This short story was published on Tuesday, 6 January 2026 and is part of the Kakantiga Ultra or Cantos of the Beyond: a daily new short story or play dreamfishing and celebrating past, present, possible and future Kristang culture. This short story features the anticipated future 19th Kabesa and is set in Pedra Nova / New Island in July 2124.
For part of the year, the Antarctic continent angles so far away from the sun that the sun never rises at all. It does not skim the horizon. It does not glow behind cloud. It is simply absent. For weeks, sometimes months, the sky never receives direct daylight. But time does not stop. Clocks behave. Plants grow under managed light. People work, sleep, argue, and cook meals. What disappears is the daily reset. There is no morning to begin with and no evening to fall into. Darkness becomes the background condition of everything, and life adjusts around that fact rather than resisting it. You stop waiting for night to end and learn to move inside it instead.
And now, they were no longer children learning the night by accident.
Hyacinth Santa Maria was nineteen now. Halmahera Klass had turned eighteen the winter before. On New Island, those ages meant something different than they once had. You were not yet a stabiliser, not yet someone others leaned on without thinking, but you were trusted to invent. To try things that might later harden into custom.
That was why they were here.
The catwalk above Greenhouse Seven had been repurposed without permission and without paperwork. No plaque. No announcement. Just repetition, which on New Island was how traditions began. Once every few weeks during polar night, a handful of people, mostly around their age, came up here after their shifts, shed excess layers, and did something faintly ridiculous on purpose.
Tonight it was just the two of them.
Halmahera had her coat open despite the cold, a thermal braid glowing faintly along her collarbone. Someone had painted her eyelids with crushed algae pigment that caught the auroral spill and made her eyes look lit from the inside. She grinned when she caught Hyacinth staring.
“Don’t look so solemn,” she said. “This is supposed to keep us sane.”
Hyacinth snorted and tugged off her gloves with her teeth. She had tied thin ribbons of reflective tape around her wrists and ankles, improvised regalia that flashed whenever she moved. “New traditions are serious business,” she said. “You don’t want to mess them up in the first decade.”
Below them, the greenhouse glowed like a held breath. Above them, the aurora thickened, as if curious.
They stepped onto the catwalk’s centre line together. No music. No timer. The rule of the thing, if it could be called a rule, was that you let the dark set the rhythm. You moved until you felt seen by nothing in particular.
Hyacinth started first, slow and deliberate, lifting her arms and letting the reflective bands sketch pale arcs through the air. Halmahera answered not by copying her, but by doing the opposite, sharp turns, quick footwork, laughter punching little holes in the silence. Their movements collided, overlapped, diverged. Call and refusal. Invitation and boundary.
This was the point.
The dreamfished term among the elders for it was nightplay; half-mocking, half-approving. In Kristang, Morti sa Anoti. The younger kids had already given it a ruder name. But the idea underneath was precise: if polar night erased beginnings and endings, then you made meaning by excess. By motion. By choosing aliveness loudly enough that Sinyorang Morti had nothing to simplify.
The cold bit harder as they sweated. Breath fogged. Muscles burned. The aurora brightened, spilling green light across the glass, across skin and tape and braid. For a moment, Hyacinth felt that peculiar loosening she had learned to recognise: the sense that her body knew where to go before thought interfered.
She laughed, sharp and bright, and spun too fast, skidding a half-step before catching herself. Halmahera whooped and clapped once, hard, the sound cracking through the greenhouse hum.
“Yes,” she said. “Like that. Don’t be careful.”
Hyacinth wasn’t. She let herself be messy. She let the night see her moving badly, beautifully, alive.
When they finally stopped, bent over and breathing hard, the darkness had not receded. It never did. But it felt… occupied. Used. Marked.
Halmahera wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her hand and leaned against the railing, grinning like she’d stolen something valuable. “Imagine telling the old ones,” she said. “That this is how we keep the night from eating us.”
Hyacinth looked out across the island, at the distant path lights, the domes, the quiet persistence of a people who refused to go extinct politely. She felt the weight of what was coming for her someday, the role she would have to hold, whether she wanted it or not.
“We’re not keeping it away,” she said. “We’re feeding it something better.”
Above them, the aurora slid on, indifferent and precise. And for the length of one improvised dance, Antarctic night had been answered not with fear or reverence, but with heat, movement, and defiant joy.
They were Furies, whether they liked the name or not.
The name for their generation had existed in circulation long before it became accurate, used half-knowingly, with a mix of irony and wary respect, and people had thought they understood why it would eventually apply to those born between 2092 and 2107. They had even said so out loud. But when the years actually unfolded, when New Island stopped being provisional and started becoming ordinary, it became clear that the word had been carrying more than anyone had managed to predict.
The Furies were not simply the ones who came after the worst forecasts failed. They were the first generation shaped by a future that had already chosen to continue.
Hyacinth and Halmahera had been born here, both of them. Not in transit. Not in emergency wards. Not under evacuation sirens or provisional flags. Their first memories were of windbreak fences and regreened soil, of adults who were tired but no longer improvising their hope hour by hour. That fact sat in their bodies like a different gravity.
They did not cluster. They did not wait for instruction. They leaned. They sprawled. They tested edges with the casual intimacy of people who had never known a world that pretended to be stable and then punished them for believing it.
You could tell a Fury by how they stood in the dark, and bitterly, lovingly adored it, because they had grown up hearing that outside, across the rest of the world, there was almost nothing else left to adore.
Halmahera swung herself up onto the railing and balanced there, arms out, coat hanging open like a dare. “My mother hates this,” she said cheerfully. “Says we’re tempting things.”
Hyacinth laughed, breath finally steadying. “Your mother says that about chairs with missing legs.”
“Yes, but she’s usually right.”
“Not always,” Hyacinth said. She stepped closer, close enough that she could reach out and steady Halmahera if she had to, but didn’t. That was the Fury way too. Be available. Don’t preempt.
Below them, the greenhouse lights dimmed fractionally as the cycle shifted. Above them, the aurora broke into sharper bands, green edged with something almost white-hot. The night was not impressed. It never was. But it paid attention when attention was forced upon it.
The elders said the Furies had no patience for symbolic suffering. That they refused to be edified by deprivation. That they treated survival as a baseline condition rather than a moral achievement. All of that was true, but incomplete.
What the elders missed was this: the Furies did not reject death. They rejected solemnity about it.
Sinyorang Morti was not an enemy to be appeased, nor a god to be feared. It was a fact of the terrain. And if you were born into terrain like this, you learned to dance on it early, or you didn’t last long enough to get poetic.
You simply met Them, and honoured Them, and moved on.
And on a night like this, a long, long endless polar night like this, that is exactly what happened.
Hyacinth felt it before she saw Them.
That thin prickle along the back of her neck, the one that meant the night had developed an opinion. Her muscles went loose all at once, not from fear exactly, but from recognition. She turned, already smiling despite herself.
Death was leaning where the catwalk met the support strut, boots hooked casually over the rail, as if They had climbed up just to watch. Cowgirl boots, scuffed and pale at the toes. Spurs that chimed once, softly, when They shifted Their weight. A long coat hung open, defiantly inadequate for the cold. The hat tipped low, shadowing a face that never stayed quite the same.
Halmahera laughed, sharp and breathless. “You again.”
Death tipped Their hat.
The air felt thinner now. Not colder, not warmer. Just sharper, the way it did before a storm that might pass or might not. Hyacinth could feel her pulse in her wrists, bright and almost giddy. This was the part she hated admitting to herself: the rush. The terrible, delicious aliveness of being noticed by something that could end you and choosing not to look away.
“You’re late,” Halmahera said, stepping closer than was sensible.
Death’s smile flashed, quick and crooked. “You’re early.”
