The silence in the frozen lab was complete, a physical weight that seemed to muffle even the hum of the failing lights.
Nino and the three who remained with him—a woman named Hatch with a cybernetic eye, a young, muscular scout called Filir, and another grizzled veteran everyone called Grease—stood with their backs to each other, forming a rough square.
Nino's knuckles were turning bone-white.
He didn't notice the strain in his hands, the way his finger hugged the trigger guard of his rifle with a pressure that threatened to crack the polymer.
He didn't see the same rigid tension in Hatch's shoulders, the slight tremor in Filir's breath as it fogged in the air, or the way Grease's jaw worked as if chewing on something bitter.
His world had narrowed to the frozen pod before him, the empty face inside it, and the waiting mist beyond the hole in the wall.
He'd passed the shield to Gideon.
He'd accepted the role.
Now, in this tomb of frost and creeping dread, there was only the waiting.
Far above, nestled in a web of support girders with a clear sightline down the sub-level corridors, Cinder watched the feed from her V-Tech Anopheles drones through a retinal display.
The thermal outlines of the four figures in the lab glowed a steady, anxious orange-yellow against the deep blues and purples of the frozen machinery.
A faint, professional interest flickered in her chest.
Nino's suggestion to split the squad—the very tactic Gideon had refused to order—had been perfectly logical.
A textbook method to force a hunter to divide their attention, to create an opening.
The fact that she had forced the choice herself, turning their desperation into her game, was just… efficient.
Smart, she thought, the assessment cool and detached.
For a gutter rat.
He recognized the tactical necessity even if his boss couldn't stomach it.
I should commend him.
Not aloud, of course.
But internally, she awarded the older fighter a point for clear, unsentimental thinking.
This engagement would provide excellent data on the drones' crowd-control and psychological-warfare capabilities against a small, trapped unit.
Far better than chasing the three runners through the maze.
Gideon and his two chosen were irrelevant in the grand scheme; a minor variable already accounted for.
Her mission parameters, relayed from Blaze with that usual casual brutality, were clear: eliminate resistance, retrieve the asset—Tenn, and delete the nuisance—Arden.
Ash was more than capable of handling that end of things.
He was theatrical, sometimes insufferably so, but his skill was never in doubt.
He would corner the smart-mouthed strategist and the nervous engineer in some dead-end corridor, and that would be that.
The thought was a smooth, completed equation in her mind.
Unless something unexpected happens.
The thought surfaced, unbidden, from some rarely-accessed corner of her training.
It was the ghost of a contingency clause, the whisper of a briefing officer long ago: Always account for the variable.
Cinder's lip curled slightly behind her mask.
What unexpected thing?
The variables here were contained.
Ash was a Scorcher.
Arden was a talker.
Tenn was a prize wrapped in fragile skin.
The outcome was pre-ordained.
Which it won't, she assured herself.
She dismissed the phantom clause.
It was statistical noise.
Sentiment.
The kind of thing that made weaker operatives hesitate.
She didn't know it, but in the silent, frost-coated calculus of her mind, she had just raised a flag.
Not a bright, waving banner of warning, but a small, almost imperceptible marker—a point of unexamined assumption, a closed door she hadn't bothered to check the lock on.
In her world of clean executions and controlled data, the truly unexpected wasn't just improbable; it was considered illogical.
And in assuming its impossibility, she had just subtly, irrevocably, invited it in.
Her finger hovered over the drone command interface.
The four warm shapes in the lab below hadn't moved.
The game was ready to begin.
"So," her voice filtered through the drones, sweet and deadly as poisoned syrup, emanating from the very frost under their feet. "To those who are remaining... are you ready?"
In the lab, Nino's grip tightened further.
He still didn't notice.
All he heard was the question, and the vast, hungry silence that waited for their answer.
The tension in the frozen lab was a wire stretched to its breaking point, humming with silent strain.
Then, one by one, the dim emergency lights casting their weak, blue-tinged glow across the frost-rimed machinery began to die.
Pop.
A brittle, glassy sound from the corner by the frozen pods.
The light there winked out, plunging the Dolls into deeper shadow.
Another from above a workbench, its death rattle echoing off the icy metal.
The pool of illumination at Hatch's feet vanished.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
In rapid, deliberate succession, the remaining lights surrendered.
