Time had lost all meaning inside that ship.
With no windows, no sky, and no point of reference beyond the constant vibration of the engines, it was impossible to tell how long we had been locked away in that darkness.
The stale air inside the maintenance compartment smelled of hot metal, old oil, and industrial fluids I preferred not to identify.
Movement outside had gradually died down.
Every now and then, heavy footsteps crossed the corridor beyond the containers and chains, accompanied by muffled orders transmitted through the speakers.
Then everything returned to that tense silence, maintained only through the effort of keeping our own breathing under control.
Havelyn had eventually given in to exhaustion.
Her head rested lightly against my shoulder, her long black hair covering part of her pale face.
I stayed as still as possible so I wouldn't wake her.
Her wings were folded as tightly as possible against her back, and although Sahger had already removed most of the heavier bandages, a few wraps still covered the base and the most badly injured areas.
She was much better than before, but she still wasn't whole.
On the other side of the compartment, Sahger leaned against one wall while Tsukumo sat with his back against the metal plating, eyes closed.
I, on the other hand, hadn't been able to sleep properly in days. Laura dominated my thoughts.
Gron-Tarh was drawing closer, and if the information was correct, we were only a few hours away from setting foot in the first place that might finally give us a real trail leading to her.
And even after hours of silence and darkness, I couldn't relax.
Suddenly, the ship trembled.
It wasn't the constant vibration of the thrusters. This time, the entire structure groaned in metallic protest.
The plates around us began rattling violently, and a forgotten tool fell from a shelf, bouncing across the grated floor.
Havelyn jolted awake.
Out of pure defensive instinct, one of her wings tried to open, but she stopped the motion immediately, her face twisting into a sharp grimace of pain.
"What's happening?" she whispered, one hand flying to her shoulder.
Sahger raised his head.
"We entered the atmosphere."
Tsukumo opened his eyes.
"Gron-Tarh?"
"Yes."
That single confirmation was enough to wipe every trace of exhaustion from my body.
I carefully stood, giving Havelyn room to pull away and regain her balance.
Sahger picked his helmet up from the floor and locked it around his neck with a dry click.
The reddish visor came alive in the dim light.
"Now comes the complicated part," the hunter said.
"Now?" I shot back.
"I thought that part started when we broke into a maximum-security prison ship."
"Until now, all we had to do was avoid being seen."
He checked the seals on his armor.
"From this point on, we need to stop being on board."
Tsukumo rose, brushing invisible dust from his coat.
"Explain."
Sahger opened the compartment door only a crack and peered into the corridor.
"When this transport crosses the prison's outer security zone, the central system will verify absolutely everything: registered crew, exact weight, declared cargo, and energy signatures, if we're detectable."
I looked at the others.
"And we're unregistered dead weight."
"Exactly," Havelyn confirmed, using a container to steady herself as she stood.
"So we can't still be here when the landing gear touches the ground."
Another violent tremor ran through the hull, much stronger this time, forcing gravity against our stomachs.
Sahger threw the door open.
"Move."
We followed close behind him.
During atmospheric reentry, the ship felt like a completely different environment.
The deep hum of the engines had become a deafening roar.
The walls creaked under external pressure, and rows of red lights flashed frantically along the corridors, warning of the rapidly approaching ground.
The crew was too busy trying to stabilize the descent, and that chaos was exactly what allowed us to move.
Armed men ran through intersections without looking to either side, while workers and slaves dragged heavy equipment toward containment bays, sealing and locking pressurized doors.
Sahger led without hesitation.
He didn't run recklessly, but he never stopped to think either. He turned at junctions before we even reached them, pulled us into secondary ducts, waited for patrols to cross corridors, then moved again.
The fact that he had once escaped that hell stopped being just a story. It was obvious in the way he read the architecture of the transport.
We descended two entire levels.
Eventually, the hunter stopped in front of a reinforced circular hatch built directly into the lower floor of the hull, surrounded by peeling industrial warnings.
Atmospheric disposal.
Sahger knelt beside the control panel and ripped off the protective cover with brute force.
