Chapter 4 : The Citadel's Shadow
The War Rig was gone from its loading platform.
I scrambled upright, heart pounding, scanning the Citadel's base for the massive convoy vehicle I'd watched being prepped the night before. Empty. The platform was empty, the fuel lines coiled, the War Boys who'd swarmed it nowhere to be seen.
Missed it. I missed—
Then the sound reached me. Engines, but distant. Coming from above, not the departure route. I looked up and saw the War Rig climbing the Citadel's internal ramp, ascending toward the high garages where final preparations happened the night before departure.
Not gone. Moved.
My hands were shaking. The Armor tightened around my wrists in response, reading my panic, trying to soothe or contain it.
"It's fine," I muttered. "One more day. Maybe two."
The camp stirred around me as the Wretched woke to another morning of calculated desperation. I pushed through them toward the Citadel's base, toward the access tunnels the woman with the beetle paste had pointed out the day before. The Armor had been pulling downward since I arrived. Time to see why.
The tunnels opened behind a collapsed section of rock face, invisible unless you knew to look. A dozen Wretched had made homes in the first hundred meters—improvised shelters built against the walls, their occupants watching me pass with the hollow eyes of people who had stopped caring about strangers.
I kept moving deeper.
The air changed as I descended. Cooler. Damper. The chemical smell of the surface gave way to something older—dust and mineral deposits and the faint copper tang of iron-rich rock. The Armor practically hummed against my skin.
Good, it communicated. Rich. Feed.
I pressed my palm against the tunnel wall and let it work.
The sensation was different from surface feeding. Instead of absorbing discrete pieces of metal, the Armor drew mineral content directly from the stone—iron oxides, trace metals, the rebar skeleton of pre-war construction that showed through the natural cavern walls. Slower than eating scrap, but deeper somehow. More satisfying.
The film on my forearms thickened visibly as I walked. By the time I'd descended two hundred meters, the Armor had achieved a density I hadn't felt since the vehicle graveyard—except now it was distributed evenly, protective plating rather than random accumulation.
Pre-war construction became more obvious the deeper I went. Concrete reinforcements. Blast-sealed junctions with faded warning symbols. Corroded steel beams supporting chambers that had been carved rather than eroded.
The Citadel wasn't just a natural formation. Someone had built into it, long before Immortan Joe claimed the water supply. Military, based on the door frames and junction designations. Australian defense infrastructure, maybe, or something more classified.
A woman sat against the wall at a four-way junction, her legs folded beneath her, her face lined with radiation scars. She watched me approach without expression.
"New," she said. The same word the man in the camp had used. "Going deep?"
"Exploring."
"Nothing down there but rust and ghosts." She made a sign with her fingers—two crossed, flicked outward. A warding gesture. "And the door."
The Armor pulsed against my ribs. Yes. The door. Go there.
"What door?"
The woman's eyes narrowed. "You feel it. The metal on your skin—it feels it. Everyone with chrome in their blood feels it, even the War Boys."
I didn't bother denying the observation. "What's behind it?"
"Joe knows. Joe opened it once, back when he was still Colonel Moore." She spat the name like a curse. "Came out white as a half-life. Sealed it same day. Two layers of weld. Told everyone who asked that death lived down there."
Want, the Armor communicated. Need. Go.
"Death?"
The woman shrugged. "That's what he said. Me, I think it's worse than death. I think it's something he couldn't control." She stood, joints cracking, and shuffled past me toward the upper tunnels. "Your funeral, chrome-skin. Don't say I didn't warn you."
I watched her go, then turned toward the deepest passage.
The Armor led me unerringly. Through junctions I would have gotten lost in, past chambers filled with machinery too corroded to identify, down shafts that required climbing and squeezing through gaps barely wide enough for my shoulders. The deeper I went, the stronger the pull became—a magnetic urgency that made my hands shake.
Then I found it.
The door stood at the end of a corridor that had been carved rather than excavated. Smooth walls. Perfect angles. Pre-war engineering at its finest, preserved by the dry underground air. The door itself was industrial-grade—thick steel, heavy hinges, the kind of construction meant to survive bombs and centuries.
Someone had welded it shut. Then welded over the welds. Then added a third layer for good measure, crude metalwork scarring the professional surface like desperate graffiti.
I reached for it.
The Armor screamed.
Not a sound—a sensation. Pure animal terror flooding through the bond, plates contracting against my skin so hard I gasped, the film trying to pull me backward and away with every fiber of its alien body. My hand stopped six inches from the door's surface, held back by my own second skin.
No. Wrong. BAD. No no no—
"Easy." My voice came out strangled. "I'm not opening it. I just want to—"
AWAY.
The Armor dragged me three steps back before I could resist. I stumbled, caught myself on the corridor wall, and stood there breathing hard while the thing wrapped around me trembled like a frightened animal.
Something was behind that door. Something that terrified a creature born from metal and hunger. Something that Immortan Joe—a man who bred women and raised death cults—had sealed away and never returned to.
I pressed my palm against the wall beside the door, carefully avoiding the metal itself.
A hum. Low, almost subsonic, felt through the Armor's contact rather than heard. Machinery? Power systems? Something alive?
Don't know, the Armor communicated when I pushed the question through our bond. Old. Hungry like me but WRONG. Bad metal. Bad.
"Different from you?"
Same. Different. Older. Stronger. WRONG.
The Armor's vocabulary was limited—feelings and urges, not language—but the message was clear enough. Whatever lived behind that door was related to my symbiote somehow. An older version. A more dangerous version. Something that had been sealed away long before I arrived.
I backed away slowly, keeping my hands clear of the welded surface, and didn't stop until the corridor curved and the door disappeared from view.
The climb back to the surface took two hours. The Armor fed the entire way, rebuilding reserves depleted by its panic response, but its usual satisfaction was muted. Anxious. The memory of that door stayed with both of us.
By the time I emerged into the afternoon sun, the War Rig had descended from the high garages and returned to its loading platform. War Boys swarmed over it again—final preparations for tomorrow's departure.
Tomorrow. The word crystallized my scattered thoughts. Furiosa leaves tomorrow. The chase begins. And I need to be on that road.
The Armor settled against my skin, calmer now that we were away from the depths but still uneasy. In my chest, the Breath counter sat at two—the harvest from the old woman in the camp and another Wretched who had died while I explored.
Not enough. Not nearly enough for what was coming.
But I knew where to find more.
The sound of engines warming carried through the rock, a mechanical heartbeat counting down the hours until everything changed.
Support the Story on Patreon
If you are enjoying the series and would like to read ahead, I offer an early access schedule on Patreon. I upload 7 new chapters every 10 days.
Tiers are available that provide a 7, 14, or 21-chapter head start over the public release. Your support helps me maintain this consistent update pace.
Patreon.com/TransmigratingwithWishes