The pressure in Grigor's chest was no longer a whisper.
It was a pulse.
He counted it like a heartbeat: one-two, one-two. Except it wasn't synchronized with his actual heart. It was slower, deeper, as if something behind his ribs was breathing on a different rhythm.
The sensation had been faint after Soren's pack retreated, barely noticeable under the adrenaline comedown. Now it drummed against his sternum like a second organ demanding attention.
'Clean it,' the voice murmured. 'Clean it.'
"Shut up," he whispered to nothing.
His knee screamed with each step. The scree had torn something in there, not dislocated, probably just ligament damage. His forearm throbbed where Milo's bone-blade had opened a shallow furrow. The blood had clotted into a tacky brown crust that pulled with every movement.
He needed to move. Staying still in the Hatcheries was suicide. Soren had retreated, but Soren wasn't the only predator down here.
The air tasted of sulfur and amniotic brine, that signature stench that coated the lungs like oil. The constant background noise of drowning screams had become almost ignorable, which disturbed him more than the screams themselves. Adaptation. The human brain's most dangerous feature.
He limped toward a cluster of deflated Birthing Sacks, old ones, long-ruptured, their membranes hanging like shed snakeskin from support structures that might have once been ribs. Good cover. Poor visibility. Acceptable trade-off.
And then he heard voices.
---
Not screaming. Not the desperate gurgling of the Sack-Drowned.
'Conversation.'
Grigor froze mid-step. His analytical mind cataloged the impossibility: casual dialogue, in this place, spoken at a volume that suggested the speakers feared nothing. Three distinct voices, maybe four. One clipped and nervous. One dry and sardonic. One reverent, almost worshipful. And beneath them all—
Silence. A fourth presence that didn't speak but commanded the space.
He dropped behind a deflated Sack cluster, pressing his wounded arm against his chest to stop the tacky blood from catching the pale bioluminescence. The voices grew closer.
"...heard Jameel finally reached Adept. Took him ninety-six kernels. Pathetic."
The sardonic voice. An older man, by the timbre. The sentence structure was strange: kernels as a unit of measurement, Adept as a destination. Grigor filed it away.
"Master Edward cleaned out another nest of those Serpent cultists." The nervous voice, speaking too fast. "Sixteen of them. Didn't even need to Demonify."
'Demonify.' Another term. Another puzzle piece.
"The Order grows bolder." A woman's voice now, low and reverent. "They'll need culling again before the season turns."
The procession came into view.
Four people carrying a palanquin, except the word felt inadequate. The carrying platform was constructed from human backs, the shoulders and spines of what must have been a dozen corpses stitched together into a macabre throne. The leather straps holding it together glistened with something that might have been oil, or might have been preserved fat.
And seated upon it, cross-legged and utterly bored, was a man.
Arab. Late thirties in appearance, though something about the stillness in his eyes suggested age that didn't match the face. His clothes were...
Grigor's brain stuttered.
His clothes were made of skin.
Human skin, tanned to supple leather, pale and smooth and marked with patterns that Grigor recognized as tattoos. Someone's chest piece. Someone's sleeve work. Someone's back mural. All of it stitched together into robes that draped like silk but weren't.
The effect was opulent in a way that made the stomach turn. Like finding gold leaf on a maggot.
The man didn't look at his surroundings. He looked through them, as if the Hatcheries were beneath his notice.
'He fears nothing here,' Grigor realized. 'Nothing at all.'
The bearers were a study in contrast:
A massive, mute giant with a Glasgow smile carved ear-to-ear, his scarred mouth frozen in a permanent grin. A thin, twitching man whose left eye spasmed constantly as he spoke. A grizzled older man who moved with the economy of a veteran and muttered observations under his breath. And finally, a woman with ritualistic burn scars crawling up her forearms, her eyes fixed on the seated man with naked devotion.
Their equipment was wrong. Not wrong as in damaged—wrong as in good. Oiled leather harnesses with brass buckles that caught the bioluminescent light. Copper rivets holding together panels of treated skin that looked almost... manufactured. The veteran carried a folding spyglass on his belt, brass and glass, the kind of precision engineering Grigor hadn't seen since Earth.
'These people aren't scavengers. They're equipped. Supplied. They came from somewhere else.'
They passed within twenty feet of Grigor's hiding spot.
He didn't breathe.
---
The ambush came from the sulfur mist.
