The city had no heartbeat.

  Caldera Reach was a carcass of steel and bone without the footfalls of its citizens. Its once-proud towers slouched inward like rotting teeth inside a gaping skull. Wind blew slick through the ruins, laced with acidic spores and the wet stench of decomposition. A faint green haze clung to the low fractured ground and slithered between ruined walkways and shattered transport lines. Their boots thudded hollow against calcified pavement, devoured by the pulsing silence.

  John led in the front. He held his Scorcher low, but he was ready for anything. The other three fanned out behind him, visors aglow. Rhea’s breath was audible over comms, short and steady. Samantha kept glancing to the rooftops. Her hand hovered near her revolver’s grip. Esh-Kaet’s movements were surgical, fluid, his frame unnervingly calm despite the graveyard around them.

  Shattered bone ceilings above them casted fractured shadows through fungal overgrowths. Civilian transports sat abandoned, half consumed by biogrowth and black moss. They passed by a shopfront with broken glass whose signage blinked in useless loops: Smile! You’re in Caldera Reach! A body slumped against a fountain, its lower half rotting in a puddle of clotting gore. When John turned it over with the muzzle of his Scorcher, the face was gone, eaten away.

  “Nothing,” Rhea muttered. “All cold. All dead.”

  They kept walking.

  Further down the main corridor, a faint beep chirped in the distance.

  John raised a hand and they halted. The sound was distant, intermittent, like a signal lost in the fog. They tracked the sound past a fallen awning under a collapsed gantry dripping with spores. A pair of bodies lay curled together beside the base of a terminal. Parents, maybe. Their arms were still wrapped around something. John knelt beside them and brushed aside their cloth folds. Inside was a portable radio.

  It blinked dimly.

  “—Anyone…if anyone hears this—Caldera Reach med sector—We’re pinned down—Please, God—” The voice was replaced by a gunshot, a scream, and then silence.

  The radio repeated its loop.

  “Bait?” Samantha said, quietly.

  Something above them clicked. Then the silence returned.

  John turned and raised his Scorcher just as the blur of chitin and fungus dropped from a ledge. Black and fast, they hit the ground with a shriek. It was a Braccari warrior, lean and armored, with its blade-limbs gleaming wet and dripping red.

  John fired a tight burst into its chest. It flinched but didn’t fall—then surged forward with its claws raised. Esh-Kaet fired next. The blast cracked across its midsection, sending fungal tissue spraying. The creature pitched forward with a convulsive twitch and died in a heap.

  Everyone froze.

  Then, from beyond the buildings, a high keening screech tore through the air. It was loud and deep. It was a war cry.

  John’s blood iced.

  “They’ve marked us,” Esh-Kaet said. “They alerted the hive mind.”

  Rhea was already moving. “We need to find cover. Now.”

  The first drops of rain fell. They hissed where the drops collided with metal. Steam rose from their armor. John looked up. The sky had turned yellow-green, roiling with thick clouds that pulsed like an infection. Rainwater sizzled down the rigid plating of his gauntlets. His HUD blinked a warning: ACIDIC PRECIPITATION — LEVEL 2.5 TOXICITY.

  Spores exploded around them with each drop and released a sickly sweet scent like rotting citrus and charred meat.

  They sprinted down an alley choked with broken scaffolding, then up a half collapsed flight of stairs into a reinforced research wing. There was a sign etched into the bone wall of the facility which read GEN-LAB SECTOR 4, barely legible beneath the grime.

  John punched the panel beside the door. “Override! Arbiter John Drayton.”

  “That’s not going to work,” Sasha said through comms.

  John barked. “Sasha. Can you open this?”

  “Bypassing,” she replied. “Five seconds.”

  The door groaned open just enough. They pushed through then slammed it behind them as the shrieking Braccari and their scraping claws skittered somewhere above, outside the facility.

  Inside, the lab was a darkened vault of ruined technology. Broken cryo-pods lined the walls, each cracked and empty. Hollow medical gurneys lay overturned. Shattered glassware lay scattered across the floor like jagged teeth. The faint buzzing of backup power resonated through the walls. The lights inside flickered.

  Something moved in the dark.