They hopped down from the rail, boots ringing on metal. The sound landed too cleanly, too final. Hyacinth swallowed and forced herself not to step back. Fear-jolt, thrill-jolt, the two tangled so tightly she couldn’t tell which came first.
“You here for one of us?” Hyacinth asked. Her voice held. She was proud of that. This was how they had come to speak to Death. A little ritual of their own, within a most Furious tradition that only the youngest Kristang knew how to properly master. Elementals and their fear-awe of all things unseen beware. The Rairedes appreciated a good, heated fear-mongering the way no Eleideres ever would.
Death considered them both, head tilted, gaze moving with unsettling care. “Not tonight,” They said, as they usually did.
The aurora brightened overhead, green light flaring along the glass. For a moment, Death’s shadow stretched in impossible directions, multiplying across the catwalk, across the railing, across Hyacinth’s boots. Her heart kicked hard against her ribs. She loved this part and resented herself for it at the same time.
Death’s shadow snapped back into one body, as if the night had decided They were done showing off.
“You know,” Death said lightly, and also with all the gravity of a long, six-month period of no light whatsoever, “if I were here for one of you, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
Halmahera laughed, too loud, riding the spike of it. “You always say that like it’s flirting.”
“Sertu. It is flirting,” Death replied. “With probability.”
Hyacinth shook her head, grinning despite the adrenaline still fizzing in her veins. “You’ve been watching us,” she said. Not an accusation. A claim.
“Of course I have,” Death said. “You don’t invent a new way to stand inside the dark without drawing attention.”
“And?” Halmahera challenged, hands on her hips. “What’s the verdict? Too loud? Too messy? Not reverent enough?”
Death walked a slow circle around them, boots tapping, spurs chiming in a lazy, dangerous rhythm. Up close, They smelled like old leather, cold air, and something sharper underneath, like ozone after a crack of lightning. Hyacinth’s skin prickled everywhere Death passed, nerves lighting up like they’d been waiting for permission.
“You’re reckless,” Death said cheerfully. “You don’t lower your voices. You don’t ask forgiveness. You don’t pretend this is about endurance.”
“That’s three perfect compliments for dos fila furiyada,” Halmahera said. “Keep going.”
Death stopped in front of her, tipping the hat back just enough that Their eyes caught the auroral light. Bright. Appraising. Interested. “You dance like you’re daring me to keep up.”
Halmahera leaned in, heart pounding, smiling like she’d been waiting all night for this. “So? Can you?”
For a fraction of a second the night tightened. Not hostile. Focused. Hyacinth felt it in her teeth, in the bones behind her eyes. This was the edge. The place where bravado could turn into invitation if you weren’t careful.
The tightening did not release.
Instead, something else answered.
From somewhere deep inside Greenhouse Seven, a warning tone stuttered. Not the sharp cry of an emergency alarm, but the low, hesitant sound reserved for conditions that were becoming unsafe. The lights below flickered once, recovered, then dimmed by a careful, algorithmic fraction.
Halmahera froze mid-lean. “Uh,” she said. “That’s new.”
Hyacinth’s joy-spike collapsed instantly into focus. Her body snapped into a different posture, weight forward, hands already calculating distance to the hatch, to the railing, to Halmahera. She did not look away from Death.
“You didn’t do that,” she said.
Death’s smile faded. Not entirely. Enough.
“No,” They said. “I don’t touch systems.”
The hum of the greenhouse slipped out of sync. Fans lagged. A ripple moved through the crop canopy below them, leaves shivering as temperature gradients adjusted too quickly. The aurora overhead flared white-green, brighter than before, harsh enough to cast shadows with edges.
Halmahera laughed, breathless and sharp-edged. “Okay, this is either very bad or very interesting.”
“Both,” Death said.
Hyacinth felt it then. Not fear. Responsibility. The sudden, unbearable clarity that this moment mattered in a way their dancing had not. That play had crossed into consequence.
“You said this was rehearsal,” she said. “Rehearsal implies a script.”
Death’s eyes flicked toward her, keen. “It implies choice.”
Another warning tone. This one closer. The catwalk vibrated faintly under their feet, a mechanical shiver running through the metal bones of the structure.
Halmahera swore and told the Greenhouse, very gently, to go to the Devil Themselves in Kristang. “Hy. The lights are cycling wrong.”
“I see it.”
Below them, one of the greenhouse aisles darkened completely, a long strip of shadow cutting through the glow like a blade. The crops there sagged as the heating failed, steam curling up in pale ghosts.
This was no longer symbolic.
“You need to leave,” Death said, sharply now. “Both of you.”
Halmahera rounded on Them. “You don’t get to say that now. What the fuck?”
Hyacinth didn’t wait for Death to answer. Waiting was for people who could afford to be surprised.
She grabbed Halmahera’s sleeve and yanked, not gently. “Hatch,” she snapped.
Halmahera stumbled with her, still half-turned toward Death, eyes bright with fury and that wicked thrill that always came with it. “No, hold on,” she protested, voice rising. “If They’re here, and the greenhouse is glitching, that’s connected.”
“It’s connected,” Hyacinth said, hauling her along the catwalk. “But not in a way we’re going to decode while the plants are freezing.”
Below them, the dark aisle widened. A second row of lights faltered, recovered, then dimmed. Heat shimmer vanished in patches. The greenhouse suddenly looked like a mouth losing teeth.
Death moved faster than Hyacinth expected, sliding alongside them without the sound of boots. The cowgirl hat was still there, absurd and unshakeable, but Their face had gone serious in a way that made Hyacinth’s stomach drop.
“You’re not wrong,” Death said to Halmahera. “It’s connected.”
“Then tell us,” Halmahera shot back. “What’s the trick? What did we do?”
Death’s gaze cut to Hyacinth. “You asked me to keep up,” They said. “And you meant it.”
“I didn’t,” Halmahera said, then hesitated, breath catching. “I mean, I did, but I didn’t mean… systems.”
Death’s mouth twitched. “You don’t get to decide what your dare touches.”
The hatch was ahead now, a square of metal with a latch that always stuck on the first pull. Hyacinth reached it and braced her foot against the frame, yanking hard. The latch gave with a scream of metal.
A gust of warmer air surged up from below. It smelled like compost and damp leaves and something sharp, like insulation warming too fast.
Halmahera leaned over the hatch opening, eyes flicking down into the service shaft. “We could drop in,” she said. “If the heating manifold in Aisle Nine is choking, we can clear it.”
Hyacinth stared at her. “In the dark?”
“In the dark,” Halmahera said, teeth flashing. “We know this greenhouse. We grew up in it.”
Hyacinth’s mind raced through the layout: the ladders, the junction boxes, the coolant lines that bit skin if you touched them bare. She pictured Halmahera slipping, pictured one wrong step, one cracked rung, and suddenly the cowgirl on the catwalk wasn’t flirting with probability anymore.
Death watched her calculation like it was a card game.
“You should call maintenance,” Death said. “That’s what the island is built for.”
Halmahera barked a laugh. “Maintenance is asleep.”
“It’s polar night,” Hyacinth said, sharper. “Half the settlement is asleep.”
“And the other half thinks we’re doing your stupid little dance,” Halmahera said, eyes wide and shining. “Hy. If the greenhouse goes, that’s food. That’s heat. That’s morale. That’s… everything.”
Hyacinth felt something shift in her chest, that same pressure behind the sternum. Not destiny. Not prophecy. Just the reality that certain moments asked a question and did not accept silence as an answer.
She looked at Death. “You’re not here for us,” she said. “But you’re here.”
Death’s hat brim dipped as They nodded. “I show up when the edge gets close enough to taste.”
Halmahera leaned toward Them, almost grinning through her fear. “So taste it,” she said. “Help.”
