The iron door of the sorting warehouse was caked in rust. When I pushed it open, the hinges let out a piercing scream.
The warehouse was stacked with green tubes, giving off a faint, ghostly glow. Iron Jaw sat shirtless on a cargo crate, his back half slabs of muscle and half metal, the seam between them weeping a foul discharge of tissue fluid.
"I knew you'd come."
He turned around, his eyes full of ugly intent. The purple chip was embedded in the crease of flesh at the back of his neck, flickering with an eerie light in the gloom.
"Be a good girl, and you can have whatever you want."
I kept my head down, my shoulders trembling slightly, like a lamb with nowhere left to run.
"Lord Skagg... as long as you stop making things hard for Mara..."
"That depends on how you perform tonight."
He strode over and seized my chin in one hand, breathing his rotten stench into my face.
"Face is ugly as sin. But the body's got decent proportions."
He shoved me against the shelving and clawed at my collar, barely able to contain himself.
I closed my eyes in submission.
And in the moment he believed I had surrendered completely --
I spread my arms wide and wrapped them around his spine, like a lover in an embrace.
"Smart girl." He was panting hard.
"Don't move."
My voice went cold.
The thin blade was already pressed into the gap along his spinal column, and I drove it in with surgical precision.
Iron Jaw's entire body went rigid. Everything below his waist went dead.
I used the leverage to flip him facedown onto the shelving and pinned him there, the blade resting against the edge of the purple chip.
"Hold still." I spoke right into his ear. "Where did you get this chip?"
"Ha... hahaha..." Iron Jaw actually laughed. "Iris, you're so naive. You think getting your hands on that chip is going to change anything?"
"Shut up." I pressed harder, working the blade under the chip to pry it loose.
"I'm telling you, we're both dead --"
Before he could finish, the purple chip at the base of his neck erupted in a burst of unearthly light.
A massive force hurled me backward. I slammed into a stack of energy crates.
Iron Jaw's body twisted and snapped at impossible angles -- then, driven by the chip's brute override, wrenched itself upright.
"Die!"
Purple light bled from his eyes. His mechanical fist came down with terrifying force.
I threw myself sideways, the thin blade slashing across his mechanical joints.
"The world outside is crueler than you can imagine!" He laughed like a madman, purple light spreading through every vein in his body. "You think Hub 101 is hell? You don't know a goddamn thing!"
"Outside?" A jolt ran through me. "There's nothing left outside 101. There hasn't been for years."
"That's what they told you! They... they're right there at --"
He never finished. His flesh began to wither at a horrifying rate, as though the chip were draining every last drop of life from him.
Then he toppled backward, stiff as a plank.
Dead.
I lunged forward and clawed the scalding purple chip out of his neck with my bare hands.
It was searingly hot. Strange runes were etched across its surface -- symbols I couldn't read.
But what occupied my mind more were Iron Jaw's last words.
There was still a world out there? We'd been lied to this whole time?
"Who's there!"
A noise from behind the scrap heap. I flipped my grip on the blade.
A hunched figure shuffled out. His skin was a sickly grey-green, his golden pupils wide with terror. He wore a heavy lead-lined apron -- standard issue for bone-crushers.
"You saw everything?" I slipped the chip into my breast pocket with one hand while dropping my center of gravity with the other.
He nodded frantically, still clutching two stolen green tubes.
"I can help you get rid of the body..." His voice shook like a rag in the wind. "Just don't tell anyone I was stealing green tubes..."
I stared at the crooked, crudely stitched wound across his sunken belly. It looked like someone had split him open and sewn him back together with wire.
"He had it coming." There was a hard glint in his eyes. "Name's Gus."
"Deal."
That night, Gus hauled Iron Jaw's corpse into the decomposition chamber.
Skagg "Iron Jaw" vanished from Hub 101, just like that.
At first, no one cared. Foremen going missing was nothing unusual in the Hub.
I went to the workshop as usual, stood in line for my green tubes as usual. The wound on Mara's forehead was slowly scabbing over. She came to find me every day, asking where Iron Jaw had gone. I told her nothing.
Until the third day.
Grimm, the Hub's administrator, stormed into the workshop with a squad of guards.
"Where's Skagg?!" Spittle flew from his mouth. "A fresh shipment of Cyon just came in from upstairs, and they need processing into blue tubes yesterday! Whoever can do this job gets five thousand fire coins!"
Dead silence.
Cyon -- human variants with blue blood, harboring lethal toxin glands inside their bodies. If a gland ruptured, you either dropped dead on the spot or the toxin ate through the machinery like acid. In all of Hub 101, no one but Iron Jaw had dared touch that kind of work.
"Why don't you ask her, Lord Grimm?"
Katia's acid voice rang out, dripping with schadenfreude as she pointed at me. "Lord Iron Jaw had Iris go to the warehouse for a little 'bonus ration' not long ago."
