Some have crystals blooming from their necks. Their arms. Theirfaces. Iridescent veins streak down their skin like lightning made solid.
One passes within inches of my hiding spot in the shaft wall.
He doesn’t even blink.
Doesn’tseeme.
I slip past.
In the next junction, I find the first body.
Not dead—dying.
A technician. Young. Her eyes flicker like a candle in the wind. She’s curled up against the wall, whispering something over and over.
“Too loud… too loud… too loud…”
Crystals rupture from her spine as I watch.
I close her eyes when she stops moving.
There’s no time to bury her.
I move faster.
When I must, I kill.
Quick, clean, brutal.
I break a neck in silence behind a power relay. Jam a knife under the ribs of a communications officer before he can alert security. Drag a humming engineer into a vent and choke the song out of his lungs.
But every time I kill, thehumminggets louder.
Like it knows.
Like thestationknows.
The lights flicker.
I hear her name in my head like a war chant.
Jillian. Jillian. Jillian.
She’s close.
I drop into a secondary corridor. Doors line the walls—labs, mostly. Containment wings.
One of them is sealed.
Thicker glass. Reinforced.
I press a claw to the seam.
Inside—her.
Slumped against a chair, restraints biting into her wrists. Eyes open. Lips moving. Not singing.Fighting.
She’s still fighting.
