Dark water rolled against a silent shore, each wave carrying the weight of a storm that had already passed. Mist clung low over the sand, thick enough to swallow footprints before they formed.
A small girl stood barefoot on a broad slab of driftwood—the shattered remnant of a ship’s belly. Saltwater streamed from her dense, black hair, tracing cold lines down her cheeks. Her clothes clung stiffly to her skin, heavy with the memory of drowning.
She didn’t shiver. Her eyes—furious, sharp, unblinking—stared down at the broken timber beneath her feet, as though daring it to rise and fight her again.
In her fist, she clutched a hala fruit: round, ridged, opalescent, its sunset flesh glowing faintly like bruised light trapped inside. Cracks spidered through the fruit’s surface. A thin strand of luminous liquid dripped down her wrist, absorbed instantly by the wet sand.
Far off at the horizon, the fog shifted. Tall silhouettes emerged—long masts, dark sails, metal-ribbed hulls cutting through the morning gray.
Foreign ships. Approaching slowly. Hungrily.
䷜㊌🜄
HAYWARD, CA
Aleki had barely slept, and a thin trace of sea salt lingered in the air, as if the dream had followed him into the morning.
He lay in bed fully dressed, staring at the ceiling like it might give him answers. His shoulder felt perfect. The events at Union Square replayed in jagged flashes: the batons, voices, Ms. Lotu’s impossible skills. The way the world around them seemed to not care… forget.
A sharp knock-knock-knock rattled the front door.
Aleki jolted up, heart thudding. His mother’s slippers whispered across the hall upstairs, but she didn’t come down. Probably assumed they were delivery people or roofers hawking for work.
Aleki crept to the window first. No cars. No police. Just a small figure on the porch.
He squinted. “A kid?”
He opened the door slowly.
A nine-year-old Tongan girl stood with one hand in the pocket of her oversized white top, black shorts folded at the waistband, and dusty slides from walking miles. Her expression was blank—no smile, no greeting, just a direct stare like she was checking if his soul was still attached.
“Uh… hi?” Aleki tried.
“Are you Aleki Mafi?” she asked.
“Yeah?”
She nodded once, decisively. “Good. I don’t like wrong houses. People get nervous.”
Aleki blinked. “…uhh.”
She walked past him into the house without waiting for an invitation, stepping in as if she paid the mortgage.
“H-wait—hey! You can’t just—who are you?!” he hissed.
“I’m Hān,” she said, inspecting the living room like she was planning a renovation. “Ms. Lotu sent me.”
Aleki’s brain stalled. “Ms. Lotu? She sent… a child?”
“Technically, I’m nine,” Hān corrected, “but don’t treat me like a baby. I’m here to walk you to work.”
“Walk me—for what?”
She shrugged. “She said you might need protection.”
Aleki snorted. “Wow…” He laughed, rubbing his forehead. “Look, little girl—no offense—but I don’t need a bodyguard half my height.”
Hān raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He threw his hands up. “What are you gonna do, bite the ankles of the Sayphe recruiters?—”
Hān sighed like she was tired of humanity in general. She calmly, casually—she pulled a 9mm pistol from the waistband under her baggy top.
Aleki’s breath left his body.
“H-H-HEY—HEY! Put that down! What the—what is wrong with you?!”
“Oh, so something’s wrong with me.” Hān deadpanned.
“Yes! That’s dangerous!—”
“The safety’s on. I’m not stupid.”
He backed against the wall. “Why do you—why do you have a—a GUN?!”
“They tried to snatch you last night,” Hān said. “Ms. Lotu said they might come finish the job and I’m not boxin’ with nobody, today!”
She inspected the pistol like a seasoned armorer. “Ms. Lotu told me you would act like a bee-atch, by the way.”
Aleki squeaked. “You do NOT get to call me that in my house!—”
Footsteps creaked on the stairs.
Hān flipped the pistol behind her back and tucked it into her waistband with one smooth motion—silent, practiced, way too quick for a normal nine-year-old.
Alisi appeared on the steps, tying her hair back with one hand.
