Riven’s head lifts, already calculating. He doesn’t have to look at me when he says, “We’re going.”
The hallway is long. Gray. Bleak in the kind of way that belongs in horror stories and hospitals. One flickering light overhead. The bulb’s dying, or it senses the way the air just turned predatory.
There’s a man on the floor.
Slumped sideways against the baseboard, his coat shredded along one sleeve. Blood has soaked half his chest and most of the rug underneath. His head lolls when he looks up, but his eyes lock on Riven instantly.
“Sir…” he chokes out. “It’s breached.”
Riven drops to one knee, gripping his shoulder, the commander rising to the surface like a mask being reapplied.
“What did you see?” he asks.
“Not what.” The man’s voice is wet. “Who.”
I step forward, something tightening in my chest.
He turns to look at me. “Red hair,” he rasps. “She was already inside before it started.”
Riven stiffens.
I feel the words hit. He looks at me like he wants to ask,Were you there?But he doesn’t. Because he already knows the answer.
“Where?” he asks the man.
“The Eighth Gate. Warehouse wing.” A cough interrupts the words, flecks of blood catching on his lips. “It wasn’t just a rupture. Something was pulled through.”
“Pulled?” I echo.
Riven’s face has gone cold. Set. Not blank. Just ready.“Get him to the house,” he tells someone behind us, one of the quiet ones who always seems to appear from nowhere.
“Are you going?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Then so am I.”
He doesn’t argue. That silence? That’s how I know it’s bad.
The car is blacked out and fast, the city streaming past in blurred streaks of red and gold. We don’t speak. We don’t touch. He offers no hint of what waits for us on the other side of this drive. We sit in silence, letting the hum of the engine and the rush of the streets swallow the space between us, until all that’s left is the thrum of anticipation crawling under my skin.
Riven straps on a shoulder holster. Checks a blade. Doesn’t offer me one. Doesn’t ask if I’m ready. Because this isn’t the type of war that waits for preparedness. It just happens.
The compound is further out than I expect, near the edge of the city where streetlights thin and the air starts to taste electric, a sharp metallic zing. It’s the taste of danger. Fences topped with barbed coils. High stone walls lined with floodlights. Something here doesn’t feel fortified.
It feels tainted.
Riven gets out first. I follow him through two layers of security, past a locked gate and a stairwell that hums with something deeper than electricity.
Then we enter the space, and my breath catches in my throat. It isn’t a building. It’s a vault. Carved from steel and silence, reinforced with seals older than language, meant to keep thingsin, not out.
Something broke it.
A single rupture tears through the far wall. A wide, blistered gash of scorched metal, like the world itself was peeled back from the inside. The damage spreads in clean arcs, too intentional to be an accident. Light above us stutters, uneasy, and the ground at my feet feels brittle, like it’s holding its breath.
At the epicenter, scorched into the wall like itbelongsthere, is a sigil I know too well.
A twisted stalk of wheat, cracked, dying, coiled with thorns.
