The clinic lights buzzed overhead, their sickly glow painting Rena's face in harsh angles as she leaned over Lucent, her mechanical fingers prodding at his temples.
The cold steel of her augmented eye whirred as it focused, scanning for damage that should have been there—but wasn't.
"You should be dead," she said flatly, her voice devoid of its usual razor-edged sarcasm. "Or at least brain-fried to the point of drooling on yourself."
Lucent lay on the examination table, his head pounding in time with his pulse.
The migraine was a living thing, gnawing at the edges of his vision, but it was nothing compared to what he'd expected.
The aftermath of rawcasting at that level should have left him a hollowed-out husk, his veins scorched black with aether corruption.
Yet here he was.
Alive.
Mostly intact.
"Guess I'm just lucky," he muttered, wincing as Rena's fingers pressed a little too hard against his skull.
She snorted. "Luck doesn't clean aether burns out of someone's nervous system." Her gaze flicked to the others—Karen, slumped against the wall with her arm freshly stitched, and Kai, pacing like a caged animal, his salvaged Conduit clutched in white-knuckled hands. "So. You met something that shouldn't exist."
Karen barked a laugh, the sound raw and humorless. "That's one way to put it."
Kai stopped pacing, his fingers twitching against his Conduit's cracked screen. "It—he—wasn't like the others. The Hollowed, I mean. He was… calm. Calculating." His voice dropped to a whisper. "And he knew the abomination. Called it 'her.' Like they were—"
"Family," Lucent finished, the word bitter on his tongue.
Rena's expression didn't change, but the rhythmic tapping of her fingers against the examination tray betrayed her unease. "You're saying a Hollowed—fully sentient, fully aware—just waltzed in, stopped your glyph mid-cast, and then cleansed the aether corruption out of you?"
"Not just any glyph," Lucent said, sitting up slowly despite the protest of his muscles. "A Rank 6."
For the first time since they'd known her, Rena looked genuinely unsettled. Her augmented eye flickered, recalibrating. "That's impossible."
"Tell that to Zero," Karen muttered, flexing the fingers of her injured arm. "That guy walked through a cryo-storm like it was a light drizzle. Then he and his 'friend' tore a hole in reality and left."
Silence settled over the clinic, thick and suffocating.
Outside, the Junkyard groaned its usual chorus of distant metal and half-heard whispers, but here, in this sterile little room, the world felt too small, too fragile.
Rena exhaled sharply through her nose and turned back to her cabinets, rummaging for something amidst the rows of unlabeled vials.
"You're all idiots," she said finally, her voice oddly subdued. "But you're alive. That's more than most get after tangling with whatever the hell that was."
She tossed Lucent a vial of murky liquid. "Drink. It'll dull the migraine. Won't fix stupid, though."
Lucent caught it without looking, his mind still replaying the moment Zero's fingers had closed around his wrist—the way the corruption had slithered out of him, drawn like poison from a wound.
You of all people should know—we're all experiments here.
Kai's Conduit sparked weakly, drawing his attention.
The kid's face was pale, his eyes haunted. "He said Dr. Rhys wasn't there. That he'd… missed him."
"Which means Rhys is still out there," Karen said, her voice like gravel. "And whoever that lunatic is, that guy was being hunted by them."
Lucent uncorked the vial and downed its contents in one swallow.
The taste was like battery acid and spoiled fruit, but the relief was almost immediate—the pounding in his skull dulling to a manageable throb.
"You're up next," As Rena pointed at Karen. "Come here."
Lucent remove himself at the examination table and went outside. His steps were lighter than before.
The sterile tang of antiseptic clung to the air as Karen hoisted herself onto the examination table, the stump of her left arm exposed under the clinic's unforgiving lights.
The flesh was still raw at the edges, the wound hastily cauterized in the chaos of the lab's collapse.
Rena didn't waste time with sympathy. She prodded the scar tissue with cold, mechanical precision. "Necrosis is minimal. No infection. You got lucky."
Karen's jaw tightened. "Lucky would've been still having the arm."
"Lucky would've been not sticking your augmented hand in a meat grinder to begin with," Rena shot back. She pulled up a holographic catalog of prosthetics—standard issue Myriad models, black-market augments, and a few custom pieces that looked like they'd been pried off dead men. "Pick your poison. Basic grip? Pressure-sensitive? Or—"
"Rotor-saw." Karen didn't hesitate.
Rena's fingers paused mid-scroll. "You got deep-pocket friends I don't know about? That would cost you."
