The freezing mist clung to everything, a thick, white blindness that swallowed sound and sight.
The frantic muzzle flashes of the Red Dogs' assault were just dull, stuttering oranges in the gloom, the gunfire itself muffled, eaten by the soupy air.
They were shooting at a ghost.
Gideon's eyes, strained and burning from the cold, tried to pierce the haze where Cinder's silhouette had been.
The shadow hadn't moved.
It hadn't jerked from the impacts.
It just… stood there, absorbing their storm of lead with an unnatural, terrifying stillness.
A cold knot, colder than the mist, tightened in his gut.
This was wrong.
This was a trap.
"Stop firing!" he roared, his voice raw and sharp, cutting through the chaotic noise.
The gunfire stuttered and died, leaving a ringing, hollow silence.
In that sudden quiet, the only sound was the ragged panting of his people and the faint hiss of the mist.
That's when he saw it. A tiny, precise point of red light bloomed deep within the white, like a single, malevolent eye focusing.
It was already too late.
"Shie—"
The word was a half-formed gasp in his throat.
The shot made no grand roar.
It was a sharp, spiteful crack that punched through the silence.
The veteran manning the shield barricade didn't even cry out.
His head simply… came apart.
It wasn't a messy explosion, but a violent, instantaneous unmaking.
One moment he was there, the next, the space above his shoulders was empty, the edges of the wound seared shut by the bullet's impossible heat.
The force didn't stop.
It tore through shielder's body, punched clean through the Kevlar vest of the woman standing directly behind him with a sound like ripping canvas, and buried itself in the chest of a third fighter further back.
One shot.
Three lives, extinguished between one heartbeat and the next.
The bodies crumpled, one after the other, like puppets with their strings cut.
There was no dramatic spray of blood, no gory spectacle.
The searing heat had cauterized the wounds as it passed, leaving behind only a terrible, clean efficiency.
The silence that followed was deeper than before, thick with the smell of aether, frozen air, and cooked meat.
The shield barricade, now unmanned, emitted a low, failing whine.
Its kinetic field died with a pathetic flicker.
Gideon could only stare, his breath frozen in his lungs.
It wasn't just a kill.
It was a statement.
A godly timing, yes, but also a chilling demonstration of how utterly outclassed they were.
They were just animals in a slaughterhouse, and the butcher had just shown them the knife.
The sight of his people falling—not in a chaotic blast, but with that cold, surgical precision—shattered something inside Gideon.
Strategy, rage, pride—it all boiled down to a single, primal instinct: cover.
He didn't think.
His body moved before the third body hit the floor.
He was a big man, but he moved with a desperate, explosive speed, lunging for the shield barricade.
His hand, calloused and scarred, slapped down on the activation panel where the man's hand had been moments before.
He didn't just press the glyph, he hammered it.
A low, powerful thrum vibrated through the metal frame and up his arm.
The air in front of the barricade shimmered, and then a wall of faintly glowing faint hexagons snapped into existence, stretching from floor to ceiling and sealing the width of the hallway.
The kinetic field buzzed, a steady, defensive hum that was the most beautiful sound Gideon had ever heard.
It was a fragile barrier, he knew.
A temporary reprieve.
But it was a wall between them and the ghost in the mist.
For a long, suspended moment, nothing happened.
The only sounds were the hum of the shield and the ragged, sudden gasp of his remaining fighters.
They stood frozen, weapons half-lowered, their chests heaving.
It was only then Gideon realized his own lungs were burning.
He, and everyone else, had stopped breathing from the moment the shot rang out.
The air now tasted thin and sharp, flavored with ozone and their own cold fear.
They had a room to breathe.
A few precious seconds bought by a dead man's post and his own reflexive lunge.
He stared into the shifting white haze beyond the shimmering shield, waiting for the next red eye to open.
The shadow in the mist didn't retreat.
It didn't move at all.
It simply... faded.
One moment it was a dark stain in the white gloom, a fixed point of dread.
The next, it was gone, dissolved into the swirling vapor as if it had never been there.