  John raised his weapon. His breath caught halfway up his throat.

  From the shadows, a tall figure stepped into view. The figure had pale skin, an elongated cranium, and his veins glowed softly blue beneath translucent flesh. He was hunched slightly, arms thin, but his eyes were sharp.

  He was a Ytheron.

  “Don’t shoot,” the Ytheron rasped. His voice was soft, bruised by the horrors of his experience. “I—I’m not one of them.”

  “Stay exactly where you are,” John snapped. “Hands up.”

  The Ytheron complied. He lifted his long fingers streaked with dried blood. “My name is Dr. Ishkavel Sa. I am…was…a research liaison. I was left behind.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Rhea stepped forward, she trained her Hurricane on the Ytheron’s chest. “Left behind by who?”

  Dr. Sa’s eyes flickered. “Thariel.”

  A silence fell so absolute it rang in John’s ears.

  “You expect us to believe that?” Samantha said, stepping beside John.

  “I don’t expect anything,” Ishkavel said. “But it’s the truth. He brought me here as a slave. He promised to give me purpose. He promised me protection. Then he abandoned me.”

  “What would Thariel want with a Ytheron?” John asked, his voice flat.

  “To study the Braccari. Their feeding. Their neural shifts. Thariel believed there was something in their biology he could manipulate and use. He wouldn’t say what. He wanted me to run tests as they fed on the colonists.”

  Samantha’s expression curled. “You were experimenting on the people here?”

  “They were dying already,” Ishkavel said, his voice tightened. “The entire colony was exposed to spore blight the day they landed here. The fungal tissue overrides their minds. Thariel said they were lost. They would have died in weeks, regardless. There is no known cure for the blight. I was just trying to extract data and find a way to save others.”

  “The others?” Esh-Kaet said. “You mean…Hyperions?”

  Dr. Sa remained silent.

  “Why was any of this necessary?” John asked.

  “Thariel changed,” Dr. Sa said. “Ever since he declared war on the Dependency. He said we were done being covert. He said this world was now a crucible of destruction. He sealed off the lower catacombs of Eurynome and vanished into the underlayers.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Yes. I don’t know where, exactly. There’s a pulse—an energy signature—beneath the crust. He built a chamber. It’s hidden, shielded from my sensors. But he is down there. And he’s with them.”

  A Braccari skittered past the facility, on the other side of the wall, which caught everyone’s attention for a moment.

  John stepped forward. His visor reflected the faint flicker of biolights. “He didn’t just come here for Laureline, did he? He’s doing something else.”

  “No,” Dr. Sa said. “That was the story he told me, too. But it wasn’t the full truth. He’s researching other things.”

  John’s jaw clenched as the pieces shifted inside his mind.

  Thariel didn’t come to save Laureline; at least, that wasn’t his priority. He came to build something, to test something. And he isn’t stopping now. Whatever he began, the effects of his research could ripple outward across more colonies, across all systems in the Dependency. The next Caldera Reach wouldn’t be limited to a single settlement.”

  Outside, something slammed against the door. There was a hiss of claws. The Braccari were no longer still.

  “They found us,” Sasha said. “Time is up.”

  John turned to the others. His voice was quiet and steel-wrapped. “We have to find Thariel.”

  No one argued.

  The pounding on the reinforced door grew louder. A Braccari claw screeched against the outer hull with a sound like shattered glass dragging across bone.

  John turned to Dr. Sa, eyes narrowed. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  The Ytheron’s brow creased. His lips parted in disbelief. “You can’t be serious. I recognize you. You’re an Arbiter, the one from Earth. You’re supposed to protect people, aren’t you? Get me out of here!”

  “I don’t trust you,” John replied. “You collaborated with a known war criminal. You experimented on civilians. You’re staying right where I can see you.”

  Dr. Sa hissed. “I helped you. His smooth composure cracked. “I gave you Thariel’s location! I told you his plan! You have to let me go. He’s going to kill me.”

  “You gave us a theory,” Rhea muttered, raising her weapon. “You didn’t give us proof of much.”

  Dr. Sa straightened. “Then perhaps you need something more…tangible.”

  Esh-Kaet snapped. “I knew the rat was hiding something.”

