The Extra's Rise

We stepped through the yard lock without helmets. Mana holds better than plastic up here if you know how to breathe.

Tycho Base spread behind us in low silver—domes, rails, the Aetherite yard we'd tamed two days ago. Ahead, the far-side ridge climbed like a black knife toward a sky full of cold stars. The regolith crunched once under my boot, then learned my weight and went quiet.

"Feel that?" Seraphina asked, already setting her pencil to a clean page.

I did. Not sound—never sound on the Moon—but a rhythm under the ground. A second heartbeat, deep and slow, a pulse that wasn't ours and didn't belong to anything born under this sky.

Luna's shoulder brushed mine. "Something wrote here," she said. "Not long ago."

Reika's voice clicked in from Valdris ops. "Courtesy alerts sent and acknowledged," she said. "South, North—Windwards and Creightons both—West, East, Central, and the Seven. All standing by. No one steps in unless we scream."

"Good," I said.

Rachel walked two fingers along my forearm and checked my pulse the way she always does. "Stay within your rails," she said. That musical timbre still found the stubborn parts of me and made them behave.

Cecilia squinted at the ridge. "It's not loud," she said. "It's patient. I hate patient."

Rose was already moving, braid tucked tight, eyes soft the way they get when she's measuring distances with a part of herself that doesn't use tape. "The pull is north by east," she said. "Like a spider's thread you only see if you don't want to."

We went without drama. Erebus walked in our shadows, tall, quiet, bones wrapped in polite darkness. If something wanted to learn our names out here, it would hear his last.

The ridge sharpened underfoot. Earth was a thin coin behind us, blue and white and far. The second heartbeat got clearer, not louder—another kind of patience, the kind that expects to win by wearing down the world.

Seraphina stopped first. "Here," she said, and drew a dot on her page like she was tapping the Moon itself.

Three black-glass pieces sat in a triangle a few meters apart, half sunk into the regolith. Not obsidian—this glass drank light and hummed when I looked at it too long. Each piece held a shallow sigil cut into its face, not in any alphabet I knew and too neat to be guesswork.

"They're not a gate," Rose said, crouching. "They're teaching the ground. Three corners make a habit."

"Triangulation," Cecilia muttered, disgust curling the word. "They're trying to make the yard learn a new rule: stillness that doesn't end."

Erebus set a hand to the regolith, then to the near sigil. "Not sealed," he said. "Hungry, not full."

"We break their conversation first," I said. "No brute force. We don't give the sender a surge to sniff."

Rose nodded. "I'll make the corners see each other wrong."

Cecilia cracked her knuckles. "And I'll cut the lead thread. Every web has one."

Seraphina set her watch. "On my call," she said. "We move on four."

Rachel took a step back, eyes on us, fingers resting on the small kit at her hip. "No racing," she said. "If anyone's breath forgets the rhythm, I pull you."

I drew Valeria—not armor, not wings, just a simple sword warmed by old steel and old friendship—and let the hum settle along my bones.

"Small truth," Valeria whispered in my head, voice cool and close. "Clean hand."

"On two," Seraphina said, soft and exact. "One… two."

Rose moved first, hand hovering above the nearest sigil without touching. Space near her fingers rippled, not bent, more like a mirage laid on its side. The triangle of glass corners looked at each other across a distance that wasn't the distance we stood on anymore. You could feel the geometry frown.

"Three," Seraphina said.

Cecilia's witchcraft is tidy when she wants it to be. She pinched the air above the far sigil and pulled. A single crimson hair glowed between her fingers—nothing showy, just the lead stitch the whole pattern took its timing from. She smiled like someone taking a thorn from a paw and set the thread aside in a little glass vial she'd brought because of course she had.

"Four," Seraphina finished.

I stepped and wrote one thin line in the air over the center of the triangle. Not a dome. Not a wall. One line with one rule that Lucent Harmony could carry: inside this line, movement will finish what it starts.

"Don't chase the wind," Valeria breathed. "Let it finish too."

Her edge whispered. The hum from the glass faltered. The ground's second heartbeat tripped on itself and forgot the next beat.

Erebus planted three bone nails in the regolith around us, pale things the Moon liked better than it should. They didn't shine. They didn't sing. They drank. Whatever the sigils shed looking for purchase, the nails took, and gave nothing back.