“Mālō ʻetau maʻu ki he ʻahó ni,”
“Good morning, I’m glad we have this day.”
she greeted, then saw Hān and smiled warmly.
“Fiefia ke toe fe'iloaki mo koe, Hān.”
“I’m happy to see you again, Hān.”
Hān hugged her, sharing a gentle contact between the sides of their faces. “Mālō, aunty.”
“You’re so cute!” Alisi cooed.
“Aleki, fanongo mai kiate ia. Te ne tokoniʻi koe ke ke ngāue mo Lotu.”
“Aleki, listen to her. She will help you work with Lotu.”
“You better be on your best behavior.”
Aleki stared. “W-Wait… how do you know I’m working with Ms. Lotu?”
Alisi clicked her tongue and waved a hand. “Boy, please. When Lotu sends her shooter, she means business.”
Aleki’s soul left his body. “SHOOTER?!”
His mother had already wandered back upstairs, humming.
Hān smiled. “Your mom’s cool. I like her.”
Aleki pressed his palms into his eyes. “This is insane.”
“Yup,” Hān agreed cheerfully as she hopped off the last porch step. “Bring your ass. I got places to be.”
SAN FRANCISCO
Naʻa kē sat cross-legged in front of her laptop, a half-drained bottle of Fiji resting against her thigh. She kept absently rolling it back and forth with her palm, the plastic crackling softly each time it shifted. She didn’t notice she was doing it.
The ring light cast a warm halo on her skin as she leaned closer to the screen, scrolling through the raw videos on her phone. Her editing software stuttered, froze, then skipped—a familiar problem, but tonight it felt intentional.
She hit RECORD for her next upload.
“Alright, fam,” she said, brushing a lock of black hair behind her ear, “y’all wanted updates on the East Bay creepy crawlies, so before I get into the Union Square footage—shout-out to MonsterKev for the tip about the red kids.”
She clicked a shortcut key and loaded a clip.
The screen showed twilight over the Berkeley hills—grass shifting, wind humming—and for three seconds, four small, red silhouettes broke into a sprint. Junior high school children. Too fast. Too synchronized. Their shapes blurred, then dissolved into sun-blown static.
Naʻa kē's voice lowered. “Still not convinced they’re A.I., but… something’s up there.” She dragged the Union Square footage into the timeline.
The software struggled. Blank frames. Half-second freezes. Glitched light blooming like electrical storms.
Naʻa kē frowned. “C’mon…” She scrubbed forward. The moment the police lights should’ve filled the frame, the footage collapsed into a flat wash of gray. Shadows went missing entirely. People were replaced with silhouettes.
And in the center—A faint circular distortion with a ripple gently expanding outward.
Naʻa kē leaned closer, brow furrowing. She reached for the Fiji bottle without looking, lifted it halfway to her lips—then stopped, staring at the screen.
That ripple. She’d seen it before. At the BART station earlier, in the reflection of the maintenance worker’s steel connector, just before she boarded the train.
She rewound the clip again. The ripple moved outward. Not random. Not an error. It shivered in the exact pattern of a finger touching water from beneath.
A comment notification popped in her stream.
WG3Switches: did u see the woman by the heart statue?? shes not in your footage??
Naʻa kē blinked. “What woman?” She slid the timeline a frame backward—
There.
Just a flicker.
An outline of an elderly form in an off-white top, Tupenu draped around the hips—but the face smudged away like fogged glass. When she tried to zoom in, the pixels rippled apart.
Naʻa kē set her jaw. “Okay… That’s different.” She opened the file metadata. Time stamps were intact. Audio clean. GPS pinged Union Square precisely.
Every time she paused the footage, the figure blurred back into a smudge—like the camera refused to acknowledge her.
Naʻa kē stared at the flicker on her screen, pulse steady even as her breathing changed. Something old stirred beneath her ribs, but she chalked it up to adrenaline.
She pushed her chair back and opened the file properties again. She scrolled through audio channels, metadata, and diagnostic logs she barely understood, hoping for something—anything—to explain the visual censorship.
It all came back clean.
