The tunnel breathed electricity.
Corridors spidered away in every direction—rusted walkways, maintenance shafts, service gratings—each corridor swallowed by the same humming blue that stained the air. The light wasn't light so much as a pressure: a thin, vibrating membrane of raw electromagnetic force, alive with crackles that licked concrete and made the metal taste of ozone. Where it touched the tunnel walls, the plaster bubbled and smoked. Where it passed through the air, tiny motes of dust exploded into sparks.
"You see that?" Taran's voice was clipped. He held his rifle at port, palms sweaty on the foregrip. The beam of his flashlight danced across the nearest shimmer and bent in on itself, folding into the blue like a fish slipping through a net.
Netoshka didn't answer at once. She watched. She listened. The wishbone line of the signal on her wrist pulsed—an irregular beat that matched the field's crackle. Her mouth tasted of metal.
"Blue energy field," Genrihk said quietly beside her, necromantic sigils faint on his fingertips.
"Remnants of experimental Plasmageist containment. Not natural. Not Wire." He ran a hand through his hair and frowned.
"Old tech, ancient shielding. It's reacting to movement."
A low, wet sound echoed from deeper in the tunnel—no, not echo. Movement. Something alive, sliding through the dark.
The first Vitraspawn appeared as a shard of wet light, crawling along the ceiling, limbs jerking wrong. Where its bioluminescent veins met the field, the creature's skin sparked and spat flaky embers, the blue running like water across its plating. It shrieked—an abrasive sound that made Rue's teeth ache—and lunged.
Netoshka's team tightened into formation. Zopi found an aiming perch; Twila folded herself into three near-silhouettes to flank; Zev's jaw worked as muscle coiled and loosened—ready. Surgien's hands trembled on his med-kit; Circe whispered to some creature spirit that had been pressed silent by the field.
"We can't run through it," Rue said. "We'll fry it."
"No," Genrihk said.
"We'll use it."
Netoshka's eyes coldened. For a moment the numbers she'd carried for days—1 3 4 5 7 3 13 24 15—including many more, felt like a code-key in her bones, a pattern that glinted against the field's rhythm. The field responded to charge, to phase. If you matched its beat—if you could glitch yourself to its signature—you might move through it without setting off the maelstrom.
She looked at Twila.
"Can you mirror the field's frequency? Not permanently—just a ghost signature."
Twila's grin was quick and better than a prayer.
"I can try. I'll paint a shadow that hums like it."
"Zopi," Netoshka added, "cover the left flank. Zev—be our bait when I ask. Taran, take point with me. Circe, keep whatever spirit you've got ready to drag our scent away."
Twila melted into the light a second later, a ripple of faces folding into one another as she built the illusion. Zopi's rifle barked a short warning burst into the distant dark—three shots that sounded like a heartbeat. It bought them a breath.
Netoshka crouched, palm flat to the rusted rail. She closed her eyes and reached, not inward but outward—feeling for the field's cadence. It was an irregular heartbeat: staccato followed by long sighs of static. She countered it with mental stabs of a different rhythm—glitches she'd learned to call up in nightmares and silence. The edges of her vision broke into pixels.
"Now," she breathed.
Twila's mirage shimmered into place and hummed a matching frequency—an artificial, vacuous echo that ticked like a wounded clock. The field recoiled, but not wholly; it accepted the shadow as an alias and loosened in its grip as a predator's pelt might fool a less-specified sense. Netoshka felt the hairs on her arms stand up as the charge washed over her—blue fire strobed across skin but did not burn. She moved.
Taran slid after her, boots finding purchase on corroded catwalks while the field hummed and accepted them as phantoms. Zev padded behind, his breath calm though his muscles quivered with predator-lore. They passed through the shimmering membrane like men wading through a veil—alive, but altered, a fraction of their molecules singing in a new harmony.
"Keep steady. Don't change your step," Netoshka hissed. Somewhere a Vitraspawn saw the intrusion and reared, the old lab scent of its body spitting into the air—acid and synthetic blood. Netoshka spat back.
That should have been the plan—pass through, get to the other side, regroup. But the field was not a gate; it was a snare.
On the far side the corridor branched, but where it should have been bare, dozens of tiny, blue orbs hovered—spherical, humming, sleeping like coiled bees. Each orb mocked the field; they were the field, condensed. Plasmageist-globes, wound around a slow core, little traps waiting for enough kinetic pulse to explode into a cascade.
Netoshka's mind flicked maps. They were surrounded on three sides, and whatever had set these up wanted to herd predators—wanted to funnel them.
She made a fast decision. "Zev," she said.
"You're our decoy."
He snapped his head up, eyes gone strange for a moment—the animal edge sharpening. "You sure?"
"I want them to follow you through the branch past the orbs. Lead them like a dog on a chain. Don't touch the globes. Run through the corridor and past the second set of steps. Twila will tear the shadow to make a corridor. When I activate the glitch field on the far bank, I want the orbs to take everything the Vitraspawns bring."
Zev's lips curled.
"I'll run until my lungs burn."
He surged forward, and the Vitraspawns answered. Their motion was a single, grinding mass—no thought, just physics, just hunger. They followed him like iron filings to a magnet.
