The hallway was a tunnel of pulsating light and shrieking sound. Dan pushed Kiran ahead of him, his back to her, the stunner a cold, inadequate weight in his hand. His I.O. training mapped the facility automatically: fifty meters to the junction, left, then thirty to the service stairwell that led down to the sub-level panic rooms.
"Move, but don't run," he hissed. Running attracted attention, created panic. They were shadows in the strobe.
Kiran obeyed, her breathing a controlled rasp beside him. The link between them, that faint psychic thread, was taut with her fear, vibrating like a plucked string. He could feel the edges of it—a cold sweat on his own neck, a flutter in his own stomach that wasn't his.
The junction was clear. He glanced left, right. Nothing. Then he saw the first body.
It was Ravi, the vault guard, slumped against the wall opposite the service stairwell door. His neck was twisted at an impossible angle, but his face was serene, empty of pain or shock. His eyes were open, staring at nothing with a glassy, forgotten look. There was no blood. It was as if his essence had been simply… turned off.
"Don't look," Dan ordered, but it was too late. Kiran froze, a small whimper escaping her lips. The psychic thread jangled with a burst of her horror.
The door to the stairwell was slightly ajar. Wrong. It should have been sealed automatically on lockdown. Dan motioned for Kiran to get behind him. He nudged the door open with his foot.
The stairwell was a concrete throat descending into darkness. The emergency lights were out. Only the flashing red from the hallway above provided sick, intermittent glimpses. And in those glimpses, Dan saw them.
Two figures stood on the landing below. They wore the white kurta-pyjamas of the facility orderlies, but their postures were all wrong—loose, twitching, heads tilted as if listening to a distant song. Their skin had the same grey, waxy pallor as the Custodian's. Their eyes were pits of shadow.
Conscripts. Not agents. Husks.
The Custodian hadn't just sent mercenaries; it had hollowed out staff, wearing them like ill-fitting suits. Their movements were jerky, unnervingly fast. They began to climb, not with the purpose of attack, but with the inevitable, gathering momentum of a rockslide.
Dan fired the stunner. The twin electrodes hit the lead husk in the chest with a crackle of blue energy. It spasmed, staggered, then kept coming. The stunner was calibrated for fully alive, fully human nervous systems. These things were neither.
"Back!" Dan shoved Kiran towards the hallway.
The husks reached the top of the stairs. The lead one lunged, its hands grasping with unnatural strength. Dan dodged, driving a hard elbow into its temple. The impact felt like hitting cold clay. It barely flinched. The second one grabbed for Kiran. She screamed, and the sound was a lance of pure terror down the psychic link.
That terror did something.
The air around Kiran rippled. Not with the golden light of the Echo, but with a sharp, silver shockwave of raw panic. It was the hollow space inside her, resonating with her fear.
The husk grabbing her recoiled as if burned, a hiss escaping its lips. Its shadowy eyes flickered with something like confusion.
Her emptiness is a weapon, Dan realized. It reflects their own void.
He didn't have time to process it. He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, wrenching it from its bracket. As the first husk closed in again, he swung the heavy steel cylinder in a brutal arc. It connected with the thing's head with a wet, crushing sound. It went down, motionless.
The second husk, still disoriented by Kiran's psychic burst, turned towards Dan. He didn't hesitate. He brought the extinguisher down on its collarbone, feeling the bone snap. It collapsed.
Breathing hard, Dan dropped the extinguisher. The pull in his gut was a furious vortex now, screaming that the epicenter of the intrusion was below. The Custodian's consciousness was here, in the building, puppeting its hollowed army.
"The stairs are compromised," he said, his voice rough. "We go up. To the roof."
"The roof?" Kiran's voice was thin with shock.
"They came from below. Vyas will be fighting the breach at the source. Our only exit is up. Now."
They ran back the way they came, past Ravi's vacant body. The alarm seemed louder, more desperate. They reached a secondary stairwell at the end of the hall. This one was clear, lit by faint green emergency strips.
As they climbed, the psychic link suddenly flared with a new sensation—not Kiran's fear, but a sharp, specific knowing. An image flashed behind Dan's eyes, seen through Kiran's memory: the Custodian in the pumping station, its hand extended not towards the Echo, but towards a weeping pipe dripping rust-colored water. A memory of thirst.
Find the thirst to find the drinker.
The well of tears. The dry aquifer.
They burst onto the roof. The monsoon night air was a slap of wet wind and freedom. The helicopter pad was empty. The sky was a bruised purple, lit by the silent flash of distant heat lightning. Below, in the compound, they could see the chaos—small-arms fire, running figures, the orange bloom of a vehicle fire.
"Now what?" Kiran yelled over the wind and the sirens.
Dan's eyes scanned the roof. There had to be… there. A service ladder bolted to the side of the main ventilation unit, leading down the back of the building, away from the main fighting.
Before they could move, the roof access door they'd just come through blew off its hinges.
Standing in the doorway, framed by the stairwell light, was the thing that had been Commander Vyas.
Her uniform was torn. One side of her face was the stern, familiar features of his superior. The other side was slack, grey, melting like wax. Her left eye was her own, blazing with furious, trapped intelligence. Her right eye was a pool of living blackness.
"Dan… Singh…" The voice was a grotesque duet: Vyas's crisp command and the Custodian's stone-grind whisper, fighting for control of the same vocal cords. "The vessel… and the conduit. Perfect. You will… come…"
She—it—took a shuddering step forward. Vyas's good hand twitched towards her holstered sidearm, a heroic, failing effort of her will. The grey hand rose, fingers contorted into a claw.
The pull in Dan's gut became agony. He was the metal shaving, and the magnet was ten feet away. The architecture of his mind, so carefully built, felt the foundations groan.
Kiran stepped in front of him.
She faced the advancing horror, her hands at her sides. She didn't scream. She closed her eyes and did the only thing she could: she opened the hollow space.
She let the Custodian' own void, reflected through the twisted half of Vyas, look into the void it had left inside her.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic. The Vyas-thing screamed, a sound of two entities in torment. The black eye swirled chaotically. The grey flesh on its face writhed. It stumbled, clawing at its own head.
"The ladder! Go!" Kiran cried, her voice strained with the immense effort.
Dan didn't argue. He grabbed her arm and ran for the edge of the roof. He shoved her onto the ladder first. "Climb! Don't look back!"
As he swung his leg over the parapet, he glanced back. The Vyas-thing had collapsed to its knees, the internal war raging. Vyas's good eye found his for a split second. In it, he didn't see a command. He saw a plea.
Then the blackness swallowed it again.
Dan started down the ladder, the monsoon rain beginning to fall in earnest, washing the taste of ozone and failure from his lips. They were in the open now. Hunted by the I.O. and hunted by the thing that was consuming it from within. All they had was a direction, a hook in his soul, and the terrifying, hollow weapon of a girl who remembered a saint's forgiveness