The alarm hit him in the middle of half-sleep.
Not the shrill site-wide wail—this was the lower, meaner tone that belonged to people like him. A tight, rising buzz in the wall panel above his bunk, synced to the pulse of the red light in the corner of his private quarters.
FULCRUM opened his eyes, already reaching.
The room was dark but for the alarm. Bed made with military precision, gear arranged in a grid on the small desk, boots aligned under the chair. The only sign of a life being lived was a mug with a faint coffee ring and a single book face-down beside it.
He slapped the acknowledge pad. The buzz cut off. The red light became a steady glow.
"Nu-7, TEAM 1," came OWL's voice through the wall speaker. "Stand up. Priority call from Site Command. Briefing in five in Ready Room Two."
"Copy," FULCRUM said, even though the system didn't need his voice.
He swung his legs off the bunk, feet finding the floor. Muscles protested; the stairwell run hadn't finished with him yet. He ignored it, pulled on his undershirt, then armor in practiced sequence.
Helmet last. Shotgun sling over his shoulder. Sidearm holstered.
By the time he stepped into the corridor, the rest of TEAM 1 were spilling out of their own rooms—VANTAGE rubbing sleep from his eyes, RATCHET still fastening a strap, HARROW already fully kitted like he hadn't bothered trying to rest at all. BASTION moved with his usual slow inevitability, shield slung across his back for now.
"Nobody told time to stop," RATCHET muttered. "We slept, what, twenty minutes?"
"Thirty-seven," FULCRUM said.
"Love that your brain keeps receipts," RATCHET replied.
They filed into Ready Room Two.
OWL stood at the front, posture straight but unhurried. The wall screen behind him showed an aerial image of an industrial complex just outside the city—a cluster of concrete buildings and storage yards lit by security floods.
Next to him, on a secondary screen, the Foundation emblem rotated in subtle animation, waiting to be replaced by something worse.
"Sit," OWL said.
Chairs scraped. TEAM 1 dropped into place. FULCRUM took the spot at the end of the table closest to the door, weapon leaned against his leg.
"Three hours ago," OWL began, "a logistics partner reported a storage incident at a secure material handling facility on the outskirts. Their description was flagged by our filters—'stone disease,' 'spreading glass,' 'breaking bodies.' Local responders were diverted. Our liaison confirmed anomalous conditions."
He tapped a key. The screen flicked to grainy security footage.
A warehouse interior. Men in hi-vis vests and helmets, moving pallets with forklifts. One frame showed a worker clutching his arm, staring at it in horror.
The next frame showed the arm halfway crystallized—flesh giving way to a jagged, translucent structure that crawled up toward the shoulder.
The frame after that was mostly shards.
RATCHET swore under his breath.
"ZERO-FOUR-ZERO-NINE," OWL said. "Probable full manifestation. Contagious crystal. You've all read the file."
"Contact leads to fractal conversion," FULCRUM said quietly. "Spread along surfaces. Secondary shatter hazard. Containment prioritizes distance and sacrificial material. No heroic grabs."
"Correct," OWL said. "You are not to touch any contaminated surface or object. If you do, you will not have time to regret it before we are forced to treat you as a contamination source."
He let that sink in for a beat.
"Perimeter?" BASTION asked.
"Inner perimeter is held by our advance containment team and structural," OWL replied. "They've isolated one warehouse and an attached office block. External shell is stable for now; internal conditions unknown. Initial reports suggest the anomaly is opportunistic but not actively 'hunting' beyond contact vectors."
He tapped again. The screen zoomed in on one of the images—a forklift wheel half-transformed, the spokes of its rim budding into deadly geometric blooms.
"Your job is tri-fold," OWL said. "One: assess spread and report so containment can plan structural intervention. Two: locate any surviving workers trapped inside. Three: don't die stupidly."
"That third one sounds personal," RATCHET muttered.
"ALPHA-1 Overwatch is monitoring," OWL added. "PRIORESS is on the line. She has additional constraints."
The speaker crackled.
"Nu-7, TEAM 1," PRIORESS said, her voice cutting cleanly through the room. "Zero-Four-Zero-Nine is a high-visibility asset. The wrong footage leaking out of this could cause strategic panic. You will keep civilian recordings to zero and our own recordings to 'need-to-know'. ETA-10 has been notified but is not on-site yet—this is your ugly."
