The rust-rain stopped, and the world ended.
It happened without ceremony. One moment, the familiar corrosion was pattering against the crawler's hull, that iron-and-blood rhythm Jinx had learned to sleep through. The next, silence. The engine's rumble became the only sound, and even that felt muted, swallowed by something vast and grey pressing in from all sides.
Twitch was the first to notice. His head snapped toward the porthole, goggles clicking through lenses.
"We're through," he said. His voice was too flat. "We're in."
Outside, the Ash Coast dissolved. The last ruins of Dis, crumbling walls, half-collapsed watchtowers, a shrine to something forgotten, shrank behind them and then vanished entirely. Ahead, there was nothing. No buildings. No road. No landmarks.
Just grey.
The ash started falling. It wasn't rain. It was dry, silent, and it coated the viewport in seconds, a pale film that the wipers couldn't clear fast enough. Jinx pressed his face to the glass and saw only fog. Dense. Impenetrable. The color of old bone.
The air tasted wrong. Sulfur and something older. The musk of predators, thick enough to coat his tongue. It sat in his sinuses like a warning, like his body was trying to tell him something his brain hadn't figured out yet.
'This place smells like death. Not old death. Patient death. Death that waits.'
"Where did the city go?" The words came out before he could stop them.
"Gone." Varris didn't look up from his warhammer. "Focus."
Craw pulled his coat tighter. His hands had started rubbing again, friction heating, Suture had called it. The Lieutenant's nervous tell. The medic noticed but said nothing, her smile sharp in the gloom.
The crawler lurched forward. Into the nothing. Into the fog.
Into the Wastes.
---
Twenty minutes in, the screaming started.
It came first as a single note, high, thin, somewhere between a cry and a whistle. Far away. Easy to ignore. Then it came again, closer, and it wasn't a whistle anymore.
It was a woman's voice.
'Sobbing. Someone's sobbing out there.'
His hand went to his steam shotgun without conscious thought. The metal was cold, slick with the condensation that had started forming on every surface inside the transport. The fog had crept in somehow. Not visible, but present, a dampness that clung to skin and steel.
"Contact." Twitch's hand went up — then froze. "Wait. No. That's not—"
A man's voice now. Calling a name. Desperate. James. James, where are you?
Then a child.
Crying.
His fingers went numb on the shotgun's grip.
"Is someone out there?" He was half-rising from his seat before Twitch's hand slammed over his mouth and shoved him back down.
"That's not a person." The scout's eyes were wide behind his goggles, pupils shrunk to nothing. His breath came in sharp bursts, Grit-paste visible in the grey crust at his lips. "That's not. A. Person."
The voices multiplied.
A man, screaming for help. A woman, begging, please, please, I have children, the words running together, overlapping, a chorus of desperation rising from the fog.
Jinx couldn't tell which direction they came from. The sound was everywhere. Nowhere. Inside his own skull.
And then it stopped.
The silence hit like a physical force. Jinx's ears rang. His pulse spiked, one-two, one-two, too fast, count it, count it, that's what you did when you panicked—
Something laughed.
A human laugh. Warm. Amused. The kind of sound you'd hear in a tavern, from someone who'd just heard a good joke.
It came from three feet outside the hull.
"Keep moving." Desmond's voice cut through the silence. Soft. Unhurried. As if he'd just commented on the weather.
The crawler lurched forward. Nobody spoke.
Jinx realized his hands were shaking. He couldn't make them stop.
---
Forty minutes.
The voices had stopped. The silence was worse.
Twitch hadn't stopped scanning. His goggles clicked and whirred, cycling through spectrums: thermal, spectral, something Jinx didn't recognize that made his lenses glow a sickly green. The scout's leg was bouncing. His fingers tapped arrhythmic patterns on his thigh. Every few seconds, he'd reach into his vest pocket, pull out a tin, and scrape more Grit paste onto his tongue.
'He's burning through it,' Jinx thought. The tin was half-empty. 'Two doses. Maybe three. What happens when it runs out?'
Boiler was awake now. The Heavy sat motionless, his cooling suit humming a low mechanical drone, but his eyes were open. Watching. His hand rested on his steam-cannon — not gripping it, just resting. Ready.
Varris held his hammer across his knees. Suture had abandoned her needle and was now holding a bone-saw, testing the edge against her thumb. Craw's hands had moved from rubbing to glowing, a faint orange light leaking through his gloves, heat haze rippling around his fingers.
'We're all scared.' The thought came unbidden. Even Varris. Even Boiler. 'Everyone but him.'
He looked at Desmond.
The General sat at the back of the transport, exactly where he'd been for the last hour. He hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken since the order to keep moving. His amber eyes reflected the dim light like coins in a well.
'Is he scared?'
Jinx couldn't tell. He couldn't read anything on that face. It was like looking at a statue. Or a corpse.
'Which is worse?'
Twitch froze.
"General." His voice was flat. Empty. The tone of a man delivering news he didn't want to speak. "We're surrounded."
Nobody moved.
"I'm toggling thermal." The goggles clicked. Whirred. Clicked again. "I count... I can't count them. Dozens. Maybe more."
Boiler's hand tightened on his cannon. Varris rose, hammer coming up. Craw's hands blazed — full orange now, heat radiating off him in waves that Jinx could feel from three feet away.
Jinx gripped his shotgun and checked its pressure gauge. His finger found the trigger guard. His stomach tried to climb into his throat.
'Don't vomit. Don't vomit. Don't—'
Desmond stood.
The floor groaned. The transport's suspension creaked as the General's weight settled, and then doubled, tripled, pressing down until the steel plates bowed beneath his boots. He moved to the forward viewport, slow, deliberate, and looked out into the fog.
He said nothing.
'That's the scariest part,' Jinx thought. The General wasn't surprised. Wasn't alarmed. He'd known. He'd known, and he'd kept them moving anyway.
The fog shifted.
For one heartbeat, it opened. A gap in the grey, a window that lasted maybe two seconds.
Fifty pairs of eyes caught the torchlight.
They glowed. Pale. Yellow. Set in faces that were almost human, stretched wrong, jaws too wide, lips pulled back in rictus grins that showed too many teeth. And behind them, bodies that ran on elongated limbs, fingers that had become claws, spines that curved and hunched like animals but moved like men.
'Those were people,' Jinx thought. The realization landed like a swallowed stone. 'Those were people once.'
The fog closed.
The eyes were still there.
Watching.
Waiting.