The sound came like some metal tearing in slow motion. It wasn't a rumble, not a boom, it was more like the world was coughing up something that it had swallowed whole. The hideout's rafters creaked, and it rained dust. And a weird, high-pitched keening managed to thread through it all. It was a sound that not only made the hair on my arms stand up, it also made my stomach want to run somewhere with better lights.
"Eliana," I said, which was a useful but obvious observation.
She didn't answer. She just moved. Fast, and her silhouette blurred. All hard edges and intent. The lantern shadows seemed to lean in the direction that she went. It was like even light was curious but afraid.
"We need to move," she said, not loud. It was too calm for the parts of me that had practiced panic for a living.
"Move where?" I asked, my voice coming out squeakier than my ego would allow.
"Outside. Now!" She responded, as she grabbed a satchel, slung it on, and shoved a compact into my hands. It was one of those little devices that hummed like a trapped bee.
"It's a beacon," she said. "If we were to ever get separated, just slam it. I'll find you."
I looked at it like it was some live grenade, then asked, "are you sure that's a good idea?"
"It's better than being eaten."
"Fair enough." I said, calmly.
We burst out into the training hall, and oh, did the place smell like iron and old paper, and a kind of ozone that tasted like someone had microwaved lightning. There were steel racks lined on the walls, and as the dying lanterns flickered, the shadows looked wrong. They looked longer and wetter. It was as if they were made of ink.
The far end of the hall—the exit—wasn't an exit anymore. It was a seam: a ribbon of dull black light that crawled along the concrete like spilled oil. It pulsed, and with each beat, a tendril reached outward and then retreated, tasting the air as if it was a blind thing groping for warmth.
Riftlings.
Not the little shit-ones from before. These ones were thicker, and sort of smarter. Their forms were wrong in that "nature didn't make these" kind of way. There were joints at impossible angles, mouths where elbows should be, and eyes like coin slits that reflected nothing.
Eliana moved in front of me without hesitation. Her blade already in her hand. She didn't look afraid, she looked furious in that focused, ancient way that suggested a long, ugly history with whatever was trying to get into our world.
"Stay close," she ordered.
"Which is code for 'I trust you not to trip on your own feet,' right?" I said.
She didn't smile. I took that as a win.
The Riftlings surged like waves. They slipped through the seam and exploded into the hall, silent as knives. Up close, the smell hit bad—sour, like rotten citrus and metal, making my stomach pitch.
The first one lunged at Eliana, but she met it clean. One slice at the neck, and it dissolved into a mist of black ash. Her moves were precise and cruel. It was like she'd mapped every possible angle of death and preferred the efficient ones.
Another dove right at me. I did the mature thing: shrieked. Then I threw my arms out, because apparently melee combat was now a group activity. Then something in my chest buzzed. The mark under my shirt, it burned, and heat crawled across my ribs. Then, like an idiot rocket, I pushed.
As I pushed, a burst of light punched out from my palms and slammed into the creature. It jerked, howled, and then evaporated into writhing smoke.
Holy crap.
Eliana cut down two more as if nothing had happened, then whipped around, setting her eyes on me.
"You used energy," she said. It was not a question.
"I panicked and did a thing," I said honestly. "And who would've thought, it worked."
"It worked," she agreed. "But the seal is unstable. You can't keep blasting like that, you'll burn out something. Your lungs, maybe your core, or your—"
"My social life?" I offered.
She shot me a look that I'm sure could freeze lava, and said simply, "focus."
We pressed deeper into the hall, and with every step, a negotiation with the dark. Riftlings were now spilling in steady from the seam. Cruel waves, and each skirmish bleeding the walls in shadows.
The training floor became a battlefield. One second, I was trying to remember the stance steps my training master—or I guess, mistress—taught me, and the next, I was slamming a beam at a creature and praying physics hadn't handed in its resignation.
At some point, while fighting, I realized my punches were faster. Reflexes that should not have belonged to the me-of-three-weeks-ago suddenly did. My hands moved, blocked, feinted… reacting not to thought, but to a physical memory that wasn't mine. It was like the seal had turned on a muscle that I never knew existed.
Eliana's breaths were shallow. Her blade was flashing too much for one human to keep up with for so long. She hacked, and threw, and slashed, with a hunger I'd only seen when she was endangered. For a terrifying second, she took a hit. One of the Riftlings' claws raked across her thigh and blood bloomed like it was ink on paper.
"Shit!" I said.
She didn't stop. She never stopped. She limped, slightly now, and her breathing hitched.
"You okay?" I called, with my voice thinner than I wanted.
She looked at the wound, then at me. And for a fraction of a second, the world narrowed so hard that all I could see was her face.
"Keep moving," she said.
