The first cell door flew open before the static from the communicator had fully faded.
Candice still had two fingers pressed against the device, absorbing Suki's final urgent words, when the metallic bang echoed through the corridor—sharp and final.
Behind her, the gate to Sector Three sealed for good. The last roots Suki had forced through the structure withdrew between the steel plates, and the earth collapsed immediately afterward, burying the way back beneath tons of stone, broken branches, and twisted metal.
There was no turning back.
Ahead, a door slid into the wall, but no one waited on the other side.
The exposed cell seemed too small even for an animal—a miserable cubicle containing nothing but a bed bolted to the wall, a drain in the floor, and restraint straps dangling beneath the harsh white light of a bare bulb.
Old, inexplicable stains darkened the corners, while hundreds of frantic scratches covered the metal walls, grouped into sets of five.
Havelyn stepped forward, spreading her black wings just enough to occupy nearly the entire width of the corridor. The tension showed in every feather.
"Was that the explosion above us?" she asked quietly, her gaze fixed on the open cell.
Candice raised her head and listened.
A distant, muffled tremor rolled across the ceiling. Fine dust fell from the seams in the metal, and the red emergency lights flickered in a nervous sequence.
"Definitely."
Another impact traveled through the structure, deeper and far more violent.
This time, something moved inside the cell.
A man had wedged himself beneath the metal bed. He crawled out slowly, dragging one foot with difficulty.
He was tall, but starvation and imprisonment had reduced his body to a collection of bones beneath sickly gray skin. A thick metal ring encircled his neck, and his hair had been crudely shaved, leaving infected cuts scattered across his scalp.
Candice noticed that three fingernails were missing from his right hand.
The man stopped at the open doorway, hesitating.
He looked into the dark corridor, then back into the suffocating cell, as though the once-clear boundary between imprisonment and freedom had vanished and he no longer knew which side held the danger.
Candice slowly lowered her scythe, trying not to appear immediately threatening.
"We're not from Gron-Tarh," she said, keeping her voice low but firm.
The man's dull, distant eyes settled on the weapon's blade.
"We came from outside."
"The prison is under attack."
The man touched the ring around his neck in a mechanical, pained gesture.
"Gron-Tarh... under attack?" he murmured, his voice hoarse and barely audible.
"Liar."
Candice frowned, confused, but he lunged before she could respond.
There was no battle cry, no change in his vacant expression. One moment, he stood there bewildered. The next, he was charging in a burst of desperate violence, brandishing a sharpened, twisted piece of his own bed that he had concealed against his forearm.
Havelyn was faster.
She intercepted the strike with ease, catching his emaciated wrist mere inches from Candice's neck.
She twisted his arm behind his back to restrain him, but the man showed no reaction to the pain he should have felt. Instead, he slammed his forehead into the harpy's face and tried to sink his teeth into the hand holding him.
With a growl, Havelyn threw him against the wall.
The impact dropped him to his knees, but he remained there, panting, still clutching the improvised weapon and staring at them.
"We don't want to hurt you," Candice insisted, taking a cautious step forward.
The man began to rise again, suicidal determination carved across his pale face.
Then every light went out.
In the absolute darkness, something enormous exploded in the upper levels of the fortress, making all of Sector Three groan beneath the strain.
When the red emergency lights began flashing again, rows of green locks had appeared along both sides of the passage.
Then the doors started opening.
One. Two. Ten.
The hydraulic clanging continued down the corridor until it multiplied into hundreds of sharp impacts, climbing through the levels, passing through walls, and returning as the monstrous echo of an execution without end.
At last, Candice saw the full, terrifying scale of the sector.
The passage through which they had entered opened into a colossal prison gallery—a cavern of steel and suffering.
Six tiers of cells lined both walls, arranged along narrow grated walkways and connected by precarious vertical staircases. At the center yawned a deep maintenance shaft protected by thick railings, with pipes and cables descending into depths the red light could not reach.
A hundred and fifty meters ahead, a massive circular bulkhead guarded access to the lower elevators.
Above the center of the gallery, a control booth hung from the ceiling behind armored glass, like the watchful eye of a cruel god.
The open cells began disgorging their occupants.
Some sprinted out in desperation without even noticing Candice and Havelyn.
Others dragged themselves across the thresholds and covered their heads with their hands, curling up as they waited for the blows they had learned to expect—blows that never came.
One woman remained seated in her doorway, hugging her knees and repeating the same number obsessively.
A four-armed man extended only his face from the darkness. He saw Candice's scythe and immediately withdrew.
Many others, however, stared directly at the two intruders.
Their bodies were too thin, too large, or altered by genetic experiments Candice could not even recognize. Some bore brands burned into their skin, incomplete and poorly fitted prosthetics, mouths sewn shut, or limbs trapped within painful restraint frames.