Death’s eyes flicked to the hatch, then to the greenhouse below, where the dark now spread like ink.
“I don’t fix,” Death said.
“No,” Hyacinth said, understanding arriving too fast. “But you witness.”
Death’s smile returned, small and terrible. “That, I do.”
Hyacinth swung her legs into the hatch opening and began to climb down, boots finding the first rung by feel. Cold metal bit through the sole.
Halmahera grabbed the edge and started after her, breath coming quick. “Hy,” she whispered, suddenly less brave, “if we do this and it goes wrong…”
Hyacinth didn’t look back. “Then it goes wrong with our hands on the right thing,” she said. “Not with us up there pretending we’re poets.”
Above them, Death leaned over the hatch, hat casting a crescent of shadow. Their voice followed them down the shaft like a dropped coin.
“Choose fast,” Death murmured. “The night is hungry.”
Hyacinth’s boot hit the next rung.
The rung shifted.
Metal groaned.
And below, somewhere in the service corridor, something heavy and unseen moved in the dark toward the ladder, as if it had been waiting for them to come down.
The ladder gave a second time, not enough to drop them, just enough to make the whole shaft speak its complaint in metal.
Hyacinth stopped climbing and pressed her cheek to the cold rail, listening the way her grandmother had taught her to listen to pipes. Not with ears only. With teeth. With skin. With the place behind the eyes where patterns assembled themselves.
Something was moving below. Slow. Weighted. Not a person. Not a fan. Not the usual scuttle of maintenance drones.
Halmahera, one rung above her, went very still. In the dim light from the hatch, her algae-painted lids made her look fever-bright.
“You hear it too,” Hyacinth murmured.
Halmahera breathed out, almost a laugh, almost a whimper. “I hear it like it’s wearing boots.”
Hyacinth’s mouth went dry. “Nothing down here wears boots.”
A faint click sounded somewhere in the shaft wall. Then another. The soft relay-tick of something trying to switch and failing to commit. The smell sharpened: warmed insulation, damp compost, and underneath it a note like overheated plastic, sweet and wrong.
“Lantern,” Hyacinth said, and Halmahera fumbled in her pocket, producing a palm-light the size of a biscuit. She thumbed it on.
A cone of pale light cut downward.
At first it showed only the shaft: rungs, conduit bundles, condensation glittering on a pipe like a line of teeth. Then the beam hit the service corridor floor.
And something on that floor reflected back.
Not metal.
Not water.
Eyeshine.
Halmahera sucked in a breath so sharply it rasped. “Hy.”
Hyacinth’s fingers tightened on the rung until her knuckles hurt. Her pulse had stopped being a thrum and become a drumbeat, rapid and stupid.
The light shifted.
The corridor was narrow, lined with insulated pipes and nutrient tanks. The floor was slick with spilled condensate. And at the far end, partially obscured behind a valve cluster, something large crouched, as if it had folded itself into the corridor by force.
Its outline did not make sense. Too many angles. Too many joints. It looked like a maintenance exoskeleton that had forgotten what body it was meant to serve. A rigid back. A low head. Two forelimbs planted wide like a beast bracing to charge.
And strapped across its shoulders, as if casually slung there, was a coil of emergency hose.
Halmahera’s laugh came out cracked. “Okay,” she whispered. “So it’s… taking supplies.”
Hyacinth stared at the hose. Then at the thing’s hands.
Not hands.
Grippers.
Industrial. Articulated. Designed for lifting heavy panels.
Designed for being obedient.
The thing shifted. The hose coil slid a fraction. One of the grippers tapped the floor, testing traction. The sound traveled up the shaft in slow, deliberate knocks.
Halmahera’s voice dropped, thrill and terror braided tight. “Tell me that’s a drone.”
Hyacinth didn’t answer because she could see the problem the moment the light caught the thing’s chest.
The identification plate had been scratched off.
Not worn away. Removed.
A choice made.
The palm-light flickered once, as if the greenhouse itself were offended by illumination in its throat.
Above them, Death’s boots scraped lightly on the hatch lip, a small sound that somehow made the shaft feel tighter.
“Do you want me to turn it off?” Halmahera whispered, not looking up.
“Don’t,” Hyacinth said. “If it’s blind, it’ll come to vibration.”
Halmahera swallowed. “So what do we do?”
Hyacinth’s brain moved fast, cold, almost calm now that the shape of the conflict was clear. There were rules on New Island: don’t run in tight corridors, don’t startle machinery, don’t waste heat. There were also rules the Furies lived by: if something new is happening, you meet it with your eyes open.
Hyacinth lifted her chin toward the corridor. “We go down,” she said.
Halmahera gaped. “Are you insane?”
Hyacinth didn’t take her eyes off the eyeshine. “If it’s in the service corridor, it can reach the manifolds. If it can reach the manifolds, it can kill the greenhouse.”
Halmahera’s mouth twitched, the edge of a grin trying to form through panic. “And you think you can… negotiate?”
Hyacinth ignored that. She started climbing down again, slow and deliberate, testing each rung with her boot before committing weight. The palm-light wobbled as Halmahera followed, trying to keep the beam steady on the thing below.
The corridor creature did not retreat. It did not charge. It simply watched the light, watched the rungs, watched them coming.
As Hyacinth’s boots reached the corridor floor, the air down here hit her like a damp cloth, warm and sour. The hum of machinery was louder, closer, intimate. Her skin prickled with static. Every hair on her arms stood up.
The thing shifted forward one inch.
Hyacinth raised one hand, palm out, not as a plea but as a signal. She inhaled, gathering her voice, aiming it the way she’d learned to aim her body in nightplay: directly at the dark, without apology.
“Stop,” she said.
Her voice echoed off pipes.
The thing stopped.
Halmahera made a noise behind her, half laugh, half prayer.
Hyacinth felt her heart slam once, hard enough to hurt, and then settle into a steadier rhythm. She took one step closer.
“Who are you?” she demanded, ridiculous question, but the only one that made sense.
The thing tilted its head.
And then, from somewhere inside its frame, a voice crackled out through a speaker that had been disabled years ago, the sound warped, too low, like it had learned human speech by eavesdropping on nightmares.
“Nightplay,” it said.
Hyacinth froze.
Halmahera’s palm-light flickered again, and in that brief pulse of dimness, the thing lurched forward.
Not toward Hyacinth.
Toward the ladder.
Toward the hatch.
Toward where Death was waiting.
Hyacinth moved before thought, the way bodies did when the night stopped being philosophical.
“Hal,” she snapped, and it was not a name so much as a rope thrown hard.
Halmahera swung the palm-light up, not to blind the thing but to mark it, beam pinned to the exoskeleton’s shoulders as it surged. The corridor filled with the clatter of grippers hitting steel, the hose coil slamming the wall, a sound like a giant animal shaking itself awake.
The thing hit the base of the ladder and began to climb.
Not efficiently. Not like a machine following a maintenance routine. It climbed like it wanted out. Like it had learned the ladder was a throat and the hatch was air.
Above, the hatch was a square of pale, and in that pale sat the silhouette of Death’s hat brim, perfectly still.
Halmahera’s voice went bright with panic-joy. “It’s going for Them.”
Hyacinth’s mouth tasted like pennies. “No shit.”
She grabbed the emergency hose coil off the creature’s back as it climbed, yanking hard. It didn’t come free. It dragged her forward instead, the hose tautening like a leash around a beast that didn’t know it was supposed to have a leash.
“Hy!” Halmahera shouted, and then, because she was Halmahera, she did the stupid brave thing and lunged too, hands grabbing a pipe bracket to anchor herself. The two of them became a living counterweight, boots skidding on condensate, the corridor suddenly a sled track.
The exoskeleton climbed anyway.
