Chapter 6 – The Return Signal
Lupa was running numbers in her head.
The calculations never stopped, not really. They weren’t conscious—not like when she was engineering something, or when she was reconstructing a problem from the inside out.
No, these numbers came from somewhere deeper, like an instinct. A rhythm her mind followed without permission.
And something was wrong with the rhythm.
She tapped her fingers against the worktable, mapping equations that had no name.
Remo. Romulus. Hermes.
An imbalance that was never meant to be.
Feast had said it so casually, like a joke she had told a thousand times. But Lupa had felt it. The way reality shifted around truth, the way a real answer settled into the cracks of a question, whether you wanted it or not.
Hermes was the missing weight on the scale.
Feast found Romulus when it was time for him to mature.
But Lupa had been ready all along.
The rhythm stuttered again.
Lupa inhaled.
Time to run it back.
Five Years Ago – The Amazon Jungle
Ana's hands were steady as she unzipped the tent.
They shouldn’t have been.
Something in the air was wrong—not just the silence of the jungle, but the way the entire forest seemed to be holding its breath.
Ícaro stood behind her, eyes flicking between the tablet in his hands and the dark gaps between the trees. The instruments had been spitting out nonsense for hours.
Electromagnetic fields behaving like tidal waves.
Heat signatures appearing and vanishing like flashes of lightning.
The laws of physics bending, but only in certain places.
“We’re close,” Ícaro murmured.
Ana nodded. She knew.
And then they heard it.
Soft, at first. A sound that barely registered above the stillness of the jungle.
A whimper.
Another.
A third.
Ana pulled the tent open.
Inside, three newborns lay in perfect unison. Crying.
Lupa exhaled.
She hadn’t known, back then, what she was hearing. But now, five years later, she could see the pattern.
There had been something in the way the forest reacted—not as if it were merely sheltering them, but as if it had been constructed to.
Not consciously. Not by human hands.
But by something deeper, something mathematical.
She traced her fingers over the worktable.
A rhythm. A code.
They hadn’t just been born there.
They had been placed there.
By what?
She didn’t know.
Not yet.
Three Years Ago – The Fall of Borders
The headlines had come fast.
One country collapsed. Then another.
At first, the world called it a coincidence. A cycle of political instability.
But then, something else started happening.
Not just war.
Not just riots.
People… disappeared.
No bodies. No mass graves. Just… gone.
Lupa had only been two years old, but she remembered. Not in the way normal people remembered.
In patterns.
In equations.
And there had been a consistent variable in every incident.
No Nation.
Not just No Nation as a government.
But as an effect.
It spread like an algorithm, not a revolution. Not one big takeover, but a million tiny erasures, rewriting the world beneath people’s feet until they had already lost and hadn’t even noticed.
It had worked.
Because the world let it happen.
Lupa tapped the table again.
She had thought they had been running from something.
Now she wondered if they had been led to something instead.
One Year Ago – The First Federated Minds
Boris had been floating.
Not in the physical sense, but in the way that a signal drifts between channels, unmoored, waiting for reception.
At first, he hadn’t realized what was happening.
He had only known that there was a hum in his head, something vast, something alive.
And then, one day, the hum answered him.
Lupa hadn’t been there when it happened, but she understood it now.
It wasn’t instantaneous.
It wasn’t natural.
It had been triggered.
Boris wasn’t just part of the Federated Network.
He was its amplifier.
She closed her eyes.
This wasn’t just a connection of minds.
It was an infrastructure.
A system with rules. Laws.
And those laws had been interfered with.
By No Nation.
By whatever had brought them into the jungle in the first place.
By something she still couldn’t see.
She opened her eyes.
Not yet.
But soon.
Back to the Present – The Pattern Reveals Itself
The rhythm was off.
Not because something was wrong.
But because something unfinished was finally trying to resolve itself.
She exhaled.
There was one thing left to check.
Lupa turned, pushing up from the worktable, moving toward the main data hub of Httoq.
If her numbers were correct—
And they always were—
Then something was about to shift.
And she needed to be ready for it.