Tsukumo leaned in to study the mechanisms and exposed wiring.
"Won't bypassing this trigger an alert on the command bridge?" the golden-eyed man asked.
"This model dumps chemical and biological waste into the vacuum or during reentry, before passing over inhabited zones."
"If I jump the circuit properly, the system will only register a routine release of inert cargo."
Havelyn stared at the hatch in the floor, fists clenched.
"Once we're out, how far will we be from the ground?" she asked.
"Impossible to know, girl," Sahger grumbled.
He took a deep breath, his gaze dropping to her bound wings, and I immediately noticed the tension in his shoulders.
"I'll carry you. You won't need to use your wings."
"I can glide," she replied flatly.
"But it'll hurt and slow your healing. Leave it to me."
I immediately picked her up and held her against my chest.
Her icy blue eyes met mine, defiant.
Sahger turned his attention back to the panel.
A small light shifted from red to yellow.
"Then listen carefully. No one releases more energy than absolutely necessary."
I looked at Tsukumo, who nodded.
"Ready?" Sahger growled.
"Let's go," we all answered.
Sahger pulled the lever.
The hatch burst open into the void, and the world outside exploded inward.
A brutal wall of freezing wind tore into the compartment, ripping loose objects free and hurling them against the ceiling.
The noise was so violent and absolute that it swallowed every other sound around us.
Sahger locked both hands around the structure to keep from being sucked out immediately.
Tsukumo didn't even blink, his posture unmoving amid the chaos.
I instinctively covered my face, narrowing my eyes to see through the hurricane battering us.
Below the hull, enormous, dense black clouds flowed like dark rivers, torn apart by constant flashes of internal lightning.
And then, through a break in the storm, I saw it.
My body forgot the wind.
Forgot the imminent fall.
Forgot even the basic command to breathe.
Gron-Tarh.
For long, agonizing seconds, my mind refused to accept the scale of what I was seeing.
Sahger had called it a "prison complex."
He had been categorically wrong.
Not because he meant to lie, but because there wasn't a word in any of our languages large enough to describe that atrocity.
The prison swallowed the horizon itself.
A colossal wall of black metal, oppressive and impossibly thick, tore across the planet's surface for distances my eyes couldn't follow, disappearing beneath the cloud cover in both directions.
From that mechanical scar rose monstrous towers like needles driven into the sky.
Some pierced straight through the storm, enormous beyond reason. Others were wide enough to contain entire vertical cities, dotted with millions of small, cold, pale lights.
Searchlights the size of mountains swept through the clouds.
Suspended steel platforms linked entire continental sectors of the facility.
Cruisers and cargo ships entered and departed like insects from ports embedded directly into the armored walls.
Everything built around the same machine.
Everything existing solely to feed it.
Suppression drones patrolled the airspace above the clouds.
Armored convoys traveled along arterial routes below, and at certain points across the dead surface, circular domes pulsed with such intense blue, radioactive light that even from that altitude and through the storm, my eyes began to water.
I had no idea what they contained, and I had no desire to find out the hard way.
Havelyn was frozen against my chest, the wind pulling violently at her hair.
Even Tsukumo's usual cold cynicism had vanished, his eyes wide and silent before the abyss.
The structure seemed to have a pulse.
Metallic.
Inexorable.
Monstrous.
"This shouldn't exist."
Sahger slowly turned his helmet toward me.
"You haven't even seen what lies underneath, kid."
The ship suddenly banked hard to the right, aligning itself with the docking route.
Sahger measured the distance with his eyes.
"Now!"
We jumped.
The wind tore me away from the hull with the force of a giant slap, the world spinning into a chaos of dark metal and gray clouds.
I looked in every direction, but the black sky made it impossible to see anyone. I began manipulating the wind lightly, stabilizing myself.
"CAN YOU SEE THE OTHERS?!" I shouted to Havelyn against my chest.
I saw her eyes dart through the storm as though she could see everything even in the pitch-black darkness.
"TSUKUMO'S DIRECTLY TO YOUR RIGHT!"
I threw my entire body to the right and eventually caught sight of Tsukumo's clothes whipping violently in the wind.
