd watched you would know you use. That means surveillance. Someone has been watching you long enough to learn your patterns.

Hunters? Maybe. But Hunters don't leave warnings — they leave tactical teams. If a Hunter squad had found her nest, she'd have woken up surrounded, not staring at three polite scratches.

The person leaving better materials on the scrapheap? Maybe. The same careful, invisible hand that's been upgrading her supplies without asking, without showing a face, without leaving a trace except in the quality of the garbage.

You don't like this. You don't like any of it. But there's a difference between not liking something and not listening to it. The crosses are positioned at an exit. They point outward — toward the industrial district, toward the route you take to the warehouse. If they're a warning, they're a warning about what's out there.

You spend the next twelve hours monitoring the news feeds through your network tap. Hunter Association activity in District 7. Patrol schedules. Incident reports.

There. Day seventeen, 14:00. A deployment order, flagged for the industrial district south of the transit hub. A Hunter squad — six operatives, scanner-equipped, with backup from the Ever Group's intelligence division. Objective: sweep of abandoned infrastructure, focus on squatter identification.

They're coming through your neighbourhood. Not for you specifically — the objective is broad, a general sweep. But they're coming, and whoever left those crosses knew about it before the deployment order hit the system.

You pack in twenty minutes. Everything you can carry: scanner, scrambler, network tap, four steno notebooks, three changes of coveralls, your T-shirt from home folded into the bottom of a makeshift pack. The food containers you can't carry, you leave. The concrete slab walls you spent days building, you leave. The nest you carved out of garbage and silence, you leave.

You've done this before. You'll do it again. Three exits. New position. Don't look back.

But at the drainage pipe, you stop. You look at the three crosses one more time.

Then you add a fourth. Small, next to the others, scratched with the edge of your scanner's casing.

You don't know why. You don't know who you're talking to. But if someone left a warning that saved your life, the least you can do is let them know you heard it.

The botanical greenhouse is a ruin that doesn't know it's ruined.

You find it on the far side of District 7, past the residential blocks, in a section of the city that feels older and less polished than the rest. The building is abandoned — officially condemned, according to the faded notice on the door, something about structural instability and soil contamination. The kind of bureaucratic death sentence that means no one will come here for years.

Inside, it's alive.

The plants survived. Whatever this city uses to keep its green spaces growing — automated irrigation, nutrient cycling, grow-lights on timers — the systems in this greenhouse are still running. Not perfectly. Some sections are overgrown, vines climbing the cracked glass panels and pushing through gaps in the metal frame. Some sections are dead, the soil dried to dust. But in the middle, where the automation is densest, there's a jungle.

Fruit. Vegetables. Herbs you can't identify. Plants with leaves that glow faintly in the dark — bioluminescent, modified, designed for environments that don't get natural light. The air is warm and wet and smells like soil and chlorophyll and something sharp that might be a chemical nutrient or might be the scent of a plant that doesn't exist in any place you've been before.

Three exits. The main door you came through. A loading bay at the back, rusted shut but breakable. And a gap in the glass panels on the east side, wide enough to climb through, dropping onto a service road that connects to the transit network.

You set up in the dead section. No plants, no automation, no reason for anyone — maintenance crew, urban explorer, curious teenager — to wander into your corner. You build your walls out of empty planting trays and grow-light frames. You hang your scrambler from a ceiling beam. You lay your insulation on the floor and line up your steno notebooks against the wall.

It's better than the scrapheap. Warmer, more protected, and there's food growing thirty metres from where you sleep.

The food is the real discovery.

You've been running a calorie deficit since day one. The restaurant skip and Dao's cash keep you fed, but not enough — not for what your body does when it decides to become something new. The Wanderer fight cost you two days and every stored calorie you had. Your body is burning through protein at a rate that packaged meals can't match.

The greenhouse has protein.

Not directly — you're not eating raw plants and expecting to build muscle. But the plants here are engineered. Modified crops, designed to produce specific nutritional profiles. Some of them are protein-rich in ways that natural plants aren't. Others contain compounds you can't identify but that your body reacts to — a warmth in your stomach, a steadying of your hands, a settling of the constant, low-grade tremor that has lived in your fingers since the Wanderer fight.

You start experimenting. Your brain does the learning thing — the quiet acceleration, the understanding-before-thinking that frightens you less each time it happens, which frightens you in a different way. Within three days, you can identify which plants produce which effects. Within a week, you're extracting and combining them — crude supplements, ground and mixed and stored in sealed containers. Not medicine. Not science. Survival chemistry, built on instinct and trial and error and the particular kind of intelligence that your body keeps producing without consulting you.

The supplements help. Not enough — nothing is enough — but the tremor in your fingers fades. The nosebleeds space out. You still crash after every shift, every acceleration, every time your cells decide to rewrite themselves. But the recovery is faster. Days instead of weeks. Hours instead of days.

You write the formulas in your steno. Five notebooks now. The handwriting is smaller than ever.

The crosses appear at the greenhouse on day twenty-three.

Not on concrete this time. On the glass — three small marks, drawn in the condensation on the inside of the east panel. The one near your exit. They're already fading, the moisture reclaiming them, but you see them in the early morning light and your breath catches.

They followed you.

Not the Hunters — you've been monitoring the feeds. The sweep passed through the scrapheap four days ago. Found nothing. Moved on. Your old nest is listed as an abandoned construction site, no signs of habitation. Whoever left those crosses knew you were gone before the Hunters arrived.

Now they know where you went.

