The scientist-thing takes another step forward, skin peeling wetly from bone, lab coat hanging in ribbons like someone tried to wash a ghost and wring it out wrong.
The stink hits the back of my throat—chemical rot, infection, metal, and something sour-sweet that makes my vision pinch. It smells like a morgue and a lab fire had a baby.
My hand goes to the handle of my blade automatically.
Behind me, Eli sleeps inside the pod, breath slowing as the cryo systems swallow him. Frost crawls over the glass like white vines, tracing delicate patterns over his small face. The pod hums with a low, steady vibration I can feel through the soles of my boots—self-contained life support, its own little coffin with an internal power core meant to keep him frozen even if the central systems die.
I can't let anything get near him.
Anything.
The creature lifts its head, and the neck cracks like frozen branches.
Then—
A sound slips out of its ruined throat, a sandpaper drag of vocal cords half-melted.
"Li… li…"
My spine snaps straight.
"Lily?" I whisper, horror crawling through me like something with too many legs.
Its jaw hangs at a crooked angle, bone showing beneath the skin that clings like old candle wax. The badge on its chest swings with every uneven breath.
J. HARPER — CRYO DIVISION.
It was human once. A scientist. Maybe even someone Lily knew, my brain supplies—and I shove that thought away, because that Lily is gone and I'm the one stuck in her skin. Someone who opened the same vault door I just passed through. Someone who thought this room was safe.
"Don't you dare say her name," I murmur, grip tightening on the blade.
The creature takes another rattling breath.
Then it screams—
Not a roar.
Not a growl.
A name.
"E—liiiiii."
The sound rips through the chamber, bouncing off steel walls, vibrating the pod glass. The faint frost traceries over Eli's face shiver with the impact.
He doesn't stir; the cold has taken him too deep.
But I do.
I launch forward.
The scientist lunges at the same time, arms jerking out, fingers long and skeletal under sheets of sloughing skin.
I duck low, swipe my blade upward. A thick chunk of flesh—too soft, too warm—spins off and hits the ground with a wet slap.
It doesn't slow.
Of course it doesn't. Whatever's running this body isn't interested in nerve signals anymore.
I dodge sideways and slam into a control console—old plastic and metal bite into my shoulder. Lights stutter across the room, flickering from sterile white to sickly yellow. Somewhere behind me, I hear a beep. A hiss. A warning tone that's probably very important and completely useless.
Not good.
Not good at all.
The creature grabs the metal table Eli had been lying on and hurls it like it weighs nothing. The sound is bone-jarring, metal shrieking as it ricochets across the room and shatters a row of old sample trays. Glass and plastic explode outward, skittering across the floor.
"Jesus—okay, Harper, calm the hell down," I growl.
It doesn't.
It lunges again—faster this time. Wrong fast. Cryo-fast. Frozen muscle thawing in violent bursts, tendons snapping into motion like overloaded wires.
I roll under its reach, come up behind it, and slam my blade into the back of its knee. The limb buckles with a sickening crunch. Harper drops to one side, clawing at the floor, dragging itself toward Eli's pod with single-minded determination.
"No," I snarl. "No, you don't."
I sprint and kick it square in the ribs. Something cracks—ribs or half-frozen cartilage, I can't tell. It rolls onto its back; face angled toward the ceiling lights.
The eyes—what's left of them—lock onto me. Clouded, ruptured, filmed with frost. Still somehow focused.
"Li…lith…" it whispers.
My heartbeat stops.
You remember her, I almost ask, but the words slip out different, warped by the throat they're coming from.
"You remember her?" I choke. "You were part of Eden. Part of Lantern?"
The name tastes like rust on my tongue. Eden. Lantern. Words I shouldn't know as well as I do. Words that don't belong to the girl whose face I wear now, and still somehow fit her like a second skin.
Another hiss answers me.
But it's not from Harper.
It's from the far wall.
A pod.
Then another.
Then another.
The lights above the stasis line flicker, shifting from cold blue to something uglier—red bleeding into white. The whole row of units wakes up like a row of coffins remembering they were supposed to stay shut.
WARNING: POD 05—TEMPERATURE INSTABILITY.
WARNING: POD 04—SEAL COMPROMISED.
WARNING: POD 02—INTERIOR MOVEMENT DETECTED.
"Oh no," I breathe. "Lily. What the hell did you leave down here?"
A hand slams against the inside of Pod 02's frosted glass. The impact sends cracks spiderwebbing across the pane, spreading in jagged lines. Cryo glass is toughest from the outside—meant to hold pressure in—but from the inside, under thermal stress from something half-frozen thrashing against it?
