Walk.
Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk.
The word became a mantra, a prayer, the only thing keeping his legs moving when everything else had given up. One foot in front of the other. Over and over and over. The world around him had dissolved into a blur of grey and black—no sky, no ground, just endless nothing with the occasional shape of something he'd had to kill.
He didn't know how long he'd been walking. Days? Weeks? Time didn't exist where he'd been. The man with tubes in his skull had sent him to a universe where nothing lived—just ruins and shadows and things that moved when they shouldn't. Things he'd had to put down. Things that had left their black blood coating every inch of his skin, matting his hair, filling his lungs with the smell of death.
He couldn't keep walking.
His eyes closed finally.
---
Consciousness returned slowly, like rising through deep water.
Wolfen's eyes opened. He was lying on something soft—a bedroll, maybe, or piled fabric. Above him, the ceiling of a cave caught firelight in dancing shadows. He was covered in bandages—wrapped around his arms, his chest, his legs. Someone had cleaned him. His hair, which had grown past his shoulders in that nightmare place, was now short again, practical. The black blood was gone.
He turned his head.
A fire crackled nearby. Beside it, a figure sat cross-legged, watching him.
She was bald—almost completely—her hair cropped so short it was barely visible. Her face was older, harder, but the eyes...
"Hey," she said.
Wolfen stared at her. His voice, when it came, was a rasp—unused, raw, barely human.
"Who the hell are you?"
The woman's lips twitched. "It's me. Maya."
Wolfen kept staring. The name hung in the air, searching for purchase in his exhausted mind. Maya. Maya with the long hair. Maya with the Omega inside her. Maya who—
His eyes widened.
It was Maya. The face was the same, under the hardness. The eyes were the same, under the weight of years. But the hair—or lack of it—threw him completely.
He tried not to laugh. He really did.
The laugh escaped anyway—a wheezing, broken sound that turned into a cough.
Maya's expression shifted. "Dipshit."
From somewhere behind him, another voice spoke, warm with relief.
"Well, at least he's still the same."
Wolfen turned his head—slowly, painfully—and saw Derek leaning against the cave wall, a tired smile on his face. Beside him, Leo sat cleaning a weapon, his posture radiating the particular tension of someone who'd been waiting for bad news that finally hadn't come.
"So," Wolfen rasped, "what did I miss?"
Leo set down his weapon. "A lot." He studied Wolfen with something like awe. "How did you get back? Didn't that bald guy trap you or something?"
Wolfen was silent for a long moment, his golden eyes fixed on the fire. When he spoke, his voice was flat—the voice he used when he didn't want to remember.
"He sent me to a different universe. And it wasn't pretty."
Maya leaned forward. "What happened there?"
"Let's just say... for now... that I didn't see a single live person." He paused. "Didn't see a lot of things that weren't people, either. But they're not alive anymore."
The silence that followed was heavy, filled with questions no one knew how to ask.
Wolfen broke it first. "So what happened here? What did I miss with you guys?"
Leo and Derek exchanged a glance. Maya's jaw tightened.
"Lily," Leo said. "She's killed more than twelve thousand people. Architects, humans, hybrids—doesn't matter. If they worked for the Architects, she killed them."
Wolfen's eyebrows rose slightly.
"She has kaiju-scale monsters under her control now," Derek added quietly. "Creatures we've never seen before. Things that came out of the ocean like something from nightmares. She commands them like they're pets."
"And she has some kind of information network," Leo continued. "We don't know how it works or who's in it. But she knows things she shouldn't. Things we haven't told anyone."
Wolfen absorbed this, his expression unreadable. "So you guys had to go through a lot, huh?"
Maya met his eyes. "You have no idea."
"Tell me what Lily looks like now."
Maya's hand drifted unconsciously to her own face. "She has a scar. Across her cheek. From temple to jaw." She paused. "And her eyes... they're empty. Like nothing's left inside."
Wolfen nodded slowly. "It was Lily who got me back."
The cave went silent.
"What?" Derek leaned forward. "Lily? The Lily who's been killing thousands of people?"
"The same." Wolfen's voice was quiet. "I don't know why. I just know she's the one who told that bald bastard to bring me back. The man opened a portal, and I walked through. That's all I remember."
"Why would she do that?" Leo asked, genuine confusion in his voice. "You're like the most dangerous person to bring back. You could destroy her whole operation."
Wolfen's golden eyes flickered. "She's planning something. Something that needs all of us together."
He looked around the cave, at the faces of people he'd spent decades with—fighting, training, surviving.
"Where's Eva?"
Maya answered. "We're meeting up with her tomorrow. At our base. She's there with Zoey, Lena, and Jordan."
Wolfen nodded. "Good."
He lay back, his body finally surrendering to exhaustion. The fire crackled. The cave held its warmth. And outside, the night screamed in a way that was also completely silent—the sound of a world holding its breath, waiting for what came next.
Wolfen closed his eyes.
For the first time in what felt like forever, he slept without dreaming of blood.