Then we backed toward a side exit I hadn't noticed before. It was a narrow shaft that led up. The syncing of our steps felt less awkward now, it was more like a practiced motion. Maybe it was the fear, maybe it was proximity, maybe I was finally learning to move without decorative commentary.
We were only halfway up when the seam widened. The thing pushing through wasn't a Riftling. It pushed through like someone unzipping the world for the express line.
A shadow which was the size of a car slid into the hall. It didn't look much like a body. It was more of an absence, shaped into teeth and bone. Every creature in the area went silent and turned to it like as a cult to a prophet.
Eliana froze.
I froze too. Because it turned its head—if you could call it that—and then, it looked straight at me.
"Conduit," it said, with a wreck of a voice. It was not a roar. Not human. And mistakes were not allowed in its speech. It knew me, knew my mark, and it knew the word.
I can't explain how seeing an entity that can pronounce your fate makes your stomach flip. It felt like someone reading the table of contents to my life, and deciding which chapters to burn.
Then it moved. Slow. Mocking. And then reached a tendril out toward me, which made the hair on my arms rise.
Eliana stepped in front of me, probably to shield me. She spread her arms, and for once there was no sass, no sarcasm. Nothing but flat terror braided with a fierce will to protect.
"Stay behind me," she ordered.
"Again with the protective heroism?" I muttered. "It's tiring."
She ignored me. And this time, for reasons beyond my charm.
Then, the tendril touched my chest.
It was cold. Colder than anything I'd felt. I felt the world contract, like a large fist around my ribs, and my mark stung. The device in my pocket, the beacon I'd sworn never to press unless it was my last resort, buzzed like a trapped insect.
Then, somewhere behind the crawl of fear, something in me responded. Not a conscious choice. It was a thrum, a answering note in a vast mechanical orchestra. The mark pulsed, and light crawled along the tendril, making it suddenly bright enough to sting.
The thing recoiled as if it was slapped, and its tendril shriveled. The hall echoed with a keening that was almost—almost—like pain.
"Eliana," it said slowly, with a sound that tasted like iron. "Your vessel tastes of old wars."
She barred her teeth, pulled her blade, and charged.
The battle became chaotic, as opposed to the efficient slicing we'd seen earlier. The entity threw the room's balance off. Gravity felt wrong in odd pockets, light stuttered, and sound fractured. Riftlings were swarming the periphery again, and for a whole minute, it was every person for themselves.
I found myself in the thick of it, just trying to survive. Reflexes that I couldn't explain pulled a broken pipe and slammed it against the creature's side, causing it to stagger. Eliana seized the moment and drove her blade deep. But when she pulled it out, a spray of black mist erupted from where a heart should be.
She screamed.
It wasn't a small cry, as it tore at the hideout like a wind ripping a page from a book. My ears rang, and the world narrowed.
I moved. I couldn't not move. My hands found her, then the mark, then the seam of the world that was still bleeding out shadows. The seal glowed, and my chest burned with a new intensity. It was not just panic, not just survival. It was something older.
I thrust my hands forward. Not outward, not a blast, but a pillar of light that reached like a spear into the entity, and it hit something hard. There was a sound, like glass shattering and then—
Silence.
The entity convulsed, righted, and then, impossibly, retreated. It folded back into its seam like a thing being sucked back home. The Riftlings fled after it, like a tide obeying an unspoken current.
We stood there in the wreckage, as smoke and ash floated like lazy moths. The floor was a ruin of gouges and scorch marks. Eliana leaned against a pillar, her chest heaving, as she clutched her side where the blood had soaked through leather.
"Milano," she said finally, her voice ragged. "You used it. You used it in a way I didn't expect."
"I panicked and hoped for the best," I said, unable to hide the tremor. "Also, I may have broken something."
She looked at me. Her eyes raw, and for the first time, openly frightened.
"You should not be able to do that," she said. "Not yet."
"Not yet?" My laugh was a little more than a broken sound. "Am I supposed to wait for some manual?"
"You are a Conduit," she said slowly. "But you're different. I mean, the Veil responded to you as if to a—"
She swallowed. The look in her face told me the rest without words: a wrongness. A potential.
"We need to leave now," she rasped. "They'll regroup, and whoever pushed the Veil tonight was just testing us. They'll come back. Bigger."
I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to demand answers. I wanted to know who had the balls to poke the Veil with something the size of a Buick.
Instead, we limped—careful, wounded, still breathing, toward the hidden tunnel that led to the surface.
The city outside waited with its broken sky and sick light.
As we moved, I caught sight of my hands. They trembled slightly, and the mark on my chest, a faint ember under the skin, danced like a tiny sun.
"Eliana?" I whispered.
She glanced back with an unreadable expression.
"We can't run forever," she said quietly. "But for now, you lived, and that's a start."
The city howled. The Veil sighed. And in the seams between one heart and the next, something very old took notice.