Untouched.
Unaltered.
Uncooperative.
Naʻa kē rubbed her eyes hard. “You’re tired,” she muttered to herself. “Drink more water, edit less conspiracy videos.”
She reached for the Fiji bottle again and scrolled through folders on her desktop. Her cursor hovered over one folder for a long second.
RIPPLE GHOST
Naʻa kē dragged the corrupted Union Square footage into the folder. She sat back and exhaled, the glow from her screen casting a wavering light across her face.
EMBARCADERO
The room was cold enough to feel deliberate. Not for comfort—never for comfort—but to keep men alert. To keep them obedient.
Rows of monitors lined the walls, each one flickering with silent feeds from traffic intersections, BART stations, and downtown pedestrian cameras.
At this hour, the screens showed only street sweepers, fog, and the occasional car cutting through the city’s emptiness.
Herensmythe stood with his hands clasped behind his back, jaw set. He had not slept. He rarely did.
The security tech—broad-shouldered, jittery—tried not to breathe too loudly as he pulled up the Union Square compilation.
“This is every angle we have on the incident,” the tech said. “We ran enhancement filters, motion restoration, everything.”
Herensmythe did not reply.
The tech swallowed and pressed play.
Camera A1: The plaza looked normal. Cable car tracks. Fog drifting. A faint cluster of silhouettes.
Then a jolt of static—
a pulse—
and the screen flickered white.
When the picture returned, the silhouettes were distorted.
Blurry.
Hollow.
Camera B3: The same moment. The recording warped, as if dragged by a magnet.
A Sayphe man appeared to fold into himself before hitting the ground.
Officers collapsed from violent blows, but no assailant.
Camera C2: A ripple spread across the footage—circular, perfect—moving out from the center of the plaza.
Herensmythe’s jaw tightened. “Pause.”
The tech froze the frame.
Herensmythe stepped closer. His breath fogged faintly in the cold.
He traced the screen with his eyes, following the ripple’s expansion.
He whispered the name like a confession.
“The Baptiste.”
The tech blinked. “Sorry, sir?”
Herensmythe said. His voice was stone. “Replay Camera C2. Slow it to five percent.”
The ripple reappeared—slow, wide, gentle—traveling exactly like water pushed from beneath.
Herensmythe watched in silence until the ripple passed over the officers’ bodies.
The moment it did, the tech gasped. “Their faces… blanked. Their expressions reset!”
“As if someone erased the memory directly from their eyes.”
Herensmythe’s face didn’t move, but something colder settled behind his expression.
“It’s her,” he murmured.
The tech stuttered, “W-What do we do?”
Herensmythe straightened.
His posture sharpened like the edge of a blade pulled from its sheath.
“We escalate.”
He turned toward the exit.
“Send a retrieval order,” he said. “Full protocol. No margin for error.”
“For… for Ms. Lotu?”
Herensmythe stopped.
“No,” he said quietly, almost reverently.
“I need to be certain. Send the five percent footage to my phone and await my orders.”
Herensmythe walked out without another word, boots echoing through the sterile hall.
SAN FRANCISCO
Hān hopped up the two concrete steps and unlocked the laundromat door with a key far too large for her hand.
The metal latch clicked, echoing through the dim, detergent-scented interior.
Aleki hesitated on the sidewalk, glancing up and down the empty Mission block like he expected a Yukon to glide out of the fog at any second.
“Come on,” Hān called, already inside. “Stop acting funny style.”
Aleki slipped in, shutting the door quickly behind him.
The neon sign outside flickered half-heartedly, trying and failing to look alive.
Hān dropped the keys on the counter. “Ms. Lotu said she’ll be in after her doctor’s appointment.”
Aleki froze. “She’s… not here?”
“Nope.”
His throat tightened. “So it’s just us?”
“For now.”
Hān shrugged. “She said you can start by wiping down the machines.”
Aleki stared at the rows of washers like they were landmines.
“Listen, I don’t—I don’t want to be alone here.”
“You’re not alone,” Hān said, wandering toward the folding table. “I’m here.”