Nine figures materialized from the yellow haze like they'd been waiting for this exact moment. Bone weapons. Scavenged armor. The dead-eyed look of men who'd eaten their fill of human meat and lost the capacity for hesitation.
And at their head—
A hulking, scarred man in his apparent forties. His face was a roadmap of violence: knife wounds, burn marks, bite scars that had healed poorly. He carried no visible weapon, but his bare muscular arms were covered in what looked like trophy marks: small, deliberate cuts in patterns that suggested ritual.
"Well, well." The scarred man's voice was theatrical, mocking, hungry. "The skin-wearer himself. Qadir the Pretty. Qadir the Soft."
The palanquin stopped.
The seated man—Qadir—didn't stand. Didn't even shift his posture. His eyes drifted lazily toward the ambushers with the interest one might give an unexpected fly.
"The Suitor." A single name, spoken without inflection. "I was hoping you'd try something. I need to warm up before the real work today."
The Suitor laughed. It was an ugly sound.
"Here's how this goes, desert flower. Give me a quick ride on that throne of yours. If you're good—if you make me finish—I'll let your pets walk away breathing." He gestured obscenely. "Otherwise, well. My boys haven't had soft in months."
The bearers tensed. The devoted woman's burn scars seemed to glow faintly, though Grigor couldn't tell if that was real or a trick of the bioluminescent light.
Qadir smiled.
And then, without gesture, without word, without warning.
The air shimmered.
---
Grigor didn't understand what he was seeing.
The three men closest to Qadir simply... stopped. Their aggressive postures froze. For a moment, Grigor thought they'd been paralyzed by some invisible force.
Then one of them dropped to his knees.
He started shoveling sulfur ash into his mouth. Handfuls of the stuff, his fingers scraping against the floor, cramming the toxic powder between his teeth and chewing. His eyes were wide, not with horror, but with desperation. Like a starving man finally given food.
The second man bit into his own forearm.
The sound was wet. Meat tearing. He chewed through skin, through muscle, grinding his molars against his own tissue while making sounds that weren't screams—they were moans.
Satisfaction. Ecstasy. His fingers reached for the wound, peeling back flesh to shove more into his mouth.
The third man was eating his own fingers.
Grigor watched him chew through his own hand, not screaming in pain but in frustration. Frustration that he couldn't consume himself fast enough.
'What the fuck. What the fuck. What the—'
"Witchcraft," Grigor whispered involuntarily. "It's witchcraft."
But his analytical brain was already cataloging: No dramatic gestures. No incantation. Just intention made manifest. A projection of will that rewrote the desires of everyone in range, replacing whatever they'd wanted with one simple, overwhelming compulsion.
'Hunger.'
The Suitor hadn't fallen. His knees buckled slightly, his jaw clenching, but he remained upright. His body was resisting the effect.
"Nice trick," the Suitor growled. "But I'm not some foot soldier you can—"
Both men moved.
Grigor's eyes couldn't follow it.
One moment they were twenty feet apart. The next, fists were colliding with impacts that sounded like hammers hitting stone. The Suitor's empowered blow cracked the palanquin in half. Qadir flowed around a follow-up strike that would have pulverized concrete, his skin-robe flaring behind him.
The bearers scattered. The devoted woman's scars were definitely glowing now.
The remaining attackers who hadn't succumbed to the hunger were charging forward, bone weapons raised—and then they started eating the ground, the air, each other, the madness spreading like a contagion.
Grigor pressed himself flatter against the deflated Sack, pulse slamming against his throat, his analytical mind trying and failing to categorize what he was witnessing into any framework he understood.
Chemistry couldn't explain this. Biology couldn't explain this.
'The void was clean,' he'd once believed. 'The universe doesn't judge. It just is.'
But this wasn't the void. This was Hell. And Hell, apparently, had rules.
Rules that could be bent.
The Suitor landed a blow that sent Qadir skidding backward, trenching furrows in the amniotic slime. But Qadir's smile never faltered.
The hunger aura intensified.
Even the Suitor's face contorted, his hardened will cracking around the edges, his hands trembling toward his own face.
"Hungry?" Qadir asked.
Grigor saw a severed finger lying on the ground near his hiding spot. One of the self-devourers must have bitten it off and dropped it.
'A souvenir.' The thought came unbidden. 'Proof you were here.'
His hand twitched toward it.
'No. Not that. Not yet.'
He pulled back, the urge lingering like an itch he couldn't scratch.
The pulse in his chest was screaming now.
'CLEAN IT.'