# PSYCHIC HARVEST

### Chapter 2: Thirty Days

---

Ethan woke up the next morning to the sound of a rooster that was not, strictly speaking, a rooster.

It was pale gold, roughly the size of a turkey, and when Ethan looked out the narrow window of the bunkhouse he saw it standing on top of the grain silo with its wings half-spread, crowing in three overlapping tones at once. A thin girl of maybe fourteen leaned against the silo's ladder, arms crossed, watching it with the weary patience of someone who had had this exact argument every morning of her life.

"That's a linked Vareth?" Ethan asked the man in the bunk across from him, a broad-shouldered guy named Priest who'd introduced himself the night before with nothing but a nod and a can of something that passed for coffee.

"Sunfowl," Priest said, not looking up from lacing his boots. "Lightning type. Wakes the whole settlement up whether you want it to or not. Comes with the territory."

Ethan sat with that for a second — *comes with the territory* — and thought about how strange it was that twelve hours ago he hadn't known this world existed, and now he was lying in a bunk complaining about the closest thing to a rooster there was in this world.

He was alive. That still didn't feel entirely real.

---

Doctor Priya had told him the shakes would fade in a few days. She was right, mostly. What she hadn't mentioned was that they'd be replaced by something worse — a low, constant hum of *awareness* that never fully switched off, a part of his brain that had learned, in a single terrifying afternoon, to listen for silence the way it used to listen for danger. Every quiet patch of trees near the settlement wall made the back of his neck prickle for the first week. He knew, rationally, that the walls held. He still checked twice.

Reyes found him on his third morning, sitting on an overturned crate near the eastern gate, watching a training group run drills in the mud.

"You're not sleeping," she said. Not a question.

"Not really."

"Good." She sat down next to him without asking, which he was starting to understand was just how she operated. "The ones who sleep fine right away are usually the ones who haven't actually understood yet what almost happened to them. You'll sleep again. Takes longer than people want it to."

"How long did it take you?"

Reyes considered the question with more seriousness than he expected. "Two months before I stopped waking up swinging at nothing. Longer before I stopped doing it in my sleep, according to whoever was unlucky enough to share a bunkhouse with me." A ghost of a smile. "You get used to carrying it. You don't get rid of it. There's a difference, and it took me embarrassingly long to understand that's fine."

She nodded toward the drill yard, where a dozen or so people — some clearly newer than others — were running footwork patterns around a set of wooden posts under the direction of a scarred, one-eyed man barking corrections in a language Ethan didn't recognize before switching fluidly back to English.

"That's orientation," Reyes said. "You start tomorrow. Terrain, threat recognition, patrol formation, basic first aid, and enough hand-to-hand that you don't just stand there next time something decides you look like lunch." She glanced sideways at him. "You get thirty days. After that, if Sato thinks you're ready, you get a Tether, if you want to pursue linking with a Vareth, and start learning to throw."

"A what?"

"Tether. The linking device." She said it like it should have been obvious, then seemed to remember he was three days removed from a jungle full of things trying to eat his mind. "Sato's own name for it. Some of us who've been here longer still just call it 'a Sato' out of habit — drives him up the wall, which is honestly half the reason we keep doing it."

Ethan almost laughed. It came out strange — thin, disused, like a muscle that hadn't been exercised in days. But it was real.

"Thirty days," he repeated.

"Thirty days," Reyes said. "Use them well. This place will teach you fast if you let it."

---

**Day 4.**

Ethan learned the difference between a Class I and a Class II threat the way he learned most things — by nearly dying, and then by having someone patiently explain, afterward, exactly which parts of his instincts had been wrong.

It happened during a supervised patrol along the outer tree line, six trainees and two senior escorts, meant to be routine. The escort — a quiet woman with hair the color of wet slate, some kind of stone-type Bleed Ethan hadn't learned to read yet — went rigid mid-step and threw up a fist.

Everyone froze.

"Thistlebound," she said, low. "Pack. Listen for the quiet."

