"...Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen..."
The words dripped from cracked lips into the darkness. A ritual older than the screaming, older than the hunger, older than the thing that had eaten his name.
Grigor Ash crouched in a hollow between two rotting Sacks. Above him, the bioluminescent membranes cast their pale blue glow over developing bodies: faces pressed against translucent walls, mouths open in silent screams. The Hatcheries stank of amniotic fluid and iron, that briny sweetness that coated the lungs and never washed out. Somewhere in the distance, a Sack ruptured with a wet pop, followed by the first ragged wail of a newborn damned.
He didn't flinch. He'd stopped flinching days ago.
'Fluorine. Neon. Sodium. Magnesium.'
The periodic table. One hundred eighteen elements. He'd recited it four thousand times since arriving in this place. Or was it five thousand? Time had dissolved into a slurry of hunger and fluid and the voice.
'CLEAN IT.'
Not a whisper anymore. Not the soft murmur that had guided him through the early days. A chorus. A dozen mouths screaming the same two words inside his skull, overlapping, drowning, fighting for dominance. Some voices were high-pitched. Some were bass rumbles that rattled his teeth. One sounded like his mother. Another sounded like himself.
'CLEAN IT CLEAN IT CLEAN IT—'
His hand spasmed. Tendons standing out like cables under paper-thin skin.
The phantom weight of it was still there. Always there. The cold press of silver against his palm, the cat's smooth curve under his fingers, the way it had fit perfectly, as if his hand had been designed to hold it.
'I haven't held it since Earth. Since Marcus's keys cracked my skull open like an egg.'
The thought should have brought rage. It brought nothing. Rage required calories.
'Aluminum. Silicon. Phosphorus. Sulfur.'
His hands were in front of him. When had that happened?
'Inventory check,' the cleaner's instinct whispered. 'Assess the assets.'
His fingers were skeletal. Knuckles like river stones wrapped in parchment. The meat had melted off him somewhere in the wandering, eaten by the endless cold that the Sacks' warmth never quite touched, consumed by the thing in his chest that demanded he feel without ever letting him eat. His nails were yellow. His cuticles bled in thin red lines. The veins on the backs of his hands stood out like blue worms trapped under glass.
'Sixty-two kilograms,' he estimated. 'Down from seventy-eight. Sixteen kilos of meat, rendered down to nothing. What was the exchange rate? Sixteen kilos for... what? A week of consciousness? A week of the Voice screaming in stereo?'
'Bad trade,' the cleaner in him observed. 'Negative ROI.'
Did organ failure even matter here? Death wasn't death. Death was just... a reset button. A trip back to a Sack, drowning in that liquid that tasted like salt and regret, waiting for his body to form again.
'And then the Voice will be louder.'
He knew that now. Each death had amplified it. The first time, it had been a whisper. The second, a murmur. By the third, after Soren's pack had eaten him alive, after his intestines had unspooled across the walkway while he catalogued the process with clinical detachment, the Voice had become a presence.
Now it was a congregation. A cathedral. A thousand mouths preaching the same sermon.
'CLEAN IT.'
"I am not meat," he said. Or thought. The line between the two had blurred.
"I am the man who cleans the meat."
'CLEAN IT,' the chorus agreed. Enthusiastic. Hungry.
His right hand twitched again. Phantom silver. Phantom cat.
'But you are meat,' some rational part of him observed. 'You've always been meat. You just refused to admit it.'
He'd been an atheist on Earth. Militantly so. Death was chemistry: brain stops, end of data, consciousness nothing but electrical impulses that ceased when the current died. Clean. Final. Rational.
"Death is not the end."
He heard his own voice, distant and philosophical. A sermon for an empty cathedral of flesh. The vowels stretched wrong. When had he started talking like a preacher?
"Death is the lesson."
The bioluminescent Sacks pulsed above him. Inside one, a woman's face pressed against the membrane, mouth wide, eyes wider, hands scratching uselessly at the rubber-thick wall that held her. She'd been in there for days. Maybe weeks. Her fingernails had worn down to bloody stumps.
'She can't get out,' Grigor observed. 'Her body is too weak. She'll drown in there forever.'
He should feel something about that. He remembered feeling things.
"You die, you learn."