A few still wore the remains of uniforms from planets that might no longer exist.
No one appeared relieved by their sudden freedom.
Fear and distrust were palpable.
The first prisoner—the gaunt man—used the distraction to attack Havelyn again.
To the other inmates watching, that became a signal.
Violence erupted.
A heavy chain dropped from the upper level and wrapped tightly around the shaft of Candice's scythe.
She felt the brutal pull before she even saw the woman holding it from the second-tier walkway. At the same time, two men charged across the gallery floor. One carried an iron bar torn from the wall; the other had wrapped bloodstained strips of cloth around his fists and was ready to brawl.
Candice planted her foot and refused to release her weapon.
Instead, she hauled on the chain with the full strength of her mechanical arm.
The woman above lost her balance, struck the grated railing, and plunged over the edge.
Havelyn reacted instantly. She caught the falling woman by one leg, spun, and hurled her into three other prisoners rushing in from the side, knocking them down like pins.
Candice took the iron bar directly against her mechanical forearm.
The impact traveled through the articulated plates and into her shoulder, but she did not flinch.
She trapped the weapon between her steel fingers, pulled the man closer, and drove the lower end of her scythe's shaft into his stomach.
He folded around the blow and dropped, unable to breathe.
The second attacker tried to grab her around the waist, but Candice spun the scythe's shaft, struck the side of his knee hard enough to bring him down, then planted her boot against his back to keep him there.
"Listen!" she shouted, her voice carrying over the mounting chaos.
"We are not your enemies!"
A steel plate torn from one of the beds came spinning through the corridor toward her head in response.
Candice ducked at the last second.
The projectile skimmed her hair and vanished into the central shaft.
"They're not interested in talking, Candice," Havelyn warned tensely as three prisoners leaped at her from an upper walkway.
The harpy snapped open her left wing and struck the air.
The powerful gust caught them head-on, scattering their bodies against doors and railings.
Her right wing, however, lagged a fraction of a second behind.
A short, agile woman exploited the opening and seized the feathers near the harpy's injured joint.
She pulled with both hands, throwing her entire weight backward and torturing the damaged limb.
A short cry of pain escaped Havelyn.
She spun on instinct, fingers already curled into talons and poised to tear apart the woman's face.
"No killing, Havelyn!" Candice ordered firmly.
Havelyn's hand stopped mere inches from the terrified woman's eyes.
Growling in frustration, she changed the motion, grabbed the woman by the neck, and hurled her through an open doorway.
The woman struck the cell's mattress violently and went still, dazed.
"She almost tore my wing off!" Havelyn protested, her voice shaking with anger and pain.
"Then break her arms if you have to."
"But not her neck."
Havelyn shot Candice a furious glare, but there was no time to answer.
The gaunt prisoner emerged from the shadows once again, this time behind Candice.
His jagged piece of metal came down toward the back of her neck, but a rigid black feather struck his wrist at the last instant and deflected the killing blow.
Candice spun and drove her mechanical palm into his chest.
The impact launched him back into his own cell.
Before he could charge out for a fourth time, a fast-moving layer of ice spread across the floor, climbed his legs, and bound him firmly to the metal bed.
"Stay there," Candice said, breathing hard.
Oblivious to her words, the man began smashing his forehead against the ice in a self-destructive trance.
Candice looked away, a knot tightening in her stomach.
More doors continued to open on the upper levels.
There was no way to tell exactly how many prisoners the sector contained.
At least fifty already occupied the visible walkways, and new shadows appeared behind the open doors with every passing moment.
Some fought one another over scraps of metal. Others sprinted desperately toward the circular bulkhead at the far end, only to find it sealed and return like cornered animals.
Only the control booth above them remained illuminated.
Candice pointed her scythe toward it.
"We need to reach that station."
An enormous, misshapen mass emerged from a cell on the lowest level.
The prisoner was gigantic, forced to hunch his broad shoulders to fit through the doorway.
Dark skin covered in natural plates of bone encased his body, though some had been forcibly removed, leaving raw flesh and exposed scars behind. In one hand, he carried his cell's heavy iron door as an improvised shield. In the other, he held a thick metal pipe.
He did not charge immediately.
He stopped and studied Candice through heavy-lidded eyes.
Then he looked at the blocks of ice restraining the other men in the nearby cell.
The pipe struck the iron shield three times, a challenge that resonated throughout the gallery.
At the signal, the prisoners surged forward together like a tidal wave.
"Now, Havelyn!" Candice shouted.
Havelyn leaped.
Her wings unfurled within the corridor with a brutal, deafening crack.
The pressure wave swept the first bodies aside, creating a narrow, temporary path through the center of the enraged crowd.
Candice plunged into it before it could close again.
She skated over a blade of ice forming beneath her boots, holding the scythe crosswise in front of her like a battering ram.
