Chapter 5
When the attack comes, it’s more efficient. That’s the first thing I notice—the noise isn’t wild, but orchestrated. It starts with a calculated volley, a thud against the reinforced outer hatch, followed by silence.
Jackson signals me to the fallback barricade. I slide behind a stack of riot shields, pistol ready, acid vials lined up along the top like sacrificial offerings. The air tastes of copper, and the sharp stink of burned insulation from the last breach still hangs in the vents.
I glance down the corridor. The bodies are gone—dragged away or trampled flat, it’s impossible to tell. The only evidence of the carnage is a dark, irregular streak across the floor and the haze that clings to the light fixtures. My hands tremble, but only when I look at them.
We wait. The quiet lasts long enough to turn anticipation into dread. Then, with no warning, the outer hatch buckles in on itself, blown open by an explosive charge. Shards of metal ping down the corridor, slicing a rain of sparks through the haze.
The first wave enters with precision: two at point, three behind, all armored in mismatched plates and duct-taped ceramic.
Their rifles sweep the corridor in a disciplined arc.
I fire—two shots, center mass—and one of them staggers, his chestplate cracking but not giving.
Jackson nails him in the neck with a controlled burst; blood geysers, and the body flops backwards.
The rest surge forward, firing in tight, overlapping bursts.
Bullets gouge the walls, the doorframes, the far edge of my barricade.
The noise is all-consuming, so loud it blots out even thought.
I duck, throw an acid vial, and it bursts on the boots of the lead raider.
The acid eats through the seam; he goes down screaming, voice high and girlish in his helmet.
A second wave follows—these are less disciplined, more desperate.
They run over the bodies of the first, firing wildly, some switching to sidearms when the rifles jam or overheat.
One gets close enough that I see his eyes—pale, wide, flecked with something white.
He fires point-blank, misses, then vaults the barricade.
My body reacts before I do. I catch his wrist, twist, force the gun up until it’s under his own chin, then pull the trigger. The recoil kicks the meat of his thumb clean off. He slumps, leaking from two holes. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my tongue.
“How did I—” I start, but there’s no time. Jackson shoves another clip into my hand. “Reload and cover!” he shouts, and I obey, even as my brain stutters, unable to process what just happened.
The pendant at my throat is a white-hot point of pain. I can smell my own skin burning where it touches me, but I can’t let go. The chain is fused to my sweat.
More raiders pile into the corridor, and I realize this is it—they’re not stopping, not until the magazine is empty or my skull is ventilated.
I reach for a new vial, but find the acid gone.
Instead, I grab a flask from the side pouch—something I’d cooked up the night before, half as an experiment, half as a joke.
Nitric, I think, mixed with a base and a stabilizer.
It was supposed to clean the pipes. I pop the cork, light the rag I find on the floor, and hurl it at the next cluster.
It shatters midair, igniting in a bloom of orange and green. The hallway fills with smoke so dense it blinds us both, but the screaming tells me I got at least two of them. Jackson is yelling now, voice ragged and close: “Fall back, last position!”
I stumble back, tripping over spent casings, ducking a burst of gunfire that sets my hair smoldering. My lungs are on fire. I taste blood and burnt plastic, the world reduced to flashes of blue-white and the hammering of the pendant against my breastbone.
At the next barricade, I turn and see one of the raiders has made it through the smoke.
He’s huge, face painted with something red and sticky, and he’s carrying a riot shield made from the lid of an industrial barrel.
He’s screaming at me—words, not rage, but I can’t understand them through the ringing in my ears.
He lunges, pins me to the wall, the weight of the shield crushing my arm.
I feel bone grinding, but it doesn’t break.
My left hand is pinned, but the right still holds the pistol.
I jam it up under his ribcage and fire, but the shot goes wild, ricochets off the shield.
The pain in my arm is blinding, but somehow I keep pulling the trigger, again and again, until the chamber clicks empty.
The raider drops, more from the loss of blood than my aim. I yank my arm free, fingers numb, and stare at the body on the floor. It twitches, then stills.