Karen's good hand tapped a rhythm against her thigh—three quick, two slow. A soldier's habit. "Put it on my tab."
A snort from the corner. Lucent leaned against the wall, arms crossed, his migraine etched into the lines of his face. "Tab's gonna be longer than your lifespan."
Karen ignored him. Her eyes stayed locked on Rena. "You got one or not?"
Silence stretched.
Then, with a sigh, Rena swiped the catalog away. "I'll see what I can scavenge." She turned to her terminal, typing one-handed. "Speaking of scavenging—you said that you went to the labs three—no it would be fourth day now, so where is your leader?"
Karen's expression didn't change. "Nex is dead."
No elaboration. No flicker of guilt or satisfaction. Just a fact, delivered like a weather report.
Rena's augmented eye whirred, zooming in on Karen's face. "That so?"
"Lab collapse." Karen's thumb kept tapping. Three quick, two slow. "Structural failure."
A lie.
Kai knew it.
Rena knew it.
But the clinic's walls had ears, and some truths were heavier than others.
Rena let it drop.
She reached for a syringe of synth-flesh stimulants instead, prepping the injection with practiced ease. "Hold still. This'll sting."
Karen didn't flinch when the needle went in.
"I'll get you a temporary augmented arm." Rena went further inside the clinic.
The silence was an awkward thing to both Kai and Karen who are still staying at the room.
"Do you need to lie about Nex?" Kai asking mainly to satisfy his curiosity. "Or whatever you told us before was a lie too?"
The silence after Kai's question was thick enough to choke on.
Karen didn't look at him—her gaze stayed fixed on the clinic's far wall, where rust streaked the metal like old blood.
"I told you," she said, voice flat. "Nex died killing himself and Gristle by detonating his Conduit." A muscle in her jaw twitched. "Just so I could run away."
Kai had seen enough corporate lies to recognize when someone wasn't telling the whole truth—but the raw edge in Karen's tone stopped him from pushing further.
The door to the room suddenly opened, Lucent let out a slow breath through his nose. "Sounds like him."
Karen's head snapped toward him. "You knew him?"
"Not really." Lucent's thumb traced the old burn scars on his forearm—the kind you got from glyphs pushed past their limits. "But I only know one thing keeping him going was spite."
Karen's laugh was a sharp, brittle thing. "Yeah. Well. He got what he wanted."
The way she said it—like the words were glass shards in her throat—made Kai's curiosity itch.
But before he could speak, Rena returned, cradling a bulky prosthetic arm in her mechanical hands.
The augment was a far cry from the sleek rotor-saw Karen wanted—just a basic Myriad-issue model, its polymer plating scuffed from years of use.
"Temporary," Rena said, tossing it onto the table with a clank. "Try not to break this one."
Karen reached for it, her fingers brushing the attachment port at the stump's end. "Wouldn't dream of it."
Rena snorted. "Bullshit." She grabbed a neural sync cable from the tray, plugging into the port at her lost arm. "This'll hurt."
Karen didn't flinch when the connection sparked to life. But Kai did.
The prosthetic's fingers twitched, then curled into a fist—slow, unsteady, like a newborn learning its own limbs. Karen flexed them, her breath coming faster as the synth-muscles calibrated to her nerve endings.
"Good enough," she muttered, though sweat beaded at her temples.
Rena watched her for a long moment, then turned back to her terminal. "Come back in a week. If you've got the credits by then, we'll talk rotor-saws."
Karen nodded, sliding off the table.
The prosthetic hung awkwardly at her side, its movements still jerky.
Kai opened his mouth—to ask about Nex again, about the labs, about why she'd lied to Rena—but Lucent caught his eye and shook his head once.
Let it go.
Rena wiped her hands on a grease-stained rag and jerked her chin toward the examination table. "Spire boy. You're last. Hop on."
Kai stiffened, his grip tightening around his salvaged Conduit. "I'm fine."
"Sure you are," Rena deadpanned. "That's why your hands haven't stopped shaking since you walked in."
Lucent didn't even look up from where he was cleaning his knife. "Just get it over with, kid. She's seen worse."
Kai's jaw clenched, but he obeyed, perching on the edge of the table like it might bite him.
Rena didn't bother with gentleness—she grabbed his wrist, turning his palm up to reveal the raw, blistered skin where his makeshift Conduit had backfired during their escape.
"Huh," she said, poking at the burns. "Thought you Spire types learned how to handle basic glyphwork in prep school."
Kai yanked his hand back. "It's a salvaged Conduit. The regulator's half-melted."