"Understood," FULCRUM said.
"MedIntel?" OWL prompted.
"PSI-7 MedIntel online," PATCH$1 said softly over the room speaker. "We've set up a trauma and quarantine lane in the south yard. Anyone with suspected contact goes straight into hard isolation. No exceptions, even if they're still… mostly soft."
Her voice didn't waver, but something in it tightened on that last phrase.
"IMINT?" OWL asked.
"Aviation Mobility, Containment-IMINT," FUSE answered. "I'm already in the stack—drones over the roof, thermal and LiDAR scans ongoing. I'll feed you safe paths and 'do not touch under any circumstance' zones. If I say no, you stay no. I don't care who's screaming from under the shiny rock."
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
"Questions?" OWL asked.
"Respiratory risk?" VANTAGE asked. "Any aerosolization?"
"Negative so far," DOCSTRING replied. "All observed propagation is via direct contact with contaminated surfaces. Dust levels in air are within normal parameters, but you'll be in respirators regardless. If you start hearing crunching where there shouldn't be crunching, you withdraw."
"Love that baseline," RATCHET said.
"Gear up," OWL said. "You roll in five."
The warehouse complex rose out of the darkness like an unfinished thought.
Floodlights bathed the outer yard in harsh white. Trucks sat abandoned, some with doors still hanging open. Foundation vehicles ringed the inner perimeter—a rough rectangle of tape, temporary fencing, and very tense security personnel in full PPE.
TEAM 1 stepped out of the armored van into air that tasted like dust and colder things.
"Respirators on," FULCRUM said.
They sealed their masks, checked one another's seals by habit. Filters hummed faintly.
"Visual feed coming online," FUSE said. "I've got you on four angles plus helmet cams. Zero-Four-Zero-Nine signatures are bright on LiDAR—anything that looks like ice coming out of the floor where there shouldn't be any is your enemy."
"Understood," FULCRUM said.
He approached the inner tape. A containment tech in a full coverall suit met him there, visor obscuring their face.
"Primary contamination is in Warehouse C," the tech said, voice muffled by the suit speaker. "We've got secondary crystallization starting in the attached office corridor—we've blocked that off as best we can. One confirmed KIA, three missing, two visible but inaccessible without stepping on the growths."
"Names?" FULCRUM asked.
The tech rattled them off. He didn't need them to do his job, but he took them anyway.
"The KIA?" he asked.
The tech hesitated. "We tried to move him," they said. "We didn't know what it was yet. His leg was… compromised. When we lifted, it shattered. The pieces started seeding around the impact. We backed off."
FULCRUM nodded once. "You did the right thing by stopping," he said. "You lost one instead of five."
The tech swallowed. "Doesn't feel like it."
"It will when you can count the living," FULCRUM said.
Behind him, HARROW grimaced. BASTION rested one hand on his shield like he wanted to hit something with it.
"All right," FULCRUM said. "Show me the map."
They clustered around FUSE's tablet. The overhead of Warehouse C showed the main floor: rows of shelving, a central lane, and an office block attached at one end. Red blotches marked known crystal growth.
"Main entrance is blown," FUSE said. "Secondary emergency door on the east wall is clear so far. Overhead, you've got patchy crystallization along the roof supports, but nothing actively dropping. Yet."
"Let's keep it that way," FULCRUM said. "We go in east, stay off any patch that even thinks about sparkling. No melee. If it moves, we shoot it; if it doesn't move but looks like 0409, we don't touch it. If someone's standing on it… we figure that out when we get there."
"Comforting," RATCHET said.
"Nu-7, TEAM 1," OWL said over their net. "You are cleared to enter. Timer starts now."
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
They moved.
The east door was a metal fire exit, propped with a pallet jack. The air beyond was colder, carrying a faint, crystalline tang like the inside of a freezer that hasn't been opened in years.
"Watch your feet," FULCRUM said.
They stepped inside.
Warehouse C had been ordinary once. The bones of that were still there: steel shelves stacked with crates, forklifts parked between rows, safety signs reminding no one now about required PPE and proper lifting technique.
