Chapter 32: Ghost Orchard

Chapter 32: Ghost Orchard By the time the trail dropped them into the belly of the valley, the sun was gone, replaced by a blue-black dusk that stretched dusk into infinity. Apollo couldn’t see the sky for the branches, and the air had a flavor, minerally sweet, with the high note of blossom, the undercurrent of rot. There was no sign of the old city anymore; only trees, packed so tight their limbs interlaced like the fingers of feuding gods. Rows and rows, as if the valley had once been planted with the logic of a spreadsheet, then left for centuries to go feral. Nik staggered to a stop, hands on his knees, and eyed the orchard with the look of a man waiting for it to apologize. "This isn’t on any map," he said, more to himself than the others. Lyra was already halfway down the slope, boots skidding through the mulch. Every tree she passed moved a little, then settled, like a crowd shifting at the edge of a duel. The dog charged ahead, then froze, tail up, hackles combed by static. Thorin grunted, dragged his sore leg after him. Apollo watched the dwarf’s face for signs of the fever breaking through, but Thorin’s expression was as obstinate as ever. If he was suffering, it was by choice. At the floor of the valley, the temperature flipped. It was warmer here, not just by degrees, but in the way of ovens and the underbellies of blankets. Sweat prickled at Apollo’s hairline. He rolled his sleeve, palmed the scar where the aether vein still ached from last week’s fight. The orchard hummed. Not music, but a vibration: the feeling of being inside a throat just before it spoke. "We make camp here," Lyra announced, as if the idea had been her own all along. She kicked a space clear at the bottom of a gulch where maybe a hundred trees bent over a single, low well. The wall around the well was old but not ancient: the stones cobbled with a logic that suggested both ritual and efficiency, the way temples sometimes doubled as granaries. Nik flopped down, working his cramping legs. "What’s the story here?" he asked, not expecting an answer. He busied himself picking seeds from the dog’s coat. Lyra ignored him, her focus on the stone wall, specifically, the places where the mortar had been picked out, then patched again in a different shade of clay. She rapped the edge with her knuckles. A hollow note. "There are stairs under this," she said. Thorin shrugged and slumped at the base of the wall, head tipped back, breathing deep. "If you want to sleep underfoot, be my guest. I’m not digging." He gnawed a chunk of jerky, teeth working it to paste. Apollo barely listened. The orchard was singing, a low resonance that made the cartilage in his ribs want to vibrate out of his skin. The urge to reach for the energy was an old habit, but tonight it was impossible to resist. The trees bled aether. Not the brittle, city-refined stuff in syringes or orbs, but the original: the kind that grew in the cracks of the world, tasty and pure enough to strip the old paint off a soul. He closed his eyes, only for a moment, and let it seep in. The effect was immediate: the ache in his left leg gone, the floaters in his vision turning crystalline and sharp. He opened his eyes and the orchard was ten times brighter, not in color, but in dimension. He could see the auras of the trees as pressure gradients, subtle but real, each one looping back into the soil and then up again. A recycling. An ecosystem of hunger. He felt Lyra’s eyes before he saw them. She watched him from the crown of the well, arms around her knees. "You’re not fooling anyone," she said, her voice not much more than air. "Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it too loud." Apollo shrugged, tried to look mortal. "It’s just old magic," he lied. "This place is soaked in it." "Maybe save some for the morning," she replied, but her expression softened for a second, like she’d let herself believe him. "We’re all running on deficit." They camped in a knot of roots. Nik rigged a windbreak with his coat and a tarpaulin, while Thorin dozed and Lyra whittled a branch into a stake, methodical, the shavings curling around her boots. The air thickened after sunset, made everything taste of syrup and green wood. Apollo found sleep impossible, even with Lyra on first watch and the dog stretched across his shins. The orchard called out, each time aligned with the rhythm of his pulse. You could almost imagine it cared if you lived or died. Or maybe it just wanted you to know it was there. He waited until the others had gone slack with fatigue, Nik’s snore like a file on steel, Thorin’s breath a staggered saw, to slip loose and walk the rows. The orchard didn’t feel dangerous; it felt expectant. As if the trees knew what he was, and had been waiting a very long time for something like him to show up. He picked a fruit at random. The skin was lemon yellow, the size of a child’s fist, fuzzed with down. He pressed his thumb to it, felt the rush of aether sluice up his arm and into the latticework behind his eyes. He saw, for just a second, a memory not his own: a woman bent over a book, her fingers stained with pollen; a child carving names into the trunks, not with a knife, but with a piece of quartz tied to a cord. The images didn’t mean anything, but the sensation did: the orchard recorded, and it paid in kind. He put the fruit back, unwilling to eat it. Instead, he pressed his palm to a trunk and let the hum work its way through him, knitting the microfractures in his wrist, bandaging the old ache in his shoulder. Even the scars faded a little, their edges taking on a new color, almost gold. When he turned, Lyra was standing at the row’s end, hands in her pockets, face blank. "How long?" she asked. He tried to dodge the question, but her look made it clear she’d count silence as confession. "All my life," he said, which was also a lie. She nodded, then vanished back to camp, her footfalls perfectly even. The scent of apple wood lingered in her wake. — Dawn brought fog and the static of frost on every leaf. Apollo returned to camp, the gold still bubbling under his skin. He felt like a lantern with no wick, brighter inside than out, and always burning a little too fast. Nik woke first, then Thorin, then the dog, which seemed to regard the orchard with the same wariness one reserved for predators too lazy to chase unless provoked. Lyra slept the latest, and when she woke, it was abrupt, like she’d chosen the second in which she’d open her eyes and not a heartbeat before. They ate, then prepared to leave. Nik packed the tarpaulin so tight it could have doubled as a club. Thorin checked his leg, better, but not whole. Apollo watched Lyra, and she watched him back, just once, as if to say: whatever bargain you made last night, keep it to yourself. It was Nik who first noticed the difference. He stared at his left forearm, the scar that had once zigzagged pale against the hair now gone. "Did I have a scar here yesterday?" he asked, voice cracking a little. Lyra peered over, frowned, and shrugged. "You drink too much. Maybe you dreamed it." Apollo knew better. He looked to the tree line, and sure enough. The aether there was a loan, not a gift. As they left the valley, Thorin limped less, but when asked about his old friend from the Watch, the dwarf looked confused, like he’d mislaid the memory in a dream. Lyra seemed unchanged, except for a tic at the corner of her mouth, and a green to her eyes that was more jungle than grass. Apollo said nothing. He felt the voids left behind by what the orchard hadn’t repaired, the debts it had collected. ’Everything in this world has a price,’ he thought, but it felt less clever than it used to. They crested the ridge by noon. The orchard behind them looked ordinary again, all the strange geometry erased by the clarity of daylight. But when he glanced back, Apollo saw faces in the trees, pale, unfinished, like wax masks left too long in the sun. One looked a little like Torgo. One looked a little like himself, but older, or younger. It was impossible to know the difference. He kept walking. The next valley would be worse, and the old hunger in his arms, gold now, not blue, reminded him that the real story, the one the orchard had tried to tell, was just starting. Whatever gods watched over this world, they no longer answered prayer. But they did keep a ledger, and at the bottom of it, Apollo’s name was written twice.