James knelt beside the dying toad on the wet ground near his camp. He had come to Venommire to build a sanctuary, a place where these creatures could live alongside the new settlers. He lifted the spiked, saddle-shelled body onto his stone-and-wood field bench and reached for his leaf-bound notebook. The feather pen scratched fast across the green page. He checked the water. He checked the mud. He pressed gentle fingers along the barbed shell and watched the toad's chest stutter. Nothing in the swamp matched the symptoms. No bite. No fungus. No rot bloom he recognized. Then he saw it. A thin, oily sheen clung to the toad's belly, faintly blue under the canopy light. He swabbed it and held the cloth to his nose. Machine grease. Refined, processed, nothing born of this place. His jaw tightened. He wrote one word in the notebook and underlined it twice: people. The toad shuddered once more and went still. James sat back against the bench, hands smeared with the proof. The sanctuary wasn't only a design problem anymore. Someone out there was already poisoning the ground he was trying to save.

James left the dead toad on the bench and got to work. He needed to know where the grease came from. Guessing would not save the next creature. He gathered jars, rope, and tube-shaped leaves from his pack and waded into the shallows. He built a sample rack between four posts above the dark water. He hung the leaves in a careful row, each one dipped into a different channel of the swamp. If the grease moved, the leaves would catch it. If it pooled, they would show that too. He worked until his hands ached. By morning, three leaves wore a faint blue sheen. The others stayed clean. The stain pointed upstream, away from his camp. James pulled the marked leaves down and carried them to his paper strip tester. He pressed each leaf into its own well and watched thin orange trails climb the paper. The trails matched. Same grease. Same source. He followed the water the leaves had pointed to, pushing through reeds for most of the day. Then he saw it through the trees. A sagging wooden structure with cracked tanks and leaking pipes. Blue drops fell steady into the swamp below. A bird with wide, painted wings burst from a branch above the leaking tanks and circled once before fleeing. Its feathers caught the oily mist as it passed. James watched it go and felt his chest tighten. The poison was not only in the water. It was in the air the creatures flew through. He had his source. But the broken station was bigger than one man could fix, and somebody owned it.