I woke to a face, not a ceiling. Vex. Her eyes were sharp, lips firm, one hand pressed to my chest like she was checking for signs of resurrection. She was close, her breath warm. Something floral in it, subtle.
Her outfit was tight, tailored for attention. Her gaze locked with mine as they opened. She didn't speak. Just put a finger to my lips. Something in her gaze, excitement, heat, calculation. Maybe all three.
Dim biolight pulsed through the chamber. Curved walls shimmered with flickering panels. Machinery whispered, the air thick with antiseptic.
I lay on a cold metal slab. Its chill had crept into my spine. I shifted to ease a cramp.
Muffled voices leaked in through the wall, Vulkred's low grumble, tense, and another: precise, clipped, authority baked in. A door hissed open. Footsteps retreated. Then Vulkred slipped in, tall, bent at the shoulders, dragging his bad leg, face like a half-melted idol.
"Inspector's gone," he muttered. "We've got a window. Don't waste it."
Vex nodded, already moving. She slid a set of injector keys into the slab's side port, then pulled the access screen to life. Glyphs skated across it in soft blue.
“Vitals clean.”
"Route to Crypodium is marked," Vulkred said. "Third floor. Terminal inside's dormant. Corpse status means no log-ins. You'll have to override."
I sat up, bones crackling. “That I can do.”
Vulkred gave a shrug that might’ve been a nod. “I’ll catch up.”
They helped me down. My limbs sluggish, nerves tingling.
We slipped into the corridor. The air was cold and dry, overcycled. Lights hummed overhead in slow pulses. The tiles underfoot were too clean in places, like someone had tried to erase something messy and failed. You could still smell the bleach fight against old blood.
Vex moved fast, quiet and lethal. I trailed her, still shaking off cryo-stupor and whatever bootleg sedative they’d iced me with.
Around a corner, two attendants loitered outside a sealed door. Academy robes, collars high, eyes smug. One whispered to the other. I caught a word “Deadspec” spoken like currency or a threat.
Vex flicked two fingers. I backtracked into a maintenance alcove. The attendants turned, scanning the hallway, but too slow.
Arvie’s voice bloomed in my skull, dry as rust.
“That was close. I had ten credits riding on you botching it.”
I inhaled slow. A cracked terminal sat beside me, coated in grime. I reached out. The interface flared to life, then pushed back, glyphs rearranging into a lock screen that hadn't been there a moment before, a second security wall. I probably had triggered it, but Arvie helped me crack it like a thief with the master key.
“For a blacksite, this firewall’s a lame joke.”
I tripped the override. The door beside the attendants hissed open. They looked in, confused. We slid past as they entered.
The halls twisted without logic. Signs had been scrubbed, painted over, replaced with blank plates. Each turn revealed more of the facility's decayed grandeur, walls cracked, lights flickering.
The Crypodium didn’t advertise itself. Just a door that looked forgotten. No hum. No glow. Just pressure seals and age. I touched the panel.
Inside, the temperature dropped fast. Harsh blue-white lights flickered overhead. Med-pods lined the walls in recessed alcoves. Some interfaces pulsed faintly. Others sat quiet, sealed in frost. A few had names etched on: Vell-K3, Subject Drought, Reserved.
The door hissed behind us. Vulkred stepped in and sealed it. “Evenin’,” he muttered, like we were here for drinks.
He looked around, then walked to the raised central terminal. A tangle of cables hung around it like roots. He jammed in a data-spike. The screen flared to life in jittery violet.
“It’s secure. Local only. You’ll have to override a pod to accept you. Your code’s DPV-EK0.”
I nodded, connected to the nearest access node. The interface stirred, sluggish, and this time there was no seam, just layer after layer of nested encryptions stacked like scar tissue. “Let’s work it, master,” Arvie chirped in my head. We peeled glyphs back one by one, cracking nested keys, until finally the system unfolded and gave us what we needed.
I fast-scrolled, found my tag: Unclaimed Asset, DPV-EK0. Status: cadaver. Scheduled for transfer.
Arvie warned. “Pods are hooked to lognet. Wake one up, somebody upstairs gets a ping.”
Beautiful.
“Found the override, but we’ll trip an alert.”
Vex tensed. “Then we move fast.”
I switched one up. A nearby pod hissed open. Machinery came alive, lights syncing in sequence.
Vex moved to the pod and gestured. “In.”
I climbed in. The lid sealed shut. Inside, sleek med-arms unfolded. A cranial halo dropped down.
A sharp jab in my neck. Cold fire spread. My mind expanded and contracted at once. Pain lanced, then vanished. Then, a scream without sound. A system booting from somewhere deep.
“Welcome back, darling. Neurolink repair complete. System stability: ninety-eight percent. Fragments... incoming.”
A flicker of light. A memory, half-formed. A word I didn’t catch.
The lid lifted.
Vex leaned over the pod, one hand tapping the rim with restless impatience, weight shifting side to side, her eyes bright with adrenaline. She reached up and adjusted the neckline of the nurse's uniform, a small deliberate motion, then fixed me with a look that made the lab coat feel like a different kind of weapon.
“You good?”
I smirked. “Define good.”
"Alive'll do." Her mouth curved. "Now get out before I charge you for the bed."
I sat up slowly, exhaling steam. “Then I’m fantastic.”
She grinned. “Get out. We just rang the bell.”
The pod sighed shut behind me, legs stiff, nerves still arguing with gravity. As we moved to the exit, I caught my reflection in a curved panel: pale, half-dead, half-saint, pupils too wide, a faint scar under my jaw.
