The Jaspers weren't campers. But when Warren's boss offered him a week at the company's private forest cabin—no cell service, no Wi-Fi, "total disconnection guaranteed"—he couldn't say no.
Warren needed a break. His wife, Lila, needed more.
Their daughter June, twelve, had stopped speaking since the car crash that killed her older brother six months ago.
Warren figured maybe the woods would give her the space to start again.
They arrived under a bruised sky, tires crackling across gravel. The cabin stood quiet amid the pines—old, sturdy, and surrounded by shadow.
June stood still beside the car, staring at the tree line.
> "It's too quiet," she finally said.
Warren's heart jumped. It was the first thing she'd said in weeks.
But Lila didn't smile.
Because the way June had spoken…
It hadn't sounded like her.
The woods at night breathed like an animal.
The wind moved strangely—never in gusts, but in pulses.
Sometimes, Warren swore the trees leaned closer when no one was looking.
At dinner, June didn't eat. She sat at the window, watching the black shapes sway outside.
"Do you see them?" she asked suddenly.
Lila's fork paused mid-air. "See what, sweetie?"
"The Others."
Warren tried to keep his voice light. "Other what?"
June turned, her eyes glassy and distant. "They don't have names. Names aren't allowed. But they know ours."
That night, Warren dreamed of blinking lights moving between the trees.
Not fireflies.
Patterns.
On the second day, Warren followed the trail behind the cabin.
A mile in, he found something odd: a metallic shard sticking out of the ground.
Like a knife blade buried tip-down.
He tried to pull it free. It didn't budge.
It wasn't rusted or weathered—just smooth, reflective, humming faintly when he touched it.
When he turned to leave, he realized the trees had shifted around him.
The trail was gone.
He backtracked, heart pounding, until he found a stream and followed it until the cabin reappeared.
June sat on the porch, barefoot.
"You weren't supposed to find that," she whispered.
Lila found the old radio in a closet.
It was an analog field unit, covered in dust but still functional. When she turned it on, it emitted only static… until around 3:17 a.m.
Then it began to speak.
Not voices.
Coordinates.
Endless strings of numbers, repeating over and over.
Longitudes. Latitudes. Altitudes.
"Military? Air traffic?" Warren asked.
"No," Lila said. "It's too deep. Too precise. Some of these are below the Earth's crust."
That night, the transmission changed.
It began including names.
Warren Jasper. Lila Jasper. June Jasper.
Followed by a number: D-08.
Then a pause. Then a new name.
D-09.
And on.
June began talking more.
But she never used contractions.
She'd say, "I do not like the cold," or "I cannot sleep tonight," or "They are not ready yet."
"Who?" Warren asked gently.
She looked up from her sketchpad.
In it: dozens of drawings.
The woods.
A tall, thin figure made of shadow and wire.
And near the cabin—a structure that didn't exist. Like a satellite dish made of bone.
She pointed at the figure.
> "He waits between the trees. He wears your voice when you are not speaking. He is not from here."
She smiled then, but not at Warren.
Like something behind him had smiled first.
At night, there were clicking noises in the walls.
Warren assumed squirrels—until the pattern repeated like Morse code.
When he recorded it and slowed the audio, the pattern transformed.
Into language.
Not human. But structured.
A machine's attempt at mimicry.
Like it was trying to understand how to say something. How to become something.
That night, Lila woke up screaming.
She swore she'd seen June standing over the bed, her mouth wide open, whispering in reverse.
But June was asleep in her room.
Or at least… something was in her room.
On day four, the forest opened.
No trail. No path. Just… invitation.
The trees bowed as they walked, like stage curtains drawing back.
There, in the clearing, was the structure June had drawn.
It looked like a sculpture made of inverted math.
Shapes that shouldn't exist. Angles that defied perspective.
Metal and bone woven into a tower that clicked softly, like teeth chewing numbers.
June walked ahead of them.
"They wanted a way in," she said. "So I helped."
Lila grabbed her arm. "What do you mean?"
June turned.
> "They were listening for a long time. But now they know how to speak."
Lila disappeared that night.
No struggle. No blood.
Just her side of the bed still warm and the door slightly open.
Warren searched for hours.
When he returned, June sat in the kitchen, sipping water.
"They took her first because she doubted the longest," she said. "She tried not to believe the silence. That is offensive to Them."
Warren slapped the cup from her hand.
"Where's your mother?!"
June blinked, slowly. "She is below now."
"Below what?"
June stood and walked to the wall.
Knocked once.
The wall knocked back.
Warren found the papers under a loose floorboard.
Not his. Not anyone's he recognized.
Stamped with the Department of Exo-Linguistic Cryptography.
Notes. Sketches. Equations describing extradimensional communication.
One paragraph was circled:
> "It does not arrive through travel but through language. We are not invaded—they are simply spoken into us. There is no alien body. Only a new shape for thought."
Beneath it: a final scribbled note.
"The children hear first. They make room for it."
On the sixth night, the trees began to shake.
No wind. Just motion.
Like something was trying to remember how to walk.
June stood in the doorway.
"They want to see you now."
Warren followed her into the woods.
The clearing was larger. The structure had grown, now pulsing with faint light.
Shapes moved within it. Not people.
Silhouettes of words given flesh.
Warren fell to his knees.
One of the creatures leaned forward—its "face" a mesh of mirrored fragments.
He saw himself, fractured into a thousand errors.
> "What are you?" he whispered.
And it answered—not in sound, but in correction.
> "What are you not?"
They didn't invade.
They rewrote.
Every tree a new syllable.
Every shadow a verb.
And Warren understood: they weren't monsters.
They were grammar.
Sentient syntax shaping reality through observation.
And June had let them in—by listening long enough that her thoughts had become infected phrases.
The forest wasn't possessed.
It had been translated.
And now so would he.
Warren woke up in the truck.
The cabin was gone.
So was June.
Only a scrap of her drawing remained on the passenger seat:
The woods. The structure. The family, all together—smiling.
But their eyes were mirrors.
He drove until the trees thinned.
When he reached town, no one remembered the cabin.
No company had ever owned it.
No employee named Warren Jasper worked at any nearby business.
He looked in the mirror.
His mouth moved slightly.
Words not his.
Weeks have passed.
Warren writes compulsively.
Not stories. Not letters.
Just symbols.
They come when he sleeps—patterns, glyphs, spirals.
And when he writes them… the walls breathe.
He saw June again last night.
In a dream.
She spoke a sentence he didn't understand, but felt.
And when he woke up, he'd written it perfectly across the ceiling in ink he couldn't identify.
It burned slightly when he stared at it too long.
And then the room whispered.
> "You are almost fluent."