The metal shaft struck ribs, knees, and wrists as she accelerated. Whenever the curved blade came dangerously close to an inmate's flesh, Candice changed its angle at the last instant and struck with its blunt side instead, knocking them down without killing them.
One man managed to seize the scythe's shaft.
Another threw his full weight onto her back, trying to drag her down.
Candice instantly froze the first man's hands to the weapon, lowered her body sharply, and threw the second attacker over her shoulder with a judo throw.
He struck his frozen companion, and both men rolled across the metal floor.
A chain suddenly whipped around Candice's legs.
One of its links closed around her ankle and violently ripped her from the strip of ice.
Candice fell onto her side.
The giant with the door came down the center of the gallery, exploiting her fall and using his shield to batter a path toward her.
The metal pipe rose over his head, ready to crush her.
Havelyn dove from above and struck his back with both feet at full force.
The blow would have toppled a light armored vehicle, but the massive prisoner merely staggered one heavy step forward to recover his balance.
He spun with surprising speed and swung the iron door like an enormous shovel, catching Havelyn in midflight.
The harpy shot across the gallery like a projectile, slammed into a grated railing on the first level, and nearly fell into the maintenance shaft.
She caught the edge desperately with one hand, wings spread beneath her body as she struggled to stabilize herself.
"Havelyn!" Candice shouted, her heart lurching.
The giant's metal pipe descended toward her.
Candice rolled inside the arc of the blow at the last second. The weapon struck the grated floor and caved in the metal.
Before the giant could raise it for another attack, Candice planted her scythe against the ground, used it as a lever to launch herself upward, and drove both feet into his knee with all her strength.
The joint did not break—the creature was far too dense—but it buckled.
The prisoner dropped onto one leg with a roar, still protected behind the door-shield.
Candice placed her mechanical hand against the shield.
Ice raced across its edges, invaded the torn hinges still attached to the door, and thickened until the iron slab fused with the gallery floor.
The giant pulled once, making the grating groan beneath the strain.
He pulled again with fury and tore an entire section of flooring loose with it, but Candice retreated before the door could crush her in the counterattack.
Havelyn swept down over him, fury twisting her face.
She caught the metal pipe with both hands, beat her wings, and tore it from the prisoner's thick fingers with one brutal pull.
Still airborne, she spun the improvised weapon and smashed it into the side of his skull.
The giant toppled heavily against his own frozen shield.
He did not lose consciousness, but it took him several precious seconds to remember how to stand.
Those seconds were enough.
Candice severed the chain around her ankle with a swing of her scythe and resumed her furious advance.
"Keep clearing the center, Havelyn!" she shouted without looking back.
"I'll cover the right!"
They reached the first major intersection of the gallery.
To the right, a metal staircase zigzagged upward through all six tiers of cells.
To the left, a narrow grated bridge crossed the central shaft and led to a parallel corridor.
The control booth hung just beyond the bridge, twenty meters above the main floor.
Farther ahead, the massive elevator bulkhead remained sealed.
Candice quickly gauged the distance.
Half the sector still lay ahead of them.
A young woman emerged from a cell on the right and charged with a sharpened shard of glass in her hand.
She was so thin that the gray restraint uniform looked as if it had been draped over a rack of bones. Fresh stitches ran across her lips, several already torn and bleeding.
Candice blocked her wrist with the scythe's shaft and disarmed her.
The young woman dropped the glass but did not stop. She tried to gouge out Candice's eyes with filthy nails.
"Look at me!" Candice demanded, seizing both her wrists and trying to break through the trance.
There was no recognition in the woman's empty eyes.
"The doors are open, do you hear me?"
The young woman continued struggling, whining like an injured animal.
"No one is putting you back in there!"
For one moment—no longer than a single heartbeat—her fingers stopped clawing.
A dry, muffled crack sounded from high above the gallery.
An invisible force snapped the young woman's head violently forward.
Hot, viscous blood struck Candice's face and stained her vision red.
All strength abandoned the thin body in an instant, and it collapsed into her arms, suddenly heavy as lead.
Havelyn looked up, her face tightening.
Gron-Tarh soldiers in tactical armor occupied the upper service gallery.
One still held his rifle aimed downward, smoke curling from its barrel.
Others began dropping to one knee behind the grated railings, using cell doors and even fallen prisoners as cover.
They were not trying to regain control of the sector.
They were cleansing it.
Erasing every witness.
"Shooters on the galleries!" Havelyn shouted, beating her wings to gain altitude.
The upper levels lit up with muzzle flashes.
Candice gently laid the young woman's body on the floor, then slammed the lower end of her scythe against the metal in a burst of pure rage.
A thick wall of ice erupted across the entire intersection, forming a barricade.
