The Lupine code

The Breach Protocol

The blast wave had rolled through the Silver District like a new kind of thunder — not from sky, but from beneath the earth.

Caleb ran toward the smoke. Not because it was smart, but because that’s where the answers would be.

The streets were a snarl of chaos — power lines sparking, dust choking the air, alarms wailing in shrill, desperate rhythm. He leapt over a half-cracked bus shell, landing in water that glowed faintly blue with chemical runoff. The air burned his lungs; ozone and iron mixed thick in the throat.

He could smell the breach before he saw it. The air had changed — sharp, charged, metallic. Something alive had spilled out.

Ahead, the skeleton of Tower 19 leaned sideways, its concrete shell half vaporized. The explosion hadn’t been fire — it was energy, clean and surgical, like something had detonated from the inside.

Caleb slowed as he reached the perimeter. Drones buzzed overhead, their searchlights crossing the smoke. He ducked into the shadows of a burned-out car, eyes scanning for movement.

It didn’t take long.

From the heart of the crater, something moved.

He focused. The silhouette was human — almost. But its spine shifted unnaturally beneath its skin, vertebrae pushing out like armor plates. Its head turned toward the sound of the drones, and the glare of their lights revealed a mouth that was no longer a mouth — split too wide, teeth lengthened into tools.

The creature howled.

Not the animal cry of a werewolf — this was something else. It came in layers, harmonized like a machine’s feedback loop. A digital scream. The lights of the drones flickered, and one fell from the sky, its circuits fried midair.

Caleb’s pulse matched the sound. His bones trembled with it.

He whispered, “You’re new.”

He moved closer, crouched, keeping to shadow. His senses stretched outward — heartbeat analysis, air temperature, the faint metallic taste of nanocarbon in the dust. The breach had released something that wasn’t pure biological mutation. It was hybrid — part machine, part man, part beast.

He reached the edge of the crater.

The creature turned toward him, nostrils flaring. It sensed him back.

Then it spoke. A single, fractured word — half-snarled, half-digitized:

“Alpha.”

Caleb froze. The voice wasn’t recognition; it was protocol. Like it had been programmed to say it.

Then the thing launched.

He dove aside as claws cut through the air where his head had been. The impact cracked the asphalt, a ripple of force radiating through the ground. Caleb rolled, came up on his feet, half-shifted — eyes burning gold, claws extending from his hands.

The creature landed again, moving too fast for its bulk. Caleb met it mid-charge, grabbed its arm, and twisted — bones shattered, but the limb reformed instantly, plates sliding back into place.

“Adaptive regeneration,” Caleb muttered. “You’re a walking code.”

He slammed a knee into its chest, driving it backward into the wreckage of a bus. The thing screamed again — a distorted howl that shook nearby car alarms to life. Caleb roared back, not with rage, but resonance — the frequency that came from whatever was left of his mutation.

The two waves collided, shaking glass for a block.

For a second, the creature’s body convulsed, static crackling across its skin. Caleb saw data bleed — thin white threads running along its muscles, like electric veins pulsing in binary.

He drove his clawed hand into its chest, yanking out one of the glowing fibers. The creature shrieked and collapsed into spasms, its body disintegrating into a cloud of ash and circuitry dust.

Caleb staggered back, chest heaving. His hands trembled — not from exhaustion, but from the hum in his veins. The dust in the air vibrated with the same pulse as his heartbeat.

He whispered to the night,

“Whatever you are, you’re not alone.”

Sirens howled nearby. Reinforcement teams. Quinn’s units.

He turned and ran before they could seal the zone.

---

The Silver District stretched ahead like a rusted labyrinth — half-living, half-dead. He moved through it as though it were muscle memory, cutting through alleys where graffiti flickered with phosphorescent tags.

The words repeated like a chant:
“THE CODE WAKES.”

Caleb ducked into an abandoned subway entrance. His reflection in a broken mirror caught his eye — eyes glowing, veins pulsing faint gold. He didn’t recognize the man staring back.

For a second, he thought about stopping. About resting, or finding water. But he knew what came next if he lingered — the transformation would finish itself. And he couldn’t let that happen down here. Not with people still in the area.

He reached a maintenance room at the end of the tunnel and kicked the door open. Inside, the smell of oil and decay was almost comforting. He found a cracked terminal, still humming faintly on emergency power.

He wiped the dust away and booted it up.

A faded logo appeared: CROSSBIO GENETICS – ACCESS LEVEL: RESTRICTED.

He bypassed the security layers using fragments of memory — old passcodes burned into the back of his skull from the days before he ran. Lines of data cascaded down.

Then he found it.

PROJECT HOWL_REBOOT.LOG
INITIATOR: DR. EVANDER PRICE
OBJECTIVE: LUNACORE V.3 DEPLOYMENT IN FIELD CONDITIONS.
STATUS: ACTIVE.

Caleb stared. He could almost hear his heartbeat sync to the machine’s hum.

They’d restarted the program.

And the city was their test field.

He saved what fragments he could, but the system crashed mid-d******d. Power surged — the lights flickered, then went dark. For an instant, he thought it was a short circuit.

Then he felt it.

The ground trembled. The hum returned — low, deep, moving through the concrete like a living thing. He pressed a hand against the wall, and the vibration answered, pulsing once, twice.

It was communication.

Not just one signal. Many.

The network had come online.

The code wasn’t spreading like a virus.

It was organizing.

He grabbed his jacket and started back toward the street, heart hammering. Above, the night sky had changed color — thin ribbons of luminescent haze rippling between skyscrapers like veins of light.

The city was starting to breathe again.

Caleb whispered, “So this is your next phase, Price…”

Then, in the distance, he heard the sound again — the multi-layered howl, rolling through the power grid, carried by wind and steel. This time it wasn’t summoning him.

It was warning him.

Something bigger had awakened.

And it was already moving.