The dark was not a void, and it was not sleep. It was a slow, crushing descent into a black ocean without a surface.
Then, a sound breached the water.
Heavy boots struck stone. The rhythm was measured, echoing through the silence like a tolling bell.
A jagged shard of light pierced the gloom. My lungs convulsed, dragging in air that seared my chest like inhaled ash. The sharp, metallic tang of rust and old copper hit the back of my throat. It was the distinct scent of a grave.
I forced my eyelids open, expecting the abyss. Instead, I lay on fractured concrete. Above me, severed cables hung like dead vines, spitting intermittent showers of blue sparks onto the dust-coated floor. Smashed consoles lined the walls. Armored corpses lay scattered across the room, their rigid, skeletal fingers still locked through the trigger guards of their rifles. Their visors were spider-webbed with cracks and smeared with thick, dried brown stains.
A cold feeling at the base of my skull, bringing a sudden, violent flash of heat. The blinding glare of a muzzle flash. The deafening shriek of tearing metal. The copper taste of someone else's blood on my tongue.
A single thought pressed against the inside of my forehead: You did this. Boot heels crunched on broken glass.
A shadow eclipsed the doorway. He was tall, his posture rigidly straight inside dark tactical armor. As he stepped into the flickering light of the sparking wires, the sharp planes of his face emerged—a granite jawline, a prominent brow, and eyes the color of cold slate. He scanned the ruined consoles, the dead bodies, and finally, me.
Recognition flared in the slate. The eyes narrowed into hard slits.
He jerked his rifle up. The barrel leveled dead center between my eyes.
My body moved before the conscious thought to run even formed. I rolled sideways. The concrete where my head had just rested erupted in a shower of sparks and pulverized stone. Pain tore through my ribs, but I scrambled forward, driving my weight upward, and clamped my bare hand directly over the hot barrel of his rifle.
The metal blistered my palm. Our faces were inches apart. I could see the minute tension lines radiating from the corners of his eyes, the slight flare of his nostrils. His lips pressed into a bloodless line. He didn't pull the trigger.
"You're alive?" The voice was a low, abrasive rasp.
I forced a breath through my teeth. "What does it look like?"
A muscle feathered along his jaw. He didn't lower the weapon. "Did you do this?"
My gaze slid to the skeletal hands gripping the rifles, to the black stains pooling on the concrete. I reached for the memory, but found only a hollow space, a blur, and the sickening auditory crunch of snapping bone.
"I don't know."
The tension in his arms slacked a fraction of an inch. The barrel lowered. He studied the micro-expressions on my face with absolute, terrifying stillness.
"Name." It was a command, cold and flat.
I dug through the static in my head. "Ashen. Ashen Ashford."
He watched me for a long moment, the look in his eyes resembling a man who had just unearthed a nightmare he thought he had buried years ago.
Then, the world dropped out from under me.
There was no warning. The blistering heat of the rifle barrel vanished from my palm. The sparking wires, the armored corpses, and the man with the slate eyes dissolved into a white void. The air rushed out of my lungs.
The scent of rust and copper evaporated, instantly replaced by the aroma of floor wax, aged paper, and chalk dust.
Warm sunlight hit the side of my face.
I gasped, sucking in the conditioned air. My hands were no longer clamped over a gun. They were gripping the smooth, varnished edges of a wooden desk. Between my shaking fingers, I held a yellow No. 2 pencil.
"You good, man?"
The voice was bright. I turned my head slowly. George leaned back in the desk beside me, balancing precariously on two legs. His wide grin pushed his scattered freckles high on his cheeks.
I stared at him. I waited for his face to melt into smoke, for a weapon to materialize in his hands. He just tapped a blue ballpoint pen against his spiral notebook in a steady, annoying rhythm.
In the row ahead, Mia shifted in her seat. She was hunched over her textbook, the afternoon sun catching the sloping curve of her cheekbone. She glanced back over her shoulder, her hazel eyes sparking with quiet amusement, and pressed a finger to her lips to shush George.
