A heavy, pulsing boom-boom-boom sounded below her. Not the sound of malfunction. Not coincidence. Purpose. "Wait, what's that?" someone muttered. One boom after another, louder each time. A red warning light spiraled into life over the back entrance. The security drones along the ceiling twitched, then sparked. One after another. Dropping like dying insects. "System error. Turret offline. Zone breach, Zone breach." A scream shattered the rising panic as the side blast doors, thick slabs of composite steel, were blown inward. Fire and debris exploded into the auction, slamming buyers, guards, and slaves alike into walls and railings.
Chaos. Pure, perfect chaos.
Mae didn't flinch this time. Her body curled instinctively, the shock collar buzzing uselessly as the system it connected to shorted out. A spray of concrete dust coated her skin. Blood, someone else's, splattered at her feet. Her wide, sharp eyes snapped upward. Back to that dark VIP balcony-they were looking right at her. The figures were moving now. One stepped out first, through shattered glass like it meant nothing. Long coat trailing behind him. Movements predatory, loose, and terrifying in their control. Ashar. There was no mistaking the wrongness of him. Half-alien, half-something worse. His hair whipped around his face, his sharp jaw set. His eyes, amber and cracked like molten glass, locked straight on her.
Not on the crowd. Not on the guards scrambling to pull weapons. Her. Three other shadows followed. Kaine, dropping heavy from the balcony with a grunt of metal against metal. His augmented limbs braced, absorbing the shock. His eyes scanned the chaos once, then snapped to her with a scowl that looked too much like desire masked as anger. Sethis, grinning like a devil, flipped over the railing, runes flickering across his synthetic skin. His hands twitched as data streams bled from his fingertips, hijacking the crumbling auction system. Riven, quieter, floated down in a glow of fractured wings, half plasma, half broken light. His gaze wasn't sharp, but heavy, weighed by something deeper. His core pulsed a single rhythm: hers.
And in the shadow that moved like smoke itself, Lucien. No fall, no descent. One blink, and he simply stepped from shadow to floor, his psychic chains sliding behind him like serpents made of light and thought. "Target located," Ashar growled. Not to anyone in particular. Not even to himself. Just a fact. Spoken like gravity or death.
"Mine." The guards panicked. Too slow. Too human. They stood no chance and neither did their weapons. Kaine ripped a turret from the ceiling and swung it like a club, smashing two armored buyers into pulp. Sethis hacked the slave collars with a flick of his wrist, half of them exploded, half shorted out. The buyers who had been ready to pay fortunes now clawed at malfunctioning implants as their own security turned against them.
Riven swept through a wall of incoming fire, plasma wings flaring. Bullets dissolved in light. He didn't even blink as he crushed a guard's skull in his bare hand. Lucien whispered and three mercenaries dropped, clutching their heads, bleeding from ears and eyes as nightmares fractured their minds into jelly. Mae staggered back. Her collar sparked, dead. Her cage door flickered. Glitched. Open. "Run," she whispered. But her legs did not move. Not because of fear. No, because of something worse. Something primal. Every gaze from the five was locked on her. Not the guards. Not the chaos. Her. The air tightened. A physical weight. A storm about to break, not just outside, but inside her skin. Her heart hitched. Her skin buzzed like static. Somewhere deep, beneath her bones, beneath her thoughts, the anomaly stirred.
No. Not yet. Not here. Stay hidden. Stay asleep. What ever you are. She thought to herself, hoping what landed her here, wouldn't show its ugly face. Mae's thinking was disrupted by the sounds of a comand, one she didn't want to hear. "Grab her," Ashar barked, half-command, half-snarl. His boots crushed through the corpse of a drone as he stalked toward her. "She's coming with us."
"What if she runs?" Sethis snapped back, grinning as he skidded past a collapsing support beam.
"She won't." Luciens's voice was rough, dark, certain. "Look at her. She knows she's already caught." Lucien's chains snaked toward her feet like living things and thats when she tried to step out, tried to run. "Don't fight it little fracture. You belong..." Riven said nothing. Just stepped in close enough that his glowing fingertips brushed the collar on her neck, still sparking weakly, before it fizzled completely into ruin. "Get away from me," Mae growled. Her fists clenched. Her voice cracked, not from fear. From rage. From fire. Her body trembled, her skin electric. The flickering parts of the broken systems around her sparked, reacting to something. Her. "You don't own me."
Silence.
For one heartbeat, one single breath, nothing moved. Then Ashar smiled. Slow. Dark. Dangerous. Mae held her breath. "Oh," he murmured, stepping closer until his towering frame swallowed her whole. His eyes burned. Almost as if they were saying "Little human, I do not think you understand." His clawed hand lifted, hovering near her jaw but not quite touching. Not yet. Not until she either flinched or fought. And she did neither, she froze. "We don't take what's ours." His voice dropped, a velvet threat at the end of a smile. "We claim it." What none of them knew, she was not one persons 'thing' to claim. She was much more that. In reality, they were hers to claim. Their existence was bound to the thing they wanted, the person in front of them.