Chapter 21
The landscape outside the transport doesn’t look real. Blue fungus, like living electricity, stretches across the cratered basin. The sky’s gone the color of surgical scrubs. The only thing that moves is the convoy itself, a mechanical animal crawling through a world that wants it dead.
It’s easy to pretend the APC is indestructible—until the world reminds you otherwise.
The first sign is the sound: a wet, concussive thud, like a full pig carcass hurled against a concrete wall.
The impact throws every soul in the transport half a meter into the air.
A heartbeat later, the vehicle pitches sideways, wheels on one side grinding through glassified mud as something pounds the exterior in a relentless, arrhythmic pattern.
Inside, chaos: two guards flung to the floor, rifles scraping against their own faces; the lieutenant’s tablet arcs through the air and cracks the ceiling; a civilian screams somewhere up the chain.
I lurch sideways and collide with Kang’s chest, the breath knocked out of me so hard it’s almost funny.
He doesn’t flinch. He clamps one hand around my arm, the other bracing against the wall as the APC rolls to a lurching stop. Outside, the thuds have resolved into a pattern—two fast, one slow, repeat. There’s a rhythm to it, an intention. They’re not just hitting the hull. They’re communicating.
I try to tell Kang, but he’s already barking orders to the guards.
“Defensive positions, now! Gunports up, suppressive fire on my mark!”
The veterans snap into place, but the rookies freeze, eyes wide as the doors.
Through the vision slit, I glimpse the enemy for the first time: skinless ghouls, their muscles striated and wet, crawling hand-over-hand across the APC’s shell.
Their faces are half-human, half-insect, with lidless eyes and mouths that gape open and shut in time with the pounding.
A second wave surges from the fungus field—larger, meaner. Six-limbed predators, built for climbing and killing, slam into the vehicle’s side and anchor themselves with claws that punch straight through steel. The hull groans, rivets popping one by one.
Then the real hell begins.
A breach at the rear. The door doesn’t so much give way as evaporate: a spray of twisted metal and hot blue light.
Three ghouls pour in at once, moving like one organism.
The first drops onto the rookie, teeth finding the soft spot at the nape of his neck; the second rolls over the lieutenant and tears at her wrist; the third goes straight for the cockpit, hands outstretched.
Kang moves faster than I can see. He kicks the first ghoul off the rookie’s back, fires a single shot into the brainstem, then pivots and drills the second in the face. Black fluid sprays everywhere, sticking to my boots, my hands, my mouth.
The cockpit is gone, just a spatter of teeth and blood on the instrument panel. The ghoul turns, confused, then charges for the next living thing—me.
I brace, but Kang is already there, slamming his body between us. The impact knocks both of us flat, but I end up beneath him, my cheek mashed against the rough edge of his vest.
I can smell him. Blood, metal, a trace of citrus from the emergency wipes he pretends not to use.
He looks down, green eyes wild. “Are you hit?”
I shake my head, and he’s already moving, already up, already killing.
The world inside the APC narrows to Kang, me, and the two surviving guards. The rest is parts and horror.
The pounding outside intensifies. Through the slit, I watch as the predators on the hull work in concert: one at the engine, one at each wheel, two at the front glass, all applying synchronized force. It’s a tactic, not a frenzy.
I grab Kang’s sleeve. “They’re patterning,” I shout over the noise. “Not random—they’re following a sequence. Fibonacci or prime, I can’t tell. Every breach comes three pulses after a cluster at the opposite side.”
He blinks at me, then at the walls. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
He keys the radio. “All units, perimeter attack is sequenced. Target breach points in three-count intervals. Watch for coordinated entries.”
The channel crackles with static, but the message sticks. All up the line, I hear plasma rifles shift to a new cadence, matching the enemy beat. The hull vibrates, but now there’s return fire—less panic, more math.
The APC rocks again, harder this time. I’m thrown into Kang, chest to chest. His hand finds my shoulder, holds me in place.
There’s a moment. It’s not even a second, but I feel every microsecond: the heat of his palm, the tension in his jaw, the way his pupils dilate at the nearness of blood and death and me.
He breaks the moment first. “Stay down,” he orders, but the softness ruins the command.
I nod, breath hitching.
A fresh wave of ghouls swarms the roof, tearing off the last vestige of external cameras. One of the guards shoves a plasma rifle into my hand.
“Shoot anything that isn’t us,” he says, and I almost laugh. But I grip the weapon, fingers remembering the feel.
