A violent blast tears through everything. My eyes dart behind us, near the entrance, to see stone and metal collapsing, the walls trembling like they’re in the throes of a death rattle.
Harper screams my name, but the roar of debris drowns everything. I grab her, drag her behind a fallen console, shield her with my body as dust engulfs us again.
A cascade of rubble seals the entrance, suffering the same fate as the entrance before this one did. Kiro’s voice on the comm cuts out in a burst of static. Harper coughs, eyes watering from the dust. I brush the debris from her hair, checking her for injuries.
She’s alive, thank the Lord. Shaken but alive.
Her hand finds mine, fingers trembling as they lock around my knuckles. She doesn’t let go.
Anton’s footsteps fade into the deeper dark beyond the servers, retreating like a phantom slipping between worlds.
He’s running deeper into the belly.
Toward something.
Or someone.
Harper squeezes my hand harder.
“Damian,” she whispers, voice hoarse but steady. “Come on, we gotta go after him.”
We move, hands clasped, stepping over shattered stone and sparking wires. My head hurts, the air is full of dust, and I’m sure there are some kind of fumes in the air that are slowly poisoning my lungs.
The only exit now leads further underground, straight toward Anton, straight toward the end of everything we’ve survived to reach.
It’s the woman whose hand is in mine who gives me the courage and resilience to keep going. Her stride is wide, unbothered by the past two blasts. The line of her jaw is unforgiving, and her grasp on me is firm.
Does she know what she does to me?
She feels me looking at her, her fingers tightening around mine.
“We finish this,” she murmurs.
Together.
And we disappear into the dark. The deeper we move, the hotter the air gets. The concrete rubble is an annoyance. The lights flicker in epileptic stutters, each pulse revealing a different version of the corridor: broken wiring, collapsed infrastructure, the dust drifting like ash from some unseen funeral pyre.
Harper walks close at my side, though she tries to pretend she isn’t. She always acts as if her nearness is coincidence, as if she isn’t matching her breathing to mine so the rhythm steadies both of us.
I let her have this.Let her think I don’t notice the tremor she hides in her frame.
We move through a narrow passage where the ceiling has bowed inward, cracked from the blast. With every step, thereis a crunch of glass and grit. The place feels alive in the wrong way with the hum beneath my feet being too rhythmic, like a mechanical heartbeat running faster than it should.
My gut tells me something’s been triggered.
Something big.
“Damian,” Harper whispers.
I lift a hand, not to silence her, but to listen. Ahead, somewhere in the artery of tunnels, sound ricochets unevenly. A ragged voice—Anton.
His voice drips through the air like oil sliding down metal—thick, staining everything it touches.
“…you think you can walk through this grave and come out clean…”
Harper stiffens, and I feel her shiver. I step half in front of her before she can argue; she doesn’t try to push past me the way she sometimes does.
Good. That means she feels that something is eerily wrong too.
