First Contact
Copyright© 2026 by Charlie Foxtrot
Chapter 6
The system had been quiet for a long time.
We’d gotten Harko on his feet and retraced our steps with Nev or me supporting him. First the creek with the bluff rising on the eastern bank, then the pathway winding back to the northwest and then the bamboo forest. Now that we had reached the edge of the potato field, Harko needed to rest again. The sky was turning from deep indigo to the thin wash of gray-blue that signaled dawn approaching.
Nev stood facing back the way we’d come. She wasn’t speaking. She wasn’t checking her overlay. She was just watching the dark where the rift was, beyond the bamboo line and the bluff and a forest of trees we couldn’t see from here, her body still and her arms loose at her sides.
Her magenta outline was gone. So was Harko’s yellow aura. The imagery had faded as we moved from the region of the rift.
Both of them glowed. Harko sitting at the field’s edge, a teal-to-cyan luminescence at his edges, faint enough that I almost missed it. Nev standing, the same residue brighter on her, the way she always seemed to take more of whatever was in the air. The system’s word for it was Flux residue. The sight of it on them was new.
I looked at my own hands. They were just hands, the same as always. If Nev or Harko could see the glow, they hadn’t said anything.
I let the quiet be quiet.
Harko was the first to move. He shifted from sitting to lying back in the grass, slow and careful, like a person who’d just figured out that the muscles he’d been using to hold himself upright were the same ones that wanted to give up. He didn’t close his eyes. He looked at the sky.
I looked too. The sky did what it always did at this hour, stars faded and the deep blue-black lightened, warming with the barest hint of yellow in the east. Beautiful in the same way the rift’s interior had been. The thought sat strangely.
Nev turned. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t sit. She turned ninety degrees and faced the settlement, the same as she’d been facing the rift. Still, attentive, weight balanced. I watched her without being noticed, and she watched everything else.
I stayed still myself. Flux had moved in me. Not pain. Not strangeness. Different, like a glass being full instead of half-full. I was filled with something I hadn’t been carrying before.
And that full weight was something real. I had found the exit with part of what filled me. I had felt the pathway out.
I might have created that path. That thought stopped me cold. If Flux could be controlled, I’d spent four years consciously not practicing.
I could still feel where the rift had been, even though I couldn’t see it through the bamboo and the bluff and the dark. I could feel where the settlement was, ahead. I could feel the space between the two of them as a thing with shape.
The sky had moved further into gray. Not yet dawn but no longer night.
I had not opened my overlay. I was waiting for the quiet to be enough.
It nearly was.
Harko’s breathing became less labored, more natural. He still didn’t say anything, just lay back looking skyward.