Not a power failure—a targeted execution.
Each demise was a small, final punctuation in the silence, until the last one flickered and died near the doorway.
Total darkness.
It wasn't the dark of a room at night.
This was an absolute, consuming void.
The kind of dark that pressed against the eyelids, that swallowed sound and dimension.
The cold, which had been a sharp presence, became the only landscape.
Nino heard Filir's sharp, stifled gasp to his left.
He heard the faint creak of Grease shifting his weight on his right.
He heard his own heartbeat, suddenly loud in the cavern of his ears.
Then, another sound.
Not from his team.
A faint, subliminal hum.
It was barely there, a vibration in the air more than a noise.
It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere—above, to the side, behind.
It was the sound of something small, precise, and utterly alien holding perfectly still in the air.
He strained, turning his head slowly, trying to pin it down.
Was it ahead?
No, it seemed to drift to the left.
He focused, and it seemed to fade, only to reappear as a faint buzz near his right ear.
It was maddening.
It was the sound of eyes he couldn't see.
On her perch, Cinder watched through the drones' multi-spectral lenses.
The world was a tapestry of vivid thermal signatures—four bright human-shaped blooms of orange and yellow against the deep blues and purples of the frozen lab.
The darkness was irrelevant to her.
It was, in fact, her preferred canvas.
She saw Nino's thermal outline move, a hand going to a pouch on his belt.
A flare.
Predictable.
A desperate attempt to reclaim the battlefield, to impose human rules of light and shadow on her game.
Too slow, she thought, her fingers dancing across the haptic interface.
With controlled, surgical precision, she directed two drones.
They dropped from their silent hover, their insectoid forms cutting through the absolute dark without a whisper.
One darted in, a barely-felt disturbance in the air, and struck the back of Hatch's knee with a calibrated impact—not to break, but to buckle.
She cried out, stumbling forward, breaking the tight square.
At the same instant, the second drone shot toward Nino's rising hand.
Nino had just pulled the flare pin, the ignition spark ready to hiss to life.
He felt a sudden, impossible brush against his knuckles—not an impact, but a swift, firm push, as if a strong, cold finger had flicked his wrist.
His grip faltered.
The unlit flare tumbled from his fingers, clattering uselessly across the frost-coated floor and rolling away into the black.
Cinder's voice bloomed in the darkness around them, light and chiding, emanating from the empty air between Nino and where the flare had vanished.
"...Oops."
A pause, letting the helplessness of the lost flare sink in.
"That's not legal in accordance with the rules of the game."
Before the words had finished echoing, chaos erupted.
Nino felt another swift, brushing contact against his shoulder—a tap, almost polite, that shoved him half a step to the side.
From his left, Grease grunted in surprise, then cursed as something he couldn't see slammed into his ribs, knocking the wind from him.
To his right, Filir yelped, a short, sharp sound cut off as he was seemingly tackled by nothing, his body hitting the floor with a heavy thud and a skid.
"Don't break formation!" Nino barked, his voice raw in the dark.
But it was too late.
They were already moving, reacting on primal instinct—swinging arms at empty air, shuffling backward, turning toward phantom threats.
The perfect, defensive square was shattered into four isolated points of panic, adrift in an invisible sea.
The hums seemed to multiply, circling them now, a soft, sinister chorus just at the edge of hearing.
They were being herded by ghosts.
Playthings for a hunter who didn't need light to see.
Nino stood his ground, rifle raised uselessly into the void, listening to the terrified, random movements of his team in the impenetrable dark.
The rules of the game, it seemed, were whatever Cinder said they were.
And the first rule was: you don't get to see what's coming for you.
Nino's breath plumed in the absolute dark, the only sign of his existence.
The random, panicked movements of his team had subsided into a tense, fearful stillness, broken only by the sound of their breathing and that faint, omnipresent hum.
They were listening, waiting for the next brush of the invisible, the next shove from the dark.
He had to probe.
He had to find a limit, a boundary to this game.
His voice cut through the silence, low and steady, aimed at the unseen master of the dark. "…What happens if we try to run for the exit?"
It was a simple question.
A soldier's question.
What's the penalty for breaking the perimeter?
The answer didn't come from a single direction.
