Chapter 15: Way
The wet scraping from the stairwell was getting closer. Each drag was punctuated by a sticky, phlegmatic inhale.
“No,” Luna breathed, the word final. She shoved Kai back from the stairwell door and scanned the ceiling. Her eyes, reflecting the sickly emergency strips, caught on a grated ventilation cover near the junction of wall and ceiling. It was old, the screws clouded with decades of paint.
“Give me a boost. Now,” she said, already holstering her pistol and lacing her fingers together.
Ren didn’t think. He just moved, bracing against the wall and cupping his hands. Luna’s boot landed, feather-light and precise, and he heaved. She rose, gripped the grating, and with a vicious twist of her body, wrenched the entire frame loose. It came free with a shriek of protesting metal and a shower of rust-flakes. She tossed it down, where it clattered loudly on the tile. The dragging sound in the stairwell paused. Then it began again, faster.
Without a word, Luna pulled herself up and into the dark square of the duct. She disappeared.
“You’re kidding,” Kai whispered, his face a mask of pure dread.
A pale hand snaked back out of the vent, fingers beckoning.
Ren looked at Kai, at the stairwell door beginning to vibrate in its frame, and made a decision. “Go.”
Kai went. Ren boosted his friend, who scrambled awkwardly, his legs kicking until Luna hauled him inward. The stairwell door handle was turning, not with intelligence, but with a slow, insistent pressure. Something was leaned against it.
Ren jumped, caught the lip of the vent, his muscles burning. He kicked, found no purchase on the smooth wall. For a terrifying second, he dangled. Then two sets of hands grabbed his forearms—Kai’s strong, Luna’s wiry—and yanked him up into the tight, dark space just as the stairwell door below burst inward with a crash of splintering wood and bending metal.
Ren froze, prone in the duct. He couldn’t help it. He looked back down through the opening.
A shape filled the doorway. It was man-like, but its joints bent the wrong way, arms too long, fingers scraping the tile. Its skin was the color of a week-old bruise, shimmering with a slick, oily secretion. It had no face, just a smooth, concave depression where features should be, ringed with a frill of clicking, bone-like barbs. It moved into the corridor with that same wet, dragging gait. The sound came from a mass of fused, twitching limbs trailing behind it like a grotesque afterbirth, studded with broken segments of security armor and uniform cloth.
Ren’s breath turned to ice in his lungs.
The entity stopped below the vent. The frill of barbs around its featureless head flared, clicking softly. It tilted its head up.
It was listening. Smelling.
Ren felt Luna’s hand clamp over his mouth. Her own breathing had stopped. Next to her, Kai had squeezed his eyes shut, trembling.
For ten heartbeats, there was only the clicking and the wet, rhythmic drag of the creature’s breathing. Then, with a sound like tearing Velcro, it moved on, continuing its slow patrol down the hall, merging back into the shadows.
Luna’s hand lifted. She pointed forward into the absolute black of the duct. No one spoke. They crawled.
The metal was cold and ridged, biting into knees and palms. Their progress was a symphony of tiny scrapes and muffled breaths, impossibly loud in the confined space. The air was thick with the taste of ancient dust and something else, a coppery decay that seeped from the very walls. Ren’s mind replayed the faceless head tilting upward. It knew they were there. It just… chose not to follow. Why?
They crawled for an eternity, turning at junctions guided only by Luna’s sense of direction. Finally, a faint, grimy light filtered from another grate ahead. Luna slowed, then stopped, pressing her eye to the slats.
She went very still.
Ren, crowded behind Kai, watched her shoulders tense. He inched forward, found a narrow gap to peer through.
They were overlooking a vast, subterranean maintenance atrium. It was a cathedral to a different era—retro-futuristic machinery with rounded corners and polished brass fittings hulked beneath layers of grime. Conduit pipes big enough to walk through snaked along riveted iron walls. And in the center of the space, under the cold glow of fossilized argon tube-lights, stood two men in the distinctive charcoal-gray fatigues and armored vests of Cleaner Corps grunts.
They looked bored. One was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, the tip glowing in the half-light. The other was leaning on his pulse rifle, scrolling on a cracked datapad.
“…absolute garbage duty,” the smoker said, exhaling a plume. “Topside’s a butcher’s shop and we’re down here babysitting pipes.”
“Quit whining, Sato,” the other grunted, not looking up from his pad. “Better pipes than whatever that thing was that went through Beta squad. Heard the comms before they went dead. Sounded like… tearing.”
“Yeah, well. Not our problem. Our problem is this rust-bucket’s atmosphere levels. Another hour and we’re clear.”
They were just… talking. Standing there. Alive. Normal. A thread of raw, desperate relief shot through Ren. They were authority. They were order. They had guns. He opened his mouth, a cry for help forming on his lips.
