Root Weaver: Book 1-The Anomaly (a fantasy reverse harem duet)

Naia

By the time the glider broke through the last layer of cloud, my teeth were chattering from the turbulence and the thin, cold air. The pilot shouted something cheerful back at us that the wind promptly stole, his words stripped away and thrown into the white. I was pressed against the small porthole, or as pressed as the harness allowed, and I watched the world open beneath us.

The Great Tree was not really a tree, not in the way the textbooks used the word. It was an entire world pretending to be a single organism. The canopy spread in every direction like a continent of leaves and platforms, terraces and grown walkways, branch spines and root towers that had never seen soil. The trunk that birthed it all rose in the distance, wider than a city, its bark braided with living conduits that glowed faintly with bioluminescent veins. The sight of it stole something from my chest, something that was part awe and part terror, because every time I looked at it my brain tried to remember that if it failed, everything failed with it.

We banked toward the port and my C-Jack warmed beneath my hairline.

It always started as a warmth, not painful, just enough to make me aware of the small ridge of synthetic bone at the base of my skull. I reached up without thinking and pressed my fingers against the nape of my neck, feeling the thin interface plate under skin and scar tissue. The warmth sharpened into a pulse that didn't match my heartbeat. It came in waves that seemed to rise from the canopy below, a quiet, insistent thrum that was more sensation than sound.

Kaela nudged my elbow with hers. "You're doing the face," she said over the roar of the engines.

I pulled my hand away from my neck and made myself smile at her. "Which face."

"The one where you look like you're listening to something nobody else can hear." Her eyes, so dark they were almost black, flicked to the window and back. "What is it this time. Pre-arrival jitters, or is the big tree already whispering sweet nothings in your neural port."

"It's just the altitude," I lied, because that was habit by now. "My stomach hasn't forgiven you for insisting on a glider instead of a nice stable shuttle."

She snorted and shoved a stray curl back under her headband. "All the shuttles were going to the lower hubs. You wanted the main Rootweave station, this is how we get here. Besides, we both know your stomach has handled worse. Remember the decompression drill in second year."

"I remember you vomiting on the instructor's boots and then insisting it was a protest against unsafe training standards."

"And did they revisit the drill protocols." She lifted her chin in smug satisfaction. "Yes. They did."

I couldn't argue with that. The glider dipped again, the wings catching a thermal rising from somewhere deep below, and for a heartbeat the extra pulse in my skull synced with the lurch of the cabin. The warmth flared into something sharper, like distant static, then settled again. Everyone else swore or laughed or gripped the armrests. I closed my eyes and let the sensation wash over me, trying to distinguish it from my own nerves.

It was worse up here than it had been in the transit elevator. Closer. The Root Network ran through every visible surface of the canopy, but I had never been positioned right on top of the main port before. The bioluminescent conduits that rose from the trunk like enormous cables, the ones that fed power and air and data to the port-town, carried more signal than anything I had experienced during training. Even without a formal link, my C-Jack was picking up ghost pulses.

"Naia," Kaela said softly, her voice dropping into that tone that meant she was done joking. "You sure you're ready for this."

I opened my eyes and looked at her properly. We had met our first year at the Academy when we'd both nearly fallen asleep in the same lecture on anchor-lock physics, and we had been orbiting each other ever since. She had grease under her fingernails more often than not, scars across her knuckles from poorly timed tool slips, and a brain that understood structural stress the way mine understood signal patterns. Where I had chased neural feedback models and interface theory, she had chased glider reinforcement and branch load calculations. Somehow, in the scraps of free time the Academy allowed, we had also managed to become each other's person.