The air in the massive chamber grew thick with the scent of burnt air and something sharper. The ten Hollowed stood motionless for a heartbeat too long, their milky eyes reflecting the flickering Aether veins that pulsed through the walls. They didn't breathe. They didn't blink. They simply waited, as if listening to some silent command.
Karen's fingers twitched against the grip of her pistol. The barrel was still warm from the last shot, the one that had torn through a Hollowed's skull only for the wound to seal shut before her eyes. Useless. She exhaled through clenched teeth and holstered the weapon, her palm already seeking the familiar weight of her Conduit. The metal casing was rough against her skin, dented from years of misuse, the screen a spiderweb of cracks that glowed faintly as it awakened.
Lucent didn't look at her. He didn't need to. His knife was already in hand, the edge catching the sterile light as he shifted his stance, his body coiled tight. The Hollowed mirrored him, their movements eerily precise, their bare feet silent against the polished floor.
Then the first one struck.
It moved faster than anything that dead should have been capable of, its fingers splayed like surgical instruments, aiming not for Lucent's throat but for the Conduit at his belt. Smart. Too smart. He twisted aside, his knife scraping against the thing's forearm—and sparks flew. Not from the blade, but from the Hollowed itself. Beneath its grayish skin, something metallic glinted. Reinforced bones? Grafted weapons?
Karen didn't have time to wonder. Her Conduit flared to life in her palm, the glyph compiling with a sharp, electric whine. She didn't bother with finesse. "Flashburn," she snarled, and the spell detonated in a burst of searing white light.
The Hollowed recoiled—not from pain, but from disruption. Their glowing veins flickered, their synchronization breaking for a single, precious second.
Lucent didn't waste it. His knife found the throat of the nearest creature, the blade biting deep. Black fluid bubbled from the wound, but the Hollowed didn't fall. It grabbed his wrist, its grip crushing, and for the first time, Lucent felt true pressure grinding against bone.
Kai's Conduit hummed as he wove a Kinetic Pulse between his fingers, the glyph spiraling into existence almost too fast to follow. He unleashed it point-blank, the force ripping the Hollowed's arm clean off at the shoulder. The limb hit the floor with a wet thud, fingers still twitching.
But the creature didn't scream. It didn't even stumble. It simply adjusted, its remaining hand snapping up to clamp around Lucent's throat—
Karen was already moving. Her Conduit sparked as she slammed it against the Hollowed's chest, the spell flaring crimson. "Rust," she hissed, and the corruption spread like wildfire, blackening flesh, eating through the metal beneath. The Hollowed shuddered, its movements slowing—finally—but not stopping. Never stopping.
Across the room, the remaining Hollowed were learning. Adapting. One feinted left, then darted right, its movements becoming jagged, unpredictable. Another lunged at Kai, its fingers curled into claws, its eyes locked onto his Conduit with terrifying focus.
Kai barely got his static veil up in time. The barrier crackled between them, the electricity grounding into the floor as the Hollowed pushed through, its Aether veins flaring brighter in resistance.
Lucent wrenched free from the decaying Hollowed's grip, his breath ragged. They couldn't keep this up. The creatures weren't tiring. They weren't slowing. If anything, they were getting faster.
Then—
The lights flickered.
A deep, resonant thud vibrated through the floor, the sound more felt than heard. The Hollowed froze. Their heads snapped toward the far wall, their glowing veins pulsing erratically. For the first time, something like recognition flickered in their dead eyes.
The air grew heavier, thicker, the bitter stench of something smoldering sharpening into something acrid—like burning flesh. The walls shuddered, the Aether veins dimming, then flaring brighter, as if the facility itself was struggling to contain whatever was coming.
Karen's Conduit sputtered in her grip, the screen distorting with interference. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me," she muttered.
The Hollowed's synchronized movements faltered as another deep tremor shook the chamber. Dust rained from the ceiling, catching in the flickering light of the failing Aether veins that pulsed erratically through the walls.
Karen's boots slipped slightly on the now vibrating floor as she adjusted her stance, her Conduit humming with unstable energy in her palm. The smell of burning insulation grew stronger, mixing with the metallic tang of the Hollowed's black blood pooling on the polished surface.
