Lilith woke to the steady rhythm of breathing that wasn't her own.

  Eve was asleep on her shoulder, head tilted at an angle that looked uncomfortable but didn't seem to bother her. Her short black hair was disheveled, and her face—so often blank and expressionless—looked almost peaceful in sleep.

  How long has it been?

  Lilith didn't know. Time had become meaningless somewhere between waking up in that glass tube and launching themselves into the void. Hours? Days? There was no way to tell in the unchanging darkness of the pod, no clock, no indication of how long they'd been drifting.

  Ever since I woke up in this body, time hasn't made sense. Just one moment bleeding into the next.

  Her thoughts drifted, inevitably, back to the Warp.

  She'd seen it. Felt it. Been inside it, in some incomprehensible way.

  But now, when she tried to remember exactly what it looked like, the details slipped away like water through her fingers. Colors that shouldn't exist. Shapes that hurt to perceive. The overwhelming sensation of being watched by things vast and terrible and hungry.

  The memory was fragmentary, incomplete, like trying to recall a dream after waking.

  But one thing remained crystal clear.

  The voices.

  She couldn't remember their words—if they'd even been words in any real sense—but she remembered their intent. The overwhelming desire, the possessive hunger, the sense that they'd seen her and marked her as theirs.

  Chaos gods.

  The thought made her stomach clench with cold dread.

  They saw me. They know I exist. And they wanted me.

  She'd read enough fragmentary lore, absorbed enough wiki articles and memes, to understand what that meant.

  The Chaos gods didn't forget. Didn't lose interest. If they'd noticed her, marked her, then she was on their radar forever.

  Great. Just great. As if this situation wasn't bad enough already.

  Her mind continued its relentless spiral.

  How long can we survive like this? We have no food. No water. We're just drifting aimlessly through space with no destination, no plan, nothing.

  What if we're trapped in here for weeks? Months?

  Eve's words echoed in her memory: "Sometimes... no food. Very hungry. So I... eat."

  The image flashed unbidden—Eve, alone and starving, calmly biting into her own finger, watching it regenerate, repeating the process.

  Would it come to that? Would I have to do that?

  Lilith's stomach turned violently.

  No. Don't think about it. Don't—

  The pod shook.

  It was subtle at first, barely noticeable. Just a faint vibration running through the metal walls.

  Then it intensified.

  Lilith's head snapped up, her right eye going wide. She looked toward the viewport—something she'd been avoiding, not wanting to stare into the endless void—and her breath caught.

  A planet.

  It filled the viewport, growing larger with each passing second. Not the beautiful blue-green marble of Earth from nature documentaries and NASA photos. This world was different—mottled browns and grays, streaked with dark clouds, the surface barely visible beneath layers of industrial haze.

  But it was a planet. Solid ground. Atmosphere. A chance.

  Oh my god. Oh my god, we're going to make it. We're actually going to—

  Hope surged in her chest, bright and desperate and almost painful.

  The shaking intensified.

  Lilith grabbed Eve instinctively, wrapping her arms around her twin and pulling her close. "Eve! Wake up! We're—"

  Eve's eyes snapped open, glowing red in the dim light. She didn't panic, didn't ask questions. She just immediately wrapped her own arms around Lilith, holding tight.

  The pod began to scream.

  Metal groaned under stress. Something in the walls began to shriek—atmospheric friction, Lilith realized distantly, the pod encountering the planet's upper atmosphere at speeds it absolutely was not designed to handle gracefully.

  They were going to crash.

  They were going to crash hard.

  The viewport blazed with orange-red light as the heat shield—if there even was one—struggled to cope with reentry. The entire pod vibrated so violently that Lilith's teeth rattled, her vision blurring.

  "Hold on!" she shouted over the noise, though she had no idea if Eve could even hear her.

  The ground rushed up to meet them.

  IMPACT.

  Pain.

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  That was the first thing Lilith became aware of. Pain radiating from her left shoulder, sharp and wrong and intense.

  The second thing was that they'd stopped moving.

  The pod had landed—crashed, really—and the screaming of tortured metal had given way to an eerie, ringing silence.