You stand at the east panel and you look at the three fading marks and you feel two things at once: fury and relief. Fury because someone is tracking you, watching you, learning your exits and your routes and the particular rhythm of your survival. Relief because whoever they are, they warned you. Twice. They could have led the Hunters to you. They could have sold your location to Ever Group or the Association or whoever is paying for information about the barefoot Gremlin who fights Wanderers and steals boots.

They didn't.

You add your fourth cross. Below theirs, in the condensation, already fading.

I hear you. I don't trust you. But I hear you.

Day twenty-five. You're in the greenhouse, grinding supplements, when your scanner picks up something.

Not a Wanderer. Not an Evol. Something else — a brief, directional flash of energy, coming from outside the building, lasting less than a second. Like someone shining a torch and then switching it off. Except it's not light. Not visible light, anyway. Your scanner registers it as a narrow-band energy pulse, high-frequency, precisely controlled.

By the time you reach the east panel, there's nothing. Empty service road. No vehicles. No people. The night air is cold and the city hums its constant hum and there's nothing to see.

But on the glass, fresh, three crosses in the condensation.

And below them — below where you left your fourth mark last time — a single line. Not a cross. A line. Horizontal, straight, deliberate.

An acknowledgment.

Someone is having a conversation with you in scratches and condensation, and you don't know their name, their face, or their reason. You know three things: they can move without being detected by your scanner. They can produce energy pulses that don't match any Evol signature in your database. And they have access to Hunter deployment schedules before they're made public.

That's not a civilian. That's not a random good samaritan with a habit of leaving cryptic warnings. That's someone with resources, with access, with the kind of invisible infrastructure that ordinary people don't have.

You should be terrified.

You're not. You're calculating.

Three blocks south. Parked between a delivery truck and a dumpster, in a gap too narrow for most vehicles but exactly right for an unmarked sedan with tinted windows and plates that change every seventy-two hours.

Caleb watches the thermal feed.

She's in the greenhouse. He can see her — a bright smear of body heat against the cool backdrop of glass and dead soil, moving with the efficient, purposeful stride of someone who knows exactly what she's doing. Her outline is sharp in infrared. Clear. He knows her dimensions better than he knows his own apartment — the width of her shoulders, the angle of her gait, the particular way she tilts her head when she's thinking. Five weeks of thermal surveillance will do that to a person.

His left hand is on the steering wheel. His right hand — the prosthesis, the one that hasn't felt anything since the programme took it from him when he was fourteen — is on the screen. Fingertips resting on the display, covering her thermal signature the way a child covers a candle flame. Not protecting it. Testing the distance between himself and the light.

He can't go in.

That's the problem. That's the problem he's been solving for twenty-five days and the answer is always the same: he can't go in. He can't approach her. He can't introduce himself, can't explain, can't say "I buried your Hunter Association file three times this week" or "I redirected the patrol schedule to keep the sweep away from the scrapheap" or "I know where you sleep and I am trying, with every resource I have, to make sure you keep sleeping there."

Because if he approaches her, she runs.

He's watched her. He's watched her react to uniforms, to authority, to the particular posture of people who carry power in their bodies. She reads them from a block away and adjusts her route. Smoothly, naturally, the kind of evasion that looks like a change of mind rather than a retreat. She's not afraid of them. She's something worse than afraid — she's prepared. Ready to bolt at any time, in any direction, from anyone who looks like they might try to control her.

He is a colonel in a black ops division. He is the definition of the thing she runs from.

The thermal image moves. She's at the east panel. Caleb watches her stand there, looking at the glass. She's still for a long time. Then she moves her hand. Draws something. He can't see what — thermal doesn't show condensation marks. But she's responding to something. Communicating with someone.

Someone else is watching her too.

That should concern him more than it does. It concerns him in the wrong direction — not "who is a threat to her" but "who else has found her." Because if someone else knows where she is, then his careful architecture of buried files and redirected patrols has a leak. And if it has a leak, she's not safe. And if she's not safe—

His left hand tightens on the wheel.

It's not operational surveillance.

His left hand — the real one, the one that still feels — tightens on the steering wheel. There's a tremor in it. Not from cold. Not from fatigue. From the particular frustration of a man who has been trained to protect things and cannot protect this thing without destroying it.

MC asked him last week: "Have you heard anything? About the girl from the plaza?"

He said no.

He lied to MC. He lies to MC every day. He lies about the thermal feeds and the patrol schedules and the three times he personally ensured that the Gremlin's incident file got buried before it reached escalation. He lies because the truth is worse: "I know exactly where she is and I can't touch her and I can't stop watching her and I don't know what that makes me."

The thermal image fades as she moves away from the panel, back into the dead section where she sleeps. The bright smear settles, dims, curls into the compact shape of a body lying down with its boots still on.

He watches until the shape stops moving. He should close the display. The data is logged. The position is confirmed. There is no operational reason to keep watching a thermal image of a woman sleeping.

He keeps watching. The shape breathes — he can see it, the slight expansion and contraction of the heat signature, the rhythm of a body at rest. It's intimate in a way that makes something shift in his chest. Not the prosthetic side. The real side. The side that still feels things and isn't supposed to feel this.

He closes the display. Opens it again thirty seconds later. Tells himself he's checking the perimeter.

Then he starts the car and drives. Not home. The route — the same route every night. Hospital. Ring road. Her old nests. Back. His right hand on the wheel now. The hand that doesn't feel. The hand that makes it easier to pretend this is professional.

His left hand sits in his lap, trembling.

He doesn't know which hand he is anymore.