EPISODE 11: Bloom Charge ## Chapter 1: Plate Steer Heat climbs first through the soles. It always does. Slow wet pulses that match the raft’s unseen vents, pushing sulfur up through boot seams until the leather itself tastes like battery acid left too long on a foundry floor. The surface under Rook Venn’s boots is not rock. It is not deck. It is a living industrial animal of fused scoria plates and vented slag, breathing through cracks that glow dull orange. Each breath shifts the world a few centimeters. Fracture lines open like gill slits. They close again with a grinding sound that travels up the bones of the leg and settles behind the teeth. Rook keeps one glove on Jory’s shoulder. The kid’s bones still feel thin under the ash-stiff fabric. Sixteen and already standing the way survivors stand—weight forward, ready to move when the surface decides to eat. Around them the torn forward hold of the MV Orpheum lists harder now, eighteen degrees becoming twenty as something underneath flexes. Metal groans wet. Not clean steel stress. The sound of plates shifting against growth that wants the gaps. “Manifest said empty fertilizer,” Rook says. Voice flat, practical, cut short by the grit that never leaves the throat. “Wasn’t. You saw the marks. We use what’s left.” Jory nods...