I didn’t sleep that night. None of us did. Even the smallest children—those who still clung to ragged toys and sucked their thumbs out of habit—kept their eyes open, wide and glassy, as if afraid that blinking would invite something in. The air in the dormitory felt wrong, like it was holding its breath along with us.Morning came without sunrise. On this planet, dawn didn’t ease in with warm colours; it just switched on, a sudden wash of pallid light from the twin moons that dipped behind the ridge. Pale-blue daylight bled through the half-shattered window, casting our shadows long and thin like stretched silhouettes.
No one spoke until Mira did.
Her voice cracked. “We need to check the courtyard.”
I didn’t want to. Not after what we heard in the dark—those scraping footsteps and the soft, deliberate tapping at the outer door, like someone counting. Or choosing.
But we obeyed her. We always obeyed Mira. She wasn’t the oldest, but she was the strongest—her power thrummed inside her like a live wire, unpredictable, dangerous. Even she didn’t fully control it. Yesterday she’d cracked the stone path outside with a single breath.
Outside, the courtyard looked… normal. Completely normal. Too normal.
The sand was smooth, undisturbed. The gate—where someone had been knocking hours ago—hung slightly open, but there were no footprints, no marks, nothing to prove what we heard was real. That was the worst part. The emptiness felt staged, as if someone had wiped away the truth.
Jonah whispered, “They were here. I know they were.”
Mira turned to me. “Did you hear it too?”
I nodded. “The counting… three taps. Pause. Three taps.”
Several children flinched at that pattern. They all knew what it meant. We’d been warned about the “tall ones”—the adults who wandered outside the settlement. They’d been changed by the planet long before we arrived. Twisted. Hollowed out. Their minds gone. Their bodies stretched thin like marionettes pulled too tight.
We didn’t know if they were real, or just another story the Overseers used to keep us obedient.
But last night… last night felt real.
Mira knelt and pressed her palm to the ground. The air shimmered faintly around her hand. When she closed her eyes, her lashes quivered.
“There’s something under us,” she whispered.
A ripple passed through the sand. Tiny at first, barely visible—but it grew, trembling outward in a widening circle. The courtyard stones shifted, grinding against one another.
“Stop,” I hissed. “You’ll wake something.”
Mira yanked her hand back. The ground stilled, but the silence that followed was worse than noise. It felt expectant.
Jonah crouched beside one of the cracks. “This isn’t new. It runs under the whole compound. Like tunnels.”
My stomach tightened. “The tall ones don’t use tunnels.”
“No,” he said, looking up at me with a face that suddenly seemed older than his ten years. “These were made by the children before us.”
The wind picked up, carrying with it a faint sound—something distant and echoing. At first I thought it was the usual whistling that came through the towers, but then I recognised the rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap… tap… tap…
It wasn’t coming from outside the walls.
It was coming from beneath them.
A wave of dread washed through the group. Mira grabbed my wrist hard enough to bruise.
“Everyone inside. Now.”
No one argued. We ran, tripping over each other as the tapping grew louder, sharper, more confident. It followed us across the courtyard like something tracing our footsteps from below.
As we reached the doorway, I dared one last glance over my shoulder.
A crack in the ground—thin as a hair at first—split wider with a sudden, violent snap.
A small hand—grey and dust-caked, fingers too long, nails too sharp—forced its way up through the gap.
The children behind me screamed.
And I realised, with cold clarity, that whatever lived under our feet wasn’t one of the tall ones.
It was something worse.
Something familiar.
Something that used to be children…
and had stayed down there far too long.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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