Grimm's gaze drove into me like a nail.
Minutes later, the guards had my arms wrenched behind my back. I was about to be thrown into Moloch.
"You can't kill me."
My voice wasn't loud, but it stopped Grimm mid-stride.
"In all of Hub 101, I'm the only one who can extract a Cyon's toxin gland intact. Kill me, and your blue tube business is finished for good."
Grimm was silent for a long time.
"One hundred bodies. One week."
"Not enough." I held his stare. "When it's done, you let me and Mara leave Hub 101."
He stared at me, hard. Then he burst out laughing.
"Now that's interesting. Deal."
Restricted Zone C-12. The dead zone at the deepest level of the Hub.
The air was a sickly blue-violet haze -- alkaline waste gas leaking from the toxin glands inside the Cyon corpses.
The helper Grimm shoved in with me turned out to be Gus.
We worked around the clock. He swung his bone-cleaver to hack apart the bodies while I wore a gas mask and excised the toxin glands. When the first blue tube slid out of the machine, crystalline as ice, we both froze.
That blue, distilled from life itself -- the most coveted luxury in the entire wasteland.
In less than five days, we'd already processed over half the bodies.
That night, while I was tallying the finished product, Gus suddenly leaned in close and dropped his voice.
"Iris, you ever hear the story about C-12? The waste pipes -- they say a Numbered once escaped through them. Followed the pipes for three days and three nights, and finally crawled out through an abandoned mine shaft."
"And then?"
"Then they caught him and brought him back. But he couldn't remember a thing anymore." Gus shuddered. "Worst part is, he just went right back to work every day. Like nothing ever happened..."
I said nothing.
The story reminded me of myself -- of waking up three years ago with nothing but a blank where my memories should have been.
"Shh, Iris -- listen!"
In the stillness of the cold storage room, from deep within the heaps of Cyon corpses, came a faint, muffled whimpering.
I tightened my grip on the thin blade and crept toward the sound.
At the very bottom of the pile of the dead, there was a massive black cocoon, slick and viscous.
I slit open the outer membrane with my blade.
What lay beneath wasn't rotting flesh.
It was a broad, bare back, streaked with blood.
"That's a living person?" Gus's voice was shaking.
The figure lay on its side in a pool of blood. Silver-white hair matted with gore. A pale face covered in wounds. Across the chest, a gaping wound so deep it turned the stomach, still seeping dark red.
He was alive. But barely.
Then his eyes snapped open.
A chill shot from the soles of my feet straight to the crown of my skull.
Those were not human eyes.
Deep violet pupils, glinting cold in the darkness. The shape of them was wrong too -- vertical slits, like a beast, like --
A wolf.
An invisible pressure exploded from his body, crashing down like a mountain.
My knees went soft. I nearly dropped to the ground. It wasn't fear. It was instinct. The submission coded into the genes of prey when it stands before a predator.
"Iris! Run!" Gus's voice seemed to come from very far away. "He's a Lycan!"
Lycan.
The true rulers of this world. Savage, powerful, bloodthirsty. To the Numbered like us, they were gods -- and demons in equal measure.
"Get away..."
He spoke. A ragged, hollow voice, laced with barely contained agony.
"Leave me."
I should have run. I should have turned and walked away, pretended I'd never seen a thing.
But I didn't move.
"Who are you?" I crouched down until my eyes were level with his. "Why are you here?"
He raised his head, and those violet eyes drove straight into mine.
Even on the edge of death, his gaze was still sharp enough to cut.
Then his pupils contracted sharply.
As though he'd seen something impossible.
"You..."
His voice was hoarse and trembling, filled with an emotion that sounded like disbelief.
"You're..."
He didn't finish. His eyes closed, and his body slumped back heavily.
Gus was shaking his head like a man possessed. "Iris, we can't get involved! He's a Lycan! If Grimm finds out we've got a Lycan hidden in here, he'll grind us both into paste!"
"I know."
"Then why --"
"Go watch the door." I cut him off. "If anyone comes, knock three times."
"But --"
"Go!"
Gus opened his mouth, looked at me, looked at the Lycan on the ground, and finally gritted his teeth and ran for the cold storage door.
The room was empty now. Just me and the dying Lycan.
I crouched beside him and studied his pale face.
Silver-white hair. Sharp, striking features. Even drenched in blood and filth, there was no hiding that aura of fierce, unyielding nobility.
This was no ordinary Lycan.
The way he'd looked at me just now...
That wasn't the way you look at a stranger.
What had he been trying to say?
I stayed crouched there, staring at his ashen face, my mind in chaos.
A Lycan. A Lycan from the world outside.
Iron Jaw had said it with his dying breath -- there was still a world out there. We'd been deceived all along.
And this man might have the answers.
I couldn't let him die here.