The woman's mouth moved. Screaming? Begging? He couldn't hear her through the membrane. Just the choked rattle of ten thousand flooded throats. A sound like a river made of lungs, drowning in perfect synchronicity.
"Chemistry was wrong."
The taste of ash filled his mouth. His own laughter, or someone else's, bubbled up from his chest like vomit.
"There IS something after."
His hands moved to his thighs without conscious direction. Wiping. Cleaning. They were already clean. He hadn't touched anything, hadn't eaten anything in so long that his body had started consuming itself. But the motion was compulsive. Necessary.
"And it hurts."
The palm sensation flared. Cold silver. Phantom cat. The weight of stolen property.
'I took it. I kept it. That's why I'm here.'
Was that true? Were the Hatcheries a punishment? A consequence? Or was Hell simply... Hell? A factory for suffering, indifferent to causality or karma or anything resembling justice?
'CLEAN IT,' the voices screamed.
He wiped his hands again.
---
The Ash Gate was closed.
Desmond Price stood at the edge of the blockade, watching the Bone Collectors' checkpoint with the patient assessment of a surgeon examining a tumor. The air here was thick with coal dust and something sweeter, the chemical runoff from the refineries beyond the wall. It settled on the tongue like a film of industrial grease.
Behind him, his squad waited.
Varris at his shoulder, the Sergeant's iron skin flickering grey under his sleeves as it tasted the air for danger. Craw three paces back, hands wringing in their leather gloves, friction-heat building between his palms. Boiler motionless as a statue, the steam rig on his back hissing softly with each breath. Twitch twitching, his remaining hand never still, the bandaged stump of his left arm tucked against his ribs like a wound that hadn't learned it was permanent. Suture counting.
Five where there should be six. No one mentioned the gap.
The Reavers. His Reavers.
"Quarantine," Varris said, reading the crudely-painted sign nailed to the barricade. "Hellhound infestation. Gate sealed until further notice." He rubbed the scar where his left ear used to be, ghost pain from an Ashen Tiger that had gotten too close. "Collectors say three days. Maybe a week."
"Route through the Cord?" Desmond asked. He didn't turn around. The question was a formality.
"Twelve hours minimum. More if traffic's thick." Varris understood the math. Twelve hours was too long.
"Could push through the crowd, but—"
"Complications."
"Yes, General."
Craw shuffled forward, boots squelching in the film of chemical residue that coated the ground. His breath steamed in the cold, not from temperature, but from the heat bleeding off his perpetually freezing body. "General, the Hatchery Fields are... I mean, the Sack Forests, they're—"
"Fresh meat territory." Desmond's voice was soft. Conversational. A businessman discussing quarterly projections. "Dregs. Farmers. Scavengers too weak for the real hunting grounds."
"Exactly, General." Craw bobbed his head so vigorously his neck looked ready to snap. "Exactly. So perhaps we should reconsider—"
"We go through."
The words hung in the chemical air. Final. Absolute.
Craw's mouth opened. Closed. His hands wrung faster, leather squeaking. "Of course, General. The General knows best. The General always knows best."
Desmond was already walking. His boots crunched through debris: bone fragments, ash, discarded teeth. Each step measured and deliberate. Behind him, the Reavers fell into formation without being told.
'The Anvil moves,' Varris thought. 'The Hammer follows.'
Boiler's steam rig adjusted with a pneumatic hiss. Twitch's solo hand found his rifle, his eyes beginning their paranoid dance: left, right, up, shadows, corners, threat assessment threat assessment threat assessment. Suture's fingers found his cleavers, counting edges by touch the way a monk counts prayer beads.
'Fresh meat territory,' Varris had said.
He'd meant the Dregs.
He hadn't meant them.
---
The ravings echoed through the Sack Forests before the source appeared.
"...Chlorine, Argon, Potassium, Calcium..."
The voice was thin. Ragged. More whisper than speech, carrying through the fluid-thick air like a dying man's last prayer.
Craw snorted. The sound was wet — congestion from the cold that never left his chest. "Someone didn't make it out of the nursery."
They stood at the edge of a clearing, if you could call it that. The Sacks here were old, some browning at the edges, membranes gone paper-thin and necrotic. The bodies inside had stopped struggling. Stopped screaming. Stopped everything except the endless, mindless act of drowning.