Heavy rounds struck it almost simultaneously, blasting smoking craters into the ice and scattering sharp, transparent fragments over the terrified prisoners.
Havelyn closed her wings around two men who had failed to find cover and dragged them behind the protective barrier.
The sector's emergency communication system suddenly crackled, and an impersonal metallic voice filled every level of the gallery.
"Containment failure confirmed. Contingency protocol activated. Detainees assigned to Blocks Three through Eight are authorized to neutralize the intruders immediately."
No one answered the announcement.
Only the crowd's ragged breathing could be heard.
"Full cooperation will be rewarded with the immediate suspension of all pending disciplinary procedures."
Several prisoners laughed from the shadows.
There was not a trace of humor in the sound. It was a dry noise born of scorn and accumulated despair.
"Lies," one of them murmured near Candice, his voice trembling.
"They're lying."
Cold white lights suddenly ignited across the metal rings locked around the prisoners' necks.
The first scream of agony came from the left, shrill and heartrending.
Then all the others followed, joining into a chorus of pure horror.
Dozens of bodies arched violently at once.
Muscles locked in uncontrollable spasms. Teeth shattered beneath the force of clenched jaws, and knees slammed heavily against the metal grating.
The acrid stench of ozone and burned skin spread through the corridor instantly.
The prisoners without collars had small metal plates embedded at the base of their spines or behind their ears. Every one of them now pulsed with the same agonizing rhythm.
Candice tightened her grip on the scythe until her knuckles turned white, fury boiling in her chest.
"Fucking bastards," she hissed through her teeth.
The electrical discharge stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
The prisoners slowly rose, gasping as though they had just surfaced from drowning.
The impersonal announcement repeated, cold and mechanical.
"Neutralize the intruders."
This time, they attacked.
Not out of loyalty to Gron-Tarh, but because they knew—with pain carved into their flesh—exactly what would happen if they disobeyed.
Candice's wall of ice exploded into fragments beneath the concentrated fire from the upper galleries.
The prisoners surged forward en masse like living shields, while the soldiers fired mercilessly from behind and above them, caring nothing for whom they hit.
"The booth, Havelyn! Now!" Candice shouted, bringing down two attackers with the shaft of her scythe.
"You'll never reach the elevator bulkhead alone through this crowd!" Havelyn protested, deflecting shots with her wings.
"I don't need to reach the bulkhead yet! I need you inside that booth, shutting off these goddamn collars!"
Havelyn looked upward and assessed the suicidal route.
Between her and the suspended control booth lay three walkways packed with kneeling riflemen, a chaotic network of support cables, and nearly twenty meters of completely open space above the bottomless shaft.
Her injured right wing trembled involuntarily beneath the strain.
Candice noticed her hesitation.
She locked eyes with her friend, ignoring the chaos around them.
"You can do it, Havelyn."
It was not hopeful encouragement.
It was a tactical order—dry and absolute.
Havelyn drew one deep breath, expanding her chest, then leaped over the remains of the shattered ice wall.
Her wings beat with brutal force, generating a shockwave that scattered shards of ice, blood, and two unlucky prisoners across the floor.
She spiraled upward through the center of the colossal gallery, twisting through acrobatic maneuvers between the first volleys of gunfire trying to bring her down.
She tore through the firing lines of the lower levels like a black projectile.
A plasma shot pierced and burned the feathers at the tip of her left wing.
Another passed beneath her outstretched leg.
Havelyn rolled in midair to correct her course and struck the first service walkway with both feet.
The metal grating bent and shrieked beneath the impact.
Two nearby soldiers lost their balance. She grabbed one by the breastplate and hurled him into the other before either could recover his aim.
A third guard, concealed behind a cell door, fired at point-blank range.
Havelyn tilted her head aside on pure instinct.
The energy beam burned away a lock of her dark hair and left a smoking hole in the metal wall behind her.
Before he could fire again, her hand closed like a talon around the hot rifle barrel.
She yanked the soldier from cover and smashed his armored face against the iron railing until the visor shattered.
Her injured right wing failed completely on the second powerful downstroke.
Havelyn abruptly lost altitude, dropping awkwardly beneath the base of the suspended booth.
She opened her left wing to its limit in an attempt to compensate, but the brutal imbalance only sent her spinning out of control over the open shaft.
Desperate, she reached out with her right hand.
Her fingers closed around a vertical steel cable hanging from the ceiling.
The jolt was vicious. Her shoulder nearly tore from its socket when the dead weight of her body came to an abrupt stop.
She slid three meters down the cable, scorching her glove, then used the momentum of her rotation to launch herself at full force toward the control booth's armored windows.
Both boots struck the same pane with a deafening crack.
A complex spiderweb of fractures spread across the armored glass, but it held.
The startled guards inside spun toward her and drew their sidearms.