  Lilith gasped, trying to move, and immediately regretted it. Her shoulder sent a spike of agony through her entire left side, making her vision white out for a second.

  Dislocated. Shit. My shoulder's dislocated.

  Her body hurt everywhere—bruises, probably, from being thrown around despite the harness. Her right arm ached. Her ribs felt like they'd been kicked. Her head was pounding.

  Stupid. So stupid. Why didn't I think about safety? Why didn't I—

  "Lilith?"

  Eve's voice, close and worried.

  Lilith forced her right eye open and saw her twin leaning over her, red eyes bright with concern.

  "I'm—I'm okay," Lilith managed, though her voice came out as more of a wheeze. "Just—shoulder. It's—"

  Eve's gaze flicked to Lilith's left shoulder, assessing the injury with surprising clinical efficiency.

  Then she moved.

  Her small foot lashed out, kicking the pod's door with enough force that the entire hatch tore free of its hinges and went flying out into the gray haze beyond.

  Fresh air rushed in—

  And Lilith immediately started coughing.

  Wrong. The air is wrong.

  It wasn't fresh at all. It was thick, acrid, tasting of chemicals and ash and things she couldn't identify. Each breath burned her lungs, made her throat constrict.

  Eve helped her out of the harness and half-carried, half-dragged her out of the pod. The moment Lilith's feet touched solid ground, her legs nearly gave out, but Eve held her steady.

  "Shoulder," Eve said, her voice matter-of-fact. "Fix it."

  Before Lilith could respond, Eve grabbed her left arm.

  Pop.

  The joint slammed back into place with a wet clunk that made Lilith see stars. She screamed—or tried to, but it came out as more of a strangled gasp between coughing fits.

  But Eve was right. It felt better. Still painful, still tender, but functional.

  "Thank you," Lilith wheezed, tears streaming from her right eye—partly from pain, partly from whatever was in the air.

  Eve just nodded, her attention already shifting to their surroundings.

  Lilith forced herself to look up, to actually see where they'd landed.

  And her breath—what little she could get—caught in her throat.

  They were in some kind of industrial wasteland.

  Cracked ferrocrete stretched in all directions, broken and uneven, stained with decades—maybe centuries—of grime and chemical runoff. Twisted metal structures jutted up from the ground like the bones of some long-dead beast, rusted and corroded beyond recognition.

  And in the distance, rising up through the toxic haze like a monument to mankind's hubris...

  A hive city.

  Lilith had seen pictures in wiki articles, fan art, conceptual drawings. But nothing could have prepared her for the scale of it.

  Towers that stretched kilometers into the sky, so tall their peaks vanished into the smog-choked clouds. Each level stacked on the one below, layer upon layer of humanity crushed together in vertical sprawl. Smoke and steam vented from thousands of points, adding to the perpetual haze. Lights glimmered in the darkness—millions of them, billions maybe, each one representing lives lived in squalor and desperation.

  A hive city. I'm actually looking at a hive city.

  The realization was simultaneously awe-inspiring and horrifying.

  She coughed again, her lungs burning. The air here was toxic—not immediately lethal, maybe, but definitely not meant for extended breathing. No wonder everything looked so gray and dead.

  What planet is this? Where are we?

  A sound cut through her thoughts.

  Mechanical. Rumbling. Growing louder.

  An engine.

  Lilith's head snapped toward the source of the noise, her heart suddenly racing.

  Please be human. Please be human. Please don't be Orks or Chaos or—

  A vehicle emerged from the haze.

  It was massive.

  A tank—or something like a tank—built low and wide, with treads that looked like they could crush buildings. Armor plating covered every surface, riveted and reinforced, scarred with scratches and burn marks from what must have been decades of use. A turret sat atop the hull, the barrel of some enormous weapon pointed skyward.

  And painted on its side, barely visible beneath layers of grime: the Imperial Aquila.

  Human. Thank the Emperor—or, uh, thank... something.

  The vehicle ground to a halt about twenty meters away, engine idling with a deep, throaty rumble.

