Three days after the storm, Route Seven still hummed wrong.
Ezra crouched at grid marker 7-North-4, running his fingers through grass that grew in perfect spirals. Clockwise. Every blade. He pulled out his notebook—personal, not League—and added another dot to the map he'd been building since yesterday. Fourteen patches so far, all within 200 meters of the glass circle nobody else seemed interested in.
The Rockruff sat beside him, eyes tracking something Ezra couldn't see. It had been doing that since he'd brought it back to the field. Staring at empty air, pupils dilating and contracting like it was focusing on objects at different distances.
"What do you see?" Ezra asked quietly.
The pup's ear twitched but it didn't look away from whatever wasn't there. The geometric burns on its fur had settled into a stable pattern yesterday—interconnected triangles that looked almost like a circuit diagram if you squinted. They still shifted when he wasn't looking directly at them, but less frequently. Maybe once an hour now instead of constantly.
Ezra made another note. Documented the grass spirals with his personal camera, the one that wrote to physical film instead of digital memory. Digital files could be edited, deleted, reviewed by supervisors. Film was his.
His League tablet beeped. Daily survey quota reminder. He needed seventeen more data points to hit minimum, and Hansen had already sent two messages asking why his morning numbers were low.
"Because I'm documenting the shit that matters," Ezra muttered, but he stood anyway. The Rockruff followed, keeping exactly three steps behind like it had calculated the optimal following distance.
They worked south along the trail. Ezra counted Pidgey nests (11, two fewer than last week), measured erosion patterns (normal), catalogued trainer footprints (43 sets in varying states of decay). He fed it all into the League system, clean data that would slot into their models without raising any flags.
But he also noted the Spearow that flew in wide arcs around certain trees. The way morning dew didn't form on rocks within fifty meters of the glass circle. The faint electrical taste in the air that got stronger near the spiral grass patches.
At grid marker 7-South-2, he found another survey tech.
Mira Sato, two years senior to him, competent enough to last but not curious enough to advance. She was photographing a Rattata burrow, looking bored.
"Cole," she said without looking up. "Heard you got caught in that storm."
"Yeah."
"Lucky." She straightened, noticed the Rockruff. "That from the incident?"
"Rescue rights."
Mira studied the pup for a moment. Something flickered across her face—not quite recognition, but close. "Interesting patterns on its coat."
"Birth marks," Ezra lied.
"Sure." She turned back to her tablet, then paused. "You notice anything weird about the electromagnetic readings out here?"
Ezra kept his expression neutral. "Weird how?"
"My tablet keeps glitching. Little spikes every few minutes. Started yesterday." She showed him the screen. The EM baseline was normal, but there were periodic jumps, barely visible unless you were looking for them. "Probably equipment failure."
"Probably," Ezra agreed, memorizing the spike pattern. It matched something, but he'd need to check his notes to be sure.
Mira moved on to the next burrow. Ezra waited until she was out of sight, then pulled out his mechanical compass. The needle pointed north-northwest. It should point north. Had been pointing true north for three days before the storm.
Seven degrees off. He wrote it down.
The Rockruff made a low sound—not quite a growl, more like resonance. Ezra followed its gaze to a cluster of trees forty meters off the trail. Nothing visible. Nothing his equipment could detect. But the pup's fur was standing up, the burn patterns glowing faintly in the morning shade.
"We're not investigating," Ezra said. "Not yet."
The Rockruff's tail drooped but it stopped staring.
They continued the route. Normal data into the League system. Real observations into his notebook. By noon, he had twenty-three official data points logged and forty-seven unofficial anomalies documented. The hum was getting stronger—not audible, exactly, but present in the way his teeth ached, the way his inner ear kept trying to adjust to pressure that wasn't changing.
He sat on a boulder to eat lunch, the Rockruff accepting half his sandwich with careful teeth. The glass circle was visible from here, midday sun turning it into a mirror. Nothing grew in it. Nothing crossed it. He'd watched three different Rattata approach the edge and turn back, confused, like they'd forgotten what they were doing.
His tablet buzzed. Message from Hansen: "Productivity review, 1400 hours."
Ezra sighed, packed up his gear. The Rockruff stood, then froze, head snapping toward the western tree line. A second later, Ezra heard it too—wingbeats, but wrong. Too heavy for the size, rhythm off by half a beat.
A Pidgeotto burst from the canopy, flying hard and erratic. It cleared the trees, banked sharp, and slammed into the ground twenty meters away. Not landed—slammed. Like it had forgotten how wings worked.
The bird struggled upright, shaking its head. Its eyes were wrong. Pupils too large, reflecting light that wasn't there. It opened its beak, and instead of a cry, there was a sound like tuning forks fighting each other.
Then it saw them.
The Pidgeotto went still. Completely still, not even breathing. It stared at the Rockruff, and the Rockruff stared back, and for thirteen seconds nothing moved except the geometric patterns on the pup's fur, cycling faster.
The Pidgeotto's pupils contracted to pinpoints. It launched itself backward, wings beating so hard it left feathers behind, and disappeared over the eastern ridge in seconds.
Ezra didn't move until the wingbeats faded completely. Then he very carefully walked to where the bird had crashed. The grass was bent in a perfect circle, every blade pointing outward from the impact point. Three feathers lay in the center, and when he picked one up, it was warm. Too warm. And it hummed with the same frequency that had been bothering his teeth all morning.
He wrapped the feather in field collection paper, sealed it, labeled it with his personal coding system. The Rockruff watched him work, no longer staring at empty air. Now it was watching him, head tilted like it was evaluating his response.
"We don't talk about this one either," Ezra said.
The pup's tail wagged once. Agreement, maybe. Or acknowledgment that they were both keeping secrets now.
By the time they made it back to the station, Ezra had logged thirty-one official data points and hidden sixty-three anomalies in his personal notes. His productivity review would be fine. Hansen would complain about his pace but accept his numbers. The League system would digest his data and produce models that said Route Seven was recovering normally from an unusual but explainable weather event.
But Ezra knew better. The route wasn't recovering. It was changing. The storm had left something behind, or taken something away, or both. The hum was getting stronger. The anomalies were spreading. And whatever had been in that storm—whatever the Rockruff could still see traces of—wasn't done with Route Seven.
He sat through Hansen's productivity lecture, agreed to increase his data collection pace, filed his reports like a good survey tech. But that night, he spread his notes across his bunk floor and started connecting dots. Spiral grass to glass circle: 200 meters maximum. Compass deviation: increases closer to impact sites. Pidgeotto incident: 127 meters from nearest spiral patch.
The Rockruff lay beside him, watching him work. At 2200 hours, its burns pulsed three times in sequence. Ezra checked his notes from the storm. Same pattern the lightning had made before the eye opened.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I see it too."
He gathered his notes, hid them in the false bottom of his equipment case. Tomorrow he'd collect more League data, hit his quotas, be a model employee. But he'd also map more anomalies. Document more impossible things. Build more evidence that Route Seven was becoming something else.
Because the storm hadn't been random. The patterns weren't coincidence. And whatever was happening here, it was just the beginning.
The Rockruff curled against his leg, burns glowing faintly in the dark.
Outside, Route Seven hummed wrong, and getting wronger.