Into the Veins
The passage Elara led them into was not a corridor; it was a wound in the refinery's steel skin. The entrance was a narrow gap behind a bank of humming coolant pipes, a space so tight they had to turn sideways to slip through. The air inside was instantly different—stale and metallic, but without the cloying, sweet smell of the nutrient vats. This was a place forgotten by the refinery's daily life.
But it was also immediately, viscerally wrong.
The smell hit them first—a sharp, chemical tang that made Anja's eyes water and her throat constrict. It was like breathing in rust and battery acid, a scent that her body immediately recognized as poison.
"The toxic fumes," Elara warned, her voice muffled by the cloth she'd already wrapped around her face. "Try not to breathe deeply. And move fast. The longer we're in here, the worse it gets."
The tunnel was a claustrophobic tube of rusted metal, barely wide enough for one person to crawl through comfortably. Their only light came from Jaya's low-powered hand lamp, its beam a weak, swimming circle that seemed to be swallowed by the oppressive darkness just a few feet ahead. The walls wept condensation—not clean water, but an oily, chemical-tainted moisture that left rainbow sheens where it pooled.
They moved in single file, Elara leading, then Anja, then Kenji, with Jaya bringing up the rear. The only sounds were the scrape of their clothes against metal, their labored breathing through makeshift face coverings, and the occasional drip of toxic condensation.
After perhaps fifty meters, the tunnel began to narrow further. What had been uncomfortably tight became genuinely claustrophobic. Anja had to remove her pack and push it ahead of her, army-crawling through a space barely wider than her shoulders.
The chemical smell was getting stronger, and she could feel it burning in her lungs with each breath. Her eyes streamed tears, and a dull headache was building behind her temples. How much exposure is too much? she wondered, but there was no way to know, no way to measure. They could only keep moving and hope they'd get through before the cumulative effects became dangerous.
Then, without warning, Elara stopped ahead of her.
"Problem," Elara's voice came back, tight with worry.
Anja squirmed forward until she could see past Elara's shoulder. Her heart sank.
The tunnel ahead had partially collapsed. A section of the ceiling had given way, buckling downward and creating a bottleneck barely a foot high. Beyond it, they could see the tunnel continued, but to get there, they would have to squeeze through a gap that looked impossibly small.
"Can we go around?" Anja asked, though she already knew the answer.
"There is no around," Elara replied. "This is the only duct that connects to the hydroponics level. We either go through, or we go back."
Going back meant hours lost, meant exposing themselves to the main corridors, meant almost certain discovery. But going forward...
"I'll try first," Elara said, already beginning to wriggle out of her jacket. "I'm smallest. If I can't make it, none of us can."
She stripped down to just her thin undershirt, removing anything that might snag or catch. Then, taking a deep breath—immediately coughing from the fumes—she began to push herself into the narrow gap.
It was agonizing to watch. Elara had to exhale completely, flattening her chest and stomach, and pull herself forward using only her fingertips on the rough metal. Her shoulders scraped against the buckled ceiling, and twice Anja heard the sickening sound of cloth tearing and Elara's hissed intake of breath as metal edges cut into her skin.
But inch by excruciating inch, she made progress. Finally, after what felt like an eternity but was probably less than two minutes, Elara pulled herself free on the far side, gasping and bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts.
"It's possible," she called back, her voice strained. "But barely. You'll need to strip down and exhale completely. Don't fight it—the more you struggle, the more you'll get stuck."
Anja went next, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat. She removed her jacket and pushed her pack through first, then began the squeeze.
The space was impossibly tight. The buckled metal ceiling pressed against her spine, and the floor pressed against her chest. She had to turn her head sideways, her cheek scraping against the rough metal, to fit at all. The chemical smell was overwhelming here, concentrated in this narrow space, and she felt her vision beginning to swim.
Don't panic. Don't panic. Just breathe—shallow breaths—and pull yourself forward.
Her father's voice, clear as day in her memory: "When you're stuck, little bird, the worst thing you can do is thrash. Be still. Assess. Find the angle that works."
She forced herself to stop, to think. Her shoulders were the widest point. If she could get her shoulders through, the rest would follow. She exhaled completely, feeling her chest compress, and pulled with her fingertips.