  Hatches opened.

  Soldiers poured out.

  They wore uniforms that looked like a cross between World War I trench coats and industrial hazmat gear. Long greatcoats in muted grays and browns. Heavy boots. Rebreather masks covering their faces, glowing lenses where their eyes should be. Each one carried a weapon—lasguns, Lilith thought, recognizing the distinctive angular design from lore she'd absorbed.

  They moved with military precision, spreading out in a defensive formation, weapons raised but not quite aimed.

  At her and Eve.

  Eve reacted instantly.

  She stepped in front of Lilith, small body tense, red eyes blazing as she stared down the armed soldiers.

  Protecting her.

  No, Eve, don't—

  Lilith tried to speak, tried to tell her twin to stand down, but another coughing fit seized her lungs. The toxic air was getting worse, or maybe she was just breathing harder, panicking—

  Her vision started to blur at the edges.

  Can't breathe. Can't—

  The soldiers were shouting something, but the words were muffled, distorted. Everything was getting fuzzy, distant.

  Lilith's legs gave out.

  She felt herself falling, felt Eve's arms catch her, pulling her close.

  The last thing she saw before darkness claimed her was Eve's face above her own, those glowing red eyes wide with something that might have been fear.

  Then nothing.

  Somewhere in the gray haze, voices shouted orders.

  "Medic! Get the medic, now!"

  "Two contacts—children, by the Throne—"

  "One's unconscious, the other's—Emperor's teeth, look at her eyes—"

  "Stand down! Don't shoot! They're just kids!"

  "Get them in the Chimera, move!"

  But Lilith heard none of it and Eve is panicking at the sight of Lilith fainted as she held her closely.

  This kind of toxicity in the air doesn’t really bother Eve, even though she can get use to it, she’ll survive because of her implants but Lilith is different.

  In that very moment, the realization dawns on Eve that Lilith easily breaks unlike her.

  Lilith. Fragile.

  One of the men approaches Eve as she becomes protective. Her mind is already filtering everything as if she can hear nothing and only Lilith matters until she hears a word that made her look.

  “Help? Lilith?”

  Eve doesn’t even realize that she’s crying and she doesn’t know what crying meant.

  She tightened her grip on Lilith with arms trembling.

  The soldiers kept their distance now. Weapons were lowered, but not slung. They watched her the way people watched an unexploded shell — wary, uncertain, afraid of what might happen if they moved too fast.

  Another voice cut through the haze, calmer, steadier.

  “Easy, little one. Easy. No one’s going to hurt her.”

  A figure stepped forward from the group, bulkier than the rest, markings on his armor denoting rank. He removed his rebreather mask, revealing a lined, tired human face. His eyes flicked once to Lilith’s pale skin, her lab-grown body struggling for breath, then back to Eve. This is the first time Eve have seen someone with that kind of face asides from Lilith.

  “She needs treatment,” he said, firmly. “Real air. Medicae. If you want her to live, you have to let us help.”

  Eve didn’t understand most of the words.

  But she understood tone.

  And she understood the way Lilith’s breathing sounded wrong. Shallow. Weak. Fading.

  Her hands clenched in Lilith’s clothing, fingers digging in hard enough to tear fabric.

  “…help,” Eve repeated, quieter this time.

  The officer nodded once.

  “Good. That’s good.”

  He gestured sharply. “Careful. Slow. No sudden moves.”

  Two medics approached, hands visible, movements deliberate. Eve tracked every step, every breath, every shift in posture — cataloging threats, calculating responses — but Lilith stirred weakly in her arms, and that mattered more than any of it.

  They lifted Lilith onto a stretcher.

  Eve did not let go.

  No one tried to make her.

  As the Chimera’s rear hatch closed and the engine roared back to life, the officer cast one last glance at the ruined pod half-buried in ferrocrete, then at the two strange children pulled from the wasteland.

  He felt a chill he couldn’t explain.

  “By the Throne…” he muttered. “What did we just find?”

  The vehicle rumbled forward, disappearing into the gray haze toward the looming hive as what awaits for the two of them remains unknown.