They went deeper.
The tunnels did not so much descend as fold inward, an architecture of absence that swallowed the sky until the world above felt like a memory one might pinch between thumb and forefinger and forget. Each step carried them farther from sun and sand; each breath tasted colder, sharper, as if the earth itself exhaled metals and old medicines. Sand sifted in thin curtains from keystones, finding purchase in the creases of their boots; it powdered their shoulders and left a thin, dry salt on the skin of their faces. The walls bore the marks of many hands—chisel scars, the shadows of scaffolding—but among those signs of labor were other marks as well: glyphs half-erased by time, the faint iron stains of chains, the dark halos where something heavy had once hung.
Soren moved first, always. He had the gait of a man who knew how to occupy narrow spaces without making himself conspicuous—compact, calibrated, every muscle reserved for economy. In his wake, Marcus followed. He was younger by the breadth of an unscarred neck and the slant of hope in his eyes, but his face already carried the practiced flatness of a man who had learned to measure shock. The pendant in Marcus's palm pressed warm and insistent into his skin, its interlocked horns biting the tender web between thumb and forefinger. It felt heavy not only for its metal but for its meaning.
They passed rooms that remembered better days—vaults with flaking frescoes, corridors where mosaic tile still hinted at beauty. The further they traveled, the more the architecture changed from the arc of men to the geometry of industry. Old columns gave way to arches rimed with pipework; natural caverns became reinforced galleries; the air took on the clinical tang of reagents, a metallic aftertaste that made Marcus's tongue blade-sharp with unease.
When the passage opened at last, it did so with a finality that felt like crossing into someone else's mind. The cavern that greeted them was a man-made interior; its scale denied natural origin. Lamps hung in industrial rows from ribbed ceilings and hummed with a jaundiced light that pooled on stainless surfaces. A low susurrus of machinery threaded the cavern—the slow breathing of centrifuges, the occasional sigh of a pressure valve—and the air itself carried the damp, antiseptic perfume of preserved flesh. Here the world had been rearranged into a laboratory.
Glass tanks loomed like sarcophagi. Each was a column of viscous liquid that trembled faintly with the pulse of mechanical pumps. Creatures lay within: scitterbugs, suspended in a state between slumber and restraint. Their shells gleamed wetly beneath the lamplight; in some, injuries had been sutured with precise, clinical loops, the shell's growth lines interrupted by man-made seams. Others were infants, curled like the last folds of a dream, their faces pinched and pale, mouths closed as if in mid-cry. Metal arms—articulated, precise—tested tissues through ports; syringes and probes slipped through gaskets with the quiet intimacy of prayer.
Marcus stopped as though struck. He had seen corpses before—enough to dull a man—but these were neither tidy nor blasphemous in the way battle left its mark. They were the results of an experimenter's hand: ordered, cruel in their precision. Instruments pressed into living flesh as though to learn how to coax the scitterbugs' regenerative mysteries into a tincture for human markets. The reflection of their two faces in the glass doubled them into supplicants before some obscene altar.
"You were right," Marcus said at length, voice small against the machinery's hymn. The words were accusation wrapped in a tired relief.
Soren's jaw tightened. He drew closer to one tank and let his fingers hover over the condensation as if the heat of his hand could tell him what the glass would not. "This isn't simply harvesting," he said. "They're trying to graft. To force their biology into ours. To make men who heal like scitterbugs. It's the audacity of hubris paired with the cruelty of commerce."
They moved through the lab with the slow, respectful caution of interlopers. Drawers stood open as if their contents had been set aside in haste—petri dishes with cloudy growths, vials labeled in a tidy, unfamiliar hand, diagrams of cellular structures annotated with shorthand for enzymes and catalysts, and, tucked amid them, crude sketches of the sigil Marcus now carried. A ledger lay near a bank of monitors, its pages soaked with ringed coffee stains and the occasional splatter of unfamiliar dark fluid. Marcus found himself reading, as much for the work of his mind as for the need to anchor his wandering guilt: test subject identifiers; dates picked with the relentless, clinical tone of someone annotating a harvest. A single entry made him go cold. It was a list of names—workers, scavengers, perhaps the unfortunate—two of them crossed in thick, impatient strokes. Beside the scrawled names: the emblem he had seen on the pendant.
