Three stories of cracked glass and hanging cable, shallow water slicking the floor, green light pulsing through a skeletal arm like a heartbeat someone had wired into bone. Dr. Magnus Holt stood with the tatters of a white coat around him and watched them enter as if they'd arrived late to his private lecture.
Chris sighted in, the cracked crescent of his 6× scope framing Holt's chest. The shard under his skin pulsed once, cold and bright, and Holt's ember eyes drifted to Chris's forearm as if he could see through flesh.
"A borrowed heart," Holt murmured, pleased. "Not a god I know. One fragment, among many, that slipped through when the veil tore."
"Hands where I can see them," Chris said. He gesturing with the rifle.
Holt smiled, almost polite. "You bring such lovely noise to my hall."
He lifted his skeletal arm. Skeeltons shot throug pod glass. Lids juddered, hissed, and blew. What crawled out were skeletons, but modified. Their polished bones threaded with IV tubing and wire, rebar spines, tags still clipped to clavicles. They moved with silent precision towards them
"Shoot!" Chris yelled. The rifle kicked. A skull burst, the green light inside snuffed.
Dev shot center mass out of habit, cursing when the round sailed through a skeletons ribs, and stepped in with his rebar. As he swung, and it connected the skeletons jaw bounced across tile. Jess met another in the knee with a crowbar, then hammered until it stopped moving. Valez's rhythm never changed: two shots, shift, two shots, each one a head
Elara wasn't firing. She'd gone still, eyes flickering to the left and right trying to find what they came here for. Finally she saw it to the right at a cracked pod, her own writing where a small black cube lay on a pedestal
CORE ARCHIVE — RUN: Δ-13
"Elara, don't," Chris snapped, tracking left-right as another skeleton unfolded.
"I see it," she said, voice flat with decision. She began to run to it.
Jess began to try to cover. Chris dropped another skeleton with brutal precision first shooting its knee, and then ground stomping its head. The shard kept thuddeding again, and again. Holt inhaled as if tasting a note of fine wine.
"It sings off-key," Holt said, delighted. "A lovely defect."
Elara slammed into the pod, jammed the latch. Nothing. She ripped her case open, dug out a screwdriver, and leaned into the hinge with small, furious motions.
Holt's eyes softened, amused. "Busy, busy."
Chris put a round into Holt's sternum. Bone dust leapt; Holt rocked and then stepped forward again, faintly offended. "Rude."
His skeletal arm flexed; air twisted. A spear took form. It was bone white, what what seemed to be ribs and femurs reimagined into a long, barbed lance. It flew not at Chris but at Dev who was distracted dealing with more undead.
Valez dove trying to shove Dev aside.
The spear punched through Valez's right thigh and pinned him to the tile with a sound that sounded like nails on a chalk board. His pistol skittered to a drain grate.
He didn't scream. He swallowed the noise, looked once, and set his jaw. When Dev grabbed under his arms to haul, Valez hissed, "Don't. Barbed."
Holt laughed softly and raised his hand. The skeletons paused mid-step. At a flick, they parted in rows, an aisle opening from Holt to the pinned man. The gesture was obscene, like a host revealing the stage.
"Let's watch," Holt said, almost fond. His gaze slid back to Chris. "The shard hums for you, and yet you're still made of small bargains. How quaint."
"Jess!" Chris barked.
"I've got her," she shot back, and put a bullet through a skull reaching for Elara's back. She pivoted, crushed another with the wrench, booted a third away.
Elara wrenched, swore, and the hinge popped. She yanked the faceplate down, grabbed the cube, and hugged it to her chest before shoving it deep into the chained case. For a heartbeat the seams glowed faint blue, a pressure you could feel in your teeth. She didn't notice. "I have it! Move!"
Dev fired wild, then steadied, head, head, miss, head, while breathing ragged. "Valez ,Valez"
"Keep the line!" Valez snapped, voice thin and fierce. Blood sheeted down his shin, pooling under his boot. He stripped the strap from his thigh holster with shaking hands and cinched a tourniquet above the wound. His fingers found the drain grate, dragged his pistol back. He checked the chamber and set his palm flat to the floor, breathing through his teeth.
"On me," Chris said, and dumped the last two rifle rounds into the closest skulls. The bolt slid back on empty with a cold click. He slung the rifle, drew the pistol, and shot another bony face as it lunged for Dev's throat. "Elara, to me! Jess left side!"
Holt stepped into the aisle he'd made, skeletons still and obedient at his flanks. The building's hum punched up a register, then down, as if matching the shard's rhythm.
"Still moving," Holt told Valez, conversational, as if noting a lab rat's persistence. "Admirable. And pointless."
Valez looked up, eyes hot and clear. "I've done more with pointless than you've done with miracles."
He clawed at the spear, tested once, found the give he needed, and dragged himself forward. The barbs tore deeper with a wet scrape; blood smeared tile in thick red strokes. He didn't stop. He clawed, pulled, clawed. Every motion cost him a breath. He took it anyway.