Ethan didn't understand what she meant until, ten seconds later, he understood completely — the insect drone of the jungle, which he'd stopped noticing days ago the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat, simply *stopped,* in a widening circle around them, like a held breath.

They came low and fast, four of them, bramble-and-bone plating catching the light in patches like broken armor. Ethan's body did the thing it had done in the clearing on day one — locked, frozen, mind stalling out on the size of the threat instead of the shape of an actual plan — and it was only the escort's linked creature, something built like a boulder with too many legs, that put itself bodily between the pack and the trainees before anyone got hurt.

"You froze," the one-eyed drill instructor told him afterward, not unkindly, but without softening it either. His name, Ethan had learned, was Okoro. "Everyone freezes the first time. The point of these thirty days is that you stop."

"How?" Ethan asked, and meant it as more than a rhetorical question.

Okoro considered him for a moment — the same evaluating look Reyes and Sato had both given him, the look of someone weighing whether this particular fresh drop had it in him.

"You start noticing the quiet before it happens," Okoro said. "Not after. That's the whole trick. Everything out there gives itself away before it attacks — there's a faint psychic wave and then a stillness." He tapped his own temple. "You're observant. Reyes told me. So keep noticing your surroundings but be quick to react.

Ethan turned that over for the rest of the day, turning it into something almost like mantra. He had spent his whole life being the person who noticed the thing everyone else missed. He was now learning that it didn't make a difference in this world if you didn't act on it too, and quickly. Okoro was telling him exactly that.

---

**Day 11.**

He started keeping a notebook.

It began almost as a joke — a habit from his old life he hadn't fully shed, the same instinct that made him take meticulous notes in seminars nobody else bothered writing down. But by the second week it had become something closer to a survival tool. He wrote down everything: the exact cadence of the "quiet before the Thistlebound," the way a Glasswing Choir's collective hum climbed in pitch right before a strike, the small tells senior survivors gave off without noticing — how Reyes's jaw tightened a half-second before she called a threat, how Okoro's stone-Bleed escort's shoulders squared toward danger before her face ever changed.

Priest caught him writing one night in the bunkhouse and leaned over to read upside down.

"You're cataloguing us," he said, sounding more amused than offended.

"I'm cataloguing *patterns,*" Ethan corrected, not looking up. "You're just where I'm finding them."

"That's what a serial killer would say."

"That's what a *librarian* would say," Ethan shot back, and Priest actually laughed — the first real laugh Ethan had heard out of him, and the first time it occurred to Ethan that he might, eventually, have something like friends in this place. Not just people he was surviving alongside. People.

It was a small thought. He held onto it anyway.

---

**Day 19.**

He saw Naomi for the first time on a supply run, and for a full three seconds he genuinely couldn't tell what he was looking at.

She was standing at the edge of the market square, arms crossed, watching a caravan get unloaded with the stillness of someone who didn't need to move to be paying attention. Her hair was some shifting, indistinct near-gray, catching light iridescently, like static caught mid-collapse. Her eyes, when she glanced briefly his way, carried flecks of at least two, maybe three colors he couldn't name, shifting faintly depending on the angle.

For one disoriented second, Ethan's brain reached for the only framework it had — *Discord,* he thought, remembering the ward Priya had mentioned in passing, the quiet horror in her voice when she'd described what happened to survivors who linked things too incompatible to hold together.

Then she moved — one clean, economical step to intercept a crate before it hit the ground wrong — and something about the sheer *precision* of it told him, instantly and completely, that he had it backward.

"Don't stare," Priest muttered beside him, not unkindly. "Everybody does it the first time. She doesn't like it."

"Who is she?"

"Naomi. They call her the Choir." Priest hefted a crate onto his shoulder, tilting his head toward her with something close to reverence. "Five links. You'll feel it if you get close enough — she's basically her own weather system. Rescue teams fight over who gets her on a mission."

Ethan watched her a moment longer, filing the image away the way he filed everything now — a fact, a pattern, a person whose stillness told him more than her face did.

*Five,* he thought. *Sato said that was the most anyone's managed.*