"No," I whisper. "Don't say that. Don't say my number."
The words scrape out of my throat like I'm coughing up nails.
Marcus' voice shifts—lower, careful, afraid that if he speaks too loudly, he'll lose me. All the edges of battlefield command wrapped in something that might be fear. "Lily… snap out of it. Now is not the time! We've all got secrets."
I don't answer.
Because I don't have a clean answer, I don't even know what Lily's secrets are.
Because the pieces I do have are jagged and bloody and stitched into me with someone else's hands.
Before I can even try, Pod 04 bursts open with a crack like splitting stone.
Another creature spills out—this one shrieking, wild, still half-wrapped in the broken harness meant to hold it sedated. Frost steams off its skin. Its movements are sharper, quicker, and more coordinated than they should be at this stage of thaw.
Shale moves.
Not at me.
Past me.
She shoves off the floor with a horrible, grinding sound from its joints, mutated feet gouging the metal. The second creature launches itself forward—not toward Marcus, not toward the sound of gunfire.
Toward Eli's pod.
"NO!" I scream, throwing myself after it.
But E. Shale hits it first.
The two collide with a crunch of bone and ice. The impact echoes through the chamber like a car crash in a freezer. Frost explodes around them, a white halo of shattered crystals. The second monster's claws rake deep into E. Shale's torso, ripping meat away like wet paper.
Shale doesn't scream.
She holds.
Pushes.
Shale forces the other infected back, away from us, away from Eli, away from the glowing, fragile coffin that is the last safe place for that boy.
"Lyth… three…" it rasps, voice shredding. "Run…"
I stagger, torn in half between the urge to fight and the urge to listen. The part of Lily that continues to live in this body, and remembers Lantern protocol, wants to argue, wants to say operatives don't retreat, and intends to stand her ground.
The part of me that is just a girl in a stolen body wants to grab Eli and run until my lungs burst.
Marcus grabs my arm. His fingers bite into my jacket. "Lily, we need to move. Now."
"Eli—"
"We move the pod."
He's right. He's absolutely right.
Behind us, Pod 05's infected thing charges into the struggle, smashing into both of the other creatures. Limbs snap. Something tears with a wet, ripping sound. Blackened, half-frozen blood spatters the wall in ugly arcs.
Shale's arm rips free at the shoulder, dangling by a strip of skin before tearing loose. The severed limb drops to the floor with a dull thud.
She doesn't scream. It is like there's still a soldier behind them, an operative under all the rot.
"Lyth… three…
Protect…
the boy…"
Then Pod 05's monster crushes its skull with a blow that sounds like ice shattering under a hammer. The body jerks once and goes slack.
I bite down on a sound that might be a sob or a curse, and it feels like both.
"Lily." Marcus' voice snaps like a command. "Pod. Now!"
We sprint to Eli's unit.
Up close, the pod's design is suddenly vivid. "There you are..." I welcome my sister to the fight with a mental hug.
She whispers, "Lantern-tech. I remember this."
My brain catalogs it automatically: reinforced frame, gimbal-mounted suspension cradle, shock-absorbing gel lining, internal gyros, sealed coolant loop, independent battery core. A portable cryo unit, not just a wall ornament.
"Transfer casters," I mutter, fingers finding the recessed panel at the base. "Come on, come on—"
A memory flashes—hands, smaller and steadier, flipping the same latch in a bright training bay, an instructor saying, Again, Lyth-3. Faster this time. Patients don't wait for you to get it right.
I snap the release.
The pod shudders as the old transfer casters unlock and extend with a mechanical clunk.
"Get under the back end," I say. "It'll tilt when it breaks seal."
"On it," Marcus answers, already moving.
We wrench the pod off its housing.
Metal shrieks as the docking clamps release. The unit lurches forward on its newly freed casters. For a heartbeat, it tilts, and my heart jumps into my throat—but the internal suspension cradle does its job. Eli's body floats in the harness, cushioned in gel, neutrally buoyant.
The frost-web over the interior glass fractures delicately but holds.
"Keep it level," I snap, grabbing one side handle, bracing my legs.
"You keep it level," Marcus grits out, shoulders straining as he takes most of the weight. "You're the one who dragged us into a zombie freezer."
"INFECTED." I correct him.
Actually, he's not wrong about one thing. I did pull us into this hellhole. But I don't tell him that.
"Symantics," he grumbles.
The casters rattle across the frost-slick floor, the pod's auto-stabilizers humming faintly—a Lantern feature I shouldn't remember, yet somehow do. Each jolt, each tilt, is swallowed by the gyros, keeping Eli perfectly centered.
Behind us, the infected tear into what's left of E. Shale. Our eyes linger briefly, "She was our friend," Lily says sadly. The sound of it burrows under my skin—the wet rips, the cracking bone, the animal snarls that don't belong in human throats.
We shove the pod toward the exit, my boots slipping on ice, Marcus swearing under his breath in a language I don't recognize and definitely wasn't meant for children's ears.
Something slams into the wall behind us again.
A pipe bursts overhead, spraying a jet of supercooled mist. It burns where it touches my exposed skin, a sting of instant frostbite. I hiss and duck my head, shoving harder.
"Door, Lily!" Marcus barks.
The main cryo door looms ahead, heavy and reinforced, rimed with frost around the edges. Above it, the panel flashes angry red and orange, cycling through warnings faster than I can read them.
I slam my palm against the manual release.
Nothing happens.
Of course it doesn't.
"Backup," I mutter, scanning the frame. Lantern-designed cryo doors always include redundancies—they never rely on just one system. My gaze catches on the emergency crank half-buried in ice.
"There," I point. "Left side. Old-school."
Marcus shoulders the pod for a second, grabs the crank with both hands, and grunts as he forces it to move. The metal protests, screaming like a dying animal, but the inches start to shift.
The door jars, then begins to slide open agonizingly slowly.
Something roars behind us.
I don't look.
If I look, I'll see my friend's body, what's left of it. I'll see the animals that were once people finishing what they started.
"Faster," I hiss.
"Tell the eighty-year-old crank to work out more," Marcus snarls, veins standing out in his neck. "This is what you get for hiding in pre-war basements."
The gap widens.
Cold, stale air from the corridor beyond rushes in, swirling with the cryo fog. The temperature difference makes the frost on the floor crack and pop under our boots.
"Go," Marcus snaps. "Get him through."
We angle the pod and shove. The casters catch on the lip of the threshold, then bounce over with a jolt that makes my heart seize. Eli's form shifts slightly inside, but the harness and suspension do their job; he doesn't slam into anything.
I drag the pod into the hallway, muscles screaming. Marcus backs through after me, still holding the crank until he can let it go and squeeze past as the door groans wider.
The chamber's noise dims behind us. The sirens are muffled now, more distant, like a nightmare behind a thick wall.
But one sound cuts through anyway—
My old designation, buried under alarms and howls and tearing metal, echoing out of the cryo room like a curse:
"Lyth… three…"
It doesn't come from a mouth this time. It comes from my own memory, from somewhere deep and cold and sealed off.
This time, I do what I never did while wearing that designation.
I run.
We push Eli's pod down the corridor, its stabilizers humming, wheels squealing, and I don't look back.
At least not yet.