The storm swallowed Petrov's screams before they'd dragged him fifty yards from the city. His crystallized wrist stump had stopped bleeding—not from clotting, but from something far worse. Thin blue tendrils had begun weaving across the wound, knitting his flesh into geometric patterns that shimmered like stained glass.

  "Tell me that's not bone," Rourke muttered, eyeing the fractal growths.

  "Not bone," Elias lied smoothly, wrapping the injury with Faraday mesh from his pack. "More like... aggressively self-organizing scar tissue."

  Petrov laughed, the sound too high and bright. "It's beautiful, don't you see? The angles—the perfect angles—"

  Eleanor slapped him. The crack echoed oddly in the glacial air. "Focus. What did you hear in there?"

  "The music of the spheres," Petrov whispered. "Played backward."

  Back at camp, Kettering spread the 19th-century journal across their makeshift lab table. The pages smelled of bergamot and burnt hair.

  "Our predecessors weren't just mining," he said, tapping an illustration of the black flower. "They were gardening."*

  The diagram showed the Fragaria abyssi connected by root-like tendrils to human figures, their bodies transforming into:

  Au (Gold)

  Ag (Silver)

  ? (Death)

  "Literal blood money," Rourke observed. "No wonder they went broke."

  Eleanor traced a margin note—a crude chemical equation:

  C?H??O? + ? → ☉ + Δ

  (Glucose + Lead → Gold + Change)

  "This makes no sense," she said. "You can't transmute elements through plant metabolism."

  The radio chose that moment to spit static. Then Jenkins' voice—or something wearing his vocal cords—intoned:

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  "You're still thinking in three dimensions."

  Kettering produced a vial of mercury from his coat. The metal moved sluggishly, as if dreaming.

  "Modern chemistry's problem?" He tilted the vial. The mercury climbed the glass against gravity. "You assume atoms are balls. But what if they're... doors?"

  The demonstration that followed defied protocol:

  

  
1. 
   
     He added a drop of Petrov's crystallized blood.
   
     


  
2. 
   
     The mercury unfolded into a perfect dodecahedron.
   
     


  
3. 
   
     The shape began rotating along axes that shouldn't exist.
   
     


  

  "Non-Euclidean geometry meets quantum chemistry," Elias murmured, reaching—

  Kettering snatched it back. "Ah-ah. This dance needs lead partners." He nodded to Rourke's ammunition. "Your bullets, Captain."

  "Forget it."

  "Not to shoot. To calculate."*

  Reluctantly, Rourke surrendered a round. Kettering pressed the lead slug against the mercury shape—

  —which promptly ate it.

  The resulting flash left afterimages of equations burned onto their retinas:

  ?2ψ + (2m/?2)(E - V)ψ = 0 (Schr?dinger's Equation, but the symbols bled silver)

  "Well," Rourke said after a stunned silence. "That's one way to bond with your ammo."

  Jenkins stood waiting outside the tent. His eyes were now fully blue, the irises geometric mosaics.

  "She wants to show you something," he said cheerfully. "In the basement."*

  Eleanor frowned. "We don't have a—"

  The ground trembled. A fissure opened near the supply cache, revealing steps carved from living ice. The walls pulsed with the same symbols they'd seen in the city.

  "Called it," Rourke muttered. "Evil ice cellar."*

  As they descended, the air grew thick with the scent of lightning and wet soil. The walls here weren't inscribed—they were veined, the glowing patterns branching like:

  

  
1. 
   
     Nervous systems
   
     


  
2. 
   
     Fungal networks
   
     


  
3. 
   
     Something in between
   
     


  

  At the chamber's heart stood a pedestal. On it rested a single silver key—its teeth shaped like:

  ☉ ? ? (Gold, Silver, Lead)

  Jenkins smiled with teeth that caught the light wrong. "Who wants to go first?"*

  The key fits three locks:

  

  
• 
  
    The sample box (which hasn't stopped singing)
  
    


  
• 
  
    Petrov's new crystalline growths
  
    


  
• 
  
    Kettering's left wrist (when did that happen?)
  
    


  

  Meanwhile, the storm outside begins forming words in Ancient Greek and binary.

  Rourke loads his remaining bullets with salt. "For the metaphorical wound."