It was like a ghost vanishing before their very eyes, leaving only the chilling certainty that it could be anywhere.
As the silhouette disappeared, a voice drifted from the emptiness, flat and clear as breaking glass.
"Would you look at that."
The words hung in the frozen air, devoid of any emotion but cold observation.
"Three birds—I mean dogs at the same time."
The correction was a deliberate, casual insult, a boot heel grinding into their pride.
It wasn't shouted; it was stated, making it all the more provoking.
She wasn't just killing them.
She was mocking their pack, their very name.
And the biggest dog took the bait.
A raw, guttural roar tore from Gideon's throat, a sound of pure, undiluted fury.
The cold logic of the shield, the brief moment of safety—it was all burned away by the image of his people's broken bodies and that voice dripping with contempt.
He forgot the barricade.
He forgot the plan.
With the shield generator humming in his grip, he lunged forward, charging headlong into the blinding mist.
"YOU—!" he bellowed, the rest of the curse lost in the roar, his massive frame crashing through the veil of white after a ghost that was already gone.
Gideon's forward momentum slammed to a halt.
His entire body trembled, not from the cold, but from a fury so hot it felt like it would crack his bones.
Instead of charging further into the deadly white, he spun and drove a fist into the frozen concrete wall beside him.
The impact was a dull, sickening thud that echoed louder than a gunshot in the tense silence.
A web of fractures spread across the frost-coated surface.
He didn't feel the pain in his knuckles, only the burning need to break something, to exert some kind of control where he had none.
His squad, which had tensed to follow him into a suicidal charge, froze behind him.
The spell of his rage was broken by the violent, futile act.
A hand settled carefully on his shoulder. He flinched, but didn't shake it off.
"Boss."
It was Nino.
His voice was low, gravelly with age and a dozen close calls.
It was the voice that had talked him down from ledges before, both real and metaphorical.
"She's a ghost in this fog," Nino said, his words measured and calm. "You run after a ghost, you just get lost. That's the plan. She's picking us off. Don't let her pick you."
Gideon squeezed his eyes shut, his forehead pressing against the cold, rough wall.
He dragged in a ragged breath that shuddered all the way down to his boots.
He knew.
He knew every word Nino said was true.
It was the same tactical sense that had kept the Red Dogs alive this long.
But it was being smothered, drowned out by the roaring in his ears—the sound of one of his men's head vanishing, the memory of that mocking voice.
"I know," Gideon growled, the words torn from a tight throat.
It was a confession.
He knew the right move, but the wrong feeling, that the raw, swelling anger, was a beast clawing its way up his chest, demanding to be let loose.
He was losing his grip, and the worst part was that he could feel it happening, like watching a wall crumble from the inside.
The fight went out of Gideon's shoulders in a heavy slump.
The red haze of rage didn't vanish, but it was pushed down, forced into a box by the sheer, grinding weight of responsibility.
He couldn't afford to be the enraged beast.
He had to be the leader.
With a grunt, he pried his bleeding knuckles from the wall and turned.
He didn't look at his men, couldn't bear to see the fear and trust in their eyes.
Instead, he shoved the heavy shield generator into Nino's chest.
"Hold the line," he rasped, the order simple and absolute.
Nino took the weight without a word, his own grim expression a mirror of the burden now passed.
He stepped forward, becoming the new wall.
Gideon's mind, stripped of its fury, scrambled for a foothold.
They needed a way out of this frozen tomb.
They needed... they needed the brains of their operation.
The thought was a desperate prayer.
As if summoned by it, his comm unit, still clutched in his back pocket, flared to life with a burst of static.
Arden's voice, strained and frantic, cut through the tense silence.
<
The relief that washed over Gideon was so sharp it was almost painful.
They were alive.
"We're almost at the lab! Where are you?!" Gideon barked into the unit, his voice raw.
The answer was a muffled, echoing shout, both through the speaker and faintly through the mist-shrouded corridors ahead.
They were close.
So close.
A new kind of energy, no less desperate but now channeled, seized him.
