Between half-collapsed buildings the city breathed like a dying animal. Its breath came shallow, leaking from broken windows and split doorframes. Streets were littered with shards of glass, fragments of bone, cloth that once offered shelter. Metallic tang clung to the air… and beneath it something else hovered… a scent that drew predators like a lamp draws moths: the lingering trace of a human not yet fully gone.
Aaron moved through the rubble with Lyra on his back. His steps were measured. His eyes swept continuously. He listened to frequencies the city hid from ordinary ears. In every thud of concrete he read possibilities: a weak ledge, a hidden trap, the distant breath of something alive.
Lyra tucked her face against his shoulder. She held herself tight, holding back the urge to sob, holding back the animal shame of being displayed to a world that wanted to consume her. Her heart beat like a hammered drum… a sound that announced her like a beacon.
"Aaron…" she whispered, louder to steady herself than to reach him. "Quiet," Aaron said, voice flat and controlled. "Do not make a sound."
They moved down what had been a main avenue. At the curb lay piles of bodies not yet reduced to skeletons… skin dried and adhered to cloth, metal implants jutting like crude trophies. Evident experiments… wires threaded under skin, metal plates fused to bone. Lyra glanced away and closed her eyes. She wanted to erase the memory before it rooted.
"I do not want to see this," she breathed.
"We are not here to look," Aaron replied. "We go through. Focus on your steps."
Their footsteps echoed then dissolved. A shadow shifted at the far end of the street. Not a human shadow… its motion was jagged, like torn membranes being dragged. A scratch of something scraping... nails or stripped tissue. Remnants of experiments still hunted the ruins. They were not mindless undead… they retained a ruined instinct, a savage way of feeding.
"Keep her back," a voice barked behind them… familiar, edged. "Do not relax," Aaron answered, picking up pace. "Keep distance."
A figure detached from a ruined vehicle… not a monster but a hunter in faded gear, a black badge on his sleeve. The hunters formed like a living map, each knowing their station. Yet the city did not obey their maps… every shattered window could swallow a life, every alley might be a snare.
"Movement ahead," one hunter hissed. "Two o'clock, up high." Aaron narrowed his eyes. He did not underestimate colleagues… they were dangerous. But what was deadlier was not the human threat… it was what smelled.
A rasp came from behind a car. The creature that slid into view was grotesque… limbs disproportioned, a maw that unhinged, teeth like saw blades. Its nostrils flared as it tracked the air. Its gaze fixed on Lyra not as food but as a target.
Lyra held her breath until her chest burned. She knew, in the oldest part of her brain, what the scent meant. The creature favored soft things. Her aura called it.
"Do not move," Aaron breathed. He pressed them against the building without hesitation. Lyra flattened herself, breath laced with ice. Sound shrank to the pulse in her throat and the scrape of debris. The creature sniffed, sliding closer like a needle following a scent trail.
It struck with a warped, stitched-together gait… pull, scrape, lunge. Time folded.
"Aaron!" Lyra started to shout, but his hands were already motion. One arm locked around her thigh to steady her torso, the other spun to snare the creature's head in a mechanic's choke... no ceremony, no ritual, just leverage.
The thing howled… a sound like ruptured pipes. Aaron used the momentum, locking a knee over its spine, driving weight to still it, then delivered a clean, bone-breaking blow to its jaw. It thudded down, convulsing.
Lyra squeezed her eyes shut even though she saw everything: flayed skin, gaping teeth, black blood leaking like oil. Her fingers dug into Aaron's coat until her knuckles whitened.
"Why does it pick me?" she whispered, voice raw with a fear that was also a question.
"Scent," Aaron said shortly. "They're attuned to certain cells. You're not random. You're attracting them."
Hunters closed in, sweeping with blinding lights and frequency rounds. The creature reared its head, shotgun fire glancing off its patched hide. It lunged again, seeking a side opening.
"Aaron ..." one hunter signaled, "close the rear!" "We do not have time," Aaron said. "I take this side. You take the other."
He moved not for show but for necessity: one joint smashed, one tendon severed, a quick snap that removed stability. The creature writhed but could no longer coordinate. Aaron kept the attack surgical, breaking structure rather than spilling breath.
A larger thing crashed from above, a mass of grafted segments and stitched plates. Hunters lobbed grenades, concrete billowed into dust. The beast tumbled then rose again… furious and never quite disabled. The line fractured.
"They're converging on the roof!" a voice shouted. "They're collapsing sectors!"
"We need exits," another panted.
Chaos layered on chaos. Creatures swarmed to the noise. Men slipped, were dragged into dark mouths, or tripped on rebar and did not rise. Wounds were plain and human; some hunters bled out, some went limp when a limb was taken. The math of flesh failed them.
Aaron moved like a calculation. He broke the foot support of a creature leaping for Lyra, sending it sprawling. Its hide split, muscles slapping the ground. It did not die but it slowed… enough to create the distance they needed.