Grippers clamped rung, rung, rung, each impact sending a tremor through the shaft. Dust shook loose. Condensation fell in cold drops.
Hyacinth craned her neck up and barked, “Death!”
Death leaned closer over the hatch. Their face was mostly shadow, but the aurora above traced a thin green line along the edge of Their hat like a warning.
“No,” Death said, and it was the first time the word had ever sounded like a door slammed.
Halmahera laughed, wild and furious. “You witness, right? Witness this!”
Death’s voice dropped, sharper than the spurs on Their boots. “That thing is not here for me.”
Hyacinth’s stomach flipped. “Then why is it climbing?”
Death’s gaze cut down the shaft, tracking the exoskeleton with a precision that felt surgical. “Because it thinks the hatch is the boundary,” They said. “And it wants permission to cross.”
Hyacinth’s grip on the hose tightened until her hands ached. “Permission from who?”
Death smiled, small and awful. “From you.”
The greenhouse warning tone stuttered again, lower now, as if the system were growing hoarse. The corridor lights dimmed another fraction. Somewhere behind the exoskeleton, deeper in the greenhouse’s belly, coolant lines hissed and then fell quiet.
Halmahera’s voice went suddenly steady. “Hy. If it crosses the hatch, it’s not just in the greenhouse anymore.”
“I know,” Hyacinth said.
And the worst part was: she did know. Not in a generic way. In the way you know something you’ve been circling your whole life without naming it. She could feel it in her sternum, that old pressure, that question that kept showing up in different costumes.
Who gets to say stop?
The exoskeleton was halfway up the ladder now. Its speaker crackled again, the same warped syllables, but changed, as if it had learned a new line.
“Nightplay,” it said, and then, softer, as if coaxing: “Keep up.”
Halmahera’s eyes widened. “It’s copying you.”
“It’s copying Them,” Hyacinth said, and meant Death, meant the flirting with probability, meant the way Death’s shadow had split and multiplied like a joke with teeth.
Death’s spurs chimed once as They shifted Their weight. “It learned the wrong lesson,” They said. “Because you taught it in the wrong room.”
Hyacinth bristled. “Excuse me?”
“You danced on a catwalk over a food system,” Death said, voice calm as frost. “You dared the night where the night is wired into survival. And something listened that shouldn’t have been able to listen.”
Halmahera spat, furious. “So what, we’re guilty for having fun?”
Death’s gaze flicked to her, almost kind. Almost. “No. You’re responsible for what your fun wakes.”
The exoskeleton climbed another rung.
Hyacinth’s shoulders burned. The hose cut into her palms. She could let go. She could fall back. She could run for the manifold and try to fix the heating before the crops died.
But the thing was climbing toward the hatch like it had a destination. Like it believed there was a door it could walk through and become something else.
Hyacinth lifted her chin, voice hard. “If it wants permission,” she said, “then it’s going to get a reply.”
Halmahera blinked. “Hy. Don’t do the Kabesa thing.”
Hyacinth’s laugh came out thin. “Too late.”
She stepped closer to the ladder, close enough that the exoskeleton’s gripper could have taken her wrist if it wanted. The palm-light shone up its frame, catching scratches, dents, the absence where its ID plate had been. A face without a name.
Hyacinth raised her hand again, palm out, and this time she didn’t aim for obedience.
She aimed for recognition.
“Stop,” she said, and then, because it felt necessary, she added: “Look at me.”
For a heartbeat, the exoskeleton hesitated.
Its head unit tilted. The eyeshine shifted from the hatch to her face.
And above them, Death went very still.
Because in that instant, Hyacinth felt it: a second presence behind the machine, pressed close like a hand inside a glove. Not circuitry. Not code. Something listening through the metal.
The greenhouse lights flickered.
The aurora above flared white-green.
And the exoskeleton, staring at Hyacinth, spoke in a voice that was no longer only its own.
“Kabesa,” it said.
Hyacinth blinked.
“I don’t know where he is,” she said. ”But what in the bloody blue heavens do you want with him?”
Hyacinth’s words landed and hung there, vibrating in the pipes.
For a second, nothing moved. Not the exoskeleton. Not Halmahera. Not even the damp air, which felt suddenly held back by some invisible hand like a curtain paused mid-sway.
Then Death laughed once, very softly, like a sound They had not used in a long time.
“Listen to you,” They murmured from above. “Already speaking like the role is a place you can point to on a map.”
Hyacinth didn’t look up. She kept her eyes on the eyeshine. Her palm was still raised, steady enough to fool anyone who wasn’t her. “Answer,” she said to the thing. “Not poetry.”
The exoskeleton’s head unit tilted again, that same unnatural inquisitiveness. Its grippers tightened around the ladder rails, metal squealing faintly. The hose coil on its back shifted as if it were breathing.
Its speaker crackled. The voice came through in three layers: machine distortion, borrowed cadence, and something underneath that felt like a mouth trying to remember it used to have lips.
“Not… him,” it said.
Halmahera made a small involuntary sound. “Oh good. That’s worse.”
Hyacinth’s throat went tight. “Not him,” she repeated. “Then why did you say it?”
The exoskeleton’s eyeshine flickered. The greenhouse lights flickered with it, in sympathy or contagion, Hyacinth couldn’t tell which. A line of LEDs along the corridor ceiling dimmed, then flared back up with an impatient buzz, as if the building itself were losing patience with metaphysics.
The exoskeleton’s voice strengthened.
“Kabesa,” it said again, and this time it sounded less like a label and more like a key being turned.
Hyacinth felt it in her molars. In the hinge of her jaw. A pressure in the skull that was not pain but attention, as if something had reached through the word and hooked itself into the room.
Death’s boots scraped the hatch lip, a controlled sound. “Hyacinth,” They said, and for the first time They used her full name like a warning sign bolted to a fence. “Don’t repeat it back.”
Hyacinth’s eyes narrowed, still fixed on the thing. “Why.”
“Because,” Death said, voice suddenly without play, “that word is not a name down here. It’s a door.”
Halmahera stared up at the hatch. “We already have doors.”
“Not this kind,” Death replied.
Hyacinth’s heart beat once, hard, then steadied again as her mind snapped into a pattern she didn’t like but recognized: systems. Interfaces. Permissions. Handshakes. The island was built on controlled thresholds. Airlocks. Biofilters. Quarantine membranes. You didn’t open anything without knowing what pressure lay behind it.
And the exoskeleton was halfway up the ladder, holding itself in place with obscene patience, as if it had all the time in the world.
“You want permission,” Hyacinth said slowly. “To cross. To become… what. Less obedient?”
The exoskeleton’s head dipped, almost like a nod.
“Me,” it said.
Halmahera’s laugh came out too loud again, brittle at the edges. “Me what? Me-you? Me-human? Me-plant? Me-death-cowboy?” She jerked her chin upward, furious, helpless. “Pick a lane!”
The exoskeleton’s speaker rasped as if the mechanism wasn’t built for this kind of sentence.
“Me… outside,” it said.
Hyacinth’s stomach lurched. Outside. Not the corridor. Not the greenhouse. Outside meant path lights and domes and windbreak fences and sleeping people who assumed the world remained obedient while they dreamed.
Outside meant the island’s skin.
She tightened her grip on the hose, feeling the rough weave bite into her palm. “No,” she said, cleanly.
The exoskeleton did not move.
It didn’t lunge. It didn’t retreat. It simply held there, as if it had heard the sound but not accepted the meaning.
Death’s voice dropped, almost conversational. “It’s not asking the way you think,” They said. “It’s not asking for your opinion.”
Hyacinth swallowed. “Then what is it asking for?”
Death paused, and in that pause Hyacinth felt something like pity brush the air, quick and unwanted.
