Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

Passphrase

The control room was cold and smelled of dust and old coffee.

Silas locked the door from the inside and stood with his back against it, listening. Nothing followed him down the stairs. The only sound was the low electric hum of the one living screen, patient as a held note.

**MASTER ACCESS. ENTER PASSPHRASE.**

a counter: **ATTEMPTS REMAINING: 3.**

He did not touch the keyboard. Anyone could guess a password, and anyone who guessed three times wrong would learn what the system did next. The thin man's card had opened the door, but the digits on its back were a door code, not a passphrase. A man who guarded that number so carefully had probably already tried it here and been refused.

So Silas did what he had done upstairs. He looked for the pattern.

The room had been left in a hurry, but not a panicked one. Chairs were pushed in. Coffee cups sat rimmed with dried brown at their bottoms. On the far console someone had pinned a child's drawing to the wall: a stick-figure family under a yellow sun, with crayon letters across the top that said **DADDY'S WORK**.

He stepped closer. In the corner of the page, in adult handwriting, someone had written: Mara, age 6. Don't forget her birthday, 14 Nov.

Too obvious, he thought. Which is exactly why people use it.

He did not try it yet. He moved to the dais and found, beneath the main console, a drawer that had been jammed shut. It took the thin man's belt knife and two minutes of patient levering to open it. Inside lay a logbook with a cracked blue cover, the last entries written in a tight, tired hand.

Day 3. Surface comms down. Command silent. Orders were to hold. We hold.

Day 11. Two of the crew have asked to leave. I have refused. We are the only ones who know what is on Level 4.

Day 19. Sealed the lower reactor access. Passphrase changed. If you are reading this and you are not one of mine, you have taken this place the hard way, and I hope you are worth it.

There the entries ended. Beneath the last line, as if added later: *Mara would have been seven. Tell her I held.

Silas read it twice. Then he closed the book and let it rest on his knee.

He felt, distantly, that this should have moved him. The man had held a door against the end of the world and left no one to say so. Silas turned the page of that thought as he would turn a page in a stranger's diary and found nothing waiting behind it. Only the logic: a man who changed the passphrase on day nineteen, with a daughter on his mind, would not use something that could be read from the wall.

He'd use what he'd lost. But not her name. Her age.

He typed it slowly: *MARA7*

The screen paused. For a moment he thought he had made the mistake that would cost him. Then the prompt dissolved, and a plain gray menu filled the display. No music, no chime, no glowing flourish. Just a list, in the blunt font of an engineer who did not care to be admired:

**FACILITY CONTROL**

**SURVEILLANCE**

**ENVIRONMENTAL**

**DOOR MANAGEMENT**

**POWER (LOCKED, LEVEL 4 AUTH REQUIRED)**

Silas exhaled very slowly, and only then noticed his hands were trembling. Not with fear. With cold, and with a hunger that had nothing to do with food.

He opened **SURVEILLANCE**.

Twenty-four small windows bloomed across the monitors, most black, some static. Seven showed live images in grainy green. He found the common room by its fire barrel and leaned in.

Four men remained. The sergeant slept sprawled on his cot with one arm hanging off the side. Mercer sat on the edge of his bunk, still awake, still muttering, the bottle nearly empty. Pike dozed in his chair with the rifle in his lap. A lean man named Harlan, whom Silas had barely noticed the previous night, lay curled on his side by the wall.

Dev, the thin man, was a dark gap among them.

Four, thought Silas. One of them already suspects.

He moved to **DOOR MANAGEMENT** and found what he had hoped for: a schematic of every hatch and corridor on this level, each marked with a small lock icon. Some were red. Most were green. He could cycle them from here. He could not open the vault, which remained gray and unresponsive, but he could do something almost as useful.

He could decide where the deserters were allowed to go.

He did not act at once. He sat in the dead commander's chair and watched the monitors until his borrowed blanket was warm and his heartbeat had steadied. He studied the layout like a man planning a long road trip. Four corridors. Two stairwells. A sealed storage room labeled COLD STORE near the east end, and above it the small gray icon of something called **FIRE SUPPRESSION (CO2 FLOOD)

At five-forty by the console clock, the sergeant woke.

Silas watched him scratch his belly, reach for the bottle, and find it empty. Mercer snored by then, bottle forgotten. The sergeant's gaze went around the room, counted bunks, and stopped.

"Dev?"

No answer. He kicked Mercer's boot. Then Harlan's. Neither man stirred.

"Pike."

The boy jerked awake, rifle clattering. "Sarge?"

"Where's the scavenger?"

Pike turned. Looked into the closet. Looked, with rising alarm, at the empty cot. "He, uh. He was in there. I swear he was in there."

The sergeant's face changed, the lazy confidence draining from it like water through a sieve. For the first time, Silas saw him think. "Where's Dev?"

"Latrine?"

"Gone since when?"

Silence. The sergeant swore softly. He snatched his rifle, kicked Harlan awake with real force, and the room filled with raised voices that Silas could hear faintly through the floor, a dull rumble transmitted by the pipes.

They had not locked down their camp. They had not posted a second guard. They had relied on the idea that a hatch could be welded and a scavenger could be broken, and they were already beginning to learn that a world could be both.

"Harlan, check the passage," the sergeant ordered. "Pike, with me. Mercer, wake your ass up."

Harlan took a rifle and a flashlight and trudged toward the side passage, grumbling. On the monitor, his small green figure moved down the narrow corridor, past the bend, past the maintenance alcove where Dev lay behind the crates.

Silas watched Harlan's light pause at the stained patch of floor.

He did not wait to see what Harlan would conclude. His finger moved over the console, quick and steady. The door ahead of Harlan sealed with a dull clunk. Then the door behind him.

Harlan whirled. His light danced. He hammered on the steel, but the walls ate the sound.

Silas opened **ENVIRONMENTAL**. A list of compartments scrolled past, and he found the one he wanted, a short corridor and an adjoining storage cell. He selected **FIRE SUPPRESSION**. The system asked for confirmation. He gave it.

On the monitor, white vapor hissed out of the ceiling vents. Harlan turned in circles, coughing, clawing at the walls, then at his own throat. He folded to his knees. His light rolled across the floor and fell still.

It took less than three minutes.

Silas sat motionless. This time, there was no blood on his hands, no knife handle slick in his grip. Only a switch pressed, and a man gone, quiet as a candle.

Upstairs, the sergeant's voice rose. Boots pounded. The first note of fear entered it.

Silas turned back to the screens, found the sergeant's face in the fourth window, and watched it go slowly pale.

Three left.