At the front of the room, Professor Kendall spoke in a steady drone. His chalk squeaked in short, sharp bursts against the blackboard. It was a perfect, mundane afternoon.
I looked down at my hands. The knuckles were white. I was gripping the yellow pencil with the exact same desperate, white-knuckled force I had used on the hot rifle.
The feeling at the base of my skull shifted. A cold, predatory amusement rippled through the back of my mind. It felt like something entirely separate from me was awake. It was watching this peaceful sanctuary through my own eyes, and it knew exactly where we were.
The yellow pencil snapped in half.
"Whoa," George said. The front legs of his chair hit the linoleum with a thud. He stared at the jagged, splintered wood in my hands. "You really hate calculus."
I dropped the broken halves onto the desk. I shoved my trembling hands deep into my pockets and focused on the rhythmic squeak of the chalk to regulate my breathing.
The shrill ring of the bell cut through the lecture. Desks scraped backward as students gathered their bags.
"Lunch is on me," George announced, slapping my shoulder. The grin was firmly back in place. "You look like you've seen a ghost, Ashen."
"Yeah. Maybe," I muttered.
We joined the current of students funneling into the hallway. For everyone else, the physics of the world were ordinary. But every time I blinked, the environment stuttered. A jagged crack appeared across a windowpane, only to smooth itself out a millisecond later. A fluorescent light buzzed furiously, casting a strobe effect, before steadying into a calm hum.
And the air. Beneath the heavy layers of cheap perfume, deodorant, and floor polish, a sharper, cumulative scent lingered in the back of my throat.
It smelled like iron.
We pushed through the double doors and stepped out into the courtyard. Sunlight poured generously over the stone benches and manicured green grass. The central fountain burbled a quiet, steady rhythm.
I inhaled deeply, letting the warm air fill my lungs, trying to shake off the oppressive weight of the bunker.
Then, the sky shattered.
The sound tore the afternoon apart. The massive, two-story windows lining the courtyard walls exploded inward simultaneously. Jagged sheets of glass rained down onto the pavement.
Screams erupted, bouncing wildly off the stone walls, instantly dissolving the quiet sanctuary into absolute chaos.
Figures stormed through the breached windows. They wore heavy, bulky black armor. Their rifles were already raised to their shoulders. Their faces were entirely obscured behind dark, mirrored visors that reflected the shattered sunlight.
They looked exactly like the dead men in the warehouse.
"GEORGE!" I screamed, the sound tearing my throat raw. "GET DOWN!"
A few yards away, George spun around, his backpack slipping off one shoulder. He was too slow.
A sharp crack split the air. A silver streak punched directly through his skull. The wide grin vanished. A mist of crimson sprayed across the grey stone of the courtyard, and his body crumpled into a heap of limbs and canvas.
"No." The raw whisper was swallowed immediately by the deafening roar of automatic gunfire.
Mia screamed. I snapped my head toward the fountain. She was backed into the stone basin, cornered. Her hazel eyes were blown wide with absolute terror. She reached a trembling hand out toward me.
"Ashen! Help!"
I lurched forward, my boots scraping against the pavement. Every muscle fiber strained to close the distance.
Another shot cracked.
Her body jolted violently. She collapsed backward, sliding down the stone basin into a rapidly expanding pool of red.
As the cordite smoke drifted across the courtyard, I saw him.
He stood casually behind the spot where she had fallen. He slowly lowered a pistol to his side. A thin, grey wisp of smoke curled upward from the hot barrel. He wore a dark, glaring red coat, its edges frayed and stained with old, drying blood.
His face was a distortion, blurring and shifting like thick smoke caught in a draft. But cutting through that visual static was his mouth. A cruel, knowing smirk curved across his lips.
I knew him. I didn't know how, or from where, but a deep, seismic certainty struck my bones.
The cold feeling at the base of my skull surged forward, flooding my nervous system. The feeling inside me didn't offer fear or panic.
It offered absolute, unadulterated rage.