At the far side of the chamber, behind a cluttered bench of tools and a bank of sealed cabinets, Marcus's fingers found a door. It was older than the polished tables around it, banded with iron, its lock throatless and stubborn. A brass plaque had been ripped away with crude force; the screw-holes left like eyes. He felt the grooves with old familiarity—the way a thief measures a vault with touch as well as sight. This door felt decisive: a concealment rather than a boundary, a skin hiding something previously known and now forbidden.
He bent. He set his full weight into the task, intending to wring what lay on the other side from the lock. He had not the time to appreciate how the routine of breaking a lock steadied the mind of a man at war with himself.
There was no prelude to the violence. The strike arrived as if gravity had chosen a new axis. A shadow moved through the air like spilled ink; a fist—small, precise, and concentrated—hammered into Marcus's stomach. The impact was a detonating core; the world cleaved. Pain made his breath stop; blackness tore at his sight. He felt the cold crown of the ceiling where his spine met stone; grit stung his mouth; for a suspended, suspended instant, he felt ejected from himself, a thing to be witnessed.
A desk lamp, jostled by the violence, came loose from its mount. It tipped slow as a falling judgment, its bulb shattering into a scattered rain of light and sparks before the arm of the lamp arced over and spilled a cone of illumination directly upon the figure who had struck him. Light is cruel in its specificity. It picked out the old man in detail that felt obscene for its intimacy.
He was older than the bones of any man Marcus had expected to find in such breeding grounds. His skin was a parchment of illnesses and weather, mapped with the topography of ruined mornings. White hair clung in thin wisps to a skull freckled with sun and soot. The veins at his temple spidered like ink, the skin pulled tight over knotted brows. His coat was layered in stains whose provenance Marcus did not want to imagine: oxidised red, brown, a dark, sickly tinge. His eyes, when the lamp revealed them, were gone not to clarity but to fever—a muddled brown that flashed with a particular kind of fanaticism. His hands were hands of work and fanaticism both: callused, nimble, fingers that had both sutured and struck.
Marcus, breath gulping back into him, tried to reason—because reasoning had saved him more times than any blade. "Stop," he managed; his voice scraped like sand. "We can talk. Why are you doing this?"
The old man gave no answer that could be counted as such. Instead, he smiled, and the smile looked less like joy than like the relish of hunger granted a license. He moved with the speed of a believer—direct, unstoppable, the faith of someone for whom a strategy had become a scripture. He struck again, and the lab became suddenly close and hot: bodies traded blows in a choreography of survival, metal rang against metal, and the scent of ionised air filled Marcus's nostrils.
Soren lunged from his stagger with a grace that belied his bulk. For a moment the two of them were a single, brittle unit—Marcus working close and precise, trading quick, surgical strikes; Soren a heavier hand, a breaker of lines. The old man did not fight as a soldier; he moved as a zealot. Each assault was less about the efficiency of harm and more about ritualized offering. He attacked with a purpose that made each hit feel like an absolution.
Soren's eyes darkened. For Marcus, the crimson in them had always been a thing to read—a temper sealed into flesh. Tonight it deepened from ember to furnace. There was a momentary hush, a condensation of the lab's breath around them, and Soren's fingers snapped with a force that seemed to unmake sound. The old man's left hand—prior instrument of benevolence or cruelty—came away in a mess of bone and tendon. He staggered backward, keening in a sound that had the cadence of both prayer and pain.
When the old man rose again, he did so with something like convulsion, eyes bright with a mad kind of logic. He spat into the puddled dark on the floor and spoke, words spilling out in a torrent of grief and scripture.