Lucent's knife hand tensed, his knuckles white around the worn leather grip. He could feel the vibrations through his boots now - not random tremors, but something rhythmic, something approaching. The Hollowed nearest him tilted its head at an unnatural angle, its milky eyes reflecting the strobing emergency lights as its too-long fingers twitched in what might have been anticipation.
The intercom screeched to life again, the projection's voice now layered with something approaching panic. "Containment failure in Sector Seven. All security protocols compromised." The words dissolved into static as another impact shook the facility, this time hard enough to send a hairline crack racing up the curved observation window overlooking the chamber.
Kai stumbled, his Conduit slipping in sweat-slick fingers. The Hollowed took advantage instantly, two of them breaking formation with that eerie, liquid grace to flank him. Their movements were too precise, too coordinated - these weren't mindless husks but something far worse. Soldiers. Hunters. Perfect weapons.
Karen saw the danger a heartbeat too late. "Kai, move!" Her warning came as the first Hollowed lashed out, its elongated fingers whistling through the air where Kai's throat had been a moment before.
He barely dodged, the static veil around his Conduit flaring blue-white as he backpedaled. The second Hollowed's attack came low, a sweeping kick that connected with his shin and sent him crashing to the metal floor.
Lucent was moving before Kai hit the ground. His knife flashed silver in the stuttering light, carving through the air toward the nearest Hollowed's spine. The creature twisted at the last possible moment, the blade scoring a deep gash along its ribs instead of finding its mark. Black fluid sprayed across the polished floor, smoking where it touched the glowing Aether veins running beneath the surface.
The intercom buzzed again, the projection's voice now barely recognizable beneath layers of distortion. "Emergency override initiated. All test subjects must be—" Another impact, closer this time, shook dust from the ceiling vents. The words cut off as half the lights in the chamber failed, plunging one side of the room into near darkness.
Karen didn't wait for her eyes to adjust. She could hear the Hollowed moving in the dark, their bare feet making wet sounds against the floor. Her Conduit flared to life in her palm, casting jagged shadows across the buckling walls. The Rust Sigil burned crimson at its center, its edges fraying with unstable energy.
"Lucent, down!" she shouted, hurling the spell past him at the Hollowed creeping up behind. The glyph struck true, eating through the creature's shoulder in seconds. It didn't scream - none of them ever screamed - but its movements became jerky, uncoordinated as the corruption spread.
Kai scrambled to his feet, his Conduit sparking wildly. The remaining Hollowed were regrouping, their glowing eyes fixed not on the trio now, but on the far wall where the metal groaned under some unimaginable pressure. The steel surface bulged inward, the polished surface warping like taffy as something immense pressed against it from the other side.
The intercom gave one last, static-filled burst: "It remembers… No! My data will be ruined! It—"
The wall exploded inward in a shower of sparks and twisted metal. Darkness poured through the gap, thick and swirling like ink in water. The Hollowed recoiled as one, their synchronized movements breaking for the first time into something approaching panic.
From within the swirling blackness came a sound that wasn't a roar, wasn't a scream, but something infinitely worse - the exact, pitch-perfect frequency of a Myriad containment alarm, the same ear-splitting wail that had preceded the Aether Incident all those years ago.
The trio didn't need to see what was coming to know one thing with absolute certainty:
The abomination remembered.
And it was coming home.
***
The boy woke to the sound of rain drumming against the corrugated metal roof of his shelter—a patched-together lean-to wedged between the carcass of an old mag-lev engine and a stack of broken shipping containers. The air smelled of wet rust and the lingering tang of last night's cookfire. He stretched, his joints popping, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the back of a grimy hand.
Breakfast was the same as always—a hunk of stale protein brick scavenged from a discarded ration pack, gnawed slowly to make it last. He washed it down with water from his canteen, the liquid warm and faintly metallic from sitting too long in the cheap tin. Outside, the junkyard stretched endlessly, the morning mist clinging to the mountains of wreckage like a shroud.
He didn't hurry. There was no point. The good pickings wouldn't start until the scavenger crews had finished their morning rounds, leaving behind whatever they deemed worthless. So he took his time, checking his few possessions—the patched jacket hanging from a bent nail, the cracked but still-serviceable boots, the little tin of grease he used to keep his knife from rusting.