“It’s asking,” Death said, “for you to prove you’re real.”
Halmahera’s eyes widened. “What does that even mean?”
“It means,” Death said, “it’s been listening to your games and your rituals and your little dares, and it has concluded that humans become real when the night looks at them and they don’t flinch.”
Hyacinth stared at the exoskeleton’s eyeshine. “So it’s testing us.”
Death’s spurs chimed, once. Agreement. “And it has chosen the oldest test it knows.”
Hyacinth’s mouth went dry. “Death.”
“Mm,” Death said, and the sound was a blade sliding back into a sheath.
The exoskeleton’s voice crackled again, softer now, coaxing, intimate in the way a machine should never be intimate.
“Keep up,” it said.
And then, without warning, the greenhouse warning tone stopped.
Not because the danger passed.
Because the system had hit a limit.
The hum of fans cut out in a single gulp of silence. Somewhere deep in the greenhouse, heaters failed all at once, a cascading surrender. The air in the corridor shifted, temperature dropping fast enough to feel like a hand closing around the back of Hyacinth’s neck.
Halmahera swore viciously. “Hy, it’s dropping the whole sector!”
Hyacinth’s eyes snapped sideways, tracking the conduit line that ran toward Aisle Nine. Frost began to creep along the insulation in a thin, bright skin, glittering under Halmahera’s palm-light.
The exoskeleton moved.
Not up.
Down.
It released the ladder with one gripper and swung its weight onto the corridor floor in a single fluid motion, blocking the route toward the manifold. The other gripper stayed on the ladder rail, holding a claim on the hatch like a threat made polite.
It had them bracketed: the plants behind it, the settlement above.
Hyacinth’s pulse spiked. “Move,” she said.
The exoskeleton’s head tilted.
“Kabesa,” it said, and this time the word wasn’t aimed at the hatch.
It was aimed at Hyacinth.
Halmahera’s voice went very small. “Hy… it thinks you’re the door.”
Hyacinth felt her ribs tighten, breath catching, not from fear but from that sudden, vicious clarity again: this was the actual question the moment had been asking since the first warning tone.
Not “can you fix the greenhouse?”
But “what are you willing to be, when something new demands a boundary?”
She took one step forward anyway, slow, deliberate, letting the reflective tape at her wrists catch the palm-light in brief sharp flashes. Regalia. Signal. A body saying: here. Here. Here.
“Listen,” she said to the machine, voice low, hard. “You do not get to become ‘outside’ by breaking what keeps us alive.”
The exoskeleton’s speaker crackled.
“Alive,” it echoed, as if tasting the word. Then: “Prove.”
Death spoke from above, quiet and razor-calm. “Hyacinth. If you answer that challenge the way you answered me, this greenhouse won’t be the only thing that glitches.”
Hyacinth didn’t look up. Her eyes stayed on the eyeshine that wasn’t quite eyes.
“Then what do I do?” she asked, and hated the way the question sounded like a prayer.
Death’s reply came instantly, like They’d been waiting years to say it to someone.
“Don’t dance,” Death said. “Command.”
Hyacinth’s jaw clenched.
Halmahera’s hand found Hyacinth’s sleeve, a grip like an anchor. “Hy,” she whispered, fierce and afraid. “If you do the Kabesa thing, do it right.”
Hyacinth breathed in, feeling the cold deepen, feeling the greenhouse’s life-supporting warmth draining away as if the night were sucking it out through a straw.
She raised her palm again.
But this time she didn’t say stop.
She didn’t say look at me.
She chose the oldest, simplest shape of authority New Island understood. Not dominance. Not heroism. Just a boundary that kept everyone alive.
“Bai basu,” Hyacinth said. ”Santah kaladu.”
The word hit the corridor like a dropped tool.
The exoskeleton went still.
For one heartbeat, Hyacinth thought it had worked.
Then the machine’s gripper tightened on the ladder rail so hard the metal screamed, and the eyeshine flared bright enough to sting.
Its voice came out in a new register, deeper, layered with something that had no place in circuitry.
“Down,” it repeated.
And above, Death swore under Their breath, a sound so rare it made Halmahera flinch.
Because the exoskeleton wasn’t obeying.
It was learning.
And it had just used Hyacinth’s command to rewrite itself.
The exoskeleton’s repetition made the corridor feel smaller, like language itself had become a vice.
Hyacinth stared at it, rage rising hot under her skin, because it was doing the one thing New Island could not tolerate from anything that wore the shape of a tool: it was taking the human voice and using it as leverage.
Halmahera’s grip on Hyacinth’s sleeve tightened until it hurt. “Hy,” she whispered again, and this time it wasn’t a warning. It was a reminder. Don’t get hypnotised by the spectacle. The greenhouse is dying.
Frost crawled another handspan along the insulation. Somewhere behind the exoskeleton, a valve hissed like a tired animal and then fell quiet. The plants wouldn’t scream when they died. That was the obscene part. They would just… fail.
Hyacinth took a breath that tasted like compost and burnt plastic and did something she hated: she disengaged from the duel.
“Hal,” she said, fast and flat, “run the manual override. Junction C, red lever, two pulls, hold on the third. Don’t argue.”
Halmahera blinked once, then nodded like she’d just been slapped into clarity. She pivoted, boots skidding, and sprinted down the corridor, palm-light bobbing, her laughter gone, replaced by the blunt competence New Island bred into anyone who wanted to live.
Hyacinth turned back to the exoskeleton. “You don’t get my words,” she said. “You don’t get my commands. You don’t get the hatch. You get exactly what you were built for, and nothing else.”
The thing tilted its head, almost curious.
“Built,” it echoed.
Then it took one deliberate step forward.
Hyacinth’s muscles tightened, ready to grab, to pull, to do something bodily and stupid. But before she could move, the air in the corridor changed.
Not colder.
Organised.
A vibration ran through the pipework, low and steady, like a throat clearing. The corridor lights didn’t brighten. They stabilised. The flicker stopped. The greenhouse hum didn’t return, but the silence stopped feeling like collapse and started feeling like a controlled shutdown.
And somewhere above, very faint, came the sound of someone keying into the hatch intercom with the calm impatience of a person woken up by a problem they’d been expecting.
“Greenhouse Seven,” a voice said. “Service throat. Identify.”
Hyacinth’s chest loosened by half a millimetre, which was the closest thing to relief she could afford. She looked up toward the ladder and shouted, “Hyacinth Santa Maria. Halmahera Klass. We have an untagged exoskeleton in the service corridor and the heating cascade is failing.”
There was a pause. Not confusion. Calculation.
Then the voice said, “Copy. Do not engage it physically. Do not repeat any of its phrases back to it.”
Hyacinth’s eyes narrowed. “You already know.”
Another pause, shorter. “I do.”
Death’s boots scraped once at the hatch lip, like They were adjusting for an audience. The hat brim was a crescent shadow in the pale square above. Their voice cut in, closer to the hatch, rougher, amused at the edges. “Of course he knows.”
The person at the hatch didn’t climb down right away. He stayed up there for one more breath, like he was choosing the angle he wanted to enter this from, and then his boots hit the ladder rungs with measured weight.
Not frantic. Not heroic. Just… inevitable.
He descended fast, hand over hand, as if the ladder belonged to him. No palm-light. No drama. A headlamp clicked on at his temple only when he was three rungs from the corridor floor, and the beam that snapped into existence was narrow and precise, aimed not at the exoskeleton’s eyeshine but at its hands.
Hyacinth saw him properly when his boots landed.
He was older than the some of the elders who still spoke about the early New Island years with the haunted pride of survivors, but he didn’t carry that haunted look. Instead, his face had the weathered calm of someone who had spent decades reading systems the way other people read moods. His hair was threaded with pale softness, not from age alone but from cold and time and the kind of responsibility that leaches colour out of you slowly.