Havelyn beat her wings once, heavily, pushing herself less than a meter away from the structure before charging again with her full weight and all the hatred burning inside her.
The second impact finished it.
The entire pane exploded inward in a lethal rain of crystalline shards.
Havelyn burst through the opening alongside the fragments and the guards' first desperate shots.
On the main floor of the gallery, Candice stood alone, surrounded by the fury of the controlled mob.
A prisoner charged from the right with a rusted, improvised spear.
She knocked the point aside with a sharp movement of her scythe, trapped the wooden shaft beneath her mechanical arm, and snapped it in two.
Another attacker rushed from the left, brandishing a knife.
Candice struck his jaw with the scythe's shaft and carried the motion into a full turn, driving the weapon into the stomach of a woman trying to leap onto her back.
A rifle shot from one of the walkways Havelyn had not cleared screamed directly between the three of them.
Candice reacted on instinct. She caught the staggering woman before she fell and used her body as a human shield, spinning them both behind the protection of a thick support column.
The next shot scraped noisily across the paint of her metal prosthetic and threw off a shower of sparks.
The giant with the door recovered from his daze, roared, and charged down the center of the gallery.
Behind him, more than twenty prisoners crowded into the narrow corridor, driven forward against their will by fresh electrical discharges pulsing painfully through their collars.
Those who tried to retreat were mercilessly trampled by the people behind them. Those who hesitated received another incapacitating shock.
Candice tightened her grip on the scythe.
She could have used the blade there.
A single broad, swift horizontal swing at neck height would have cleared all the space she needed.
Her fingers adjusted by mere millimeters against the metal shaft.
For one unbearable, lucid fraction of a second, she imagined Rubens among them.
She pictured her brother thin and unrecognizable, his face contorted in pain as he charged her simply because someone in the comfort of a control room had taught his body to fear refusal more than death itself.
Candice growled in frustration and reversed her scythe, gripping it by the blade and turning the weapon into a heavy staff.
"Come on, then," she challenged, her voice low and dangerous.
The giant attacked first in a blind fury.
The improvised iron door swept toward her in a massive horizontal arc, broad enough to crush three people against the wall at once.
Candice did not try to block it.
She dropped to her knees and slid across the wet floor beneath the moving metal plate, keeping low to the ground.
As she passed between the prisoner's colossal legs, she drove her mechanical hand hard into the grated floor.
Ice erupted behind her at terrifying speed.
Two thick, uneven columns wrapped around the giant's ankles and grew rapidly in opposite directions, anchoring him to the ground.
His heavy stride stopped in midmotion.
The momentum of his massive body pitched him awkwardly forward, and the iron door flew from his hands, barreling uncontrollably through the corridor until it flattened the entire first row of prisoners behind him.
Candice sprang to her feet inside the destabilized enemy formation.
The scythe's shaft became a blur.
It struck one temple with a dull crack, came down heavily on an armored shoulder, swept two knees with a low strike, then smashed into the wrist of someone holding a sharp knife and disarmed him.
One man tried to seize the weapon. Candice let him.
She instantly froze his fingers to the metal, dragged him through her next spin, and used his weight like a flail to knock down three more attackers.
A thin but sturdy chain suddenly wrapped around her throat from behind.
Someone pulled violently, cutting off her breath.
Candice choked as the air vanished from her lungs.
She wedged the metal prosthetic between her neck and the frozen links, desperately preventing them from crushing her windpipe, but another prisoner exploited her immobility and struck her ribs with a heavy length of pipe.
The second blow landed in exactly the same place, clouding her vision.
Clenching her teeth hard enough to nearly crack them, Candice released one hand from her scythe, grabbed the chain strangling her, and poured all the cold of her power into it.
Frost instantly whitened the metal.
One sharp sideways blow from her prosthetic shattered it into dozens of harmless frozen links.
Candice turned, coughing, and found the first prisoner from the corridor—the gaunt man who had begun the riot—standing before her yet again.
Fresh blood streamed from a cut on his forehead, while fragments of the ice that had restrained him still encircled his legs like broken shackles.
The sharpened piece of his bed remained clenched in his trembling hand.
"I don't want to go back into that room," he repeated, his eyes wide and vacant, the words emerging in a terrifying monotone litany.
"I'm not going back. Not going back. Not going back."
The sharpened metal darted toward Candice's eye in a desperate lunge.
She turned her face aside at the last possible instant.
The point scored her cheek and opened a thin but deep cut.
Candice ignored the pain and caught his wrist in her mechanical hand, stopping it in midair.
"You're not going back," she said, fixing her eyes on his and forcing her voice to remain calm and steady.
The man tried uselessly to tear his hand free.
"Did you hear me?"
She firmly twisted his wrist aside, forcing him to drop the improvised weapon.
"You will never go back into that cell."
"It's over."
