Chapter Six: Below
We didn't make it five minutes.
One second, we were cutting through an alley toward the old rail yard. The next, the ground gave way beneath us.
No warning. No noise. Just the floor swallowing us whole.
I landed hard, my shoulder screaming, the boy's weight slamming into me. We tumbled in the dark until the slope leveled out into something solid. The air here was… wrong. Warm, damp, heavy with the same metallic-sweet scent I'd been running from.
The hum was deafening now.
Dim, pulsing light revealed the walls weren't stone. They were alive. Packed earth and resin, glistening as if breathing. Tiny workers scurried in the gaps, their black eyes unblinking as they brushed past my arms and legs.
The boy backed up until he hit the wall. "Where—"
"Shh." My voice was barely air. "They'll hear it."
"Hear what?"
"Your heartbeat."
We weren't alone.
Shapes moved in the glow — tall, too thin for human proportions, with armor that caught the light like wet obsidian. Soldier caste. They didn't walk so much as glide, every movement soundless.
One stopped in front of me, tilting its head as if scenting the air. The plates on my neck twitched. My mark burned hotter, and I felt my knees bend without meaning to — my body instinctively falling into the Hive's posture of submission.
I fought it.
The soldier's eyes locked on mine, and for a heartbeat, I thought it knew.
Knew I wasn't fully with them.
Knew I'd been resisting.
Then the hum shifted. The soldiers turned in unison and began moving deeper into the tunnel.
And we followed.
Not because we wanted to.
Because that's what the Hiveborn do when the Queen calls.
The tunnel widened until it became a cavern — and I saw her.
The Queen.
She was… enormous.
Her thorax anchored to the wall, her body glistening under a layer of translucent resin. Antennae as long as whips drifted lazily through the air, tasting us. Her face — if you could call it that — was almost human in shape, but stretched, wrong, the mouth too wide, the eyes too black.
Beside her throne of soil and bone stood a figure.
Human.
And even in the resin-lit haze, I recognized him.
The boy from my visions.
The boy I'd just dragged out of an alley.
Only now… he was smiling at her like he'd been here all along.