Jackson is beside me, bleeding from a cut over his eye but otherwise intact. He tosses me another mag, and I fumble to reload, hands shaky and slow.
“More coming,” he says, voice flat. “Maybe five, tops.”
I nod. “We’re almost out of acid.”
He grins, bloody and wild. “Then we make do.”
There’s a lull, a moment where the air grows thick and slow. My heart is racing, every inch of me slicked with sweat and other people’s blood. The pendant is pulsing, not blue, not purple, but a sickly red that seems to seep into the world around it.
Jackson slaps a patch over his eye, rips open a stim syringe, and plunges it into his thigh. “You got one more in you?” he asks, not really a question.
“Yeah,” I say, and it’s true.
We take positions, shoulder to shoulder.
The next wave is slower—maybe they’re afraid, or maybe they’re just calculating.
They launch smoke grenades, then follow in a tight line, shields up, weapons braced.
Jackson fires first, aims low, and the lead man stumbles.
I pick him off through the gap in his helmet, a lucky shot that takes out half his jaw. He drops, but the line holds.
They get closer. Too close. Jackson jams a pistol into the ribs of the next, fires until the gun is empty. I go for the knife, but my arm is too slow. The raider gets a hand on my shoulder, pulls me into the wall, and I feel my collarbone snap. There’s no pain at first, just a hot numbness.
I scream, but it comes out as a gurgle. The world narrows to the inside of my own skull. My vision tunnels; all I can see is the blurring red of the pendant and the glint of Jackson’s teeth as he roars, pushing me behind him and swinging a length of rebar like a baseball bat.
He buys us a few seconds, enough for me to scramble to my feet, clutching the arm that doesn’t work anymore. I look down and see bone, slick and pink. I force it back into the socket, scream again, but the pain brings everything into focus.
I stagger to the workbench at the end of the hall. There’s a single bottle left—a volatile, untested compound I’d mixed as a failsafe. Jackson is down now, kneeling but not moving, and the raiders are almost through.
I grab the bottle, light the rag, and look back one last time. Jackson is watching, eyes bright even with blood pouring down his face.
“Do it,” he mouths, and I do.
I throw the bottle, hard, into the mass of bodies at the corridor’s mouth.
It explodes with a sound like tearing metal, the fireball flattening everything in the first ten feet.
The heat hits me a second later, slamming me into the far wall.
My teeth rattle. My skin peels. I taste blood, and metal, and fire.
I’m on the floor, world spinning. The corridor is full of smoke and silence. I see shapes, but they’re not moving. I try to stand, but my legs won’t listen. My hands work, though, and I drag myself to Jackson’s side.
He’s alive, barely. His breath rattles, but he grins when he sees me. “Told you you’d make it,” he whispers, blood bubbling in his mouth.
I want to say something—anything—but the world tilts, and I fall into the dark.
The last thing I see is the pendant, red as a dying sun.
I come back to a world that’s half silence and half agony.
My right arm is useless, bent in a way that’s geometrically impossible unless something fundamental has given way.
My left eye is blind, or maybe just caked shut with blood.
Every breath tastes of hot metal and burnt protein.
I’m buried under debris—a collapsed slab of polycrete pinning me at the waist, a web of steel mesh pressing my cheek into the gritty floor.
The only thing that still works is my hearing.
First sound: the Geiger counter. Still alive, still ticking, a slow, steady beat that’s almost soothing.
Second sound: the pop and hiss of cooling metal, water from the busted pipes sizzling as it contacts still-hot wiring.
Third sound: the wet, ragged wheeze of Jackson’s breathing, not far from my left.
The rest is silence. No enemy fire. No shouts.
It takes minutes to free myself, working my left hand inch by inch beneath the mesh until I can lever the slab just high enough to slide my torso out. My legs scream, but they hold. I stagger upright, see the world through a slit of blood-caked lashes.
The corridor is unrecognizable—walls blackened, the barricades reduced to slag and splinters.
The air is so dense with particulate that every breath razors the inside of my throat.
Bodies are everywhere, most of them in pieces, most of them still smoking.
My own hands are flayed raw, the skin peeled away in some places, melted to the knuckles in others.