"And whose fault is that?" Rena reached for a jar of synth-flesh gel, scooping a glob onto her fingers.
The stuff smelled like chemical cherries and burnt plastic. "Hold still unless you want this sealing your fingers together."
Kai forced himself to stay put as she slathered the gel over his burns. It stung—a sharp, biting cold that made his teeth ache.
"So," Rena said, not looking up. "You three piss off anyone else besides Myriad, or is that it?"
Lucent snorted. Karen, testing the grip of her new prosthetic, said nothing.
Kai swallowed. "Why?"
Rena's eye focused on him. "Because Reclamation Units don't just patrol the Junkyard for fun." She jerked her chin toward the clinic's boarded-up window. "Something's got them riled. And if I had to guess?" She tapped his Conduit, making the cracked screen flicker. "It's whatever the hell you pulled from that lab."
Kai's pulse jumped. He opened his mouth—to lie, to deflect, something—but Lucent cut in first.
"We're not that stupid." He sheathed his knife with a sharp click. "Just a routine data heist gone wrong. Happens every Tuesday."
Rena stared at him. Then at Karen. Then back at Kai.
"Bullshit," she said simply.
No one argued.
The gel on Kai's hands hardened into a thin, flexible film, the blisters beneath already knitting back together. Rena tossed the empty jar into a bin with a clatter.
"Come back when you're ready to tell the truth," she said, wiping her hands clean. "Or don't. Either way, my door locks at midnight."
The dismissal was clear.
As they get out, Kai caught Lucent's arm. "She knows more than she's saying."
Lucent didn't stop walking. "Everyone does."
Behind them, the clinic's lights flickered off one by one, plunging the room into darkness.
***
The tunnels beneath Ghost City breathed.
Not the steady inhale-exhale of something alive, but the slow, wet rasp of a dying beast—dripping pipes like exposed veins, groaning metal like aching bones, the distant hum of faulty wiring a pulse fading under the weight of decay.
Zero moved through it all with the ease of a man walking through his own home, his boots leaving no prints in the thick layer of grime and old blood that coated the walkways.
Behind him, Mio—no longer just an abomination, not quite a person, something in between—flowed like ink in water, her form shifting between solid and liquid, between then and now.
The fluorescent lights flickered as she passed beneath them, their glow bending unnaturally around her edges, as if afraid to illuminate her fully.
The door at the end of the tunnel wasn't locked. It didn't need to be.
Beyond it stretched a cathedral of carnage.
The storage facility had been massive once, a relic from the city's early expansion, all steel beams and reinforced concrete.
Now, it was a tomb.
The air hung heavy with the stench of iron and voided bowels, the scent so thick it coated the tongue.
Bodies littered the floor like broken dolls—Hollowed, their emaciated forms curled in on themselves as if even in death they sought to hide from the light, and humans, their faces frozen in expressions of disbelief.
Security personnel still clutched their rifles, fingers stiff around triggers they'd never get to pull.
Scientists lay sprawled over overturned lab equipment, their white coats now crimson.
And in the center of it all, five figures sat around a circular table.
They knelt as one in front of Zero when he entered, their movements too synchronized to be natural.
"My lord."
The words echoed, overlapping, a chorus of voices that didn't quite match the mouths they came from.
Zero sighed, running a hand through his hair. "I told you to stop doing that."
He then scanned the room like looking for something "Where are the twins?"
The tallest of them—Levi—straightened first and just shrugged. "You do know those two loves their given freedom too much. So, they are most likely at the surface, creating problems."
"Of course they are." Zero just muttered.
Levi's face was almost normal, if you ignored the way his skin stretched just a little too tight over his cheekbones, the way his pupils dilated and contracted independently of the light.
His second mouth, hidden beneath the collar of his jacket, twitched in amusement.
"You're back early," Levi said.
"Because it was a waste of time," Zero replied, nudging a discarded syringe with the toe of his boot. "Rhys wasn't there. The whole thing was a trap."
The reaction was immediate.
Sister Amelia surged to her feet, her rotting vestments flaring as she slammed both palms against the metal table.
The impact sent surgical tools skittering, one scalpel embedding itself in the forearm of a corpse.
She didn't notice.
"Such blasphemy!" Her voice cracked with righteous fury, the exposed tendons in her neck straining.
The censer hanging from her belt swung violently, emitting puffs of acrid smoke that smelled like burning hair.
Across the table, Marrow didn't look up from his revolver.
His elongated fingers—each joint visible through translucent skin—spun the chamber with practiced ease.
