“Purge protocol,” Asher said, reading a panel near the landing. “The system is sterilizing sections. One at a time.”
One at a time. For now.
They came around the corner, and Zoe was there, less than twenty feet away.
For a half-second, the amber lights made it abstract — shapes and proportions and features that didn’t make sense.
Then it parsed.
The creature’s height filled the corridor, its head brushing the ceiling, and Levi wasn’t sure if it was the same one he had seen before, or if all of them looked the same. The strange flat shape where a face should have been was oriented toward Zoe, with dozens of dark circles extending and retracting like lenses, the tiny apertures cycling with a sound —tck tck tck— and all down its arms looked to be wire-like veins, just visible under its near translucent skin. It picked her up by the throat, her legs kicking at nothing as she screamed.
Levi reached for the gun at his belt, but Asher grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t,” Asher whispered, pulling Levi back slowly.
Zoe’s hands pushed against the hand holding her as it turned her in the air, like it was examining her. One of its metal-tipped fingers moved across her back, finding the seam of her uniform between her shoulder blades, and it tilted its face as it felt alongthe seam. The uniform parted along the line the fingers traced, opening like the creature was unzipping it. It traced the bare knobs of her spine, the metal fingertips prodding at the bones before it ran a line down her back.
The skin parted just like the clothes did.
Levi winced as her screaming changed. It had been fear. Now it was a pitch that wasn’t in the normal range of sounds a person made —it was somewhere deeper than the throat, somewhere structural. The creature’s fingertips peeled the skin back from the muscle with the same steady attention. Layer by layer. The apertures on the dish were wide open, the lenses fully extended and focused.
It’s looking for something.
The vibration in Levi’s sternum hadn’t changed.
Zoe’s scream cut out, and the sound that replaced it was just wet tearing. The creature’s fingers wrapped around the column of her spine and pulled, and the spine came away from Zoe’s body with a dense, wet sucking sound, and her body went slack. The creature held the spine up in front of its dish-like face, and the apertures cycled —tck tck tck tck tck— faster now, examining what it held.
The dish tilted slightly.
Asher’s grip tightened on his wrist and pulled hard.
They ran. “Don’t let them get their hands on you,” Asher said ahead of him, not breaking his stride. Levi couldn’t erase the image of Zoe’s spine hanging in the air behind his eyes — the way the connective tissue had let go in sequence, like buttons being undone, and the creature holding what it found up to its dish with that careful tilt. His stomach roiled and he felt bile rising up his throat.
Good to know I can watch someone get taken apart and not puke now. Really building a great skill set here.
Somewhere to their left, behind a sealed bulkhead, something heavy hit the floor, and the echo of it reverberated into the corridor. He skidded to a stop as he heard a usually easy-going voice groan, all the ease having gone out of it, “Ah, fuuuuck.”
Asher’s grip tightened, and he jerked Levi towards him. “Keep moving.”
He’d needed the NPCs in the sanitarium…when he and Asher tried to beat Faine’s maze solo, they just ran around in circles dying, and it didn’t work. If this place operated the same way, losing Jasper now meant losing whatever Jasper’s skills were going to unlock later. It was the strategic calculation, one he could sell Asher while hiding a simpler truth: Jasper was his friend, even if he wasn’t real.
“We need him alive,” Levi said.
“You need to keep moving.”
“If we lose the team, we can’t beat this. It’ll be just like what happened before, Asher!” Levi snapped, pulling his arm back. “You can watch me get my spine ripped out by one of those things a dozen fucking times, or you can let me go help Jasper and maybe we’ll survive this time!”
Asher’s jaw worked. Levi could see him weighing the risk against the reward of giving Levi what he asked for.
“Thirty seconds,” Asher said and let go. “Get him here by then or I kill him myself.”
Levi went around the corner and spotted an open door. He pulled out the pistol like he actually knew how to aim the damn thing, and went through the door ready for anything except what was there.
Jasper was on the floor, his left arm held against his chest, and his shin bone splintered through his coveralls. On the floor near him was a welding torch still attached to a gas supply, and one of the creatures, dead, with burns singeing most of its body,its narrow torso blistered and split open, revealing a strange mixture of black goo and wiring.
“Levi!” Jasper’s face lit up as much as it, but his face was beaded with sweat. “Really good timing, man. Really, really—”
A hydraulic mechanism engaged behind Levi and Jasper’s eyes widened, the last remnants of his smile vanishing. “WAIT, DON’T!” he shouted. “It’s fine! It’s dead—fuck!”