His dull eyes shifted for a moment and focused on her.
A sliver of understanding appeared behind the terror.
A Gron-Tarh rifleman suddenly emerged on the walkway directly above them, his weapon aimed at both of them.
Candice had no time to think.
She pulled the gaunt prisoner against her chest with her mechanical arm and raised the prosthetic over his head as an improvised shield.
The energy shot struck the metal plates with the force of a hammer blow.
The violent impact traveled through her shoulder and drove her heavily onto one knee. She ground her teeth against the pain, but the man in her arms remained alive and unharmed.
Candice slowly released him and pushed him toward the relative safety of the wall.
"Now get down and stay quiet," she ordered.
This time, without the collar controlling him, he obeyed immediately and curled up on the floor.
Candice rose, fury replacing the pain in her ribs.
In one continuous motion, she hurled the scythe upward with the full strength of her mechanical arm.
The weapon spun once through the air, a blur of metal, before passing through the railing of the upper walkway.
Its curved blade entered beneath the rifleman's breastplate and pierced him.
The force of the impact tore the soldier from the catwalk.
He plunged, still caught on the scythe, struck the metal wall of the central shaft, and remained hanging there, swaying grotesquely from the weapon lodged in his chest.
Candice jerked her mechanical hand backward.
A thin, gleaming chain of pure ice formed instantly between her outstretched fingers and the end of the dangling scythe's shaft.
The weapon tore free from the corpse with a wet crack and flew back toward her, skidding across the grated floor until its handle settled perfectly into her steel fingers.
Above her, the suspended control booth shook violently beneath Havelyn's assault.
The harpy had entered ready to kill, with no intention of taking prisoners.
The first guard to survive the exploding window tried to use the primary command desk as cover while drawing a pistol.
Havelyn vaulted over the control panel in a black blur, kicked the discarded rifle on the floor into his weapon hand to disarm him, and drove her knee into his armored face with the dry sound of breaking bone.
The second guard attacked from the side with a crackling electric baton.
Havelyn allowed the blue discharge to scrape harmlessly across the rigid feathers of her left wing, trapped the man's arm between its two powerful joints, then snapped them shut.
His arm broke with an audible crack.
With a furious shout, she hurled him into the wall-mounted monitors, shattering the screens in a shower of sparks.
The third guard panicked and ran toward the back of the booth, where an emergency lever stood behind thick glass.
"Turn off the collars. Now!" Havelyn ordered, advancing with her talons extended.
Instead of obeying, the man smashed through the glass with his armored elbow, his face twisted into a mask of sadism and fear.
"I said turn them off, you bastard!" she roared, leaping at him.
The man smiled behind his cracked visor and pulled the lever with one final, desperate yank.
A heavy metallic sequence of safety locks echoed throughout Sector Three, vibrating through the walls.
Every cell still sealed by security protocols opened simultaneously with one unified boom.
Havelyn roared in fury, seized the guard's head in both hands, and smashed it against the central command console.
He went limp instantly amid an eruption of sparks.
On the lowest level of the prison gallery, massive reinforced doors began to move.
They were entirely different from the ordinary cell doors—three times thicker, surrounded by independent locking mechanisms, and marked with bright yellow stripes denoting biological hazards and maximum isolation.
Whatever lay behind them had remained terrifyingly silent throughout the entire rebellion.
Candice saw the first dark gap appear between one of the colossal doors and its frame.
"HAVELYN! WHAT DID YOU DO?!"
"I KNOW! I'M TRYING!" Havelyn shouted back, her voice breaking beneath the strain and desperation.
She stared at the booth's damaged controls.
Dozens of screens flashed error messages, alien symbols, and tactical commands she could not decipher in time.
Small white lights, however, continued pulsing stubbornly across a simplified diagram of every level and cell in the prison.
Havelyn slammed her fist against the first large red button she saw.
Nothing happened.
She tried another panel at random.
The collars below discharged again, stronger this time.
Heart-rending screams of pure agony erupted beneath her, mingling with the grinding sound of the heavy doors opening.
"That didn't turn them off, Havelyn! You're killing them!" Candice shouted from the gallery floor as she dodged a convulsing body.
"I don't know how this thing works!"
A wounded guard lying on the floor of the booth grabbed Havelyn's leg in a desperate attempt to bring her down.
Without even looking, she kicked him in the face, tore the crackling baton from his limp fingers, and drove it into the center of the main power panel.
Sparks and smoke engulfed the booth in a massive short circuit.
The white lights on the monitor diagram flickered wildly and dimmed, but to Havelyn's dismay, they did not go out.
They continued glowing, powered by a backup system.
"Damn it! They're still on!" Candice shouted urgently.
Havelyn looked behind the ruined console.
A dense forest of thick, armored, color-coded cables emerged from the back of the equipment and vanished into the ceiling, leading directly to the fortress's primary power source.