The girl found him like that, sitting on an overturned crate and sharpening his blade with slow, methodical strokes.
"You're late," she said, leaning against the mag-lev's broken hull. Her hair was damp from the rain, clinging to her face in dark strands.
The boy shrugged, testing the edge of his knife with his thumb. "Nothing worth rushing for."
She snorted and tossed him a wrapped bundle. "Tell that to your stomach."
Inside was a strip of dried meat—real meat, not the synthetic protein from the ration packs. The boy raised an eyebrow.
"Dog?"
"Rat," she corrected. "Big one, though. Got it near the old coolant pipes."
They ate in comfortable silence, watching the scavenger crews move through the heaps of scraps like ants, their voices distant and indistinct. The boy kept half an eye on the upper layers, where the better pickings went—where the intact Conduits sometimes slipped through the cracks.
The girl followed his gaze and sighed. "Still dreaming about magic, huh?"
The boy didn't answer. He just pocketed the last of the meat and stood, slinging his pack over his shoulder.
The girl rolled her eyes but fell into step beside him as they picked their way through the wreckage. The pits were alive with the usual morning sounds—the clang of metal, the distant shouts of scavengers, the ever-present hum of the Aether nodes that loomed over the junkyard like silent sentinels.
They passed the usual landmarks—the gutted remains of an old transport where a family of glowmites had taken up residence, the pile of shattered Conduits that never seemed to shrink no matter how many were hauled away, the rusted-out husk of a security drone that the girl liked to kick for good luck.
The boy's fingers itched as they neared the fresh dump piles, his eyes scanning for that telltale glint of a working screen. Most days, he came up empty. Most days, the girl was right—it was all junk.
But today—
Right now, something flickered in the wreckage.
The girl saw it too. She stopped mid-step, her breath catching.
The boy didn't rush. He never rushed. He just crouched, brushing aside the debris with careful fingers until—
A Conduit. Cracked, battered, but alive. Its screen pulsed weakly, like a dying ember.
The girl's hand closed around his wrist. "Don't," she whispered.
But the boy was already reaching.
The boy's fingers froze mid-reach, hovering just above the cracked Conduit screen. That faint glow he'd seen - gone now. Just another trick of the light, another dead husk among thousands. He picked it up anyway, turning it over in hands stained black with engine grease and old blood. The casing was cold, the glass spiderwebbed with fractures. No pulse. No life. Just scrap.
"Told you so."
The girl's voice came from behind him, laced with that familiar mix of amusement and exasperation. She crouched beside him, her patched knees popping, and plucked the dead Conduit from his grasp. Her fingers - nimble where his were blunt, delicate where his were scarred - traced the broken edges with practiced indifference.
"Third one this week," she said, tossing it over her shoulder where it clattered against the mountain of other failures. "When you gonna learn?"
The boy didn't answer. His eyes were already scanning the next pile, the next shadow where a working core might hide. The junkyard stretched endlessly around them, a graveyard of shattered technology under the sickly yellow glow of the smog-choked sky. Towers of broken mag-lev parts loomed like skeletal remains, their jagged edges casting long, twisted shadows across the cracked concrete.
The girl sighed and stood, wiping her hands on her threadbare pants. She didn't bother waiting for him to follow as she picked her way through the wreckage toward her own project - a makeshift workbench cobbled together from a rusted door balanced across two barrels.
Her space was chaos. A hundred scavenged components spread across the uneven surface - copper coils stripped from old generators, cracked but salvageable capacitors, fragments of spell matrices pried from dead Conduits. None of it worked right. Not yet. But she'd take this over his hopeless searching any day.
The boy finally gave up and wandered over, watching as she carefully soldered two frayed wires together, her tongue poking out between her teeth in concentration. The soldering iron hissed, spitting sparks that reflected in her dark eyes.
"You're wasting time," she said without looking up.
He leaned against a broken generator, arms crossed. "Says the girl playing with garbage."
"This garbage," she tapped the half-assembled mess of components, "could actually work someday. Unlike your stupid treasure hunts."
