“Time’s up,” I whisper.
The command alcove shakes.
Support pillars groan.
Tur’s voice cuts through the red noise. “We have to fall back.”
I stare at the node. It’s tearing itself apart.
“No,” I say. “If this place ends, I end with it.”
“Kim,” Tur growls, raw now. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“Iamthe deal,” I say. “They want it because of me. Letting this thing eat itself is the only clean ending left.”
“You promised?—”
“I lied.”
A pause.
Then: “Then I’m lying with you.”
CHAPTER 32
TUR
Blood slicks the floor beneath my boots—warm, viscous, and sticky, like the ground itself is trying to hold me here, one final desperate grip. It seeps into the seams of my pants, thick enough that the scent of iron chokes the air before it hits my throat. Screams echo through the tunnels like distant thunder, a chorus of dying men and machines, uneven, jagged, fading but not finished. Every step I take toward the node feels like wading through a fever dream stitched together from war and memory.
The machine looms at the end of the corridor, vast and alien in its fury. Pale blue light pulses from a fracture across its surface—rhythmic, like a heartbeat too fast to be human. The fractures crawl wider as I approach, spidering like cracked glass in a frozen lake. That light doesn’t glow. It bleeds. It pushes back against the darkness like it hates the shadows and everything in them.
It’s alive.
Not in a metaphorical sense. Not in some poetic way scientists like to frame their mistakes. This thing issentient—angry, betrayed, wounded, and aware. It knows what’s coming. It knows I’m the one who brought it.
I lower my hand to the interface. The surface is jagged, burned from a skirmish no more than ten minutes past. My blood drips from a cut on my wrist, and the node reacts—glyphs lighting up in a spiral around my palm, as if it recognizes me. As if it remembers what I am.
My voice feels too loud in the silence. “Viis-Zeta-Four-One-Seven,” I rasp. “Full purge authorization. Execute root burn protocol. Confirm identity match.”
The symbols freeze.
A pause.
A flicker of doubt.
The node's next pulse nearly drops me—it pushes heat straight into my chest like someone slamming a forge door open.
It asks if I understand.
I press harder against the panel, skin singeing. “Yes.”
Because I do. For once in my godsdamn life, Iunderstandeverything.
This isn’t about heroism. It’s not about legacy or sacrifice or any of that propaganda bullshit people wrap around a death wish to make it palatable.
It’s about stopping something that should never have existed.
The glyphs shiver once, then flare gold. Too bright. Too fast.