"My wife," he said, voice hoarse and high with despair. "She is gone. It is the prophet who said it could be mended. The book—" he spat the word as if it were both solace and poison, "—the book told me how. It showed me the pattern. It told me that if I gathered enough blood, if I joined bone to flesh to marrow, if I gave part for part, she would wake. I have stitched and stitched and found only the proof that it can be done. The prophet would not lie. The prophet would not—"
His speech folded into noise. Marcus's chest compressed at the sound. The man's fervor had the shape of a wound from which infection layered itself until all anatomy of thought had been replaced by one echoed truth. In the old man's mind, the book was not a text; it was a telescope through which he had seen a future returned. Whatever the book provided—ritual frames, measurements, promises—had been a map that led him to this lab and to the tanks of scitterbugs.
Marcus felt the taste of bile. He thought of the girl's whisper in the dim corridor: the same words repeated like a prayer or an incantation. The sigil on the pendant flashed in his memory, its horns like accusing fingers.
"That book is lies," Marcus said, words measured though his insides shook. "It turns grief into a machine. It teaches men to become pluckers of the living and gives them a prophet to justify it. Your wife is dead; you cannot make her a ledger entry and stitch her back as if mending a coat."
The old man laughed then, a tearing sound that made the glass tremble. He struck Marcus across the cheek with the fury of someone who believed he had been robbed of the very breath of the world. Marcus hit the bench and tasted metal, the world ringing. "It is truth," the old man snarled. Blood and zeal mingled at the edge of his mouth. "I have seen it. The prophet's hand pointed the way. The book showed me how to weave life from blood. You cannot stop what is written."
Soren watched with a stillness that conveyed deliberation. He moved not as an executioner but as a judge offering final clemency that had been refused. He set his hand—large and sure—before the old man's face with a sound like a closed ledger.
"You have two choices," Soren said, and his voice did not rise so much as settle like cold iron. "Stop this. Close your hands on what remains of your life and walk away. Or refuse, and die here, swiftly. Perhaps then you will find what you seek where living men cannot go."
For a moment the old man protested, the words wet and breathless and pious. He clutched at the edge of reason like a drowning man. But conviction had eaten through him; argument could not find purchase. Soren's nod was small, almost regretful. Then the finger-snapping that had already undone a hand moved again—this time as final as a judge's hammer. The old man's head fell forward with a dull, awful softness. There was no goreful spectacle—only the removal of the fever from the room, the silence that follows an execution of mercy or necessity.
Marcus looked down at the body and felt an uneasy tangle of relief and revulsion. The room's hum returned as though the lab had simply adjusted to the absence of one fraught heartbeat. Soren holstered his firearm with a deliberate slowness and brushed his hands on his coat as if he could wipe away more than blood.
"Why?" Marcus asked. He did not speak with accusation alone; the question was a plea for logic to match the violence laid before him.
The silence after the old man's death was oppressive — the kind of silence that clings to the skin and sinks beneath the ribs. The lab's lamps flickered weakly, the dim glow drawing tremulous shadows across the floor, the walls, the sprawled corpse. The air had grown stale, sour with iron and the faint sting of chemicals.
"Because…" Soren began, his voice low, the weight of his breath trembling faintly. "He had nothing else to live for."
He exhaled slowly, his eyes cold and unreadable. "Sometimes, death is a mercy."
He bent beside the old man's ruined form, inspecting the remains with a strange, detached care. The body was frail, twisted by both age and delusion — veins blackened by injections, skin thin as parchment stretched over a frame that had long since given up the idea of rest. The man's face, half-shattered by the blast, had lost its rage and returned to something closer to peace — the kind found in the absence of all else.
Soren was about to turn away when something caught his eye. A glint of dull metal shimmered beneath the corpse's ribs, half-buried in congealed blood. He leaned closer, brushing aside the old man's tattered coat, and there it was — a rusted key, small and unremarkable, yet placed with purpose, as if meant to be found only by those who survived this far.
Marcus, still catching his breath, noticed the gleam as well. His gaze darted to the locked metal door at the far end of the room. It stood in eerie stillness, untouched by dust or decay, as though time itself had refused to enter.
Soren lifted the key, turning it once in the dim light. "Do we open it?" Marcus asked, hesitant. "It was locked for a reason."
Soren's mouth curved into the faintest shadow of a grin. "And it has a key for a reason."
Marcus frowned. "Meaning?"