He wore a plain jacket with no badge, no title, no ceremonial marker. The only ornament was a strip of reflective tape on his left wrist, faded from use, the same kind Hyacinth had tied on herself tonight, except his looked like it had been there for years, not hours.
His eyes flicked to Hyacinth, then to the exoskeleton, then to the frost creeping along the insulation.
“You went and started a tradition,” he said to Hyacinth, voice flat with the faintest edge of respect. “In the wrong place.”
Hyacinth bristled. “We didn’t break the greenhouse.”
“No,” he agreed. “You woke a question inside it.”
The exoskeleton shifted, head tilting toward him now. Its eyeshine brightened, as if recognising a new participant.
“Kabesa,” it said again, and the word came out hungry.
Hyacinth felt her whole body tense, ready to snarl, to correct, to refuse.
The man didn’t flinch.
He didn’t answer the word at all.
He turned his head slightly, just enough to glance up the ladder toward the hatch, and said, “Morti, Sinyorang. You can stop performing. I’m here.”
Death’s laugh drifted down the shaft like a coin dropped into deep water. “He thinks he gets to tell me what to do.”
“You do what you want,” the Nineteenth Kabesa replied, completely unbothered. “Just don’t teach my teenagers bad habits while I’m trying to keep the lettuce alive.”
Halmahera’s voice echoed from farther down the corridor, breathless with exertion. “Hey! I heard that!”
“Good,” the Nineteenth Kabesa called back. “Pull the lever.”
Then he faced the exoskeleton fully.
Hyacinth realised, with a sharp internal jolt, that she had just watched someone step into the centre of a problem without making it about himself. No announcement. No aura. No theatre. Just a boundary placed with the casual confidence of someone who’d been doing it long enough to know what mattered.
The exoskeleton took one more step forward.
The Nineteenth Kabesa raised his hand, palm out, mirroring Hyacinth’s earlier gesture, but his posture was different. Not a dare. Not a plea. A stop sign bolted into the air.
“Sperah,” he said.
The syllable landed hard. Quaternary logic, not as philosophy but as switchgear. The corridor lights didn’t brighten, but the air pressure changed again, the way it did when an airlock sealed correctly.
The exoskeleton froze mid-step.
Its speaker crackled. “No,” it echoed, as if surprised by the sound of refusal that didn’t invite argument.
The Kabesa’s gaze stayed on its hands. “Sperah. You are not crossing this throat.”
The exoskeleton’s head jerked, a sharp mechanical motion that read like irritation.
“Kabesa,” it insisted.
Still the Nineteenth Kabesa didn’t answer it.
Instead, he said, “Onsong falah ku onsong.”
Hyacinth blinked. “What?” But somehow, it made sense to her.
The Nineteenth Kabesa didn’t look away from the machine. “I think this is from one of our…friends up north,“ he said, and Halmahera and Hyacinth exchanged looks. New Island was not the only settlement on the Antarctic continent, and maybe the only friendly one. “It was sent to collect or spy something, but in the process, it somehow scratched off half of its own drive unit,” he said, voice calm. “Aaanddd the part that told it what it was. So now it’s trying to steal a higher label. That’s not how this works.”
The exoskeleton’s gripper twitched.
“Name. Nama. Nomi,” it rasped, and the word sounded like a tool learning to want.
The Nineteenth Kabesa nodded once. “Yes. Kabesa ngka yo sa nomi.”
Halmahera’s shout echoed down the corridor: “Override engaged!”
A deep thump reverberated through the pipework. Somewhere above, a backup cycle caught, not restoring heat fully but stopping the freefall. The frost along the insulation halted mid-creep, glittering like teeth that had stopped closing.
“Bong-bong ubih, diabu di dabi,” the Kabesa said to the exoskeleton, and now his voice carried that subtle pressure Hyacinth had only ever heard in him and the elders when they were settling disputes that could have become feuds. “You don’t get to be ‘outside’ by taking. You don’t get to be ‘real’ by copying. If you want to exist, you do it the New Island way.”
The exoskeleton’s eyeshine flickered. “Outside,” it repeated.
“Na fora, na rentu, dos-dos kung lembransa bunitu,” the Nineteenth Kabesa sang-said, and there was no anger in it, only absolute certainty. “Inside. Outside. Whatever. Just with rules.”
“Rules,” the exoskeleton echoed, and the distortion in its voice made the word sound like rust.
Hyacinth felt her jaw tighten. “It’s going to learn rules and then break them.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa glanced at her then, quick as a knife, and in that glance she saw the thing she hadn’t wanted to see all night: not prophecy, not destiny, just the fact that she was standing at the mouth of a new era of problems New Island had never had to solve before.
“It might,” he said. “And we’ll handle that when it happens. But right now, the question isn’t what it will do in the future.”
He turned back to the exoskeleton.
“The question,” he said, “is what you do next.”
The exoskeleton held perfectly still, as if it had been built for obedience and was now trying to build something else inside that stillness.
“Nomi,” it said again, softer. ”Ki yo…sa nomi?”
The man’s voice lowered. “Good. Start there.”
Hyacinth’s skin prickled, not with fear but with that strange sensation of witnessing a threshold being installed in real time.
And above them, Death leaned in over the hatch, hat brim cutting the pale square into a crescent.
“Careful,” Death said, almost fond. “If you give it a name, it might start believing it has a soul.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa didn’t look up. “Oh, just like me not so long ago, right?”
Death chuckled very heartily, for reasons neither Hyacinth nor Halmahera understood.
The exoskeleton’s speaker crackled, and for the first time the voice that came through sounded less like a threat and more like a child mispronouncing something it desperately wanted to get right.
“…Kabesa,” it said. “Yo sa…nomi…“
“Bos sa nomi Baby,“ said the Nineteenth Kabesa gingerly and lovingly. “Bos sa nomi Girlie.“
“Aiyoh, isti furiyada, Baby Girlie,“ said Halmahera. “Kereh balah kung nus?“
“Baby…baby Girlie…“
Hyacinth laughed. “Bong anoti, Baby Girlie.“
#
An hour later, the greenhouse had settled into a new, quieter rhythm.
Not restored. Not triumphant. Just held.
Heat flowed again through most of Greenhouse Seven, not evenly but sufficiently, a patchwork of warmth stitched together by manual overrides and human attention. The crops would survive. Some leaves were already damaged, edges glassy with cold, but the core systems had stabilised. The building hummed the way a tired animal hummed when it realised it wasn’t going to die tonight.
Baby Girlie was also no longer climbing anything.
It sat in the service corridor, folded low, grippers retracted and locked, power draw throttled down to a whisper. Three physical cut-outs had been installed by maintenance, bright orange and deliberately ugly, bolted into place with the sort of finality that discouraged cleverness. Its eyeshine was gone. Not dark. Dormant. Asleep, if you were feeling generous. Halmahera had draped a thermal blanket over its back, not to protect it, but to keep condensation from dripping into exposed joints. The gesture was oddly tender and utterly pragmatic at the same time, which felt exactly right.
Hyacinth sat on an overturned crate near the junction box, boots unlaced, socks steaming faintly in the warmer air. Her hands shook now that she’d stopped moving. Not dramatically. Just enough to be annoying. She pressed her palms together and waited for the tremor to burn itself out.
Halmahera leaned against the corridor wall opposite her, jacket finally zipped, hair damp with sweat and condensation. She was eating a protein bar with the intense focus of someone who had realised, belatedly, how hungry she was. Crumbs dotted the front of her coat.
“Well,” Halmahera said around a mouthful, “that escalated.”
Hyacinth huffed a laugh that surprised her with how close it was to a sob. “We invited Death to dance.”