The anomaly had rewritten parts of it.
Patches of glittering crystal crawled up from the floor in irregular clumps—jagged growths that had once been concrete, pallet wood, rubber tires. Some clusters were small, like frost on a window. Others had swelled into waist-high eruptions, facets catching the warehouse lights and sending them scattering.
"Visual confirmation of ZERO-FOUR-ZERO-NINE," VANTAGE murmured.
"Keep your distance," FULCRUM said.
As they stepped past one growth, he saw something embedded in it—a boot, halfway transformed, the shape of a foot within frozen mid-flex.
He did not look at it for long.
"Heat signatures?" he asked.
"Two, mid-floor, near rack sixteen," FUSE said. "Third is further back, near the loading dock. Using drones to verify whether that last one is whole or in pieces."
"One thing at a time," FULCRUM replied.
They threaded a careful path through the aisles, stepping only where dull concrete showed. BASTION kept his shield angled not against bullets now, but against the possibility of a stumble.
"Left," FUSE said. "You've got an arm of contamination reaching out from the main cluster—don't cross it."
"I see it," FULCRUM said.
The "arm" was a sinuous vein of crystal that had spread along a hairline crack in the floor, thin but continuous. He led them in a high step over it, making sure no boot sole brushed it.
They found the first survivor pressed against a shelving unit, back literally to the wall. A man in his fifties, face white behind his safety goggles, stood on a narrow island of untouched floor. In front of him, the world had become glass teeth.
Crystal growths fanned out from the base of the shelf he faced, a jagged field that had swallowed the aisle. In the middle of it, half-submerged, was another worker. His lower body was fully transformed, crystalline legs fused to the floor. His torso leaned forward, arms outstretched like he'd tried to crawl free.
He'd made it as far as turning his head. The expression frozen on his half-glass face hadn't been spared the process.
HARROW swore softly.
"That's… something," RATCHET said, voice a little thin.
"I told him not to move," the standing worker babbled as they approached. "I told him, I told him, but he grabbed the pallet and then it was— it just— it—"
"Hey," FULCRUM said, keeping his voice level. "Look at me."
The man did, eyes wild.
"You did right by staying put," FULCRUM said. "You step forward, you become part of that. You stayed. You're alive. That's the correct answer."
"I can't feel my toes," the man whispered.
"You're standing on concrete," FULCRUM said. "Toes are fine. Your brain is lying to you. Hold still while we get you out."
He eyeballed the gap—the island the man was on, the spread of crystal in front, the shelves to either side.
"Can't go forward," VANTAGE said. "Left shelf is contaminated at the base. Right one's clear."
"Entry from the side it is," FULCRUM said.
He slung the KSG and unclipped a small collapsible bridge plate from BASTION's pack—a narrow, reinforced strip of composite designed for exactly this kind of bullshit.
"FUSE?" he asked.
"Your right-side shelf is clean up to three meters," FUSE said. "Beyond that, I can't guarantee. Keep it tight."
FULCRUM nodded, then moved carefully along the right shelf, keeping his shoulders brushing metal to anchor his position. When he reached a point level with the survivor's island, he knelt, extending the bridge plate sideways.
It clanked softly as he set one end on the concrete under his knee, the other end on the man's patch of floor.
"Okay," he said. "You're going to step onto this and come to me. One foot at a time. Do not look down. Do not look at him. You look at my shoulder plate, nothing else. Understand?"
The man swallowed hard. "He's my friend," he whispered.
"I know," FULCRUM said. "You living is how you honor that. Move."
He extended a gloved hand—not to grab, not to pull, just there, a target.
The man stepped.
For a second, his boot wobbled on the bridge. FULCRUM felt his own breath hitch, forced it steady.
The man took another step. Then another. Every motion felt like it hung on the edge of a knife.
Then he was close enough for FULCRUM to catch him by the elbow and steer him back to safer ground.
He sagged against the shelf, shaking.
"See?" FULCRUM said. "Toes intact."
The man laughed once, a high, hysterical sound, then clamped his jaw shut.
"HARROW, escort him to the exit," FULCRUM said. "Keep him off anything that shines."
