The second birth was less traumatic than the first. Not because it hurt less, the tearing of the membrane still felt like peeling off a layer of sunburned skin, but because the panic was gone.
Panic is a variable. It skews data. It wastes calories.
Grigor slid from the sack, hitting the wet stone with a slap that sounded obscenely loud in the quiet between screams. He didn't scramble. He didn't gasp for air. He simply crouched, knees pressed against his chest, and waited.
The amniotic fluid drained from his lungs in a series of wet, hacking coughs that left him rattling like a consumptive—what he imagined tuberculosis patients must have felt before the sanitariums, lungs heavy with things that shouldn't be there, each breath a negotiation with drowning. It tasted like seawater filtered through a slaughterhouse. Salty. Metallic. Faintly sweet in a way that made his stomach clench.
'Breathe. Sample. Analyze.'
The air here was different. The metallic tang of the last place was heavier, but beneath it lay something sharper. Something that stung the back of the throat like a swallowed battery.
'Sulfur.' High concentration. Volcanic origin. Combustible.
And something else. A sour, biting scent rising from the mist below.
'Acid.'
Grigor opened his eyes. The world was a blur of grey fog and bioluminescent slime, but his brain wasn't seeing shapes anymore. It was seeing a crime scene.
He looked at his hands. New skin. Pale, translucent, unscarred. The body was a fresh canvas, reset by Hell's twisted economy. But the mind... the mind was still dirty.
'Good,' he thought. 'Clean is for the dead.'
He stood up. The vertigo hit him—a momentary spin as his inner ear calibrated to gravity—but he pushed it down. His muscles remembered the stance even if the flesh was new. Muscle memory was not stored in the flesh, apparently. One more data point.
The ledge stretched before him, a narrow spine of volcanic rock slick with condensation and something that might have been mucus. Above, the Birthing Sacks hung like obscene, blasphemous fruits, their bioluminescent glow casting everything in shades of corpse-blue. Below, the mist churned. Things moved in it. Things that didn't need to breathe.
They had eaten him. The Butcher, Kiv. The fetid woman named Bruna. The boy. They had processed him like livestock.
That was a mistake.
If you kill a man, you end him. If you eat him and let him respawn with his memories intact, you haven't disposed of the evidence. You've just given the witness a chance to review the case file.
Grigor began to walk. Not blindly this time. He moved with the slow, deliberate pace of an investigator walking a grid. Left foot, right foot. Two-second pauses between steps. Eyes scanning the ground in overlapping arcs.
'First priority: weapons. Second priority: concealment. Third priority: intel on their patrol patterns.'
He stopped at a patch of yellow crust accumulating on the side of a thermal vent. The vent hissed softly, exhaling heat that felt almost pleasant against his new skin. He scraped a fingernail across the crust, bringing the powder to his nose.
'Rotten eggs. Brimstone.'
Sulfur. Pure elemental sulfur. Flammable. Reactive. Melting point: 239 degrees Fahrenheit. Ignition point: 450.
He scraped a handful of the crystals into his palm, closing his fist around them. The powder was gritty, slightly warm. It wasn't a weapon, not yet. It was an ingredient. Every bomb started as a shopping list.
'Mix with an oxidizer and you get combustion. Mix with acid and you get sulfuric. Mix with nothing and you still have a blinding agent.'
He moved on.
Ten meters down the ledge, a pool of green liquid had gathered in a depression in the red rock. It steamed slightly in the cool air, wisps of vapor curling upward like slow-motion smoke. The smell was sharp enough to make his eyes water. Concentrated, like smelling hot vinegar.
Someone else had stumbled too close. Its foot was dissolving.
Not like ice melting. Like meat stewing. The flesh bubbled and sloughed in wet chunks, revealing the yellowed bone beneath. Fat rendered and ran in greasy rivulets. The tendons snapped one by one, each with a sound like wet string pulled taut. The ankle gave way entirely and the foot stayed where it was, floating in the green pool like discarded offal while the stump continued to hiss and spit.
The person didn't scream. It just stared at its own liquefaction with a dull incomprehension.
Its mouth opened and closed. No words. Just the wet clicking of a tongue that had already forgotten language.
Grigor watched. He didn't help. He timed the reaction.
'Thirty seconds to liquefy dermis. Sixty for muscle tissue. Bone remains intact. pH somewhere between 1 and 2. Stronger than stomach acid.'
'Hydrochloric acid?' Or perhaps something biological. A gastric secretion from this place itself. The distinction was academic.
It didn't matter what it was. It mattered what it did.
Resources.
Except for the flesh, Hell was just chemistry. And chemistry obeyed laws. Even here.
He found a shard of black glass, obsidian, formed by the heat of the vents, near the pool. Sharp. Brittle. The edge caught the bioluminescent light like a razor blade dipped in ink. He tested it against his thumb. A thin line of red welled up immediately.
'Good edge retention. Brittle, so no parrying. Stab or slash, commit fully, discard after.'