I moved close enough for him to see me.
"DO YOU SEE SAHGER?!" Tsukumo shouted.
Finding them in that darkness without sensing their auras was almost impossible, but Havelyn found him.
"THERE!" she shouted, pointing ahead.
Sahger fell like a blue meteor, carving a path through the storm, and we began following him.
Far above and behind us, the cargo ship continued steadily toward the ports in the wall.
It didn't alter course.
No alarm split the sky.
We were free.
For now.
Suddenly, a spear of pure, concentrated white light tore through the heavy clouds several hundred meters beneath our formation.
"Down! Now!"
Tsukumo multiplied the force of our downward vector.
I was violently dragged toward the abyss, the air ripped from my lungs.
We plunged.
Two seconds later, the same beam swept through the exact airspace we had just abandoned by mere inches.
The light sliced coldly and analytically through the sky, turning that small stretch of darkness into daylight through sheer intensity.
I looked over my shoulder.
A second beam was beginning to form between two of the mega-towers, sweeping across the adjacent sector.
"Into the clouds! Now!" the hunter ordered.
We plunged into the storm, and the wet darkness of the clouds swallowed us instantly.
For the next excruciating minutes, everything became freezing rain, turbulence, and flashes of lightning detonating far too close.
The water hammered my face so brutally that I could barely keep my eyes open, while Havelyn clung to me.
We passed through the body of the storm and finally broke beneath the cloud layer.
Below us, dark, jagged mountains emerged.
Their peaks were uneven and sharp, covered in low vegetation that looked like black moss smeared across the stone.
It was hostile terrain, located along the outer reaches of the complex.
Sahger pointed toward a deep, dark ravine wedged between two towering rock walls.
"There!"
Tsukumo increased the resistance of his field, drastically slowing our momentum.
What had been a suicidal descent became a hard but survivable landing.
My boots hit the slick stone, and I slid nearly four meters across the black moss before digging in my heels and stopping.
Tsukumo touched down with the absurd elegance of someone stepping off a stair.
"You all right?" I asked Havelyn.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm just freezing," she said.
I also noticed that her wings were trembling badly.
Far above our position, beyond the mountains, the cargo ship that had served as our Trojan horse disappeared from sight.
The hum of its engines faded into the distance until it vanished completely.
The insane plan had worked.
We moved deeper into the mountains, and the rain showed no sign of letting up.
If anything, the farther we went, the more the wind seemed determined to push us back, lashing the rock walls with relentless fury.
After nearly half an hour of exhausting movement through the downpour, Sahger found a narrow split between two dark monoliths.
It was a natural cave, deep and sheltered from the wind.
We entered.
The sudden absence of the constant noise outside left my ears ringing.
The storm still roared beyond the entrance, but now it reached us like the pounding of a distant drum, muffled by layers of stone.
Havelyn dropped to the ground almost immediately, resting her forehead against her knees as she pulled them to her chest.
Sahger walked over to her, loosened the clasps on his breastplate, and began examining her wings.
Tsukumo moved toward a dry corner and started wringing water from the sleeves of his soaked coat with methodical calm.
Watching him made me smile.
Tsukumo noticed.
"What?"
I walked over, extended my palm, and released such a thin, precise layer of wind that every particle of water clinging to Tsukumo's body and clothes was expelled behind him.
"Laura taught me," I said.
I did the same for Havelyn and Sahger, sparing them the trouble of drying themselves.
I stayed near the mouth of the cave.
From there, I could still see a distant fragment of Gron-Tarh.
Not the entire abomination. The mountain ranges and thick rain concealed most of the horror, but every time lightning tore through the clouds, the silhouettes of the mega-towers emerged like black claws scratching at the storm.
They were far away.
And even then, absurdly colossal.
"This weather is terrible for traveling on foot," Tsukumo remarked, stopping behind me.
I looked up at the murky sky.
"We'll wait for the rain to ease before trying to find the village."
From deeper inside the cave, Sahger made a short sound somewhere between a dry laugh and a grunt.
"Then you'd better get comfortable."