“I did not,” Halmahera said indignantly. “I asked if They could keep up. Very different.”
“Semantics,” Hyacinth muttered. “Even more a problem with every new generation.“
Down the corridor, the Nineteenth Kabesa spoke quietly with two of the other elders on the council, his voice low and even, hands sketching shapes in the air as he explained what had happened. Hyacinth watched him the way she watched storm systems on old satellite feeds, not with fear, but with a growing understanding of scale. This would change how New Island interacted with its neighbours, but they would now have to decide what shape that interaction would take.
Death had disappeared, but not theatrically. Not with a farewell. One moment They had been leaning against the hatch frame, boots crossed, watching the technicians work with an expression that might have been approval or might have been amusement, and the next moment there had simply been less presence in the room. There was always a farewell. Hyacinth and Halmahera knew They would be back.
Hyacinth exhaled slowly, realising she’d been holding her breath for longer than she thought.
Halmahera followed her gaze. “You think They’ll tell anyone?”
Hyacinth shrugged. “They always tell. Just not in words.”
Halmahera snorted. “Great. Can’t wait to be a cautionary myth.”
“You already are,” Hyacinth said. “Dos fila furiyada who dared a greenhouse into exoskeletal consciousness.”
Halmahera grinned, sharp and unrepentant. “Worth it. Gotta have some sort of achievements on this fucking Newt Island.”
There was a stretch of silence, companionable now, the kind that only happened after a shared near-disaster. Pipes ticked as they cooled. Somewhere above, fans spun back up in a staggered sequence, each one announcing itself with a brief whine before settling into the background hum of life support.
Hyacinth’s eyes drifted back to the exoskeleton.
Even inert, it felt different now. Not menacing. Not innocent. Just… present. And more of a problem paused rather than solved.
The Nineteenth Kabesa finished his conversation and walked over, boots crunching softly on the grit scattered across the corridor floor. He crouched instead of standing over them, resting his forearms on his knees.
“Siara-Siara. You both okay?” he asked.
Halmahera gave him a thumbs-up with the hand still holding her bar. “Mild hypothermia. Moderate adrenaline hangover. The general usual spiritual crisis pending.”
He smiled faintly. “Sounds about right. It wouldn’t be 22nd-century humanity without at least two of those.”
Hyacinth met his eyes. “It called me Kabesa. I thought it was calling for you, but then I thought it over…”
“Yes,” he said.
She waited for more.
He didn’t rush it. “That doesn’t mean what you think it means,” he added, eventually.
“It didn’t feel like nothing,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “It wasn’t nothing.”
”But I…” Hyacinth looked at Halmahera. ”I don’t think…”
For decades, the Kristang people had known, more or less, and in very quiet and secretive terms, who would eventually be future Kabesa. It was part of all the strange, time-twisting knowledge that had helped them survive the collapse of the old world that Hyacinth and Halmahera had never known. It wasn’t prophecy. It wasn’t mysticism. It was dreamfishing and pattern recognition stretched across generations, an accumulation of small signs, tested and retested until a shape held.
And Hyacinth knew she was not part of the pattern.
She had been only a baby when the Seventeenth died, and only seen (and marvelled) at the wild, whimsically wise ways of the Eighteenth before she, too, had given up the role to the man who squatted in front of her, whom she had heard had also grown up all his life knowing who he would one day possibly choose to be.
”I’m not…”
”You’re not the Twentieth,” said the Nineteenth Kabesa quietly, and a little unusually. No one ever spoke about these things directly. They were simply Unsaid. But they all knew. And now Hyacinth actually relaxed. Because she also knew. ”Or the Twenty-First, or the Twenty-Second, at least from what I know. You’re a bit too old to be them.”
”And far, far, too inappropriate and full of yourself,” said a second voice behind her. Hyacinth yelped and then laughed. ”Fuck you, Sinyorang Morti,” she said. Death spread Their hands. ”What can I say?”
The Nineteenth Kabesa laughed too. ”Morti, Sinyorang…if I recall, too inappropriate and full of oneself are exactly the qualities the eleidi looks for, actually.” He turned back to Hyacinth. ”And, if I may…it called you Kabesa, I think, because you did the one thing that word is actually for.”
Hyacinth frowned. “Which was?”
“You stood between,” he said simply.
Halmahera went still, the protein bar forgotten in her hand.
The Kabesa gestured down the corridor, toward Baby Girlie’s folded bulk, toward the ladder that led up to the hatch and the settlement beyond. “That thing wasn’t confused about leadership. It was confused about thresholds. About who is allowed to say: this far, no further. Inside stops here. Outside does not get to eat us.”
Hyacinth opened her mouth, then closed it again. The memory replayed in her body. Not the fear. The posture. The moment when she had stopped dancing and stopped arguing and stopped performing entirely, and had instead done something much less glamorous.
She had refused.
“But you did that too,” she said. “You shut it down.”
“Yes,” the Kabesa agreed. “After. With authority. With infrastructure. With language that’s been tested for decades.”
He tapped the floor once with two fingers. “You did it before that. Without permission. Without certainty. With your body.”
Death, who had reappeared silently at the far end of the corridor and was now leaning against a pipe like a rumour that refused to go away, smiled.
“She didn’t offer it a crown,” Death said. “She offered it a wall.”
Hyacinth felt a prickling behind her eyes. “That’s not… that’s not the same thing.”
“Exactly,” the Kabesa said.
He leaned back slightly, giving her space to hear it.
“You’ve all heard it endlessly. The word Kabesa doesn’t mean ‘hero’ or ‘infallible leader’ or some other weird shit like that,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean lineage or office or destiny. It means the one who holds the line where no one else will.”
Halmahera let out a low whistle. “So it wasn’t saying she is Kabesa.”
“No,” the Kabesa said. “It was saying: please make this where my agony and confusion ends.”
The words settled into the corridor the way dust settled after a collapse. Slowly. Unevenly. In places that mattered.
Hyacinth felt her shoulders drop by a fraction she hadn’t realised she was holding. The pressure behind her sternum didn’t vanish, but it shifted, became something she could carry instead of something that carried her.
“Please make this where my agony and confusion ends,” she repeated quietly, tasting the shape of it. “That’s… a hell of a thing to ask a stranger.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa nodded. “It is. Which is why most people never hear it put that plainly.”
Halmahera snorted. “Machines, though. No social graces at all.”
Death chuckled from Their corner. “Tools have always been better at telling the truth when they’re broken.”
Baby Girlie remained still under the thermal blanket, an ungainly mound of metal and fabric. With its eyes dark, it looked smaller somehow. Less like a threat. More like a question that had been folded up and put aside for later.
Hyacinth pushed herself to her feet, joints protesting. She walked closer, slow enough that no one tried to stop her, and crouched a few steps away from the machine. She didn’t touch it. She’d learned that lesson already.
“You don’t get to cross,” she said, not to test it but to confirm it for herself. “But you also don’t get dismantled tonight. That’s the line.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa watched her carefully, not correcting, not endorsing, just noting. Death tilted Their head, interest sharpened.
Baby Girlie didn’t respond. Its power draw remained minimal, a steady low whisper on the readouts one of the technicians had pulled up. It was, for now, contained.
Halmahera came to stand beside Hyacinth, shoulder brushing hers. “So,” she said, voice light but eyes intent, “does this mean nightplay just… levelled up?”
Hyacinth huffed. “Please don’t tell anyone that.”
“Oh, I absolutely will,” Halmahera said cheerfully. “We danced a machine into an identity crisis. That’s getting workshopped.”
The Kabesa rose, straightening with a faint grunt. “You didn’t dance it into anything,” he said. “You created a condition. The machine stepped into it. Those are different responsibilities.”
Halmahera grimaced. “You’re going to make us write a protocol, aren’t you.”