He found dried moss clinging to the rock. It was blood-red, the color of rust and old wounds. When he pinched it, it crumbled between his fingers like charred paper, releasing a smell that made no sense: ash. Cold ash, like a dead fireplace. He wrapped the dull end of the shard with it, testing the grip twice before he was satisfied.
He pocketed the shard.
Then he turned back to the acid pool. He needed a container.
The dissolving one had nothing useful on it. But it had a stomach.
Grigor looked at the body. Still breathing. Still blinking at nothing. The acid had climbed past the ankle now, working on the shin. In maybe three minutes it would reach the knee. In ten, the torso. The thing was dead already. It just hadn't received the memo.
'You need a container. It has one.'
He crouched beside it. The obsidian shard felt heavier than it should have.
'You've done autopsies. You've cleaned up after autopsies. You know where everything goes.'
But those had been corpses. Cold. Still. This one was warm. Its chest rose and fell. Its eyes tracked him with bovine blankness.
'It's practical. It's necessary. It's already dying.'
He cut.
The blade went in wrong. Too shallow. He had to press harder, sawing through the muscle wall with quick, ugly strokes. Blood welled up immediately—hot, obscenely hot against his new skin. It ran between his fingers in thick streams, filling the creases of his palm. The smell hit him next. Copper and salt and something worse, something intestinal, a sourness that belonged inside and was now outside.
The thing didn't scream. It just made a sound like a sigh.
Grigor's hands were shaking. He ignored them. He reached in, found the stomach—slick, smaller than he expected, like handling a water balloon filled with bile—and pulled. The connective tissue resisted, stretched, then tore with a wet sound that would follow him into his next death.
He emptied the contents onto the ground. Thin gruel. Half-digested something. He didn't look at it.
'You're already dead,' he thought at the body. 'You just haven't finished the paperwork.'
The stomach lining was slippery in his hands—fresh tissue, not leather, not cured. The blood made it worse. He scooped volcanic ash from the ground and rubbed it into the outer surface, grimacing as the grit cut into his palms. Better. A rough grip now.
He filled the pouch halfway from the green pool. Cinched the opening with a strip of torn tissue. The stomach didn't sizzle. Acid-resistant by biological necessity.
'Weapon acquired.'
It wasn't much. Against a man with a rebar hook, it was barely a start. But it was order. Order was the first step toward control. Control was the first step toward survival.
And hunger was the variable that would collapse everything.
His stomach cramped. Not loud. Not yet. Persistent. A reminder that this new body came pre-loaded with a caloric deficit. He hadn't eaten since Earth. Since the gas station burrito eight hours before Marcus Webb had introduced brass keys to his skull.
'Fourth priority: nutrition.'
The problem was obvious: he wasn't going to eat another human. Not knowingly. Not willingly. There had to be alternatives. Endemic fauna. Something that wasn't born from a Birthing Sack.
The chittering came from a crevice near the thermal vent.
Grigor froze. His hand found the obsidian shard. The sound was high-pitched, almost rhythmic. It sounded disturbingly like laughter.
A shape emerged from the shadows.
Black. It had the size of a small dog. Its fur was wrong—rigid, quill-like, more porcupine than mammal. Milky eyes swiveled blindly. A naked tail, pink and prehensile, whipped behind it. The creature's jaws opened, revealing a mouth overcrowded with iron-grey teeth that had no business fitting in that skull.
'Rodent. Unseen on Earth, a new species. Highly adapted. Probably apex vermin in this ecosystem.'
The rat lunged.
No warning. No posturing. Just violence, raw and immediate.
Grigor sidestepped, felt the quill-fur slice a line across his calf.
'Sharp, noted.'
He drove the obsidian shard down into the creature's spine. The glass penetrated. Crunched. The rat twisted, teeth snapping at his wrist, but the angle was wrong. The blade was in deep.
He pressed harder. The spine severed. The legs went slack.
The rat continued biting for another thirty seconds. Jaw working mechanically, like death was an administrative procedure that hadn't been filed yet.
Then it stopped.
Grigor exhaled. His calf burned where the quills had grazed it. Blood ran down his shin in thin rivulets. He looked down at his calf.
'Approximately twelve seconds of combat. Superficial laceration, possible foreign material in wound.'
'Still alive.'
And now, spread before him on the volcanic stone was meat. Three, maybe four kilograms of protein. Enough calories to stabilize his metabolism. Enough energy to keep moving.
He extracted the obsidian shard. Wiped it on the creature's coarse fur, slicing his palm slightly in the process. Then he began to carve.
'No fire. Raw consumption carries parasite risk, but so does starvation. Muscle tissue first. Avoid organs–liver and kidney accumulate toxins.'
The first bite was difficult. Not because of the taste. The meat was gamey, stringy, with an iron undertone—but because of what it represented. A line crossed. A regression from civilized eating to survival intake.
He swallowed.
The burning started immediately.
'What—'
His throat constricted. Not like an allergic reaction. Worse. The meat rejected him. He could feel it searing down his esophagus, hitting his stomach like molten lead.
He doubled over. Vomited. The rat meat came up streaked with blood—his blood, his stomach lining coming apart in real time.