Something snagged—her shirt caught on a sharp edge. She felt it tear, felt the metal scrape across her ribs, but she kept pulling. The pain was distant, abstract, less important than the need to get through, to get air, to escape this metal coffin.
Then, suddenly, she was through. Elara's hands grabbed her arms and pulled her the last few inches, and Anja collapsed on the other side, gasping, her body shaking with the aftermath of adrenaline and oxygen deprivation.
"You're bleeding," Elara said, examining the long scratch across Anja's ribs. It wasn't deep, but it was ugly, oozing blood that mixed with the chemical condensation on her skin.
"I'm fine," Anja managed. "Just help the others through."
Kenji came next, his broader shoulders making the squeeze even more difficult. They heard him grunt with effort, heard his controlled breathing as he worked himself through the gap. When he emerged, his back was scraped raw, and his face was pale from the chemical exposure.
Jaya was last, and for a terrible moment, Anja thought the warrior wouldn't fit. Jaya's shoulders were even broader than Kenji's, built from years of weapons training and physical labor. She had to strip down to almost nothing, and even then, the gap seemed impossibly small.
"I'm stuck," Jaya's voice came through, tight with controlled panic—the first time Anja had ever heard fear in the warrior's voice.
"Don't move," Kenji called back. "Where are you caught?"
"Right shoulder. There's a bolt or something—it's caught on my shoulder blade."
Anja's mind raced. If Jaya was truly stuck, they couldn't pull her through by force—they'd tear her open on the sharp metal. But they couldn't leave her there either. The chemical exposure in that confined space would quickly become lethal.
"Jaya, can you back up at all?" Anja asked.
"Maybe an inch."
"Do it. Back up one inch, then rotate your right shoulder forward—toward your chest. The bolt is probably catching the back edge of your shoulder blade. If you can rotate it forward, you might clear it."
There was a long moment of silence, then the scrape of movement. Then a muffled curse, and suddenly Jaya was sliding forward, emerging on the far side with blood streaming from her shoulder but alive, free, moving.
"Everyone through?" she gasped, immediately slipping back into command mode despite her obvious pain and exhaustion.
"Everyone through," Kenji confirmed.
They took a moment to catch their breath, to wipe away the chemical condensation, to assess their wounds. They were all bleeding from multiple cuts and scrapes. They were all showing signs of chemical exposure—streaming eyes, painful breathing, pounding headaches. But they were through.
The Toxic Gauntlet
The tunnel continued for another hundred meters, and the farther they went, the worse the air became. The chemical smell was now so strong it had a taste—metallic and bitter, coating the back of the throat like oil.
Anja felt her vision beginning to tunnel, dark spots appearing at the edges. Beside her, Kenji was breathing in shallow, controlled gasps, his face gray. Even Jaya, the toughest of them, was moving more slowly, her usual fluid grace replaced by a mechanical, determined trudge.
"How much farther?" Anja managed to ask, her voice a hoarse whisper.
"Fifty meters," Elara replied. But her voice was weak, uncertain. She'd been in these ducts longer than any of them, had been breathing the poison while leading them through. "Maybe less. There's a... a junction up ahead. I think."
I think. The words sent a spike of fear through Anja's foggy mind. If Elara—their guide, the person who knew these passages—was becoming disoriented...
"Everyone, stop," Jaya commanded, her voice cutting through the haze. "Inventory. Now. Does anyone have clean water?"
Kenji fumbled with his pack, pulled out a small canteen. "Half full."
"Wet your face cloth. Cover your mouth and nose. It'll filter some of the fumes." Jaya was already doing it herself, and the others followed suit.
The damp cloth helped, but only marginally. The chemicals were in everything now—the air, the water, their clothes, their skin. They were marinating in poison.
"Move," Jaya ordered. "We don't stop again until we're out."
They crawled forward with renewed determination, each meter a victory over their own bodies' screaming demands to stop, to rest, to give up. Anja's world narrowed to the circle of light ahead, to the sound of her own ragged breathing, to the mantra repeating in her head: Forward. Just forward. One more meter. One more.
Then, finally—mercifully—the tunnel began to widen. The air, while still foul, became marginally less toxic. And ahead, Anja could see a faint change in the darkness—not light exactly, but a lessening of the absolute black.