“That’s not reassuring!” Aleki hissed.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re NINE!”
Hān snorted. “Blood being ageist. That’s a shame.”
“I’m serious!”
Aleki paced in a small circle.
“I’ve never even done laundry before. My little sister always handled it.”
Hān cocked an eyebrow. “Dump the dirty in and fold the clean. What’s t’know?”
“It’s more complicated than that!”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is!”
“No, it’s really not.”
He threw up his hands. “That’s not what I’m scared of!”
Hān stopped mid-step and looked at him. “Then what?”
“The Sayphe guys! They’re gonna come back,” Aleki whispered, voice cracking.
“They saw my face. They’re gonna find me.”
“Oh. That.”
Hān wandered back to the front counter and climbed onto it.
Without ceremony, she pulled the 9mm from her waistband and placed it on the counter beside her keys.
Aleki’s soul nearly left his body. “WHY WOULD YOU PUT THAT THERE?!”
“So you don’t feel unprotected,” Hān said simply.
“I FEEL THE OPPOSITE OF PROTECTED!”
“Then pick it up.”
“No!”
“Suit yourself.”
Hān hopped off the counter.
“Okay,” she said cheerfully, “have fun doing laundry.”
“Wait—wait, WAIT—where are you going?!”
“Bathroom. Snack run. Stretch break. I dunno.”
Hān waved a hand. “Somewhere.”
“You can’t just leave me here!”
“You got the protection with you!”
Hān called over her shoulder. “What I’mma do? ‘Bite ankles,’ right?”
Aleki sputtered. “I DIDN’T MEAN THAT!”
“Well,” Hān said, pushing the door to the back hallway open,
“you said it.”
She disappeared around the corner, leaving Aleki standing in the middle of the laundromat.
Alone, with a handgun, it felt like the quietest room in San Francisco.
Aleki whispered to himself, “I’m gonna die doing laundry.”
SAYPHE MEDICAL
Ms. Lotu stood alone in the dim consultation room, hands trembling slightly as she held the glossy X-ray films to the fluorescent light.
The pale lattice of her lungs glowed against the black background—fractured shadows, cloudy blooms, skeletal trees where healthy branches should have been.
The doctor’s voice had been talking for minutes, muffled under the hum of the vent.
She hadn’t heard a word.
She only saw the shapes.
The spreading.
The doctor’s voice cut through the haze.
“I’m stunned, Ms. Lotu. With your scans showing stage four progression, you should be experiencing severe fatigue, shortness of breath, coughing… but you have none.”
She kept her eyes on the X-ray.
Her voice was steady. “And you said I have… months?”
The doctor hesitated. “If that. But—truly—I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s… miraculous that you appear so stable.”
Miraculous.
She felt the word salted her aged traumas.
“Well,” she murmured, lowering the film,
“miracles don’t last long.”
The doctor opened his mouth to respond, but she had already turned away.
She pressed the elevator button and stepped inside as soon as the doors parted.
Then three figures entered—Sayphe security in matching windbreakers—and behind them, Herensmythe.
He poured strict attention into the phone call occurring in his AirPods.
None of them acknowledged her as she lifted her X-ray copies toward the ceiling light, squinting at the ghostly white lesions across her ribs.
Her breath shook once—only once—but enough for her to hear it.
A small patch of black ink on the left side of his neck caught her eye.
A brand.
Sharp-angled.
Old.
The VOC insignia. Dutch East India Company.
For a moment, she became still—like water held at the edge of a boil.
Her heart kicked against her ribs hard enough to sting.
The elevator chimed, and the doors slid open.
She pushed past the enforcers, shoulders brushing them aside with unexpected force for a woman her size and age.
Herensmythe turned slightly, but maintained focus on his call.
She didn’t look back.
She walked straight through the lobby, past the nurse’s station, donation placards from Sayphe Temple members, and into the cold morning air.
Outside, she stopped only long enough to shove the reports, pamphlets, and X-ray films into a trash can.
The metal bin violently rocked, scaring a nearby little girl and her father.
Ms. Lotu kept walking, each step faster than the last.