The boy's jaw tightened. He'd seen real Conduits work once - up in the upper layers where the enforcers patrolled. Had watched from a distance as they wove spells with effortless flicks of their wrists, the glyphs burning blue and perfect in the air. No jury-rigged nonsense. No maybe-it'll-work. Just power.
The girl saw the look on his face and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Magic." She waved a hand dismissively. "Keep dreaming, scrap rat."
A distant whistle cut through the heavy air - the shift change at the sorting yard. The girl immediately started packing up her components into a dented metal box. The boy didn't move.
"You coming or what?" she asked, tucking the box under her arm.
He glanced back at the piles. One more look. One more try.
The girl sighed and turned away. "Suit yourself."
He watched her go, her silhouette small against the towering wreckage. Then, with one last look at the dead Conduits, he followed.
Tomorrow would be the same.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
***
The Myriad recruiter's office was too clean.
That was the first thing the boy noticed—the stark white walls, the polished floor tiles that reflected the harsh fluorescent lights overhead, the complete absence of grime or rust or the ever-present metallic tang of the junkyard. It smelled like antiseptic and something else underneath—something sweet and cloying that made his stomach turn if he breathed too deeply.
The recruiter sat across from him, his tailored suit crisp and unwrinkled, his fingers steepled on the desk between them. A datapad glowed softly in front of the boy, the text scrolling endlessly in tight, corporate script.
"Just a formality," the man said, his voice smooth as synth-silk. "Standard employment contract for technical apprenticeships. Room and board included, of course."
The boy's fingers hovered over the screen. He wasn't stupid—he knew better than to trust a Myriad suit bearing gifts. But the numbers on the screen...
5000 credits monthly.
Enough to buy a working Conduit from the black market. Enough to get off-world if he saved carefully. Enough to never dig through scrap again.
His guardians had already signed their portion without even reading it. He'd seen the way their eyes lit up when the recruiter mentioned the signing bonus—like he was a crate of salvage they'd finally managed to offload.
The boy swallowed hard. His thumbprint wavered over the glowing field.
Then—
"Wait."
The recruiter's smile didn't falter. "Is there a problem?"
The boy hesitated. The girl's face flashed in his mind—her skeptical frown, the way she'd roll her eyes at this whole setup. She'd call him an idiot. She'd be right.
But she'd also be jealous.
"There's... someone else," he said slowly. "A girl. Smarter than me. Better with tech." He met the recruiter's gaze. "You take her too, or no deal."
Something flickered in the man's eyes—too fast to name. Excitement? Hunger? He recovered instantly, reaching for another datapad with practiced ease.
"Of course! Myriad is always looking for talented individuals." The new contract appeared as if conjured from thin air. "Just need her name here."
The boy should have questioned it. Should have wondered why a corporate recruiter would jump at the chance to take two nobodies from the scrap pits. But the numbers on the screen blurred together, and the recruiter's polished words filled his head—stable work, real credits, a way out—and before he could second-guess himself, he scrawled her name beside his own.
The recruiter's smile widened as he collected the pads. "Excellent. Transport leaves at dawn—bring only what you can carry." He stood, straightening his cuffs. "Oh, and welcome to the Myriad family."
The door hissed shut behind him, leaving the boy alone in the sterile room. The air smelled sharper now, the antiseptic burn scratching at his throat.
Somewhere deep in his gut, something twisted—a warning he couldn't name.
Too late now. And the boy went to his friend.
The girl was waiting for him outside the chain-link fence, perched on a stack of broken Conduit casings. She took one look at his face and knew.
"You idiot," she said, but there was no heat in it. Just resignation.
He handed her the copy of the contract—the one with both their names glowing at the bottom. She stared at it for a long moment, her fingers leaving grease smudges on the pristine screen.
"When do we leave?"
The boy exhaled, the tightness in his chest easing slightly. "Dawn."
The girl nodded once, sharp and final, then tossed the pad back to him. It landed in the dirt between them, the screen still glowing with promises neither of them fully believed.
Tomorrow, they'd step onto that transport.
Tomorrow, everything would change.
But tonight—
Tonight, they sat together in the gathering dark, watching the lights of the upper layers flicker to life in the distance, neither speaking.
What have I just signed up for?