She spread both hands and drove her talons into the console's hot metal.
Her fingers dug beneath the panel.
The outer plates resisted at first, welded to the frame.
Havelyn planted one boot against the command desk for leverage, spread her wings until their tips pressed against the booth's narrow walls for stability, and pulled with the strength of her entire body, ignoring the pain in her injured wing.
The metal began to groan and deform grotesquely beneath the pressure.
Bolts tore loose with sharp cracks and flew through the booth like bullets.
The entire console ripped free from its foundation with the shriek of twisting metal, exposing hundreds of colored wires, small pulsing energy cores, and coolant tubes that began venting pressurized gas.
Havelyn seized the main bundle of armored cables with both hands, ignoring the electrical shocks burning her fingers.
"Candice! Get ready!" she shouted, bracing herself for the final pull.
On the gallery floor, her friend understood immediately.
Candice struck the grated floor with the lower end of her scythe, using every ounce of strength she had left.
A thick semicircular wall of pure ice erupted around her and the nearest prisoners who had stopped attacking, physically separating them from the reinforced isolation doors still creeping open in the darkness.
"Do it, Havelyn! Rip them out!"
Havelyn gave one final pull, putting all her weight and fury behind it.
The thick cables ruptured with deafening bursts of energy, whipping around and releasing blue-white sparks throughout the booth.
Sector Three went dark instantly.
The collars around the prisoners' necks released one final, painful flash of white light.
Then they died, becoming nothing more than useless rings of cold metal.
The silence that followed was not complete. Moans of pain and exhaustion remained, along with the distant echo of gunfire somewhere on the upper levels and the heavy hydraulic groan of the enormous isolation doors grinding to a halt midway through opening, trapped by the sudden loss of power.
But the synchronized torture had ended.
Dozens of prisoners collapsed where they stood, exhausted, like puppets whose strings had been cut.
Some wept quietly with relief and trauma.
Others raised trembling hands to the metal rings around their necks, feeling them in disbelief as they waited for another electrical discharge that never came.
Candice gave them no time to process what had happened.
The surviving soldiers on the upper walkways, acting on pure training instinct, switched on their rifle-mounted lights and resumed firing into the darkness at anything moving below.
Now that she no longer needed to restrain the prisoners, Candice could answer without holding back.
She emerged from behind the ice wall with her scythe raised.
She spotted the first flashlight beam descending the stairs and struck toward its source.
The curved blade punched through the guard's breastplate before he could react.
Using the weight of his body caught on the weapon, Candice tore him violently from the grated walkway, released him over the shaft, and continued climbing the staircase one step at a time, ignoring the pain in her ribs.
The second soldier stood on an intermediate platform with his rifle trained on a line of fallen, defenseless prisoners, ready to massacre them.
Before he could pull the trigger, a swift black shadow dropped from the shattered control booth above.
Havelyn landed on him with both feet, crushing his armor against the metal grating with a dull impact.
Before the other guards could adjust their aim in the darkness, she opened her wings in one brutal horizontal sweep.
The nearby soldiers flew like rag dolls into the metal cell doors, collapsing unconscious or dead.
Candice reached the upper gallery and entered the opening Havelyn had created, her scythe becoming a blur of death in the flashlight-slashed darkness.
The blade severed a rifle with a shriek of metal, returned in a defensive arc, and cut through its owner's armored neck.
Her metal prosthetic blocked an electric baton swinging in from the side.
Candice caught the guard's arm in her steel hand, twisted until his elbow inverted with a dry crack, then shoved him mercilessly from the walkway and into the central shaft.
Candice breathed through her open mouth, tasting blood and dust.
Warm blood ran from the deep cut in her cheek, dripped from her chin, and stained her clothes.
Havelyn landed nearby, panting, her right wing held rigidly against her body.
Several primary feathers were broken or bent, and a dark thread of blood ran along the wing's inner surface before dripping onto the metal grating beneath her feet.
"We did it," Havelyn said hoarsely as she approached her friend.
"No. Not yet."
Candice was trembling.
"We're going to save him, Candice."
"What if he attacks me like they did?"
A tear struck the floor.
Havelyn froze. It was the first time she had ever seen Candice cry.
"Hey. No, no. That isn't going to happen."
"He's better than that. If you held on all this time, then he did too."
Candice exhaled and froze the tears on her face, letting them fall like tiny shards of glass.
"Don't tell anyone about this," she said.
"Now that's the Candice I know."
Candice did not appreciate the response in the slightest, but there was no time to argue.
The giant with the bone-plated skin was slowly rising beside the ruins of his frozen shield, bruised and dazed.
Without the collar's electrical punishment driving him forward, however, he did not attack.
He remained in the center of the corridor, staring at the dead young woman's motionless body.
