The dead sing in ultraviolet.

  Elena crouched in a Parisian sewer that hadn’t existed since 1943, her boots sinking into a slurry of temporal runoff—Nazi blood mingled with Martian permafrost. The skull hovered above her palm, its crystalline facets refracting light that hurt. Not visible spectrum. Not anymore.

  “Show me,” she whispered, pressing her mother’s titanium vial against the artifact.

  The skull shivered.

  Reality peeled back like necrotic flesh.

  ——

  Three hours earlier, she’d woken in the Louvre’s ruins. Not the polished tourist trap of 2147, but the bullet-riddled skeleton of 1944. German artillery boomed beyond the Seine as Resistance fighters dragged corpses through shattered galleries. None saw her. None could.

  “Quantum ghost,” Lucas had called her.

  Bullshit.

  She’d proven him wrong by stealing a Wehrmacht officer’s Luger. The gun felt heavier than it should—a 20th-century relic infected with chronal decay. When she pulled the trigger on a passing SS patrol, the bullets became hummingbirds.

  Nein, not hummingbirds. Microdrones.

  TerraGenesis logos gleamed on their tungsten wings.

  “Fascinating,” she muttered, pocketing a blood-soaked drone. The skull’s song vibrated in her molars, translating the Vognir glyphs scrolling across Mona Lisa’s irradiated smile:

  WE ARE THE MISTAKE THAT PRECEDES ALL TRUTH.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  A child’s scream split the air.

  ——

  The girl couldn’t have been older than eight, her dress a patchwork of rationed fabrics. She knelt in the Musée d’Orsay’s ruins, clutching a doll with Elena’s face.

  “Maman?” the child whimpered.

  Elena’s tattoo burned. Her mother’s ashes screamed inside the titanium vial.

  “I’m not—”

  The doll’s head rotated 180 degrees. Glass eyes reflected the skull’s fractal light.

  “Kóvacs. M???????????other. Choose.”

  Artillery shells froze mid-air. The Resistance fighters became marionettes with quantum strings. The girl reached into her own chest and pulled out a pulsating black orchid—its petals unfolding into the Vognir symbol for genocide.

  Elena did the only rational thing.

  She shot the child.

  ——

  The bullet passed through, igniting a chain reaction.

  Paris dissolved into a fungal forest growing through the ribs of dead starships. Mycelium networks pulsed with bioluminescent data. The skull’s song mutated into something wet and hungry.

  “Hódítás,” whispered the mushrooms in her mother’s voice. Conquest.

  Elena stumbled through the fungal cathedral, her Geiger-counter chanting a death march. The Titan vial grew hot—too hot. She hurled it against a capsized starship’s hull.

  The vial cracked.

  Her mother’s ashes swirled into the shape of the Vognir glyph now throbbing on Elena’s sternum:

  YOU ARE THE VIRUS WE DESIGNED TO KILL GOD.

  ——

  Lucas found her retching chronal bile in the sewer.

  “Took you long enough,” she spat, wiping temporal residue from her chin. The skull floated between them, whispering equations that made their teeth bleed.

  He looked worse than last time—neural scar glowing through a fresh black eye, whiskey flask dented. “Your corpse-child gave me ideas.”

  “She wasn’t real.”

  “Neither are we.” He tossed her a mangled quantum drone. “TerraGenesis is time-hopping. They’ve infected WWII.”

  Elena studied the drone’s guts. Nanobytes wriggled in its circuitry—identical to the Vognir glyphs in her blood. “They’re not invading history. They’re harvesting it.”

  The skull pulsed. Lucas’s spinal implant shrieked.

  Paris folded.

  They stood on Mars again, except the Noctis Labyrinthus now grew through Omaha Beach’s corpses. American GIs bled quantum foam. The crystal skulls numbered in the thousands, suspended like malignant chandeliers.

  “Christ,” Lucas breathed. “It’s a fucking farm.”

  Elena touched a frozen soldier. His face melted into hers.

  The truth arrived in Vognir verse:

  WE SOWED WAR

  SO YOU WOULD REAP

  THE GODS’

  BONES.