Luna’s hand shot back, fingers digging into his thigh with bruising force. He glanced at her. She wasn’t looking at the guards. She was staring into the deep shadows at the far end of the atrium, near a massive, gear-toothed door sealed with a huge wheel lock. Her eyes were wide, her pupils dilated.
Ren followed her gaze.
At first, he saw nothing. Just darkness pooled between two great turbine housings. Then the darkness moved. It detached itself from the deeper shadow with a liquid, boneless grace.
It was different from the one in the hall. Smaller, more condensed. Its skin was a matte black, absorbing the light. It moved on four limbs, each ending in long, taloned fingers that clicked softly on the concrete. A long, segmented tail, tipped with a barbed stinger, swayed like a metronome behind it. It clung to the side of a pipe, watching the two men.
It was hunting.
The smoking grunt, Sato, dropped his cigarette and stamped it out. “Hell with this, I gotta take a leak. Cover me.”
He walked, unzipping his fly, toward the very shadows where the creature waited.
“Don’t go far, idiot,” the other called, finally looking up with mild annoyance.
Sato chuckled, stepping into the gloom between the turbines. “What’s it gonna do, bite m—”
The creature dropped.
It landed on him silently from above. There was no roar, no cry. Just the sharp, crisp snap of his spine. The creature’s front limbs, tipped with those savage talons, gripped the man’s head and shoulders. Its tail, in a blur, jabbed forward, the barb piercing clean through the back of Sato’s armored vest with a sickening punch. Sato jerked once, a marionette with its strings cut, and went limp.
It happened in less than two seconds.
The other guard stood frozen, his datapad clattering to the floor. “S-Sato?”
The creature lowered Sato’s corpse to the ground without a sound. Then it turned its head. It had a face, of sorts—a cluster of deep, pit-like eyes that reflected no light, and a vertical slit of a mouth that peeled open to reveal needle teeth.
_Click. Click. Click._
Its talons tapped the concrete as it began to stalk forward, a low, vibronic hum starting to emanate from its chest.
The guard fumbled with his pulse rifle. He got it up, his hands shaking, and fired. A bolt of ionized energy sizzled through the air, scorching the wall behind where the creature had been. It wasn’t there anymore. It had bounded sideways with impossible speed, ricocheting off a pipe and landing in a crouch five feet to the left.
The guard fired again, wild. The creature closed the distance. A taloned limb flashed. The rifle, and the hand holding it, spun away in different directions. The guard stared at his spurting wrist, his scream a high, thin thing just beginning to form in his throat.
The creature’s tail whipped around. The barb plunged into his open mouth, silencing him forever. It retracted, slick and dark.
In the utter silence that followed, Ren could hear the slow drip… drip… drip of blood on concrete.
The creature stood over the two bodies, its head swiveling, those pit-eyes scanning the atrium. It sniffed the air. The vibronic hum deepened. Then, with terrifying, casual strength, it grabbed a leg of each corpse and dragged them back into the shadows from whence it came, disappearing into the darkness near the great sealed door.
The atrium was empty again. Just the humming lights, the archaic machinery, and the two dark, wet smears on the floor.
Beside Ren, Kai was crying silently, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his cheeks. His whole body shuddered with the effort of staying quiet.
Luna simply continued to stare at the spot where the creature had vanished. Her face was bone-white, her expression not of terror, but of a furious, calculating recognition. She knew this thing. Or things like it.
She turned back to them, her voice a ghost of sound in the duct. “We go the other way. Now. Don’t look back.”
She didn’t wait for agreement. She began crawling away from the grate, away from the abattoir below, deeper into the labyrinth. Ren, after a final, horrified glance at the empty atrium, followed. Kai, moving on pure instinct, came last.
They crawled for another few minutes before the duct opened into a slightly wider junction. Luna stopped, slumping against the metal wall, her breath coming out in a controlled shudder she finally allowed herself. Ren collapsed next to her, the images of the efficient, silent slaughter replaying behind his eyes. The Cleaners—the professionals, the ones his family revered—had been butchered like animals. What hope did three cadets have?
Kai hugged his knees to his chest, the pistol forgotten beside him. “They didn’t… they didn’t even have a chance,” he whimpered.
“They weren’t paying attention,” Luna said, her voice flat, empty. “Down here, you always pay attention.”
“You’ve seen those things before,” Ren stated. It wasn’t an accusation. Just a fact, clawing its way out of the numbness.
Luna looked at him. In the near-dark, her eyes were bottomless. “In New America, we have a name for that kind. We call them Stalkers. They’re smart. They like to wait.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “The one in the hall was different. A Drifter. Slower, dumber. But tougher. They’re… evolving. Adapting to our city.”
“Our city?” Kai laughed, a broken sound. “Luna, we’re in the Academy basement!”
Suddenly they notice a sound.
(author note: next scene should end on a cliffhanger. With ren, Luna, Kai deciding on the safer option or the leap of faith.