This wasn't a blind charge.
It was a rendezvous.
It was a plan.
He met Nino's eyes, then swept his gaze over the remaining fighters.
"Let's go!" he commanded, his voice a low rumble of renewed purpose.
He pointed forward, into the mist, toward the sound of Arden's voice.
The fight for survival was all that remained.
***
The chaos from the rest of the base was a distant, muffled orchestra of terror—the crump of explosions, the staccato pops of gunfire, shouts that were cut short.
Each sound wormed its way into the room where Jessa and Tink were held, feeding a dread deeper than any they had ever known.
It was a feeling colder than hunger, sharper than fear.
It was the certainty that the world was ending just beyond the door, and they were tied to a chair in the middle of it.
The air in the room was thick and cloying, carrying a sweet, greasy smell that made Jessa's stomach clench.
Ash's artwork hadn't been cleaned up.
The dark stains on the floor and the lingering scent of cooked meat were a constant, nauseating reminder.
Her mind, traitorously, made the connection her stomach already knew: it was the smell of a person.
A human being, reduced to this foul aroma.
She fought down a gag, the cloth in her mouth suddenly feeling like it was soaked in the same vile substance.
Her wrists ached where the bindings dug into her skin.
She had faced down gang enforcers and corporate patrols in the Junkyard, but she had always had her wits, her legs, a chance to run.
This—being trussed up and helpless, forced to sit in the aftermath of a slaughter—was a new, terrifying kind of defenselessness.
She looked at Tink, her heart squeezing into a tight, painful knot.
He was slumped in his chair, his face pale and beaded with a cold sweat.
He'd never really recovered from the injury to his spine days ago.
He needed rest, a safe place to heal, not this… this nightmare.
His small frame trembled, his wide eyes fixed on nothing, seeing horrors only he could see.
The Blaze guy had been clear: they were hostages, bait to lure Lucent.
The thought filled Jessa with a cold horror that went beyond her own fear.
These people weren't just ruthless; they were a different species of evil.
She'd seen the worst of humanity in the Junkyard—the back-alley surgeons, the credit-pinching slavers, the desperate who'd slit your throat for a day's rations.
But she always saw the reason in it, the grim, ugly logic of survival.
You did evil to live another day.
There was no reason here.
No survival.
Just a twisted, vile enjoyment that made her question if Ash was even human at all.
The memory of Kai's kindness in the hideout felt like a dream from another life.
His patient explanations, the way he hadn't looked at them with disgust or greed.
And Lucent, for all his harsh, stoic exterior, had given them something more valuable than credits: real knowledge.
He'd shown them the structure of a glyph, the flow of aether, tools that could mean the difference between life and death.
It was a hand up, not a hand out.
Now, that fragile hope felt like a cruel joke.
The first real breath of fresh air they'd found in years, and it had led them here, to a room that stank of death, waiting for a rescue that might just get everyone killed.
A profound silence had settled in the room, broken only by Tink's shallow, pained breaths and the distant, muffled war outside.
Into that silence, a voice slid like a razor blade.
"So pitiful."
It was a child's voice, light and clear, but it held a flat, ancient quality that didn't match its sound.
It came from directly behind them.
Tink, already on a hair-trigger, jerked violently in his bonds, a small, broken whimper escaping his gag.
His wide, terrified eyes darted around, searching for a source that shouldn't be there.
Jessa's blood ran cold.
Her head whipped around as much as the restraints allowed.
The door was still shut, still locked.
The air hadn't stirred.
No one had entered.
How?
Her mind, sharpened by survival, scrabbled for logic and found none.
It was as if the voice had simply formed out of the foul air itself.
Slowly, with a silence more unnerving than any footstep, a figure glided into their field of view.
It was a girl in a pristine, frilly pink dress, a splash of saccharine color in the grimy, soot-stained room.
The contrast was so staggering it felt like a physical blow.
The dress was immaculate, untouched by the dust and blood that coated everything else, as if she had just stepped out of a shop window and into this nightmare.
