The suspension of time lasted exactly one heartbeat.
Then, the silence shattered.
When Jyoti spoke, the two smaller beasts didn't just hear her; they reacted with a terrifying, synchronized precision. Their heads snapped toward the rubble where she crouched. Their ears flattened against their skulls. For the last few minutes, the boy had been the only prey in the cavern, the only warm thing that smelled of blood and fear. But now, a new scent had revealed itself. A new heartbeat.
The distraction was microscopic—a singular second where the predators looked away from the boy leaning against the pipe and toward the darkness shielding her.
But for the boy, a second was an eternity.
He didn't look at Jyoti. He didn't waste time wondering who had spoken or why. He saw the gap in the beasts' attention, and he exploded into motion.
He pushed off the pipe, his body launching forward not away from the beasts, but past them, toward the source of the voice. He moved with a desperate, jagged speed, the heavy chain dragging behind him like a metallic tail.
"Run!" he didn't scream it; he hissed it through clenched teeth as he reached her level.
Jyoti didn't need to be told twice. The spell of the moment broke. She scrambled up from her crouch, her boots slipping on the loose shale of the debris pile. The beasts, realizing their error, let out a high-pitched shriek that sounded like grinding gears and lunged.
They were fast. Faster than they looked.
Jyoti hit the ground running, her breath hitching in her throat. She could hear the click-click-click of claws on the metal floor, a frantic rhythm that was getting louder. She didn't look back. She knew what she would see: wet muzzles, dilated pupils, and teeth designed to tear through safety mesh.
"Left," the boy commanded. He was right beside her now.
Up close, the damage he had inflicted on himself was horrific. His hands were mangled claws, swollen and purple, dripping blood that left a sporadic trail on the rusted floor plates. Yet, he didn't slow down. He held his arms close to his chest to minimize the jar of impact, his face a mask of grim concentration.
They hit a maze of collapsed gantries and twisted infrastructure.
Mountains of discarded metal boxes stacked high and crooked like a dead city built without care. Paths wound between them just wide enough to run through, their walls made of dented steel and torn lids, some split open like cracked coffins. Dust hung heavy in the air, stirred by movement and old collapse, and every breath tasted of iron filings and dried blood. No steam rose here, only the cold weight of the cavern pressing down, making the space feel endless and crushing at the same time.
Jyoti ran with the knowledge of a rat born in the walls. She didn't just see the path; she felt it. She knew which rusted lids were cancer-soft and would crumble underfoot. She knew which jagged corners were safe to hold and which stacks were nothing but hollow rot that would slide into a landslide of scrap if she grabbed them for leverage.
She didn't fight the wreckage. She bounced off it. She used the vertical walls to pivot, sliding under jagged overhangs of torn steel that would have taken a taller person's head off. She was scrappy, her movements jerky and explosive, fueled by adrenaline and the terror breathing down her neck.
The boy was different.
Running beside her, separated by a line of broken pillars, he moved with a disturbing, liquid efficiency. Despite the starvation, despite the blood loss, he flowed over the obstacles. He didn't scramble; he glided.
He vaulted a chest-high beam with a silent, economized grace that didn't belong in the filth of the Pits. He landed without sound, his knees absorbing the impact, his momentum unbroken. Every step was calculated. It was high-born movement, the kind of physical discipline taught in clean, well-lit dojos far above the smog line. He moved like he was spending a specific budget of energy, careful not to waste a single joule.
They didn't look at each other. They just ran side by side, focused entirely on survival.
Jyoti risked a glance over her shoulder, and the breath froze in her lungs. The beasts were closing the distance, not with the mindless charge of animals, but with the calculated precision of seasoned hunters. They poured over the uneven terrain like black water, muscles coiling and releasing in fluid ripples. One beast scrambled high up a wall of crushed crates while the other stayed low, weaving through the shadows to cut off their escape. They weren't just chasing; they were herding them.
The ground ahead simply ended. A jagged rift tore through the floor, opening into a drop that meant certain demise. Cold air blasted up from the deep, carrying the scent of stagnant rot and dead. The only bridge was a single, warped girder—narrow as a spine and slick with decades of grime.
The boy veered toward it. He didn't slow. He hit the edge and launched himself. He landed on the bent girder, bare feet gripping the slick metal like claws. Impossible balance. Jyoti followed. She threw herself into the void. For a second, she floated. The air rushed past, heavy with the smell of wet and old rot, before her bare feet slammed onto the steel.
They didn't stay on the girder. They scrambled up a rusted lattice, hauling themselves onto a hanging platform above.
The beasts reached the rift and skidded to a stop. They hesitated, sniffing the drop. Then, they leaped. Two dark shapes blotting out the dim light. They landed on the platform with a heavy, wet thud.
The boy and Jyoti moved faster. They were smaller, cleverer. They weaved through the maze of pipes and crushed crates, slipping through gaps the beasts couldn't fit. They put distance between them and the teeth. They were winning.
Then, they weren't.
The platform ended.
A solid wall of tangled cargo chains, thick as thighs, blocked the alley. The ceiling had collapsed here long ago, sealing the route tight with a curtain of heavy scrap.
Out of luck. Dead end.
They were trapped.
The two beasts slowed as they entered the clearing behind them. They didn't rush. They split, one moving left, one moving right, flanking their prey. Their snouts twitched, dripping thick saliva that sizzled faintly when it hit the rusted metal below. They knew they had won.
The boy stopped running. He turned to face them.
He stood with his back to the wall of chains, his chest heaving. He raised his ruined hands, gripping the length of steel chain he had carried with him from the box. It was a suicide stance. He was done running. He was preparing to die, but he was going to make it expensive for them.