"Meaning," Soren replied as he slid the key into the lock, "it was meant to be opened."
The lock resisted at first — its tumblers corroded by age — then yielded with a brittle click. The heavy door creaked open on ancient hinges, the groan echoing down the corridors like the call of something waking from a long sleep.
What lay beyond was not the horror they had braced for, but something quieter — a small, dimly lit chamber, suffused with a pallid yellow glow from a single hanging lamp. Boxes and crates lined the walls, their labels faded, their lids warped with time. The air here was colder, somehow untouched by the heat and rot of the tunnels.
Yet something in the room felt wrong. The stillness was not lifeless, but waiting.
Marcus motioned for silence, raising a hand. His other pointed toward the center of the floor, where a large, irregular mound lay beneath a tattered sheet. The outline beneath it was strange — too uneven for a crate, too large for debris.
"What the hell is that?" Marcus whispered.
Soren didn't lower his voice. "Well, we won't find out by staring at it, will we?"
He strode forward, knelt, and pulled back the sheet with one firm motion. Dust exploded upward in a dense, choking cloud, swallowing the lamplight and turning the air into shifting fog. The two men coughed, eyes stinging, momentarily blinded.
Then — a sound.
A soft yawn.
It was so calm, so casual, that it did not belong in this grave of a room. When the dust thinned, Soren blinked against the haze — and froze.
Before him, sitting upon the cold stone floor amidst the discarded cloth, was a girl. A living girl.
She blinked once, then tilted her head curiously at him. Her face was near enough that the light seemed to cling to it, illuminating her features in impossible detail. Her hair — a deep, lustrous violet — cascaded over her shoulders in loose, silken waves, catching the lamp's faint glow and scattering it like shards of amethyst. Her eyes were the same rare color, glowing softly as if touched by moonlight; they shimmered with something between wonder and mirth, alive in a way that felt utterly alien in this place of death.
Her skin was pale but luminous, the faint dust motes of the air seeming to orbit her rather than cling. A faint trace of warmth touched her cheeks, giving her the softness of a dream remembered at dawn. Her lips curved slowly, first into a small, startled smile, then into a radiant one that transformed her entire face.
"So after all this time," she said brightly, her voice melodic and warm — a stark contrast to the cold stone and iron surrounding her — "someone finally found me?!"
Her enthusiasm struck Soren like a blow; it was the last thing he expected here, amid the ruins of cruelty. "Uh—yes," he stammered, caught off-guard by the sudden burst of life. "We… found you."
"Thank you so much!" she exclaimed, her joy unrestrained. Before either man could react, she threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around Soren in a fierce embrace that sent both of them tumbling to the ground.
Soren hit the floor with a grunt, his coat billowing around them. She knelt above him, hands pressed to his shoulders, her violet hair falling like a shimmering curtain that brushed against his chest. The faint scent of lavender — impossibly clean for this place — drifted through the air.
For a moment, neither spoke. Soren's crimson eyes met hers, and something unspoken passed between them — confusion, disbelief, maybe awe.
"W-who are you?" Soren managed, still half-breathless.
The girl tilted her head, her expression almost playfully confused. "You don't know me?" she asked, not in arrogance, but with genuine surprise, as though the very idea were absurd.
Soren blinked. "Should I?"
She smiled again, that same infectious, luminous smile that made the shadows retreat an inch further. "Well," she said cheerfully, "that's a first."
She rose lightly to her feet, brushing dust from her dress — a curious garment, half torn and yet elegant, made of thin, dark silk with faintly metallic stitching. Even frayed, it gave her an aura of regality, as though it had once belonged to someone of great importance. The lamplight caught the fabric and traced the subtle curve of her form in glimmers of soft violet and gray.
She turned toward them, one hand resting lightly at her waist, her other brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. "Oh well," she said at last, her tone bright and lilting, "I suppose I'll tell you anyway!"
Soren and Marcus exchanged wary glances, the silence between them taut.
The girl smiled wider, eyes gleaming like twin amethysts in the gloom. "My name…" she said, pausing for a moment as if savoring the words
"is Vivienne Blackwood."