"Again," Seraphina said, and we did it: Rose held the corners wrong; Cecilia pulled the new lead stitch as it tried to form; I traced the same rule in the same place with the same breath; Erebus fed the nails. Rachel said nothing, which meant we were inside the lines she drew for us.

The first sigil cracked with a sigh only mana hears. The second followed a breath later. The third held long enough to be proud, then split down the middle like glass that remembered it had been sand.

"Good," Valeria said, almost pleased. "Again, if asked."

The second heartbeat faded. The ridge felt honest again—cold, still, simple rock basking in a light it didn't care about.

"Do not celebrate," Rachel said, softly, which made three of us smile.

Seraphina rolled her pencil. "They'll notice the silence."

"They noticed it when we arrived," Rose said, standing. "This was bait."

Cecilia tapped the vial in her palm. "Then we tell them we don't like their bait."

We weren't done. You never are when someone patient is teaching your ground to obey.

I knelt where the center of the triangle had been and set Valeria's tip gently into the regolith. Lucent Harmony hummed along the blade, into the dust, and out into a wedge of ground the size of a small room. No command. No force. Only a phrase I'd learned to write with my hands: when you move, you finish. When you rest, you rest because you chose to.

"Soft," Valeria warned. "No pride. Pride is a wobble."

The Moon doesn't care about that sentence. But it listened long enough to remember its old habits were better than the new one it had been sold.

Erebus pulled the bone nails and slipped them into a sleeve that shouldn't have fit them. The regolith covered their holes with a little slide that made me think it had liked their taste.

"We walk," I said.

We took the long line along the ridge, eyes open, senses spread. Seraphina marked quiet dots on her page when the ground felt right. Rose hummed a tune with no notes I could learn. Cecilia cut three more hair-thin threads that drifted near us like spider silk on a wind nobody else felt.

Halfway back, the shadow on the rim looked back.

Nothing moved. Nothing glowed. But somewhere beyond the edge, something noticed its triangle had come apart and turned its face this way. The chill across my shoulders didn't live in skin. It lived in stories: predators you never saw because they never needed you to.

Luna's hand slid into mine, quick and warm. "Don't bristle," she said, barely shaping the words. "It likes bristle."

"I wasn't," I lied.

"Seen," Valeria murmured, dry as snowfall. "Unworried."

I eased my shoulders and let Lucent Harmony go quiet. A tune is also something you can refuse to play.

Seraphina didn't look up from her page. "Arthur?"

"I feel it," I said. "Deepdark. Old. Not the Overlord. Court, not throne."

Erebus tilted his head like he was listening to a very distant bell. "An archduke's attention," he said. "Not body. Not even hand. A glance."

Reika's voice came steady. "We have your mark. All continents remain hands-off. The Seven are listening. If you want a backstop, say the word."

"Keep them out," I said. "If we crowd, we give it more to study."

We walked the last stretch without speaking. The dome looked small and human by the time we reached its shadow—lights low, crews moving like they were part of a machine that knew its job.

Chief Hale met us at the lock with dust on his boots and sleep in his collar. He lifted a brow the way men do when they want you to tell them the truth in one sentence.

"Three anchors taken out," I said. "Whatever set them knows the address now."

"Can you make it forget?" he asked.

"No," I said. "But we can make it dislike the taste."

Rachel flicked my shoulder with two fingers and handed me water. "Drink," she said. "Then say your next sensible sentence."

"Next sensible sentence," I said after two swallows, "we don't sit on our roof waiting for a second triangle. We step one ridge out and meet it there if it tries again."

Hale nodded. "I'll keep the yard quiet. You keep my sky boring."

"Deal," I said.

We stripped off dust and crossed into the main dome. The base hummed at night pace—low voices, a cart wheel squeak, the clean smell of heated water in thin air. Cecilia took her vial to a side bench and began sketching the cut she'd made, witch notes neat and mild. Rose stood at the viewport and watched Earth without blinking. Seraphina copied her dots into a second page and drew a line between the three that meant more to her than it ever would to me. Erebus leaned against the only patch of shadow in the room and was very still. Rachel wrote something down in that little book she uses when she wants to remember how a day felt, not what it did.

Luna leaned her head on my shoulder. "It saw you," she said.

"It saw us," I said. "That's better."

She smiled. "Yes. It is."

Valeria rested across my knees, quiet as a sleeping cat. "Hold the tune small," she whispered. "If it reaches, we cut once, not pretty."

"I know," I told her.

"Good," she said, and went still again, listening in ways only a blade can.