She held a matching pink frilly umbrella, tilted down to shadow her face.
From their low, tied-up angle, Jessa and Tink could see only the lower half of her face: a small, pale chin and a mouth that curved into a gentle, placid smile.
It was a smile that didn't reach the hidden eyes, an empty expression that offered no comfort, only a deep, unsettling wrongness.
She was a doll that had learned to speak, and she had called them pitiful.
"Children being bound and confined in this dirty room—"
The girl in the pink dress turned her head, and the frilly umbrella tilted just enough for her hidden gaze to sweep over the dark stains and the grim remains of Ash's artwork on the floor.
Her gentle smile never wavered, but the air in the room grew heavy, the cold from the sub-levels seeming to bite deeper into Jessa's bones.
"Is deplorable."
The word was spoken softly, yet it landed with the weight of a judge's gavel.
It wasn't loud, but it was sharp, and it carried a thread of something old and icy—a anger so deep it felt less like a fire and more like the absolute zero of forgotten space.
For a moment, it was as if a deep, frozen memory had resurfaced in the room, one that had nothing to do with them and everything to do with the girl who spoke.
As she turned back to face them, the umbrella once again hid her eyes, leaving only that placid smile.
Jessa and Tink were trembling uncontrollably, their fear a live wire in the stagnant air.
They didn't understand the shift in the air, but their bodies did, screaming at them that they were in the presence of something infinitely more dangerous than the Scorchers.
The girl's head tilted. "I didn't mean to scare both of you."
An apology.
The words were correct, the tone was gentle.
But it was all wrong.
The smile didn't fade.
The hidden eyes felt like they were dissecting them.
It was the most terrifying thing that had happened yet—this mockery of comfort from a creature that felt no such thing.
The apology wasn't meant to soothe; it was another layer to the performance, and both children felt the wrongness of it in their marrow.
The girl in the pink dress was perfectly still for a moment, the gentle curve of her smile the only feature in the shadow of her umbrella.
Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, she lifted it.
"…Do you want to be freed from this disgusting place?"
The umbrella rose, revealing her eyes.
Jessa's breath hitched.
Her first, immediate feeling wasn't hope, but a deep, instinctual wrongness.
The eyes that looked down at them were not a child's eyes.
They were pools of milky white, like frosted glass.
They seemed to look not just at them, but through them, as if seeing the very shape of their fear and the desperate beat of their hearts.
There was no warmth, no life, only a vast and ancient stillness.
Tink made a small, choked sound, pressing himself back into his chair as far as the ropes would allow.
The words she had spoken were the very thing they had been screaming for in their minds—freedom, escape from this room of horrors.
It was everything he wanted.
But the offer, coming from those terrible, seeing-unseeing eyes, filled him with a terror even greater than Ash's.
This was a different kind of trap, one he couldn't begin to understand.
He wanted to be free, but not with her.
Jessa's gaze flickered from the milky-white eyes to Tink.
She saw the pain etched on his pale face, the way his small body trembled with exhaustion and terror.
The logic was cold and brutal.
Waiting for a rescue meant Kai and Lucent walking into a den of Scorchers.
It also meant more time for Tink's condition to worsen in this filth.
It meant hoping their captors would show a mercy they were clearly incapable of.
This… creature… was a door.
A terrifying, unknown door, but a door, nonetheless.
It was a choice between a certain, slow-burning doom and a leap into a different kind of dark.
Her eyes met the unsettling voids of the girl in pink.
Slowly, deliberately, she gave a single, sharp nod.
The girl's smile widened, a perfect, bloodless curve.
"I'm glad you agreed." She paused, the silence stretching just long enough to feel like a trap being set. "But before I can let you out, I need you to do something for me."
The words landed not as a request, but as a price.
A cold dread, sharper than the fear of Ash or Blaze, washed over Jessa.
This wasn't a rescue.
It was a transaction.
And she had just agreed to it without knowing the cost.
The thought was a stone in her gut: agreeing with this person might have been the biggest mistake of her life.