The weapon clicked through empty slots in a rhythm that matched the dripping pipes overhead.
"That guy is really elusive," he murmured, his voice carrying the same detached amusement as someone commenting on the weather.
The cylinder stopped spinning.
A single aether-round glowed faintly in one chamber.
He left it there.
Idris said nothing.
The living shadow in the corner didn't even seem to breathe.
Only the occasional gleam of his carapace betrayed his presence—black chitin catching the light when he tilted his head, like oil swirling on water.
His stillness was more unnerving than Amelia's outburst.
Dyr's armor creaked as he shifted, the rusted plates groaning in protest.
The sound drew every eye in the room.
When he spoke, his voice emerged hollow and metallic from behind his visor.
"...I am only saying this once." A gauntleted hand rose to tap the welded seam where his breastplate met gorget.
Beneath, something wet and heavy shifted. "Maybe there's a traitor among us?"
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Even Marrow stopped fidgeting with his gun.
Zero smiled.
It wasn't a pleasant expression. "Now that," he said, stepping over a pool of congealing blood, "would be interesting." His fingers trailed along the table's edge, leaving smears of something darker than rust. "Wouldn't it?"
The question hung in the air like the scent of opened graves.
Mio then let out a sound—not a growl, not a scream, but something raw and guttural, the noise vibrating through the room like a struck chord.
The glass beakers on a nearby table shattered, their fragments skittering across the floor.
Levi didn't flinch. "But you still left a mess."
"We always do." Zero answered with a smug face.
Zero raised his hand toward the far wall, fingers splayed.
The air around them thickened, buzzing with unstable energy as his pupils dilated into black voids.
A glyph spun to life in his palm, its edges fraying like torn film.
The wall rippled.
For a moment, the concrete seemed to melt, replaced by a grainy, flickering projection—not holograms, not screens, but memory made manifest.
The footage was grainy, but the figure on it was unmistakable—Lucent, his glyphs flaring blue-white against the darkness of the lab.
"There was someone else, though," Zero mused. "A variable."
Levi followed his gaze. "Him?"
"Him."
"You want me to find him."
"Obviously."
Levi's primary mouth twisted into a scowl. "With what description? 'Guy who casts glyphs'? Half the city does that. Don't tell me you even forgot to ask his name?"
Zero's smile was slow, deliberate. "You're the one who keeps bragging about your infiltration skills. And wasn't it you who helped design GhostKey's security?"
Levi's second mouth hissed, a sound like steam escaping a valve. "Fine. But if he's already dead by the time I track him down, don't blame me."
"He won't be." Zero turned away, already losing interest. "People like him don't die easy."
Behind him, Mio crouched beside one of the dead scientists, her elongated fingers pressing into the man's chest as if searching for a heartbeat she knew wasn't there.
Her form shuddered, the edges blurring, and for a moment, she looked almost human again—just a girl, kneeling in the ruins of a life she couldn't remember.
Mio's fingers sank deeper into the dead scientist's chest, her nails elongating into blackened talons that pierced through fabric and flesh with equal ease.
The body convulsed—not alive, just reacting to the violation as her tendrils slithered through its veins, seeking, searching.
For a moment, her face flickered—features softening, eyes widening with something like recognition.
A memory, perhaps.
A ghost of the person she'd been before the labs, before the pain, before the hollowing.
Then it was gone.
The tendrils on her back lashed out, spearing through the other corpses strewn across the room.
Flesh dissolved on contact, liquefying into a thick, black slurry that her tendrils absorbed hungrily.
Bones cracked and collapsed like brittle kindling, sucked dry in seconds.
The floor, already slick with blood, grew darker as the bodies vanished into her.
Zero watched, arms crossed, his expression unreadable.
"Anything useful?" he asked.
Mio shuddered, her form rippling as the stolen biomass settled inside her.
Then, slowly, she shook her head.
No memories of Rhys.
No hidden labs.
No clues.
Just the taste of meat and the hollow ache of knowing none of it would ever fill the void where her humanity used to be.
Levi snorted from across the room, his second mouth licking its lips. "Waste of good meat."
Zero ignored him.
He stepped closer to Mio, tilting her chin up with one finger.
Her eyes—too many, too bright—met his, and for a heartbeat, they understood each other perfectly.
Hunger.
Fury.
Loss.
"Next time," he murmured, thumb brushing the place where her cheek might have been, if she still had such clear distinctions. "We'll find him next time."
Mio's answering smile was all teeth.
Somewhere above them, the city slept, unaware of the monsters festering in its guts.
But not for long.