"Got it," HARROW said, taking the man gently by the arm.
As they left, FULCRUM looked once, briefly, at the half-crystallized body.
He made himself memorize the position, the growth pattern, the way the shards had cut through fabric and bone. Not as a horror. As data.
"Doc, you seeing this?" he asked.
"Recording," DOCSTRING said. "We'll use it for propagation modeling. Thank you."
They moved on.
The second survivor was at the edge of a loading dock ramp, pinned in place not by crystal but by fear. A fan of contamination had grown across the ramp in front of him, thin spines of growth reaching toward his boots like frozen waves.
This extraction was easier—another bridge, another walk, fewer dead friends in his line of sight.
"Third signature?" FULCRUM asked once they'd sent the second man out with BASTION.
"Deep in the back, near the overhead doors," FUSE said. "He's not moving much. Either he's calm as hell, unconscious, or partially converted."
"Two of those are acceptable," RATCHET said.
They pressed deeper.
The lights had started to fail toward the back. The warehouse shadows were longer here, pooling under shelves and between growths. Crystals caught and refracted their helmet lamps in ways that made the edges hard to judge.
"Careful," FUSE said quietly. "You're in the densest patch."
"I can tell," FULCRUM said.
They turned a final corner and saw him.
A young man in a facility jumpsuit sat with his back against a pallet of shrink-wrapped boxes. Crystalline growth had swallowed his legs from mid-thigh down, fusing them into a single, jagged column rooted to the floor.
His hands rested in his lap. His face was pale, eyes unfocused but open.
"Hey," FULCRUM said, keeping his distance. "You with us?"
The man blinked slowly, then turned his head as much as he could.
"It's pretty," he said hoarsely.
"Yeah," RATCHET muttered under his breath. "Like a minefield is pretty."
"What's your name?" FULCRUM asked.
"Luis," the man said. "I think. My ID says Luis."
"Okay, Luis," FULCRUM said. "Here's the situation. Your legs are compromised. The rest of you isn't. Yet. We're not going to lie to you—there's no version of this where you walk out of here."
Luis let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I figured," he said.
"But," FULCRUM continued, "there is a version where the rest of you leaves. Understood?"
Luis' fingers twitched in his lap.
"That sounds… messy," he said.
"It will be controlled," DOCSTRING cut in on the channel. "Zero-Four-Zero-Nine's conversion hasn't reached major organs yet. Amputation above the growth line is viable if performed without direct contact. We can contain the limb afterwards. Medically grisly, ontologically clean."
"Love your phrasing, Doc," RATCHET said faintly.
Luis swallowed. "So you're gonna— what, hack me out?"
"Not here," FULCRUM said. "Too much contamination. But we can stabilize you, keep the spread from jumping, and then move you with the chunk you're in. Surgery happens in a controlled environment."
"And if it… spreads while you're moving me?" Luis asked.
"Then we stop," FULCRUM said. "And we don't let it touch anyone else. I won't promise more than I can deliver."
Luis closed his eyes for a second.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I don't want to… stay like this. I don't want to break."
"We'll do what we can to prevent both," DOCSTRING said.
"PATCH$1," FULCRUM said. "Prep for incoming partial conversion. You'll get a leg or two in hard crystal and a patient who's going to need a lot of reassurance."
"I've got a bay ready," PATCH$1 said, voice steady. "And a hand to hold if he wants it."
"Good," FULCRUM said.
He didn't move closer than necessary. Instead, he directed RATCHET and VANTAGE in setting up a containment harness—a rigid frame they could lock around Luis' torso and upper thighs, isolating his flesh from the crystal as much as possible.
It took time. Time for Luis to sit there, listening to the faint creak of his own half-glass prison.
"Does it hurt?" VANTAGE asked him once, quietly.
Luis shook his head. "No," he said. "My legs… they feel gone. But they're right there." He laughed again, sharp and wet. "I can hear them when I breathe. Like they're vibrating."
"Keep talking," FULCRUM said, more to keep him anchored than for information. "Tell me what you remember right before it started."
"Pallet slipped," Luis said. "Caught it with my foot. Thought I'd just twisted something. Then my boot… cracked. And then it was like—like someone poured winter up my bones."