It's already failing.
Harper laughs—gargled, wet, inhuman.
I whirl back toward him.
"Shut up," I snap, slicing downward—and the blade hits bone, scraping along skull. Harper shrieks, a thin, piercing sound, and latches onto my ankle with unnatural strength. Nails—more like claws now—dig into my skin through my pants.
Pain spikes. I slam down with my boot, wrench complimentary.
And then—
Footsteps. Rapid. Heavy. Familiar.
"Lily!"
Marcus.
The cryo door slams open behind me, alarms screaming louder in his wake, air pressure slapping cold wind across my back. He takes one look at me, at Eli frozen behind the glass, at Harper writhing on the floor—
And his face changes.
"What the—" He draws his weapon without finishing the thought. "Move!"
Pod 05 bursts open.
Cold vapor floods out like a tidal wave, flooding the floor in white fog. Something stumbles forward—something bigger than Harper, limbs stiff, hair frozen into jagged white filaments.
Marcus fires. One, two, three rounds. They burrow into the thing's chest, but the creature barely reacts, only turning its head toward the sound like it's trying to remember what bullets are.
"Marcus!" I shout. "They're waking up!"
"No shit!" he barks, backing toward me, tracking the thing with his gun. "What did you walk into?"
Another pod hisses.
Another crack.
Another shape pressing against the glass, hands smearing the frost from the inside.
Harper uses the chaos to drag itself closer to Eli's pod—closer to the boy suspended inside, closer to the fragile line of glass between them.
And the scientist screams his name again, louder, warped into something predatory:
"E—LIIIIII—"
I don't think. I don't breathe. I don't hesitate.
I leap.
My blade comes down full-force—
—and Harper's skull caves under it.
Bone gives with a hollow crack, like a dropped skull on tile. Freezing blood sprays across my arm, weirdly warm against the ambient cold. Harper spasms once, twice, then slumps sideways, jaw still locked in that impossible angle, hands finally going slack.
No time for relief.
CRACK.
Pod 02's glass splits wider, fissures glowing pale with the cold inside. A blue-gray hand punches through, fingers snapping off shards of ice as it claws at the edges. The cracking web spreads with each hit; the whole pane is under stress, the way cryo panes get after too many freeze-thaw cycles and not enough maintenance.
"Lily!" Marcus shouts. "We're out of time!"
"I know," I rasp.
I spin toward Eli's pod.
He's deeper in the freeze now, lashes rimed in white. His breath fogs the interior glass in slow, ghost-thin pulses. Every instinct says don't move him, and get him out now.
I press a hand to the pod. "Hang on, Eli."
Pod 05's monster lumbers fully into view. Not just big—densified. Bones thickened like someone reforged them out of ice and rage. Muscles jerk and seize in bursts as thawing nerves misfire.
Marcus empties another burst into its chest. "Why is it not going down?"
"They're half-thawed," I say, mouth dry. "They'll only get faster."
"Oh, good," he mutters. "I was worried today might be too easy."
Pod 04 groans, its seal failing with an ugly, tearing sound. Fog spills onto the floor, curling around our legs.
The creature in Pod 02 hauls itself free, smashing the rest of the glass outward. Shards scatter across the floor. It lands in a clumsy, heavy sprawl, then jerks upright, frost cracking off its skin like falling crystal shards.
"Lily…" Marcus grits out. "It's looking at you."
I feel it before I see it—the weight of its stare. I step away from Eli's pod, putting myself squarely between the creature and the child.
"Come on," I whisper. "Face me."
The thing tilts its head. Its eyes are cloudy, blind—or should be. But as it lifts its head, something in them clears, just a fraction, like memory boiling up through ice.
It inhales. The sound is ragged, broken. Skin splits along its cheeks with the effort, dark fluid oozing from the fractures.
Then its mouth opens.
"Li… lyth…"
Everything inside me goes still.
Marcus freezes, too. "What did it just call you?"
My tongue feels thick. My heart beats too hard and not at all.
"It's… nothing," I lie.
The creature's lab tag hangs from its chest, half-fused to ruined flesh by frozen blood and time. I squint through the flickering red lights, through the fog, through the part of my brain that doesn't want to see.
SHALE — LANTERN OPERATIVE.
My knees almost buckle.
Not nothing.
Not even close.
"Lyth…" it says again, more sure this time. "Lyth… three…"
My designation.
The one I buried.
The one I swore I'd never hear again.
And now, a dead operative is saying it in a cryo tomb under the earth.