It seemed to condense from the cold air itself, a voice of sweet, sinister syrup that coated his ears.
"Oh no," Cinder cooed, a smile audible in her tone. "You don't want to imagine."
The words hung, not as a threat, but as a statement of fact.
The implication was worse than a shouted warning.
It left the horror to their own minds, each conjuring a private, personal doom in the blackness.
Then, light returned. Not the harsh glare of the emergency lights, but something new.
From the four corners of the vast, frozen lab, a dim, sourceless glow began to seep into the space.
It was the color of weak tea, a jaundiced twilight that did not illuminate so much as it stained the darkness.
It fought with the mist that still coiled around the frozen pods and machinery, creating a hazy, shifting gloom.
The light was just enough to see shapes, but not details—to perceive the outline of a person, the bulk of a machine, but not the expression on a face or the make of a weapon.
Nino blinked, his eyes struggling to adjust.
He could see them now.
Four human outlines in the murk.
Hatch, a stocky silhouette to his left, crouched low.
Filir's wiry frame was a few paces ahead, turned partially away.
Grease's broader shape was on his right, back against a frost-coated console.
They were separated, disoriented, but present.
He did a quick, instinctive count.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
He started to relax, just a fraction.
They were all accounted for.
The game, whatever it was, would involve the four of them.
Then his eyes, tracing the outlines again, caught a discrepancy.
There was a fifth shadow.
It stood slightly apart, near the jagged hole in the wall where Arden had escaped.
It was human-shaped, roughly the same size as Filir, its edges blurred by the mist and the poor light.
It wasn't moving.
Just standing.
A cold finger traced Nino's spine.
He counted again, slowly.
Hatch.
Filir.
Grease.
Himself.
Four.
But the shapes in the gloom… there were five.
Before he could speak, Cinder's voice filtered through the lab, clinical and instructive.
"A simple puzzle to warm up. One of you is not who they seem. One is a… fabrication. A gift from me."
A beat of silence, letting the wrongness of the fifth shadow settle into their guts.
"All you have to do is choose who the fake is."
The rules unfolded with chilling simplicity.
"Each of you gets one shot. You will take turns. Name your target. If you are correct… the game progresses. If you are incorrect…" She left the consequence to the darkness between her words. "If you do not shoot—verbally or otherwise—within thirty seconds of your turn… you already know what will happen."
The implications crashed over them.
They were isolated by mist and poor light, unable to see each other's faces clearly, unable to verify an identity with a glance or a whispered word.
Trust was already the first casualty.
Now, it was the weapon.
And one of the shapes standing with them in the gloom was a lie, placed there by the woman in the dark.
A shot in the dark, with a friend's life as the potential cost.
Nino's gaze swept the four other outlines, his mind racing.
The fake wasn't just an enemy to find.
It was a wedge to drive between them, turning their fear and suspicion inward.
The game wasn't just about survival anymore.
It was about who they were willing to sacrifice to buy another thirty seconds of it.
"Nino," Cinder's voice chimed, sweet and final. "You first."
Before he could draw breath to protest, a soft, digital chime echoed in the lab, followed by her flat, emotionless count. "Thirty."
The number hung in the jaundiced gloom.
The pressure was immediate, a vise tightening around his temples.
His eyes darted to the five shadowy outlines in the mist.
The obvious choice was the one standing apart, near the broken wall.
The solitary silhouette that didn't belong to their original four.
It was the logical answer, the one a game-maker would plant to be easily found and eliminated.
But the cold pit in Nino's stomach screamed otherwise.
Cinder didn't do obvious.
Her entire method was misdirection—the shadow in the hall that wasn't her, the voice from the wrong wall, the drones they couldn't see.
This standalone shadow reeked of a red herring, a piece of bait placed to be snapped up by panicked, simplistic thinking.
"Twenty-two."
His finger, resting beside the trigger of his rifle, froze.
Sweat beaded on his brow, cold against his skin.
Trust the logic, or trust the gut-deep instinct honed by decades in the Junkyard's traps?
"Eighteen."
Time was sand in a broken hourglass.
He couldn't afford inaction.
He swung his rifle, not toward the isolated shadow, but centering his aim on the one closest to it—a blurry outline that might have been Grease.