Jess tried to break through. Two skeletons hit her shoulders in a clean, practiced tackle. She twisted, hit one in the skull with the wrench, and kicked the other off with her knee. Dev yelled Valez's name as if shouting would build a bridge. Elara pressed the case to her chest and shoved it under her arm, free hand white-knuckled around the rail of a busted console.
Chris emptied his magazine into the aisle. One skull exploded; another cracked and kept coming until Jess finished it. Two shells left. He sighted, fired, sighted, fired, then reached to reload,Click. Empty pouch. He'd burned through more than he thought.
Holt knelt as Valez dragged within reach. He lifted his skeletal hand and set the cold bones under Valez's jaw like a surgeon about to angle a light. Up close, the green glow inside the arm crawled along lines cut into bone, symbols etched and healed and etched again.
"You reek of mortality," Holt said, fascinated. "Of ends. It's… almost pretty."
Valez spat blood in his face. "Yeah? So do you."
His left hand came up with a grenade he'd clipped from a dead guard's belt. He'd pulled it while crawling. He'd kept it flat to his side. pulling the pin with his thumb and held the spoon with shaking fingers. The tremor stopped.
Chris saw it and moved without thinking. Skeletons blocked, smooth as doors. He shot one in the temple, slammed shoulder-first into another, and felt the air rip around him as something heavy fell somewhere else.
"Valez," Chris said, voice breaking, "don't"
Valez looked past Holt's shoulder, found Chris's face across the chaos, and held it.
"You keep them alive," he said. No bark, no order, just promise he demanded back. "Or this means nothing."
Chris's body trembled. Slowly forcing out the words. "I promise."
Holt parted the last row of skeletons like a curtain. "Walk, little fire. Show me how men end their stories."
Valez's laugh was small and true. "We don't end 'em. We buy time."
He shoved the grenade hard up under Holt's ribs and pulled him close by the torn lapel of his coat, as if he could keep the necromancer on this side of the world long enough to matter.
Holt didn't flinch. He leaned in, ember eyes bright. "Then let's share it."
The world detonated.
Green light and orange flame mated in a single, brutal bloom. Bone dust burst like ash. The shockwave hit Chris with a aoomph, He slowly walked backward into Jess, Dev and Elara. They quickly ran together with water, and debris raining over them. Alarms soon began to scream, the sprinklers coughed spuring out water.
"Up!" Chris roared, hearing nothing but his own voice. He grabbed Jess's sleeve, while pushing dev forward. Elara staggered with the case hugged to her ribs following behind.
Behind them, the chamber seemed to fold into itself. The aisle collapsed, consoles buckled, a catwalk slammed down in an ugly, final chord. Through the rolling smoke, the skeletons did something Chris couldn't process,they bowed, tidy and synchronized, toward the center of the blast. As if in reverence.
They arrived at the maintenance door, but it was jammed. They continued to push badly forcing it open. A red-lit corridor yawned, steam hissing from ruptured fire lines. The floor seemed to tilt. Dev kept stumbling weighed down by what only could be self blame, and grief. Jess shoved him forward again.
They ran. With the ceiling dropping and shattered behind them.
On the edge of hearing, threaded through sirens and groans, a laugh followed a delighted sound, muffled by concrete.
"Fragments from beyond," Holt's voice whispered through the building's ribs. "The gate always sends its children home."
"Stairs," Elara gasped, pointing with her chin. She slammed into a dented metal door, bounced, hit it again with her shoulder. It gave. They spilled into a narrow well choked with dust and heat.
Dev kept saying I'm sorry without knowing he was. While Jess swore with every step. Wanting to just get out of the collapsing building.
They burst out through a service hatch into air that tasted like coins and rain that never came. Harrow Point heaved below them, smoke coughing from vents in thick gray ropes veined with a sick green that refused to blend with fire.
They fell against the outside wall and Chris began counting, two, three, Elara, Jess, Dev. Chris swallowed the fourth name instantly reminding himself.
"We have to" Jess started, then dropped the sentence completely before she could continue.
Elara slid down to a sit with the case clutched to her, forehead pressed to cold metal. "We have what we came for."
Dev's hands shook. "Tell me that worked. Tell me he's"
A dull thump rolled under their boots. The hatch behind them rattled once, like knuckles tapping on a door. Far below, something laughed again, softer now, as if from farther away.
Chris set his palm on the wall to keep the world from tilting. He looked at the faces that were left to him and made his voice steady.
"On your feet," he said. "We need to move before his sacrifice becomes worthless."
Jess wiped her face with the back of her hand and stood up fast enough to sway. Dev pushed to his feet unsteadly, enough that a mild wind would blow him away. Elara rose slow, jaw tight, one arm around the case like a strapped-on heart.
No one looked back for three steps.
Then Jess did, quick and angry, and bit the inside of her cheek until it stopped feeling like crying. Dev started to turn and Chris put a hand on his shoulder and didn't let him.
They headed for the service road in a line that wasn't neat but held.
Behind them, Harrow Point exhaled smoke that shivered green at the edges.
Under Chris's skin, the shard answered once, a deep blue thud. Something in the lab answered back from far away, patient as the tide of the ocean.