Jyoti's breath hitched. She looked around frantically, her eyes scanning the towering walls of refuse, scanning for anything that wasn't a claw or a tooth.
Her eyes darted up.
Directly above the narrow choke point where the beasts were converging, a massive, shapeless load of compressed scrap hung suspended. It was held by a single, rusted retention pin, a remnant of a failed cargo lash that had snapped decades ago. The load was groaning, swaying slightly in the draft. The pin was stressed, bent at an agonized angle.
She didn't shout. She didn't have time to explain the physics of the trap. She just moved.
She sprinted not away from the beasts, but toward the wall, scrambling up a pile of crushed boxes to reach the height of the pin.
The boy saw her trajectory.
In that split second, a silent communication passed between them. It wasn't trust—it was tactical recognition. He saw the pin. He saw the beasts. He saw the geometry of the kill.
He didn't question it. He stepped forward, away from the partial safety of the chain wall, exposing his throat. He dropped his hands slightly. He made himself small. He made himself look like food.
It was the bait.
The beasts took it. The primal instinct to kill overrode their caution. They lunged, their powerful hind legs driving them forward into the kill zone, their eyes locked on the boy's pale throat.
Jyoti reached the pin. Up close, the metal was cancerous with rust. She didn't have a pry bar, but she had gravity. She grabbed the pin, anchoring her grip on the dying steel. Then, she moved.
She used her whole body. A surge of her newfound strength pushed her up, and she came down hard—latching onto the heavy scrap and driving her boots into the joint like a piston.
It didn't struggle. The metal gave way instantly, breaking off clean as if it was meant to fall.
CLANG.
The metal screamed. Sparks showered down like fireworks.
The load dropped.
Time seemed to stutter. The beasts froze. They looked up, sensing the sudden shift in air pressure, the heavy, roaring wind of falling death.
The scrap didn't land between them. It landed on them.
One beast was erased. Crushed instantly into wet paste under the tonnage. The other tried to scramble, claws skittering on the iron floor, but it was too slow. The steel edge clipped it.
CRUNCH.
A hind leg, severed clean.
The impact shook the world. Dust exploded outwards, blinding and choking. Through the grey haze, a sound tore the air. Not a roar. A shriek. High, wet, and filled with agony. The survivor thrashed in the ruin, spewing black blood.
Jyoti rode the collapse down. She landed hard on the top of the fallen mountain, metal groaning under her feet.
She looked down.
A nightmare. The severed beast lay twitching on the floor plates, a black, wet stump leaking onto the rust. The survivor was screaming, thrashing against the weight that pinned its packmate.
She didn't freeze. She vaulted off the scrap pile. She hit the floor hard, right next to the boy.
"Move," the boy's voice was a rough croak in the dust.
He grabbed Jyoti's shoulder—his grip surprisingly weak—and shoved her toward a dark fissure in the wall of crates, a crawlspace barely wide enough for a human.
They dived in, scrambling over sharp edges until they were deep in the shadows, hidden from the main thoroughfare.
Silence fell, heavy and sudden.
The only sound was the wet, rhythmic screeching of the maimed beast echoing in the cavern and the rasp of their own breathing.
The hiding spot was tight, a claustrophobic pocket of air that smelled of ancient rust and fresh sweat. They were pressed close together, forced into intimacy by the crushing weight of the refuse around them.
The boy slumped against the cold metal wall of a crushed box. He slid down until he was sitting, his legs sprawled out. He held his hands in front of him, floating in the dark.
Jyoti wiped grit from her mouth, spitting out the taste of ash. Her heart was still hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She looked at him—really looked at him—for the first time since the box broke.
Up close, he was terrifying.
He was painfully thin, his collarbones sharp enough to cut skin. His silver hair was matted with grime and blood, but the glow was undeniably real. It was faint, pulsing under his skin like a bioluminescent vein, casting a sickly, spectral light on the bent steel walls.
But it was his hands that drew her eyes.
They were the hands she had seen him ruin moments ago. The thumbs were destroyed—snapped by the torque of the chain he had used to free himself. They were purple, swollen to twice their size, and bent at nauseating angles. The skin was torn where the steel links had bitten into him. He stared at them with a clinical detachment, as if they were tools that had malfunctioned rather than parts of his own body.
"You're fast for a corpse," Jyoti whispered. Her voice was raspy, trembling. She tried for a grin, a spark of banter to cut the suffocating tension. She needed him to say something. She needed him to be human.
The boy didn't look up. He didn't blink.
He carefully placed his right hand on his knee, positioning the dislocated joint. He took a breath, held it, and then pressed down.
There was a wet, sickening pop as the bone ground back into the socket.
The sound was small, but in the silence, it was louder than the roar of the Alpha.
He didn't scream. He didn't gasp. A single bead of sweat rolled down his temple, cutting a clean line through the dirt on his face. He exhaled a sharp hiss through his nose, his jaw tightening until the muscles stood out like cords. Then, with the same horrifying calm, he switched hands. He didn't hesitate. He knew the pain was coming, and he walked right into it.
Snap.
The second thumb slid back into place.
Jyoti flinched. Her stomach churned. She pressed her back harder against the metal wall, putting as much distance between them as the small space allowed.
He ignored her completely. No nod. No acknowledgment of the save. No 'thank you' for the trap that had kept them from being eaten alive. He wiped his bloody hands on his shredded pants and leaned his head back against the rusted plate, closing his eyes. He was already calculating the next variable, the next escape, the next cost.
Jyoti felt a chill that had nothing to do with the damp air or the cold steel of the boxes. It settled deep in her gut.
She watched the faint silver glow pulsing in his veins. She realized then that she hadn't saved a victim. She hadn't rescued a helpless boy from the monsters.
She had trapped herself in a box with a predator. And he was hungry.