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“How did I—” I start, but there’s no time. Jackson shoves another clip into my hand. “Reload and cover!” he shouts, and I obey, even as my brain stutters, unable to process what just happened.

The pendant at my throat is a white-hot point of pain. I can smell my own skin burning where it touches me, but I can’t let go. The chain is fused to my sweat.

More raiders pile into the corridor, and I realize this is it—they’re not stopping, not until the magazine is empty or my skull is ventilated. I reach for a new vial, but find the acid gone. Instead, I grab a flask from the side pouch—something I’d cooked up the night before, half as an experiment, half as a joke. Nitric, I think, mixed with a base and a stabilizer. It was supposed to clean the pipes. I pop the cork, light the rag I find on the floor, and hurl it at the next cluster.

It shatters midair, igniting in a bloom of orange and green. The hallway fills with smoke so dense it blinds us both, but the screaming tells me I got at least two of them. Jackson is yelling now, voice ragged and close: “Fall back, last position!”

I stumble back, tripping over spent casings, ducking a burst of gunfire that sets my hair smoldering. My lungs are on fire. I taste blood and burnt plastic, the world reduced to flashes of blue-white and the hammering of the pendant against my breastbone.

At the next barricade, I turn and see one of the raiders has made it through the smoke. He’s huge, face painted with something red and sticky, and he’s carrying a riot shield made from the lid of an industrial barrel. He’s screaming at me—words, not rage, but I can’t understand them through the ringing in my ears.

He lunges, pins me to the wall, the weight of the shield crushing my arm. I feel bone grinding, but it doesn’t break. My left hand is pinned, but the right still holds the pistol. I jam it up under his ribcage and fire, but the shot goes wild, ricochets off the shield. The pain in my arm is blinding, but somehow I keep pulling the trigger, again and again, until the chamber clicks empty.

The raider drops, more from the loss of blood than my aim. I yank my arm free, fingers numb, and stare at the body on the floor. It twitches, then stills.

Jackson is beside me, bleeding from a cut over his eye but otherwise intact. He tosses me another mag, and I fumble to reload, hands shaky and slow.

“More coming,” he says, voice flat. “Maybe five, tops.”

I nod. “We’re almost out of acid.”

He grins, bloody and wild. “Then we make do.”

There’s a lull, a moment where the air grows thick and slow. My heart is racing, every inch of me slicked with sweat and other people’s blood. The pendant is pulsing, not blue, not purple, but a sickly red that seems to seep into the world around it.

Jackson slaps a patch over his eye, rips open a stim syringe, and plunges it into his thigh. “You got one more in you?” he asks, not really a question.

“Yeah,” I say, and it’s true.

We take positions, shoulder to shoulder. The next wave is slower—maybe they’re afraid, or maybe they’re just calculating. They launch smoke grenades, then follow in a tight line, shields up, weapons braced. Jackson fires first, aims low, and the lead man stumbles. I pick him off through the gap in his helmet, a lucky shot that takes out half his jaw. He drops, but the line holds.

They get closer. Too close. Jackson jams a pistol into the ribs of the next, fires until the gun is empty. I go for the knife, but my arm is too slow. The raider gets a hand on my shoulder, pulls me into the wall, and I feel my collarbone snap. There’s no pain at first, just a hot numbness.

I scream, but it comes out as a gurgle. The world narrows to the inside of my own skull. My vision tunnels; all I can see is the blurring red of the pendant and the glint of Jackson’s teeth as he roars, pushing me behind him and swinging a length of rebar like a baseball bat.

He buys us a few seconds, enough for me to scramble to my feet, clutching the arm that doesn’t work anymore. I look down and see bone, slick and pink. I force it back into the socket, scream again, but the pain brings everything into focus.

I stagger to the workbench at the end of the hall. There’s a single bottle left—a volatile, untested compound I’d mixed as a failsafe. Jackson is down now, kneeling but not moving, and the raiders are almost through.

I grab the bottle, light the rag, and look back one last time. Jackson is watching, eyes bright even with blood pouring down his face.

“Do it,” he mouths, and I do.

I throw the bottle, hard, into the mass of bodies at the corridor’s mouth. It explodes with a sound like tearing metal, the fireball flattening everything in the first ten feet. The heat hits me a second later, slamming me into the far wall. My teeth rattle. My skin peels. I taste blood, and metal, and fire.

I’m on the floor, world spinning. The corridor is full of smoke and silence. I see shapes, but they’re not moving. I try to stand, but my legs won’t listen. My hands work, though, and I drag myself to Jackson’s side.

He’s alive, barely. His breath rattles, but he grins when he sees me. “Told you you’d make it,” he whispers, blood bubbling in his mouth.

I want to say something—anything—but the world tilts, and I fall into the dark.

The last thing I see is the pendant, red as a dying sun.

I come back to a world that’s half silence and half agony. My right arm is useless, bent in a way that’s geometrically impossible unless something fundamental has given way. My left eye is blind, or maybe just caked shut with blood. Every breath tastes of hot metal and burnt protein. I’m buried under debris—a collapsed slab of polycrete pinning me at the waist, a web of steel mesh pressing my cheek into the gritty floor. The only thing that still works is my hearing.

First sound: the Geiger counter. Still alive, still ticking, a slow, steady beat that’s almost soothing. Second sound: the pop and hiss of cooling metal, water from the busted pipes sizzling as it contacts still-hot wiring. Third sound: the wet, ragged wheeze of Jackson’s breathing, not far from my left. The rest is silence. No enemy fire. No shouts.

It takes minutes to free myself, working my left hand inch by inch beneath the mesh until I can lever the slab just high enough to slide my torso out. My legs scream, but they hold. I stagger upright, see the world through a slit of blood-caked lashes.