  Dr. Sa turned without waiting for approval and pressed his long fingers against a false panel in the wall. With a low groan, the rear wall of the lab split open and retracted into itself. A hidden chamber unfurled beyond, dimly lit, breathing faintly with ambient heat. The scent hit them immediately—sterile chemicals laced with the sweetness of rot.

  “I didn’t want to show you this,” the Ytheron said. “But you are clearly too stubborn to understand the scale of what’s at stake.”

  “Move,” John ordered, gun leveled.

  They entered the chamber one by one.

  The air was humid and pulsing. Fungal lights lined the ceiling like sickly fireflies and casted mottled shadows along the organic walls. As they crossed the threshold, a faint whir clicked on above them. A camera rotated silently toward the group and locked into place. Its red lens glowed.

  “Surveillance just went live,” Samantha said. “Someone is watching us.”

  Rhea spun to face Dr. Sa, then stepped around, pulled his arms behind him, and locked a pair of magnetic cuffs around his wrists. “No more surprises.”

  “I’ve shown you the truth,” Dr. Sa said, bitterly. “That’s worth something.”

  “We’ll decide what it’s worth,” John said, pushing forward.

  The lab opened up into a gigantic research chamber. Half of the tech was Dependency while the other half was something much older and whirred with alien fiber. Test chambers lined the walls, each one sealed by a thin transparent membrane. Behind the membranes was something horrific.

  Creatures stood in various stages of mutation. Some were barely Braccari—long limbed and dripping with mucous. They bore scythe-like appendages where hands should have been. But others—others were much worse.

  Their bodies were somewhat humanoid. Their eyes were white. Their lips were twisted. Some had the shape of torsos, ribcages, and fingers. One specimen reached a hand toward the glass. Its face was a misshapen echo of a young boy stretched over a fungal jaw. It stared at them with recognition. Or maybe it was longing.

  “They’re merging them,” Samantha said. “Human DNA with Braccari.”

  Esh-Kaet lowered his weapon an inch. “Why?”

  Dr. Sa sighed. “I don’t know. I was never told the ultimate purpose. Everything we do is compartmentalized. Only Thariel can see every piece and make sense of the entire puzzle.”

  John turned slowly. “You’re still lying.”

  The Ytheron hesitated. Then he exhaled. “Fine. Yes. I lied.”

  He stepped back a half-pace. “Thariel believed these hybrids were the key to something greater. A new species. Obedient. Adaptable.”

  Samantha looked sick. “He was building a race of slave soldiers?”

  “No,” Dr. Sa said. “He was building a replacement for humans.”

  The lights dimmed.

  A faint whir sounded.

  John’s eyes flicked up.

  Something moved in the shadows near the chamber ceiling—just beyond the curve of the fungal arch. A silhouette stepped into view. He was tall and wore white armor, curved, elegant, and lined with blood-slicked grooves. He wore a narrow and regal helmet. He wielded a grenade in one hand and a pistol in the other. “Arbiter. You arrived sooner than expected.”

  “Thariel,” John muttered.

  “Dr. Sa,” Thariel said, voice calm. “You were never meant to survive.”

  Before anyone could react, Thariel snapped his pistol up and fired.

  The Ytheron’s head snapped back with a pop. Blood fanned across the walls. His body collapsed and twitched once before going still.

  John raised his Scorcher to fire at Thariel.

  But he was already moving.

  With a fluid grace, he hurled two small grandes into the chamber. They bounced twice, then ignited. The concussive force tore through the center of the lab and slammed Rhea against the far wall. Sam ducked behind a console as fire bloomed across the floor. Esh-Kaet shielded John. Their armor sparked as the shockwave tore past.

  When the smoke cleared, Thariel was gone.

  In his place was a gaping tunnel, torn through the wall of the chamber, its edges still hot with heat scars. Deep inside, faint Braccari screeches echoed. John caught one last glimpse of Thariel—he rode atop a Braccari which bound down the tunnel’s throat. Several more Braccari soldiers followed him.

  John’s legs wobbled as he rose to his feet, coughing, eyes wide.

  “He’s here,” John said, more to himself than the others. “He’s still here and we’re going after him.”

  The hunt was on.