The Lupine code

The Sound of Metal Breathing

The Silver District never slept — it twitched.

Metal groaned in the cold, steam hissed from ruptured pipes, and the wind carried the scent of rust like something dying slow. Lights flickered where the grid was failing, giving the impression that the buildings themselves were breathing. Watching.

Caleb Mercer kept to the alley shadows, hood up, gloved hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. To anyone passing by, he looked like another vagrant scraping through New York’s forgotten sector. But he wasn’t forgotten.

He was escaped.

Electric pain pulsed beneath his ribs, like his bones were trying to move on their own. The change lurked hours away — he could feel it waiting, patient and cruel.

He whispered to himself,

“Hold it together.”

The wind shifted.

He smelled blood before he heard the scream.

Caleb dropped instinctively, muscles coiling. The scent wasn’t human — it had the copper burn of altered DNA, the oily tang of gene-mod gone wrong. His vision sharpened. Sounds separated: footsteps stumbling, a body dragged, wet breath snarling.

Feral Lycaon.

He should walk away. He needed to stay off radar. Every confrontation risked disclosure: security drones, bio-scanners, Quinn’s strike teams.

But another scream hit the air — shorter this time, throat caught by fear.

His pulse spiked.

Too late to pretend he didn’t hear.

Caleb moved.

He sprinted between towering skeletal scaffolds, boots striking cracked concrete. The district was a maze carved out by neglect — broken glass, abandoned freight depots, subway entrances sealed by welded bars. The city let this place rot.

And Program Howl thrived in rot.

A warehouse door ahead hung open. Inside: darkness, heavy and saturated with the stink of meat. Caleb slid along the wall, breathing deep, letting the beast in his blood map the living shapes.

Three heartbeats. One frantic. Two predatory.

He crossed the threshold.

A feral broodling crouched over a struggling man — its jaws half-human, half-wolf, coated in reddish foam. Another one stalked circles, sagging skin over bone, eyes filmed white. Their bodies were collapsing under their own mutagen.

Caleb spoke softly,

“Back away.”

The creatures turned, snarls bubbling through broken teeth.

Then his bones tore.

Pain knifed up Caleb’s spine — the transformation forcing its way early, triggered by stress and proximity to the others. He clenched his teeth hard, resisting the urge to drop. His fingers elongated, nails thickening into black hooked claws. Vision shifted to amber, pupils narrowing.

“Not now—”

But the ferals leapt.

Caleb caught the first by the throat mid-air, ripping it sideways. The second slammed into him, teeth trying to chew through his coat. He twisted violently, spine cracking, throwing it into a pillar. The concrete sheared.

The human victim scrambled toward the exit, bleeding, limping. Good — one less body to worry about.

Caleb felt another wrench inside — ribs dislocating, muscles swelling to contain new shape. He was halfway between man and monster, a grotesque hybrid, but strong enough.

The brood twisted up again, jaws clicking.

Caleb answered with brutality.

He lunged — claws flashing under flickering industrial lights — and crushed its skull to the floor. The other tried to run, but Caleb grabbed its spine, tearing it free in one motion. It fell twitching, breath rattling out.

He stood over the bodies, chest heaving, steam rising from his skin.

Silence returned — but not calm.

Caleb tasted metal on his tongue.

Not blood.

Steel.

A mechanical whirr sharpened in the rafters.

Drones.

He bolted.

Out the back, across a yard full of rusted shipping containers. Red tracking lasers danced through the air behind him, marking lines across mist and corrugated metal.

A voice amplified through a loudspeaker boomed:

“UNIDENTIFIED BIOLOGICAL. HALT IMMEDIATELY.”

Caleb didn’t stop. He scaled a ladder to a service roof, muscles trembling from the unstable half-shift. Bullets pinged the tower’s side, sparking off rust and bolts.

A spotlight struck him — bright, punishing.

Then a shape dropped from the sky.

He turned too slow — a concussive round hit him in the chest, sending him crashing through ventilation ducts. He landed hard inside a derelict textile plant, coughing, ribs refitting themselves with a sickening crack.

Through his blurry vision, boots approached — precise, tactical.

“Don’t move.”

Agent Yara Quinn.

Her voice was ice. Her stance — ready to kill. The rifle in her hands wasn’t designed to fire bullets. It fired inhibitors — the kind that forced a shift until bones snapped from confusion.

Caleb raised both hands slowly.

“You’re late,” he growled.

Quinn didn’t flinch.

“You left three corpses behind you.”

“They weren’t corpses when I found them.”

“And that’s somehow better?”

Her trigger finger tightened.

Caleb’s instincts screamed at him to tear, run, survive — but he shoved the beast down.

“You need me,” he said. “Those things weren’t part of the original program. Something new is happening.”

Quinn’s jaw clenched at the word “new.”

She knew more than she was allowed to admit.

Then, from deep within the Silver District —
a blast shook the skyline.

Lights died in a forty-story radius. A shockwave of dust and glass roared upward like a volcanic eruption.

Both of them froze, staring.

That wasn’t an accident.

That was a breach.

Quinn’s radio shrieked with panicked voices.

Caleb smelled the truth rising with the smoke:

More Lycaon.

Dozens.

Maybe hundreds.

The evolution had begun.

Quinn’s aim faltered — just enough.

Caleb ran.

By the time the drones found the edge of the roof, he was gone into the metal-breathing night — toward the blast, toward the truth, toward the monsters that mirrored him too closely.

Change was coming.

And he was already too late to stop it.