'Toxic. The meat is TOXIC.'
The tremors hit next. His muscles locked in overlapping spasms. His vision fractured into prismatic shards. He heard the laughing-chittering of more rats somewhere in the mist—drawn by the blood, by the weakness, by the smell of something dying.
For sixteen minutes, Grigor Ash convulsed on the volcanic stone, experiencing organ failure in excruciating detail.
The pain gradually diminished.
He opened his eyes. His stomach still burned. His throat felt as if he had swallowed sand. His fingers, which had been clawing at the ground, lost their nails.
He looked at them. At the ground beneath. Ten little crescents of keratin lay scattered in the volcanic ash, each ringed with a dark smear of blood. His fingertips were raw meat, the nail beds pink and glistening.
'Almost died.'
But the worst was that the hunger still remained. Worse than before. A debt that had been compounded by the failed transaction.
He lay there, gasping, staring at the half-eaten rat carcass with new understanding.
'The fauna is incompatible. The meat of Hell's native creatures may be toxic to humans.'
Which left only one option.
'Them. The ones who ate me. The ones wearing skin. The monsters who herded and their livestock.'
'Only human meat works here. Fuck this place.'
The horror of that realization should have been crushing. It should have broken something fundamental in his psyche.
Instead, Grigor felt the cold clarity of an equation balancing.
'If I want to survive, I have to be what they are. A predator, not just in self-defense. A participant in the economy.'
He stood. Slowly. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
The rats that had gathered at the edge of the mist scattered, for some reason. He was no longer dying. He was considering his options.
'Not today. Not yet. But the math is clear. The math was always clear.'
He wiped the blood from his mouth and checked his inventory. The sulfur was intact. The acid pouch was secure on the ground next to his feet. The obsidian shard needed cleaning.
Tools. Not food.
The distinction suddenly felt very important.
---
Grigor stopped.
He saw it on the ground, five meters ahead. A splash of red against the grey stone.
Blood.
Not fresh. Tacky. Coagulating. Maybe twenty minutes old. The edges had already started to crust, but the center was still wet enough to reflect the pale glow from above.
He knelt beside it, his knees pressing into the cold stone. The spatter pattern was high velocity. Someone had been hit while moving. The drops were elongated, pointing down the ledge. Cast-off from a blunt weapon, based on the distribution. Swing arc suggested an overhead blow.
'Target was running. Fast.'
He measured the distance between the drops. Two meters. A full sprint.
'Barefoot. Light body weight. Female, probably. Under 60 kilograms.'
He leaned closer. The blood was mixed with something else. Something milky, viscous.
'Semen.'
His brain cataloged it without comment. This was evidence. Evidence didn't have emotion attached to it. Emotion contaminated analysis. The techs who got sick at crime scenes were the ones who made mistakes.
He had cleaned up after rape-murders before. The fluids were the same as any other organic compound. Protein. Enzymes. DNA.
'Irrelevant here. No forensic labs in Hell.'
Next to the blood, a clump of hair. Long. Blonde. Torn at the root. The follicles were still attached. Pulled, not cut. Force applied at an upward angle. Someone had been grabbed by the hair while falling.
And a fingernail, ripped from the bed. This made him look at his own nailless fingers.
'Someone tried to hold on.'
He followed the trail. Not footprints, but drag marks. Wide smears where a body had been pulled across stone. The spacing suggested two assailants. Maybe three. The drag pattern was uneven; they'd shifted their grip at least twice.
Something caught his eye near the drag marks. A boot print. Not bare feet, not wrapped cloth—an actual boot. The sole pattern was uniform. Manufactured.
And beside it, an impression in the ash: a cylinder, set down and picked up again. Brass fittings at one end. Pressure gauge, maybe. The kind of precise engineering that didn't match the sharpened bones and rusted pipes he'd seen the Dregs carrying.
'Someone here has access to real tools. Industry. Infrastructure.'
He filed the anomaly. The scavengers who had eaten him used bones, their teeth and fingernails. These hunters were equipped.
'Struggling. Still conscious at this point.'
The smell changed.
Iron, yes. Ammonia—someone had pissed themselves. Fear response. Involuntary. And something else. Sharp. Chemical.
'Bleach?'
Faint, but present. The kind of industrial bleach used to sanitize surfaces. Or mark territory. Or... livestock.
'Branding solution,' he realized. Someone was being processed.
Livestock. Property. The specifics didn't matter; the pattern was universal. Every economy had a supply chain.
'Not my problem,' Grigor thought. 'Dead is dead. They'll use her or they won't. I don't have the resources for heroism. Heroism is expensive. Heroism gets you eaten.'
He had been eaten. He remembered the sound of his own tendons being chewed.
'Lesson learned.'
He almost walked away.
His feet were already turning when the sound reached him. Distant at first, then sharper. Human. Female. Raw.
Not a cry for help. Something beyond that. The kind of scream that came from a throat that had already given up on words.
Screaming.
'Thirty meters. Maybe forty. Echoes make it hard to judge.'
His feet stopped.