The harness clicked into place with a final, decisive sound.
"All right," FULCRUM said. "We're going to move you now. You keep your hands on the frame and your head against the pad. You don't look down. You don't try to help. Let us do the work."
"You're the boss," Luis said.
They lifted as one.
For a moment, the entire structure—man, frame, crystal column—felt too heavy, too unwieldy. FULCRUM felt each tiny shift like a risk calculation. But the crystal held, the harness held, and they began the slow, careful journey back through the warehouse.
"Path is clear," FUSE said, voice low but intent. "I'm watching every step. If any new growth spikes, I'll call it."
"Keep watching," FULCRUM said.
They passed the half-frozen worker again. Luis didn't look.
"That him?" Luis whispered.
"Yes," FULCRUM said. "He didn't have a team when it hit. You do."
Luis swallowed and focused on the frame.
By the time they reached the east door again, BASTION had rejoined them, shield ready to clear a path if someone stumbled.
They exited into the cold night.
"PSI-7, package incoming," FULCRUM said.
"I see you," PATCH$1 replied. He could hear her moving—curtains drawn, equipment shifted, a bed readied.
As they handed Luis off to the waiting med team, FULCRUM held back, letting others support the weight.
"Stay with us," he said.
Luis managed a shaky grin. "I'm kind of stuck with you," he said.
Then the med techs wheeled him away.
"Nu-7, TEAM 1," OWL said over the net. "Inner sweep reports no additional heat signatures. ZERO-FOUR-ZERO-NINE growth is stable within current bounds. Structural will begin planning physical excision at zero-seven-hundred. You are clear to stand down."
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
He felt the come-down thud into his bones—a composite of exhaustion, delayed stress, and the quiet knowledge that some of the people they'd met tonight would not be walking anywhere for a long time, if ever.
As the others drifted toward the FOB and the promise of hot food and worse coffee, FULCRUM found himself standing at the edge of the quarantine lane.
Behind the clear barrier, PATCH$1 moved from bed to bed. Luis lay on one, already prepped, machines around him. Crystalline growth glittered under the harsh lights, ugly and beautiful.
She looked up once, meeting FULCRUM's gaze through the barrier.
He gave a small nod.
She nodded back, then turned to Luis, taking his hand in both of hers as DOCSTRING began to talk through surgical options.
FUSE appeared at FULCRUM's elbow, tablet tucked under one arm.
"You did good," FUSE said grudgingly.
"We all did," FULCRUM replied.
"That's not what they're going to write in the file," FUSE said. "They're going to say 'Breach Lead executed exemplary judgment under contamination risk.' They love writing that about guys like you."
"Guys like me?" FULCRUM asked.
"You know," FUSE said. "The ones who walk into bad places and walk out mostly whole. Until they don't."
FULCRUM didn't answer. There wasn't anything to argue with in that.
"Overwatch channel opening," came PRIORESS's voice, softer now, more distant. "Command observers, be advised: night's incidents are logged. Additional assessments pending."
On a channel FULCRUM didn't hear, in a room he hadn't seen, another voice answered her.
"Shadow online," the man said.
"Zero-One-Two, Zero-Nine-Seven-Zero, Zero-Four-Zero-Nine," PRIORESS said. "All within tolerance so far. Your thoughts?"
There was a pause, filled by the faint sound of someone breathing through a mask.
"He's holding," the man said. "You can see the strain at the edges, but he keeps it where it belongs. Doesn't reach for more, doesn't flinch from what's there. That's… rare."
"Comparable?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Comparable."
"Noted," PRIORESS said.
Back at the quarantine lane, FULCRUM finally turned away.
He'd done what he could for the night. The knife's edge hadn't taken a piece of him this time.
Tomorrow—or the day after, or the one after that—there would be another object, another wrong space, another body half-claimed by something that didn't care.
He walked toward the barracks, boots crunching on gravel, the air cold in the gap between respirator and collar.
Behind him, in a private suite on a different floor, a woman watched his footage in the dark while a man sat beside her, both of them silent as the same sequence played out again and again.
They were thinking about fractures.
They were thinking about how long you could balance two blades on the same fulcrum before one of them finally snapped.