The door on my left gives with a screech, and two predators drop in. I squeeze the trigger, blue-white fire lancing through the air. The first takes it in the chest and staggers, the second loses an arm but keeps coming, claws raking for my throat.
I jam the barrel into its mouth and fire again. Its head splits like a fruit, spray painting the interior. My hands are shaking, but not from fear.
Kang finishes off the first one, then pulls me up by the elbow. “You’re good,” he says, and there’s a trace of surprise in his voice.
I shrug. “Pattern recognition. It’s what I do.”
He grins, “Remind me never to underestimate you again.”
The next attack is worse, but the convoy adapts. The new firing pattern disrupts the breach, slows the advance. I can hear other APCs reporting similar tactics over the comm: “Fire in three, rotate, fire in three.” It’s working.
Until it doesn’t.
A shriek of metal from the lead vehicle, then a flash so bright it leaves an afterimage burned across my vision.
The Humvee at the front of the column detonates in a pillar of blue fire, scattering debris and bodies a hundred meters in every direction.
The shockwave flips the next two vehicles like toys, rupturing their hulls.
Through the shattered slit, I see the civilians in the third APC—still alive, hands covering their heads, the Mnemonic Suppressors on their temples blinking frantically.
They don’t move as the ghouls pour in. The soldiers in their vehicle are already dead or gone. The civilians just sit, blank-eyed, as the monsters tear them apart.
I scream, but it’s swallowed by the walls. No one hears it.
Except Kang.
He sees the carnage, jaw locking so hard the scar at his cheek pulls tight.
I grab his sleeve, voice breaking. “We can’t just leave them—”
His eyes snap to mine, flaring with something raw. “I’m protecting what’s mine—”
He hesitates—barely a breath—then stiffens, retreating behind protocol. “—I mean, securing the asset. Mission comes first.”
Mine.
The word detonates in my chest.
For a heartbeat I’m frozen, mind blank. Half of me melts at the sound of that claim—heat curling low and reckless—while the other half screams what the actual fuck, Diana? The whiplash is dizzying; I taste iron where I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek.
When the fog clears I’m furious.
I jerk my arm free, voice a rasped snarl. “I am no one’s possession—least of all yours, Captain. Not after the cuffs, the cages, the lies. You don’t get to claim me.”
He doesn’t flinch, but a muscle jumps in his jaw. “Focus. We move in thirty.”
“Then lead,” I spit, stepping past him, pulse a riot of anger and something far more dangerous.
Behind me, his breath hitches—just once—as if he feels the collision he’s set off but can’t afford to acknowledge it. The damage is already done. And I can’t tell if it’s outside…
or in me.
The last ghoul breaches our door, claws at my ankle. Kang grabs its head, wrenches it sideways, and snaps the neck. He stands over me, breathing hard.
Outside, the battle is winding down. The ghouls, sensing the pattern is lost, break off the attack and scatter into the fungus. The guards finish the wounded, then collapse against the wall, hollow-eyed.
Kang surveys the compartment, counts bodies, assesses the damage. His hands are slick with black blood, but his voice is steady. “Everyone who can move, out. Fall back to vehicle four.”
A guard—barely old enough to shave—looks at me, then at Kang. “Sir, what about the prisoner?”
Kang’s eyes go flat, Authority mask snapping back into place. “She rides with me.”
He pulls me upright, hands lingering on my forearms a moment longer than necessary. I feel it, the tremor, the calculation, the impossibility of what we just survived.
He leads me to the next vehicle, the two of us limping through the shattered convoy. In the distance, the blue fire from the Humvee still burns, a beacon for every predator in the valley.
I glance back, just once.
The civilians are gone, bodies shredded and scattered, Suppressors still blinking blue.
I look at Kang. He meets my gaze, but his face is closed.
I know what he’s thinking.
We made it out.
But at what cost?
No one talks during the last leg to the base.
The convoy limps along on half its wheels and half its hope, the battered survivors squeezed into the two remaining vehicles.
My seat is a thin plastic shelf at the back of the command APC, wedged between a medkit and a bucket of used plasma cartridges.
Every bump in the road reopens a wound somewhere on my body.
My wrists are unbound now—either they think I’m too useful to restrain, or too broken to bother.
Kang rides in the jump seat across from me, boots planted, eyes dead-ahead. There’s a line of black blood dried along his jaw. He hasn’t wiped it off, and neither have I. The world outside is a negative of itself, all blue and black and the color of regret.