Chapter 14: It
The annex corridor was a throat of bruised shadows. Flickering emergency strips cast a sickly jaundice on peeling propaganda posters—Cleanliness is Godliness; A Clear Path for a Clean Future. The air grew thicker, smelling less of dust and more of copper and ozone. Ren’s knuckles were white around the durasteel leg.
Kai moved with a new, grateful efficiency, pointing to intersections, his voice a low murmur. “Left here. Then a stairwell down. The maint-access is—”
Luna stopped.
Not a hesitant pause, but a full, rooted halt. Her shoulders squared, her head tilted, listening to something beyond the hum. She was staring at a reinforced door, half-ajar, its poly-carbon surface spiderwebbed with impact cracks. A faded sign clung by one screw: CAMPUS SECURITY – MONITORING STATION.
“What?” Kai whispered, skidding to a stop. “We can’t go in there. That’s a choke point.”
Ren saw it too. The door wasn’t just cracked. It was dented inward, near the handle, as if something massive had tried to pull its way out. A dark, glossy smear trailed from the threshold into the hallway. His stomach turned. He knew that color.
Without a word, Luna pushed the door. It groaned on twisted hinges.
The room was a tomb of light and noise. Banks of dead monitor screens reflected the chaotic strobe of a single, dying console. The air reeked of spent cordite, voided bowels, and the sweet, metallic tang of fresh blood.
Three bodies. Or parts of them. Two security officers in shredded gray uniforms lay twisted near the entrance, their sidearms still holstered. A third was slumped over the central console, head resting on a keyboard as if asleep, except for the cavernous absence where his back should have been.
Kai made a wet, gagging sound and spun away, his hand clamping over his mouth. Ren forced his breath in and out through his nose, the detached part of his brain cataloging the scene. Defensive wounds on the first officer’s arms. The sidearms hadn’t been drawn. They’d been overwhelmed before they could react.
Luna moved past them, her boots careful on the sticky tile. She wasn’t looking at the dead. She was looking at the gun racks on the far wall, their locks sheared through by claw or tool. A few standard-issue pulse pistols remained. She went to the nearest body—the one by the console—and with a respectful, almost clinical gentleness, rolled him aside.
The man slid to the floor with a soft, heavy thud.
“Whoa, hey,” Kai managed, his face pale. “What are you—”
Luna ignored him. She pulled a heavy-duty mag-lock case from under the console. It was scuffed. She pressed her thumb against a biometric panel. It flashed red. With a frustrated sigh, she reversed the pistol in her hand and smashed the butt into the latch. Once, twice. On the third strike, it gave with a shriek of metal.
Inside, nestled in foam, were two weapons not meant for standard campus patrols. A long-barreled precision plasma rifle, disassembled. And a heavy revolver, its chrome finish gleaming dully under the strobe, chambered for solid slugs. Antiquated, brutal, immensely powerful.
She lifted the revolver, broke it open. Her fingers, slim and sure, plucked thick, brass-slug cartridges from the foam and slotted them home. The cylinder clicked back into place with a sound of finality. She tucked it into the waistband at the small of her back.
Next, she moved to the bodies by the door. With a deft tug, she pulled a spare magazine from the belt of the first officer. She checked it, shoved it into a pocket. From the second, she took a functioning flashlight.
Ren watched. The detached, analytic part of him was screaming. Fresh transfers didn’t know the locations of biometric caches. They didn’t handle heavy infantry revolvers with that kind of casual, familiar ease. They didn’t loot the dead while their bodies were still warm, their faces a canvas of frozen terror. Kai’s jaw was slack, his horror at the corpses momentarily eclipsed by confusion.
Luna stood, sensing their stares. She met Ren’s eyes first. Her expression was unreadable, a mask of polished porcelain in the strobing dark. She saw his understanding.
“They don’t need them,” she said, her voice low, devoid of apology. “We might.”
“You knew the code on that box was toast,” Ren said. It wasn’t a question.
“I know mag-lock placements. Standard New American design. Thumbprint fails, it’s usually the latch that gives, not the core. This one was cheap.”
“New American,” Kai echoed, blinking. “Right. You’re from there. But… you’re a cadet.”
Luna hefted the remaining pulse pistol, offering it to Kai. “In New America, cadets who live past sixteen learn to do this. Or they become stains on the wall.” Her gaze drifted to the shredded officer on the floor. “Like him.”
Kai took the pistol as if it were a live serpent. He fumbled, almost dropped it. “I… I’ve only done range sims.”
“Point the emitter end away from us,” Luna said, turning back to the broken gun rack. “The trigger is the curved part. Leave the safety on for now.”
Her tone wasn’t mocking. It was instructional. Utterly matter-of-fact. She took the last two pistols, checked their charge packs, and handed one to Ren. The weight of it was foreign, colder than the metal leg.
“You don’t have to like it,” she said, holding his gaze. The strobe light caught the gold in her dirty blonde hair, the sharp line of her cheekbone. “You just have to be better with it than whatever is out there is with its teeth.”
Ren’s fingers closed around the grip. The ghost of his mother’s smile, the one from the faded photo on his uncle mantel, flickered in his mind. He worn a uniform too. He carried a gun. He’d always thought of it as a tool of noble duty, of clean lines and honor. This was different. This was the gruesome arithmetic of survival, learned in harder schools than this ivy-choked academy.
He clicked the safety off. The hum of the weapon synced with the hum in the air.
Luna gave a single, sharp nod. Acknowledgment. Not approval. Just recognition of a choice made.
“The stairwell,” she said, looking at Kai. “Now. Before whatever did this comes back for seconds.”
Kai, still ashen, nodded vigorously. He led the way back into the hall, the pistol held stiffly in front of him. Ren followed, the new weight on his hip a nagging question.
He didn’t ask it. The questions—how she really knew, what she’d seen, what she’d done—were luxuries for a world that had dissolved around them. The only answer that mattered now was in the way she moved, a fluid certainty in the chaos. A promise, or a threat, he couldn’t tell.
Behind them, in the tomb of flickering light, the dead kept their silent watch. Ahead, the stairwell door beckoned, a dark maw leading down. As they approached it, a new sound filtered up from the depths—not a skitter, but a slow, wet, dragging scrape.
They all heard it. Luna’s hand went to the revolver at her back.
Kai swallowed audibly. “The Sub-terran access is at the bottom.”