I turned toward the darkness.
"What?"
He finished tightening the bandage around Havelyn's shoulder and rose, enormous in the dim light.
"I said this storm isn't going anywhere. Ever."
Tsukumo frowned, studying the hunter.
"How can you be so certain about the weather on a planet you haven't set foot on in seven years?"
Sahger extended one massive arm and pointed toward a flash of lightning on the horizon.
"Because that thing out there isn't a storm."
The atmosphere inside the cave shifted instantly.
Havelyn raised her blue eyes, suddenly alert.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
The mercenary walked heavily toward the entrance.
Another bolt of lightning cast the broad shadow of his shoulders across the stone wall.
"The sky above the entire prison complex is completely artificial."
I blinked, taking several seconds to process the absurdity of the statement.
"Artificial how?"
"Constructed. Maintained by orbital and underground atmospheric generators."
I looked back outside the cave in disbelief.
Rain.
Heavy clouds.
Deafening thunder.
Wind carving across the rocks.
Everything looked and behaved like the chaos of nature.
"You're telling me someone made this weather?" I asked, incredulous.
"Someone designed the matrix and the machines keeping this endless cycle running."
Tsukumo stepped forward, his analytical mind already dissecting the concept.
"For what purpose?"
"There are several logistical reasons."
Sahger rested an armored hand against the edge of the entrance.
"It makes unauthorized flight extremely difficult and severely punishes anyone who attempts it."
"It reduces ground visibility to almost zero."
"It causes chronic electromagnetic interference with unencrypted radar, civilian drones, and navigation beams."
"And above all, it turns the airspace itself into an active wall."
Havelyn swallowed behind me.
"So... even this planet's sky was designed to function as part of the containment system."
"Yes," he confirmed.
Thunder rolled through the mountains, making the stone tremble beneath our boots.
Sahger fixed his gray eyes once more on Yashin's territory.
"Now do you understand why knocking on the front door of that place and demanding answers would be idiotic?" he asked, his tone calm but direct.
"Hmm," I murmured.
He didn't smile.
He simply looked back into the darkness.
This time, there was none of his usual provocation in his expression.
Only a rare gravity.
"If Laura is rotting somewhere inside that place, Suki, we'll find her," Tsukumo said.
The others withdrew deeper into the cave.
I remained alone at the entrance for a long time.
At the back of the cave, Sahger finished tightening the buckles of his tactical gear.
"The leader of that resistance, Candice, kept a camp a few hours' march north of here the last time I was hunting in this sector," he announced.
He looked at me, and I was clearly running out of patience with all of it.
"Like I said before, I have absolutely no guarantee that village still exists, Suki."
Havelyn, leaning against the rock, planted her hands on the ground and slowly pushed herself to her feet.
Her wing sat slightly more naturally now, less tightly drawn after Sahger adjusted the pressure of the bandage, but the exhaustion in her eyes was obvious.
"When do we leave?" she asked.
No one answered.
It felt like we were chasing a damned ghost.
Sahger set his heavy helmet on the ground beside his boot and leaned his back against the rock.
"We leave in exactly two hours. That should give the searchlights time to finish sweeping this sector."
"Until then, rest."
I sat near the edge of the entrance, feeling stray droplets splash against my face.
The artificial rain continued its assault beyond the stone, an endless cascade.
There would be no clear dawn waiting for us at the end of that rest.
There was no sun, and I was restless, far too anxious to wait and recover.
Exactly two hours passed, and I counted every second.
When the last one ended, I was already on my feet.
"Let's go. Break's over."
Sahger's eyes opened immediately.
He stood, picked up his helmet, and sealed it into place.
Havelyn rose from her rest looking refreshed enough to walk without pain twisting her features with every step, though she still kept her right wing rigidly pressed against her body to avoid unwanted friction.
Before taking my first step outside, I looked one last time toward the metal monster on the horizon.
Another enormous, branching bolt of lightning exploded across the artificial atmosphere.
And for a single second, the entire prison revealed itself clearly through the clouds.
An engineering abomination.
Like a black leviathan god lying dormant.