Chapter 11:
The Harvest Zone
The rain came first. A slow, toxic drizzle that made the ruins sweat rust. It wasn't water anymore, not really. The fallout had changed it, turned it acidic and thick, leaving streaks of orange corrosion down the sides of buildings like tear tracks on a corpse. It pooled in the hollows of collapsed structures, turning the streets into a maze of black mirrors that reflected only fragments of the broken world above. Our boots made no sound as we moved through it, leaving no prints in the irradiated water. We were ghosts moving through a dead city, and for the first time, I wondered if we were already among the damned.
Sarin limped ahead of us, his breathing too controlled and too even. The shrapnel wound in his side had stopped bleeding hours ago, but the skin around it had taken on an unhealthy grayish hue that spread like spilled ink beneath his flesh. He hadn't complained. Not once. But I'd become fluent in the language of Sarin's pain. The way his jaw clenched when he had to pivot too quickly, the barely perceptible hitch in his step when he thought no one was looking, the way his fingers twitched toward the injury whenever we paused, as if checking to make sure it hadn't begun to fester.
Nia walked between us, silent as a shadow. Her hands—still streaked with that unnatural black fluid from whatever she'd done to that creature—were shoved deep into her pockets. She hadn't spoken more than three words strung together since the attack. Just single-word answers, tight nods, the occasional hum of acknowledgment. But sometimes, when she thought I wasn't paying attention, I caught her whispering to herself. Or maybe not to herself. The way her lips moved, the cadence of those unheard words—it sounded like a conversation.
The building emerged from the fog like a mirage, or maybe a nightmare given form. A squat, windowless structure of reinforced concrete, its walls scarred with bullet holes and the telltale scorch marks of plasma fire. The door hung crooked on its hinges, swaying slightly in the wind with a sound like a dying man's last, rattling breath. Above it, barely visible beneath layers of grime and time, someone had stenciled two words in peeling red paint:
HARVEST ZONE
Sarin stopped short, his shoulders tensing.
"Charming," he muttered, but the joke fell flat. There was no humor in his voice, only a wary exhaustion that mirrored the weight settling in my own bones.
The inside was worse.
The stench hit first, formaldehyde and something sweetly rotten, clinging to the back of my throat like a physical presence. It was the smell of old death, of things left to fester in the dark. The main chamber was a graveyard of medical equipment: overturned gurneys with straps still dangling like dead vines, shattered IV stands with their tubes coiled on the floor like snakes, surgical tools scattered across the tile like metallic bones. But it was the walls that made my stomach turn, that sent a cold sweat prickling down my spine.
They were lined with them.
Pods.
Glass cylinders, each large enough to hold a person, their interiors stained with dark residue that could have been rust or something far worse. Most were shattered, their jagged edges gleaming in the dim light, but a few remained intact, their surfaces fogged with age and something else. Something that left greasy, finger-shaped smears on the inside of the glass.
Nia stopped dead in the center of the room. Her head tilted back, her nostrils flaring as if she could smell something we couldn't.
"They screamed here," she said softly, and the way she said it, like she could still hear them, made the hair on my arms stand on end.
Sarin shot me a look, one eyebrow arched in silent question. I ignored him, drawn instead to a bank of overturned filing cabinets against the far wall. The drawers had been pried open, most of the contents looted or destroyed, but a single folder remained, its edges curled with moisture, its surface streaked with mildew.
The label made my blood freeze.
PROJECT ASTERION
Inside, the pages were waterlogged, the ink bleeding in places, but still legible.
Subject Designation: CAT-7
Genetic Compatibility: 98.7%
Procedure: Neural Rewiring via ZERA-β Strain
Objective: Stabilization of Host-Carrier Symbiosis
My hands shook. The face staring back at me from the attached photo was younger, paler, the eyes wider with a fear I didn't remember feeling, but undeniably mine. There were dates, too—injection schedules, observation logs, notes scrawled in a hurried hand.
Subject shows promising neural adaptation. Recommend progression to Phase II.
Adverse reaction to latest serum. Vitals unstable.
Termination ordered.
"Catara?" Sarin's voice was sharp, cutting through the static filling my head.
I couldn't answer. Because beneath my photo, stamped in red like a brand, was a single word.
TERMINATED
Nia made a sound. Half gasp, half static. When I turned, she was clutching her head, her eyes squeezed shut. Veins stood out in stark relief beneath her skin, pulsing black for one terrifying second before fading back to normal.
"They're singing," she hissed through clenched teeth. "Can't you hear it?"
And then the lights flickered on.
Not the overheads. The pods.
One by one, their interiors glowed to life, a sickly blue light illuminating the things suspended inside. Not bodies. Not anymore.
They were perfect.
Hairless. Sexless. Their skin translucent, their veins glowing faintly blue beneath the surface like circuitry. And where their faces should have been... smooth. Empty.
Save for a single, branching vein that pulsed in time with some unseen rhythm.
Just like the thing Nia had killed.
The nearest pod hissed, its seal breaking with a sound like a sigh.
Sarin's rifle was up in an instant, the barrel steady despite the pain I knew he was in.
"Move. Now."
But the door we'd come through was no longer there.
In its place stood a figure in a tattered lab coat, its too-long fingers curled around a syringe filled with something black and swirling. Its face was human or had been once, but the skin stretched too tight over the bones, the mouth too wide when it smiled.
"Subject CAT-7," it said, its voice a perfect mimicry of human speech, but with something buzzing beneath it, something mechanical and wrong. "You're late for your appointment."
And then the screaming started.
Not ours.
Theirs.
From inside the pods.
The sound was inhuman, a chorus of a hundred voices twisted into something that scraped against my eardrums like broken glass. The intact pods shuddered, their glass cracking as the things inside began to move, their smooth faces turning toward us in unison.
Nia grabbed my arm, her fingers burning hot.
"Run," she whispered, but there was nowhere to go.
The figure in the lab coat took a step forward, the syringe glinting in the eerie blue light.
"Don't worry," it crooned. "This will only hurt until it doesn't."
And then the first pod shattered.