"Talk!" Nino barked, his voice a whip-crack in the tense silence.
The shadow he aimed at shifted, and Grease's familiar, gravelly voice erupted, thick with panic and betrayal. "Hey! Why are you aiming at me?! Are you blind? That one is the obvious fake!"
An arm, a darker blur in the gloom, shot out, pointing emphatically across the lab.
Not toward the solitary shadow, but toward where the silhouette of Filir stood, tense and silent.
Nino's blood ran cold.
The accusation wasn't aimed at the obvious outsider.
It was aimed within their circle.
"Eleven."
Before he could process this, Hatch's shadow on his left moved abruptly.
Her voice, usually so steady, was sharp with a different kind of certainty. "No! Don't listen to him! That is the fake!" Her own arm pointed directly at the shadow that had just spoken—at Grease.
In that fractured second, as the accusations flew between the mist-shrouded forms, Nino's mind made a terrible, seamless leap.
They weren't all seeing the same scene.
The solitary shadow by the wall wasn't the universal "obvious" target.
Grease saw Filir as the fake.
Hatch saw Grease as the fake.
They were pointing at different silhouettes, operating from different realities.
Cinder wasn't just hiding a fake among them.
She was showing each of them a different fake.
The puzzle wasn't about finding the liar in the room.
It was about realizing they were all in different rooms, staring at different lies, while the real hunter watched them turn on each other's phantoms.
"Seven."
The countdown continued, relentless.
He had seven seconds to make a choice in a game where the board was different for every player.
"Three."
Cinder's voice was a merciless tick of the clock in the muffled gloom.
The number left no room for thought, only action.
The pressure of the silent, pointing shadows, the conflicting accusations, the gut-churning realization they were each seeing a different enemy—it all compressed into a single, unavoidable imperative in Nino's mind.
He had no choice.
His finger, already cold and stiff, tightened on the trigger.
He didn't aim at the solitary shadow, nor at Grease's accusing outline, nor at the one Hatch had condemned.
He pulled the trigger.
The blast was shockingly loud in the confined, misty space, a flat, brutal CRACK that should have been the period at the end of the sentence.
But they never heard the bullet strike.
They never saw where it went.
Before the ringing report could even begin to fade, the world dissolved into violence.
It began as a deep, intestinal rumble that climbed from the foundations into their feet, a vibration so profound it felt like the planet itself was shuddering.
Then the sound arrived—a god's fist slamming into the spine of the building.
A colossal, shearing explosion tore through the sub-levels, a symphony of failing steel, shattering concrete, and collapsing floors.
The lab didn't just shake, it jumped.
The floor seemed to kick upwards, throwing Nino from his feet.
His rifle was torn from his hands, clattering away into the suddenly chaotic dark.
The frozen console he'd leaned against tore free from its bolts with a shriek of tortured metal.
Hatch's silhouette vanished as a section of the ceiling directly above her pancaked down in an avalanche of rubble and ice.
The jaundiced lights died instantly, plunging them back into absolute, choking blackness filled with the roar of destruction and the sharp, deadly music of falling debris.
Dust, thick and suffocating, blasted through the space, filling lungs and stinging eyes.
The game, the shadows, the countdown—all of it was erased in a single, apocalyptic instant.
Far above, in her perch, Cinder's retinal display flickered with distortion from the shockwave.
The drone feeds stuttered, thermal outlines breaking into pixelated chaos.
A frown touched her lips behind her mask, not of concern for the structural integrity, but of pure, professional irritation.
As the initial cataclysm subsided into a deep, groaning aftershock and a rain of smaller debris, her voice was a dry, annoyed whisper to herself, perfectly audible over the private comms to no one.
"That damn Ash," she sighed, the words laced with exasperation. "Getting far too enthusiastic in his hunting."
She assumed, logically, that the earth-shaking disturbance was his handiwork—some overzealous application of fire or force in his pursuit of Arden and Tenn.
A variable causing inconvenient collateral damage to her controlled experiment below.
She recalibrated her drones, waiting for the dust to settle in her digital eyes, ready to re-establish her game on a now even more treacherous board.
She had no idea the tremor had come from somewhere else entirely.
That the variable wasn't Ash.
It was the weapon he had unknowingly created, now turning on him with a force that could shake foundations.