The stillness after the raid was choking, dense and oppressive, thicker even than the smoke drifting in the corridors. It was a stillness where gunfire and screams had been, and it pressed in on Ken from every side. He stood among the ruins of Sophia's room, a statue of a man hacked out of raw, immovable rage.His palms found the chill, wrought-iron shape of her overturned bed. His fingers encircled it. The metal was unyielding, a harsh contrast to the warm, lingering heat he could still feel in the tangled rumpled sheets strewn about the floor. He could see the perfect shape of her head on the pillow, a white crater in the linen, a fossil of an instant's peace stolen half-breathed.The sight of it—that intimate, vulnerable shape—unleashed something inside him.It was not grief. Grief was an empty, sorrowful thing. This was a fire. A white one in his heart, burning the rest of his emotions—the shame, the doubt, the crushing weight of responsibility—away, leaving a clean, devouring ang

The hush that accompanied Ken's departure from the command center was a vacuum, and into it exploded the sound of his footsteps—not the crunch of an occupying boot, but the relentless, pounding cadence of an oncoming storm. He didn't go to the armory. He didn't store gear. He went to the Heart.The Heart was their term for the command center, the sanctum where the city's initial scientists had interfaced the different strands of their survival: air, power, communications, and resilience. It was a sacred space, a science and order temple, with walls covered in screens and charts, with an air charged with the silent promise of safeguarding. It was the basis of the Leader's power, and it was governed by one, unbreakable oath: First, do no harm.Ken shoved the double doors open. The sound was a gunshot in the hallowed quiet. The two duty technicians jumped, their faces paling with shock at who stood in the doorway. They saw the blood on his hands, the crazed glint in his eyes, the aura of

The breach's brightness faded within a decade of strides, consumed by a darkness so absolute it had texture. The air, already cold, grew thick with a wet, mineral chill that seeped into their gear and into their marrow. The city noises—the distant thrum of generators, the hum of voices—seeped away, replaced by a silence so intense it seemed to ring in their ears. There was just the gurgle of their own motion and the rough edge of their breathing, too harsh in close quarters.Ken went first, the beam from his strong torch a mad, shaking eye that probed into the darkness. It did not so much illuminate the tunnel as provide fleeting, nightmare glimpses of it. Shining, dripping walls of rough rock, slick with a black, sticky slime. Flaking iron pipes, like the fossilized veins of some giant, crawling along the ceiling and splashing cold water on their heads.The earth beneath their feet was just as uneven, a seeming-dangerously-sloping surface of rubble and silt that tried to twist their

The quiet of the flooded tracks was a deception. The quiet of a predator that was not breathing. Their sole sounds were their own laborious gasps, the splash of water from their dripping packs, and the wretched wheeze of Kael's lungs. His ankle was a mauve, puffed-out disaster, and every jolting step on the uneven tracks sent waves of sickness coursing through him. They were moving as slowly as they could, a death march of the damned.It was Lyra who caught it first. She stood frozen, her head up, her body tense. "Stop," she whispered, the sound not vocal.Ken froze, his hand in mid-air. The silence thickened, a palpable weight. Then he caught it too. A sound that wasn't water or rock or man. A thin, high whine, the voice of an outraged insect blown up to the size of a thousand. It was soft, still distant, but unquestionably machine."What's that?" Kael breathed, his pain-swollen voice straining to reach his own ears.Ken didn't answer. He extinguished his torch, and they were in a co

The hush that came after the killing was thicker than the darkness. It pressed against them like a force, weighed down with the ghosts of the two men seeping into the stagnant pool of water behind them. They crawled along the new duct, a smaller, more cramped pipe than the last one, their progress slowed to a straining, scratching crawl. Kael's breathing was a tenuous thread, waiting to break with every jarring movement. Lyra's was rapid, superficial, as if she could outrun remembering what she had witnessed.Ken's leadership, yet his driving desire had taken on a new, brittle tone. The icy, clinical focus that enabled him to kill without hesitation was beginning to crack. The adrenaline had dissipated, and it left the images flooding in. Not of the soldiers' dying eyes, but of Sophia's.He saw her, not as the smart, vituperative historian, but as the woman-child who had taught him to read the ancient blueprints as a kid, her hand over his on the creased pages. He saw her laughing in