Netoshka pushed deeper into the tunnel and began the sequence—short glitches, high frequency. She tuned her body; she tuned the stray shards of circuitry they'd salvaged into a pulse generator. The field answered her glitch like a chorus. For a wild moment she felt everything align: the blue globes hummed, the lab-built creatures surged, Zev's lungs burned.
Twila's shadow cut open the third corridor, phasing into a doorway the Vitraspawns saw but could not understand. Their heads turned, voices like broken chords.
Zev dove through the opening and the Vitraspawns tumbled after him in clumsy abandon.
"Now!" Netoshka bellowed—too late.
The first orb shuddered, then detonated—not a fireball, but a wash of electric-blue radiation that didn't burn flesh in a normal way. It overdrove the Vitraspawns' bioluminescent circuitry, scrambled the little regenerative nodes along their spines. The creatures convulsed; muscles spasmed as if telegraphed by a conductor slamming his hand on the orchestra. The blue light crawled across their plating and combusted into phosphorescent ash.
For three heartbeats it was beautiful: the Vitraspawns collapsing like puppets with cut strings, their bodies smoking and slumping into inert heaps.
But the field was older than any of them. It didn't simply die after an input. The orbs cracked into shards, and some of the Vitraspawns, not yet fried, writhed with blue circuitry singing and broke apart into smaller, meaner swarms. A few flung themselves back toward the path Netoshka's team had taken.
"Tight! Clean them up!" she shouted. Genrihk hurled a wheel of necromantic chains through the nearest pile and dragged the twitching limbs into a neat mass, pinning and impaling the worst of the reanimated.
Rue dove into a tangle and came out with two crushed skulls, fangs bared, breath white in the cold air. Zopi's shots were clinical, each round finding a seam, each seam unraveling a creature's ability to move.
Surgien screamed as a small hand—slick with blue—grabbed his ankle and tried to bite. He stamped it until his boots stirred a fine blue powder into the air. "Goddamn rats," he howled, but there was an odd edge of triumph in his voice when he ripped free.
The trap had worked. The field had been used against the Vitraspawns and it had burned them. But the victory tasted of tin. Two of the orbs had detonated and the corridor behind them had been peppered with shards and electromagnetic flare—no more safe passage. The team had sacrificed part of the tunnel to survive.
They moved on, netting the broken bodies, sweeping for Survivors. Genrihk muttered to himself and dropped a ward that dulled the field's residual hum for a moment—a small mercy.
They reached an elevator shaft gated by rusted steel, the kind of mechanized lift that groaned like ancient lungs. At the back of the shaft the blue glow deepened into a pulsing node, the field's heart. Around it the plastered walls were stamped with old hazard markers in a language half-eaten by time.
Netoshka pressed her palm to the metal gate and felt the last of the field's hum under her skin. She tasted the ozone, felt her old mental keys work. The numbers she had carried all along were a rhythm; this tunnel's field answered to it. She slipped a wire into a terminal, fingers moving with practiced intent, and keyed a low-frequency retaliation pulse. For an instant the blue dimmed, the nodes flickering.
"It bought us three minutes," Genrihk said.
"Maybe five."
"Enough," Netoshka said.
"We'll ride."
They jammed their weight into the old lift and it gave, groaning upward. The Vitraspawns behind them keened—a sound swallowed by the tunnel. As the lift clawed out of the shaft, the shaft's field pulsed hard once, a last gasp that scattered the ceiling into a snow of blue dust.
When the doors snapped open at the top, they didn't find safety. They found a corridor cut clean by something enormous: a breach in masonry and a vista into deeper ruins, and standing there like a gatekeeper was a larger thing—one of the Belfre, or a cousin to it—looming, all sinew and wet plating. Its eyes were empty, and above it the tunnel bent into a rotunda that hummed with residual blue energy.
But they had bought space. They had crossed the field on their terms, and the Vitraspawns had been interrupted, burned, thinned.
Netoshka's voice was a wire. "All right. We move. Keep the field between you and anything that follows. We don't let them herd us again."
They stepped into the ruined rotunda, boots ringing against cracked tile and the lingering smell of lab fluid. Beyond, other corridors coiled like veins—choices thin as knives.
At the edge of the rotunda, Genrihk paused, fingers staining with a little blue ash from the Vitraspawns' hides.
"The field is an old thing," he murmured, "but it is not the master here. Someone turned it on, someone who knows how to speak to Plasmageist tech. Whoever that is—knows how to hurt us."
Netoshka's eyes narrowed.
"Whoever lit this trap—whatever runs this place—wants something. We'll find out."
They moved deeper into the bones of the city-under, the blue light now a map in memory rather than a barrier. Behind them the field's glow retreated into a million sparking veins as if irritated and then sated—like a beast that had eaten something sharp and was licking its wounds.
Ahead the corridor opened again into the dark fastness of the tunnel system—no promise of safety, only the promise of secrets. Netoshka tightened the straps on her rifle and fell into step with her team, each of them carrying the scent of blue dust and small victories.
They walked toward the unknown where continuous darkness loomed over their every move.