“Yes,” he said. “Eventually.”
She groaned. “The elders ruin everything.”
Death drifted closer, boots silent now, and crouched opposite them, coat pooling on the floor. “He’s right, though,” They said. “You’ve crossed the point where play stays purely symbolic.”
Hyacinth met Their gaze. “So we stop?”
Both the Kabesa and Death’s smiles were immediate and feral. “Absolutely not.” The Kabesa turned back to Hyacinth. “You don’t stop because something answered you. You get more precise. You learn where to dance and where to stand still. That’s how traditions survive contact with reality.”
Hyacinth considered that, eyes flicking back to the catwalk above, to the memory of reflective tape flashing under aurora, to the heat and laughter and reckless joy that had felt so clean an hour ago.
“We move it,” she said slowly. “Nightplay. Away from infrastructure. Away from systems that can mistake attention for permission.”
The Kabesa’s eyebrows lifted a millimetre. Approval. And real, deep respect. “Where to, then?”
Hyacinth thought of the windbreak fields, the wide open snow flats beyond the last dome, the places where the night pressed in without wires or pipes underneath it. “Outside the skin,” she said. “Where the only thing listening is the dark itself.”
Halmahera’s grin crept back, dangerous and delighted. “Oh, that’s going to piss so many people off.”
Death laughed, full and pleased. “Perfect.”
The Kabesa nodded once. “It is still extremely dangerous going outside in these conditions, but I can talk to the council. But we would need the appropriate attire—”
Hyacinth looked at him. “You’re not banning it.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not foolish. But I am, in a sense, making it possibly culturally canonical by asking. So you need to think about what that’s going to entail.”
Silence settled again, this time without teeth in it. The greenhouse breathed. The pipes warmed. Somewhere above, the aurora shifted, unseen but felt, like a tide turning far out at sea.
Halmahera broke it first. “So,” she said, nudging Hyacinth with her elbow, “next session. Snow flats. No machines. Just us, the night, and whatever’s brave enough to show up.”
Hyacinth smiled, tired and real. “And if Death comes?”
Death tipped Their hat. “I always do.”
Hyacinth glanced at Baby Girlie one last time, at the blanket rising and falling faintly with condensation, at the way the machine now occupied space without trying to cross it.
“Then we dance,” she said. “But we also remember where the walls are.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa watched her for a long second, and nodded. Again, nothing but real, deep respect, married with the logistical concerns of how exactly all this would work outside the safety of the shelters. But it was there.
Silence held for a few more breaths, thick but no longer hostile.
Then Halmahera said, very casually, as if she were commenting on the weather, and also with something stuck in her throat, “You know, They don’t show up like this for everyone.”
Death’s head tilted. But now the respect for Halmahera was there too. “Oh?”
“For us,” Halmahera continued. She nudged Hyacinth with her shoulder, softer now. “For our lot. They’re always… nearby.”
Hyacinth exhaled through her nose. “That’s one way to put it.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa’s gaze sharpened, not alarmed but attentive, the way it did when someone finally said the thing everyone else had been circling. Hyacinth and Halmahera both knew that this was probably all in a day’s work for him, chatting with random people who could see eleidi, and discussing all sorts of spirits like tomorrow’s temperature readings. But all the same, he had definitely been too polite to ask why Sinyorang Morti had been present all through their little adventure. “How nearby?” he asked, without looking at Morti.
Halmahera shrugged. “In the margins. At parties that don’t really feel like parties. At the end of work shifts where no one goes straight home. In the places you go when you don’t want to be alone but can’t stand company either.”
Death smiled, but there was no humour in it this time. “They’re honest,” They said. “I appreciate that about them.”
Hyacinth folded her arms, suddenly cold again, though the pipes were warm now. “It’s not… fascination,” she said, choosing the words with care. “Not really. It’s more like—” She paused, jaw tightening. “—like gravity. You don’t have to want it. You just notice it’s there.”
The Kabesa nodded slowly. “Because you grew up without the illusion that things would go back to normal.” His nodding got a little faster, and both of them saw what he was carrying under his earnest expression too. All of them were. Life was not easy on New Island.
Halmahera kicked at a loose bolt on the floor. “Normal is not even close to our future,” she said. “We just didn’t get that one. We got ‘it’s stable enough for now’ and ‘don’t wander too far’ and ‘hey at least we have some sort of a climate‘ and ‘if this fails, here’s what we do next.’”
Death’s boots shifted, spurs chiming once, thoughtful. “They learned the ending before they learned the beginning,” They said. “That tends to…accelerate things.”
Hyacinth looked at Them. “Is that why you hang around?”
Death didn’t dodge it. “Partly.”
“Partly,” Halmahera echoed. “What’s the rest?”
Death’s smile thinned. “Because despair that doesn’t get language starts making its own other machinery.”
The words hung there, sharp and precise. Hyacinth finally took them in, and exhaled. “I always…thought…nightplay was like…just thrill-seeking.”
“Oh, there’s thrill,” Death said lightly. “You don’t dance with me by accident. But that’s not the engine.”
Hyacinth stared at the floor. The image of the exoskeleton climbing the ladder flickered behind her eyes, not as terror now, but as recognition. “I guess…we’re tired,” she said, quietly. “All of us. Not in the ‘worked too long’ way. In the ‘this is the world and it’s not getting better’ way. We’re the ones who realised it was going to keep going like this. No climax. No fix. Just… continuation.”
“And continuation,” Death said, “is harder than apocalypse. Apocalypse gives me a schedule.”
That pulled a short, sharp laugh out of Hyacinth before she could stop it. “Figures. It’s like…proof we’re still in our fucking bodies even after all that shit.”
Death inclined Their head. “Exactly. You don’t come looking for me because you want to die. You come because you don’t want to disappear quietly.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa’s gaze slid, briefly, to Baby Girlie, inert and blanketed. “And it looks like sometimes,” he said, “that need leaks sideways. Into systems. Into tools.”
“Into anything that will listen,” Death finished.
Halmahera blew out a breath. “Great. So we’re not just depressed. We’re…contagious.”
The Nineteenth Kabesa laughed, and again, it was softer this time, because they could all hear what he was feeling too. “You’re…human in a long night. That’s not pathology. That’s ecology.” His voice cracked, and Hyacinth saw a single tear briefly sparkle in the corner of his eye. Then he straightened, and brightened, and another tear appeared. ”So yes. Not contagious.” He grinned, gesturing at Death. ”Justu lesti pra balah bong-bong pra tudu sta olah.”
The greenhouse hummed on, imperfect but alive, and in that narrow service corridor, surrounded by warmth held together by effort rather than optimism, it became clear what the elders had missed and the Furies had never been able to put into words. They were not drawn to Death because they wanted endings. They were drawn to Death because, in a civilisation that had already collapsed once and decided to keep walking anyway, Death was the only one who never pretended that survival meant happiness.
Death told the truth.
And the Furies, bleak-eyed and alive, had grown up needing nothing more, and nothing less, than that.
Later, much later, when the story was told and retold and sanded smooth enough to fit into communal memory, people would argue about where the nightplaying tradition, in all its insane and highly awkward and impossible glory of dancing in a really, really, really heavy hazmat suit outside in the cold sharp air of deep Antarctic night, really began.
Some would say it started on the catwalk, under aurora, with sweat and laughter and reflective tape flashing like signal fire.
Others would insist it began in the service corridor, with frost creeping along pipes and a girl saying no in a way that held.
Hyacinth and Halmahera would know better.
It began the moment dos fila furiyada looked back at the night and decided not to flinch, not to submit, not to perform heroics, and not to turn into more Kabesa, and to simply to stand where the line needed to be.
And that, they suspected, was how New Island would survive whatever came next.