Between the dead Sacks, a figure huddled.
"Titanium, Vanadium, Chromium—"
Skeletal didn't cover it. The man was a diagram: every bone visible through stretched skin, every joint a knob, every tendon a cable. His ribs moved with each breath like the slats of a broken accordion. His eyes were sunken into his skull, rimmed with dark circles so deep they looked painted on.
"Manganese, Iron, Cobalt..."
"A week without food." Varris's voice was clinical. Professional assessment. "Maybe more. Body's already cooked."
'No,' Varris corrected himself, studying the figure more closely. 'Longer than a week. That's at least ten days of catabolism. Maybe twelve. He should be dead three times over.'
The man's hands moved constantly — wiping at his thighs, his arms, his face. Wiping at nothing. The motion was compulsive, mechanical, the ghost of a habit that had outlived usefulness.
"Pathetic." Craw's lip curled, revealing teeth stained yellow from chronic thermal damage. "Should we torch him? Might attract Farmers otherwise. Leave a mess..."
"Wait."
The word was soft. Almost gentle.
Every Reaver froze.
Desmond Price was staring at the figure. His head tilted, a fraction of a degree, barely perceptible, and his left hand rose briefly to touch the wad of gauze packed into his damaged ear. An unconscious gesture. The Reavers knew that tilt. It preceded acquisitions.
The man's hands. The compulsive cleaning. The yellow stains on sunken fingernails, not disease, but chemical. Industrial. The periodic table recitation that tumbled from cracked lips like a catechism learned in childhood and never forgotten.
'Not madness. Discipline. A ritual.'
"Interesting."
And then the figure turned.
The ravings stopped.
For one long moment, nothing moved. The Sack Forests held their breath — even the drowning seemed to pause, the wet gurgles fading to silence. Grigor Ash stared at the squad with eyes like diluted ammonia: hollow, starving, but aware.
Not the awareness of an animal. The awareness of something that was thinking.
His gaze swept across the formation. The steam weapons, gleaming with maintenance oil. The blackened-steel armor, uniform in a way no Farmer gang could afford. The discipline, the instant stillness when Desmond spoke, the formation that held without a single shuffled foot.
'Military,' Grigor's mind catalogued. 'Trained. Equipped. Supply chain. Officer class.'
His eyes found the largest figure — the bald skull gleaming like polished onyx. The way the floor groaned when he shifted his weight. The physics were wrong. The density was wrong.
The Voice went silent.
Not the quiet that came from taking souvenirs. Not the temporary lull after collecting evidence. This was different. This was total. For the first time since the Birthing Sack, the screaming chorus simply stopped. No whispers. No commands. No overlapping voices demanding he 'CLEAN IT CLEAN IT CLEAN IT.'
Just a void where the noise had been.
'Why them?'
The silence was deafening. Terrifying. He'd grown used to the screaming. The absence was worse. It felt like standing in the eye of a hurricane, knowing the wall was coming.
'Something about these people...'
And in that absence, his eyes found the brand.
A dog's head. Crude but unmistakable. Seared into the armor of every man present: on chest plates, on shoulder guards, on the leather straps of weapon harnesses. The same mark he'd seen burned into the woman's shoulder. The one in the Hatcheries, months ago. The one whose teeth they'd smashed. The one whose tongue she'd bitten off rather than scream for them.
'The Kennels,' his mind supplied.
His brain churned. Not with the Voice — still silent, still absent — but with borrowed memory. The woman's memory. The taste of her own blood. The sound of her teeth shattering. The hands that had held her down.
'They own people. They break people. They burned a dog into her flesh and sold her screaming.'
His hand twitched.
Phantom silver. Phantom cat.
Desmond Price looked at the cadaveric wreck before him. At the recitation. At the compulsive cleaning. At the starvation that should have killed a man three times over and hadn't. He looked at the eyes that held assessment instead of animal fear, the calculating gaze of something that was counting threats and measuring exits even while it starved.
'Not prey,' Desmond thought.
"I see," he said.
His hand rose slowly. Not a threat. Not a weapon.
A gesture. An invitation. A question.
The Sack Forests waited.
The Voice stayed silent.
And Grigor Ash, for the first time in longer than he could remember, had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.