Lyra folded inward, breath tearing. "If… if I..." she began.
"You will not," Aaron cut in, flat and final. "You stay behind me. You bend your knees if you must. You do not scream."
But she still felt it… a shadow that brushed her sleeve as a claw ripped fabric. She shivered deep into her bones.
A wounded hunter tried to force a corridor to clear their path. He swung a weapon; rounds flew and metal sang. One creature leapt and latched on, and the hunter's firearm clattered away. Aaron saw him drop the gun, moved like a precise, brutal instrument, and snapped the hunter's elbow with a single strike. The man crumpled not dead but incapacitated. Aaron did not kill for hatred. He removed variables that threatened the mission.
Order blurred into survival. Flesh fought history. No miracles came down from the sky. Only cause and effect, and Aaron's unrelenting prioritization.
The largest creature angled toward a narrow lane… Lyra's scent drew it until it was inches away. Her face paled to bone. She could not shout. Aaron read the microshift in the beast's shoulder… the bias of its momentum. He moved into the attack path, pivoted, and met claw with forearm and knee. Bone cracked. The beast screamed not from malice but from structural failure.
Lyra exhaled in a ragged sound and clung to him, trembling as if her skin had been peeled. She stared at his hands... slick with black ichor... at the flatness of his face. For the first time she saw not emptiness but a thin line of something like anger.
"Do not look," Aaron hissed. He would not let her witness more than she needed.
"But I..." she started, then closed her mouth.
The remaining hunters fell back to regroup. Their morale bled with their numbers. The creatures fed, regrouped, and struck again. The city's thin illusion of safety ended.
Aaron slid Lyra behind a toppled wall and checked that she was curled safe. He stepped out, eyes like voids scanning for routes. Each movement carried the weight of potential death and the calculus of the living.
In his ear the entity whispered …Finally you move.
Aaron did not answer in words. He answered through motion.
Night sank deeper into a city of corpses. Hunters were numbers, creatures chaos… and between them two bodies continued: one brittle, one bedrock, keeping a thin human balance.
Lyra hugged herself, fingers numbed. Aaron halted.
Not for fatigue. Not for doubt.
Something in the air shifted… a wrongness he had not yet felt in these ruins. A tiny tremor. A rhythm off-beat. Not the creatures he had trained to expect. Not the hunters either.
Lyra's spine prickled. She gripped Aaron's arm. "A-Aaron… what is it?"
He did not speak. He raised one finger to his lips... silence.
The silence fell heavy… like cloth drawn across the mouth of the street.
Then… a sound.
Click… click… click…
Not footsteps. Not breathing. Not the scuttle of scavengers. It was the sound of joints being reassembled, of precise mechanics set into motion. Staccato. Unnatural. Approaching.
Lyra hugged herself tighter. "Tell me that is not..."
Two luminous eyes opened at the tunnel's mouth. Not red. Not yellow. Not like the others. They were clear… too clear… mirrors reflecting Lyra's own fear back at her.
The figure took a deliberate half-step forward. Lyra saw its form. Human… but not human. Proportions perfect to an uncomfortable degree. Movement unnerving in its fluidity. Fingers too long… surgical like instruments.
Aaron shifted, planting himself between it and Lyra.
The creature bent forward, nostrils flaring. When it raised its head it smiled.
Not a smile of amusement. A smile of recognition.
"Lyra Veridine," it said. Voice soft and wrong.
Lyra stiffened. Her spine felt iced to the marrow. "A-Aaron… how does it know my name?"
The creature inclined its head. Close enough she saw the precision of its face… the way every plane aligned without the small asymmetries of life. It was not some degraded product.
It was Product Epsilon… a generation erased from records because it was too dangerous.
It lunged. Not at Aaron. Not at the hunters. Straight for Lyra.
Distance closed in a sliver of a heartbeat.
Lyra made a sound like a broken thing… a noise that held the tiny realization that she had no time to run.
And as the claw almost grazed the hairs at her temple...
Aaron was gone from where he stood.
No footstep. No wind. No audible motion.
In the space a human eye takes to blink, he was in the strike path, his body a shield across hers, his hands closing around the creature's wrist.
Everything went still.
The Epsilon looked into Aaron's face and, for the first time, its eyes dimmed.
Aaron's voice came low and animal. "I told you… do not touch her."
Pressure thickened the air. Dust rose in a small gust. Lyra did not move.
The Epsilon flexed. It made a sound too deep to be a growl. Aaron held on with a single hand. That one hand. Not a display. Not a flourish.
Hunters watching from a distance froze. They recognized escalation beyond their capacity.
Lyra hugged herself, shuddering. She understood, in a single cold flash, that this Aaron was not the same boy she had once seen under glass.
This was the facility's craft. This was something that should not have a name.
The creature said, voice breaking like cracking porcelain, "I… finally found you."
Aaron's head tilted... almost a nod. His tone was quiet and lethal.
"Too bad… I found you first."
The Epsilon roared.
And the dead city shook.