Then his heavy eyes moved toward the corpses of the Gron-Tarh soldiers scattered across the walkways.
Finally, he raised his head and met Candice's gaze through the darkness.
Around him, on the floor and along the walkways, the surviving prisoners slowly began to rise and examine their own bodies as they absorbed their new reality.
Havelyn spread her uninjured left wing in an instinctive threat display, watching the crowd below and preparing to fight again if necessary.
"Wait," Candice said, placing her mechanical hand on her friend's shoulder.
Candice descended the metal staircase alone, one step at a time, while the pain in her ribs protested every movement.
She kept her scythe in her right hand but allowed the curved blade to drag harmlessly across the grated floor, far from anyone's throat. Her posture remained cautious without showing immediate aggression.
She reached the main floor and stopped at the center of the colossal gallery, surrounded by hundreds of eyes watching from the shadows.
"The cell doors are still open," she said, projecting her voice firmly and clearly through the empty sector's acoustics.
None of the prisoners moved.
"The collars don't work anymore."
"And the men who controlled this block and inflicted that pain on you are dead on the walkways above."
The first gaunt prisoner—the man who had attacked Candice at the beginning—remained kneeling near the wall, curled in on himself.
He touched his neck with trembling hands and stared at the open door of his cell as though it still possessed some invisible power to call him back to the safety of familiar torture.
Candice continued, addressing the silent crowd.
"I'm not going to ask you to trust me."
"I know what you endured here, and I know you have no reason to trust anyone carrying a weapon."
Her blue eyes traveled across all six levels of open, empty cells, taking in the scale of the suffering that place contained.
"Look at those open doors," she continued, pointing toward the exits.
"Look at them and decide for yourselves what you want to do."
A scarred woman on the second level laughed, the sound bitter and joyless.
"Decide what, invader?" she asked, her hoarse voice filled with scorn.
"Which death corridor gets to kill us first when we try to leave?"
Candice pointed her scythe toward the massive circular bulkhead at the far end of the sector.
"That passage leads to the main elevators."
"The route we used to enter has collapsed, so there's no going back that way. But this fortress is under a massive attack on the surface right now."
"If you reach the upper levels through those elevators, you'll find the resistance fighting."
"They won't shoot you."
A murmur of doubt spread among the prisoners.
A voice called from the darkness.
"And you? What do you get from this? Why did you open the cells?"
"Honestly, I didn't come here for any of you," Candice answered, her voice trembling slightly—not with fear, but with restrained emotion.
Her eyes swept across the gallery once more.
"I came for my brother."
"And for everyone who lost family to this cursed place."
The silence that followed differed from the one before.
It was a silence of shock and incomprehension.
In a place where names were erased and replaced with numbers, the simple mention of a family bond sounded like heresy—or madness.
The dark-skinned giant slowly lowered his hand and studied Candice with something new in his heavy gaze.
Candice stepped closer to the center of the group, exposing herself.
"His name is Rubens."
The name traveled through the silent gallery in a way the screams and gunfire had not.
It carried a weight of its own—an echo that touched painful memories buried within many hearts.
A chain suddenly shifted on the fourth level of the parallel gallery.
Someone who had taken no part in the fighting and remained hidden until then slowly emerged from the last cell on the left.
He was a small, frail old man. Deep, ancient burn scars covered both eyes, having robbed him of sight long ago.
He walked with one hand against the wall, feeling the metal and counting doors with calloused fingertips in a familiar rhythm.
Unlike every other inmate in the sector, he wore no collar.
An ugly, empty metal socket had instead been embedded at the base of his neck. The scars surrounding it suggested that someone, at some point, had torn out the original device along with a piece of flesh and nerve.
The old man stopped beside the grated railing and turned his face toward Candice's voice.
"Say that name again, girl," he asked, his voice weak but suddenly urgent.
Candice looked up at him, her heart beating so violently that her injured ribs spasmed in protest.
"Rubens," she repeated, her voice filled with hope and fear.
"Do you know him?"
The man ran a trembling hand across the burn scars where his eyes had once been, the gesture carrying an ancient anguish.
"I never saw him with my own eyes. This cursed prison stole them from me," he answered bitterly.
Candice's hope withered instantly, striking her harder than any fist.
But the old man continued, one finger still raised.
"That name is famous in here."
Candice did not realize how tightly she had clenched the scythe until the mechanical joint of her prosthetic groaned audibly in the sector's silence.
"Know this, girl. He is still fighting."
The world around her seemed to disappear, leaving only Candice and the old man's voice.
The other surviving prisoners saw the exchange and understood what would come next. They silently drew closer to help her, joining their strength with hers.
For the first time since the cells had opened in that nightmarish sector, they did not advance against Candice and Havelyn.
They advanced beside them, in silence.