"The junction," Elara breathed, and there was relief in her voice so profound it was almost a sob. "We're here."
They emerged into a small, circular chamber where three ducts met. The air here was still bad, but it was breathable in a way the tunnel hadn't been. They collapsed against the curved walls, gasping, their bodies shaking with exhaustion and the effects of chemical exposure.
"How long were we in there?" Kenji asked, his voice raw.
Anja checked her internal clock, the mental timer she'd been running. "Twenty-three minutes."
Twenty-three minutes that had felt like hours. Twenty-three minutes that had aged them all.
"The hydroponics bay access is through there," Elara said, pointing to the duct opposite their entry point. "That one's clean. Or at least, cleaner. It was part of the original ventilation system before they sealed it off. We'll come out in the planter storage area, beneath the main growing floor."
"Can you make it?" Jaya asked, studying Elara with a warrior's clinical assessment. The young woman looked terrible—pale, shaking, blood seeping from multiple cuts. But her eyes were still fierce, still determined.
"I can make it," Elara said firmly. "My sister is up there. My mother. People who've been waiting for someone to care enough to come for them. I can make it."
Jaya nodded, accepting the answer. "Then we rest here for two minutes. Get your breathing under control. Then we move."
They sat in silence, each wrestling with their own pain, their own doubts, their own fears. Anja's ribs burned where the metal had scraped them. Her lungs felt raw, damaged. Her head pounded with a toxic headache that she knew would last for days.
But they were through. They had crossed the toxic gauntlet and survived.
The question now was whether they had enough left to complete the mission.
A Glimpse Through the Grate
After another ten minutes of silent, tense progress, Elara stopped, holding up a hand. "Quiet now. We're directly above the Sector Gamma command hub."
She pointed downward. The floor here was a section of heavy metal grating. Peering through the gaps, Anja's breath caught in her throat. They were looking down into a brightly lit control room, a stark island of order in the surrounding decay. Below them, two technicians monitored a bank of screens, and a hulking, black-armored guard—Rhys—stood with his arms crossed, his presence a suffocating aura of menace.
A thin, sharp-featured man strode into the room, and the technicians immediately straightened. Anja recognized him from the scavenged data slate's logs. It was Voss.
"Report," Voss commanded, his voice as cold and precise as a scalpel.
"Hydroponics are stable, Leader," one of the technicians said. "But the blight is adapting. Our projections show a thirty percent crop failure within the next cycle, even with the new filters."
Voss's expression didn't change. "Unacceptable. Double the nutrient solution. Force the growth. I want the yields maintained, even if it burns the plants out in a month. By then, it won't matter."
He turned to Rhys. "The new asset. Has it been integrated?"
"The pulse rifle from the Cooperative's watchtower is being calibrated now, Leader," Rhys grunted. "Their own weapon will soon be guarding their future seed stock."
Voss gave a thin, cruel smile. "Excellent. Let them see their own strength turned against them. It's a more elegant form of breaking their spirit."
He swept out of the room, leaving a chilling silence in his wake. Anja pulled back from the grate, her blood running cold. They weren't just planning to starve the Cooperative; they were planning to replace them entirely. The seed bank wasn't a resource to be plundered; it was the foundation of their new world.
The Back Door
"He's a monster," Kenji whispered, his voice shaking with a mixture of fear and rage.
"He's a strategist," Jaya corrected, her own voice a low, dangerous whisper. "And he just confirmed our target."
Elara led them on, the mood now heavier, more urgent. The glimpse into the enemy's mind had stripped away any last vestiges of doubt. This was a mission of survival, not just for the Cooperative, but for the very idea of a future that wasn't ruled by men like Voss.
Finally, Elara stopped before a blank section of wall, indistinguishable from any other. She ran her hands over the surface, then pressed a specific spot. With a low groan of rusted metal, a small, almost invisible panel swung inward, revealing an opening barely large enough to crawl through.
"The hydroponics bay is on the other side of this maintenance duct," Elara breathed. "This service panel isn't on any of Voss's schematics. It's a ghost. The guards at the main door have no idea it exists."
She looked at them, her eyes dark and serious in the faint light. "This is as far as I can take you. The inside of that bay is a fortress. Once you're through, you're on your own."