The RadShield pendant is fused to my sternum by a blistered crescent of flesh.
I limp to Jackson, who’s slumped against the far wall. He’s propped upright with both arms, but only one of them is his—he’s using a raider’s arm, snapped at the elbow, as a kind of brace. His eyes are open, but so clouded with blood it’s impossible to see where he’s looking.
“Diana,” he says, voice like torn fabric.
I kneel beside him. “You’re alive.”
He shakes his head, grins. “Not for long. You—” he coughs, spits a clot, “—you look like shit.”
“Thanks,” I say. The joke helps, a little.
He nods to the ruined barricade. “Clear the corridor. There’s always a third wave.”
I look at the Geiger counter. The tick is faster now, but nothing critical.
I peer through the haze, see two shapes moving at the far end—raiders, picking their way over the dead, cautious now, not wanting to die as pointlessly as the last ones.
My pistol is gone, so I grab the nearest weapon—a makeshift cleaver, serrated and caked with gore.
I move down the corridor, ignoring the screaming of my own muscles, and ambush the first of the pair.
The blade takes him through the neck, the spray hot and arterial.
The second hesitates, just for a second, but it’s enough.
I bash him with the flat of the cleaver, then finish the job with a shard of broken pipe.
I stand over the bodies, heaving for breath, blood running from my nose and ears.
I wait for more, but nothing comes. The Geiger slows.
The world, for the moment, is empty of threat.
I drag myself back to Jackson, fall to my knees, and tear open his jacket.
The wound is obvious—shrapnel through the gut, bleeding out with every heartbeat.
“Help me up,” he says. I do, though he weighs twice as much now that he’s limp. I brace him against the wall, then sit beside him, head on his shoulder. We don’t talk for a long time. When he speaks again, his voice is clearer. “There’s a tape, in the locker. Yours. Take it. Trust it.”
I nod. “I know. I remember.”
“Good.” He closes his eyes, teeth clenched against the pain. “You’ll need to run. They’ll send others. The Network—” He stops, gulps air. “The Sanctuary Network. Go east. Don’t stop until you see the river. Find them. Find him”
Him? Who the fuck is him? I want to ask more, but he’s fading. “What about you?”
He grins, lips red and slick. “I’ll cover your exit. Like old times.” He reaches for my hand, and for the first time, I let someone hold it.
His grip weakens. “Don’t look back,” he whispers. “They’ll only slow you down.” His head lolls, chin to chest. He breathes once, twice, then stops.
I sit there for a minute, eyes shut, letting the silence settle. When I’m done, I roll him to the side, arrange his arms so he looks like he’s just sleeping, not gutted. I strip the ammo from his belt, take the canteen, and grab the battered old pendant from his neck and pocket it.
I crawl to the locker, find the tape—a data drive, black as sin, marked with the initials I’d never bothered to decode before: DK. My own. I snap it into the pocket of my suit.
I bind my arm with a strip of torn shirt, pop a pair of stims from the medkit, and take one last look at the corridor. I seal the main hatch from the inside, lock it down with the override. No one’s getting in or out until the power fails. Jackson gets a proper tomb.
The ventilation shaft is barely wide enough to crawl, but I wedge myself in, using elbows and knees to propel forward.
The world outside the shaft is cold, then hot, then cold again.
Each length is a new microclimate—here, the stink of burned plastic; there, the hush of undisturbed air.
Somewhere in the middle, I pause to drink from the canteen, the water tasting like memory, clean and bitter.
I reach the end of the duct, pry open the cover with the tip of a scavenged blade, and drop into a maintenance corridor lit by the sick glow of emergency lamps.
The world outside is darker, but at least it’s not burning.
I limp down the hall, every step a catalog of injuries, the Geiger counter still at my hip, the tape drive digging into my thigh.
I don’t look back. I don’t need to.
At the far end of the corridor, a heavy door stands closed.
I press the access panel. The door slides open with a reluctant groan, revealing a tunnel that vanishes into black.
I touch the RadShield pendant, still fused to my chest, and walk into the dark.
This is what it means to survive: not to remember, but to continue.