Arvie chimed in. “Neurolink’s online. I’m patched, dangerous, and still underappreciated.”
“How dangerous?”
“Let’s just say you haven’t seen me peel a firewall… or borrow a droid as a pet.”
The door slammed open. Without thinking, I yanked Vulkred into the alcove beside me. The wall pressed cold through my shirt.
Boots clacked in. Authority in motion. Then a clipped voice.
“Who authorized pod activity?”
“Oh, by the Divines, I’m so sorry,” Vex purred, smooth as oil. “I was calibrating the pod and I think I tripped a redundant line. You know how unstable these old diagnostics panels are.”
Silence.
I imagined her standing there, posture perfect, lab-coat fitting enough to weaponize her collarbone.
The guard huffed. “That explains the fault spike?”
“Mmm, the ‘fault spike.’” You could hear her smile. “You could write love letters with the errors in this grid.”
Another beat of silence. Then footsteps approached the platform. Gloves rasped against alloy.
Something shifted deep in my gut. Faint and wrong. The floor answered two beats later with a lurch, sudden and vicious. The lights strobed, dropping us into red emergency pulses. Somewhere nearby, a structural groan rolled through the walls like a wave finding the shore. Frost cracked off the pod casings in sheets. One of the sealed units at the far wall swung loose on its mount and slammed back with a boom that rang in my teeth.
Vulkred's face tightened. His eyes went to the ceiling and stayed there, like a man recalculating how much time he has and finding the answer unpleasant.
Vex's breath caught, sharp and short, barely a sound.
The guard's measured clip broke into a run. Outside, another set of footsteps joined it. Then more, until the corridor was a rhythm of alarm and retreat, boots on plascrete going everywhere at once.
We held until the wave of boots crested and thinned a bit. Then slipped out the door like a sin forgiven.
The corridor outside was still chaos wearing a thin skin of procedure. Two medics sprinted past without looking at us, a droid wheeled itself into a wall trying to reroute through the traffic, and somewhere ahead a klaxon had gotten stuck on a single, rhythmic note like a headache given form. A chunk of ceiling tile had come down at the far junction, and someone had put a yellow cone next to it that had already been kicked over.
A transit slab waited just beside the arch. Standard issue, slightly scuffed and greasy.
Vulkred yanked open a side panel, muttering a continuous low stream of something that involved anatomical terms and structural integrity. "Get on. Play dead. And by the Divines, don't breathe loud, your vitals are still reading warm."
I climbed on. He threw a sheet over me. It smelled like med-rot.
Wheels moved. Cold air licked my fingertips where the sheet didn't cover. Distant alarms. Doors hissing in rapid succession somewhere overhead. Boots on plascrete, moving in many directions. A droid's monotone cutting through static: structural assessment requested, level four. I heard a medical unit crashed into something heavy and kept moving.
Something squishy popped under the wheel. Vulkred stopped. "Bleeding hemorrhoids of the divines," he hissed, kicking the slab violently to one side. The motion jostled my hip against a metal rail.
"If they left a bio-bag in the transit lane again, I'm burning this ward down. Every one of these mouth-breathing orderlies thinks the floor is a…" He caught himself.
“Pretty sure we just broke eight safety regs. I’m proud.”
Nearby, a door opened and a scent drifted in: sour tea and ozone. Two voices, speaking med-jargon, clipped and fast. I felt Vulkred’s sharp intake. We moved again.
Twice we paused, once for a droid to whirr past, another for two voices around a corner snapping orders at each other about structural containment and who was supposed to have filed the tremor report. Then the lift of a ramp. A pressure door hissed. The air changed, warmer, stale.
Vulkred bumped the slab into a lock just as boots clacked in again.
The inspector's voice arrived before his step did, precise and aggrieved. "Another one. They are getting worse. The whole subsection nearly lost power." He let the silence carry his contempt for a moment. "I assume you filed a post-event protocol?"
Vulkred's voice was flat. "Filing now. Got a transfer backed up."
"See that it's complete before dusk." A pause. The inspector's footsteps moved closer. "I've reviewed the cadaver report. Its signature was abnormal. Was it confirmed?"
Vulkred didn't miss a beat. He clicked his tongue, the sound of a man who has just diagnosed something terminal and is deciding how much to enjoy saying it. "Confirmed. Probably spiked by scavvers. You know how they mess with vitals to up the resale. My guess, necrotizing fasciitis, stage four, atypical presentation. The tissue degradation's already systemic, skin's delaminating at the subcutaneous level, which is why you're getting the irregular bio-readings. It's not active enough to read clean, but it's too far gone to salvage." He let that sit for exactly the right amount of time. "You want to come verify?"
A somber whisper chimed in my skull: "Necrotizing fasciitis. Stage four. You're practically falling apart. I'm devastated."
Three hasty steps back.
“I’m not signing off on a flagged transfer. That’s on you.”
“Fine. I’ll recycle it later.”
Silence. Then a tap on data pad.
“This sets you back a rotation.”
“I’ll live.”
Footsteps retreated. The door sealed.
Vex’s voice filtered in. “Good news?”
Vulkred grunted. “We get to keep the corpse.”
Lucky me.
He pulled back the sheet. His face was drawn, burns catching the light in tired lines.
"Sorry, prince." He loomed over me, already flicking a vial the color of antifreeze, his bad leg taking its weight against the slab. "Your heart rate's spiking like a panicked rodent. Gotta make you a corpse again. Dead enough to pass through the gates." He tapped the needle once, professionally. "Brace yourself. This'll feel like your cardiovascular system filing a formal complaint." He jammed it in without further ceremony.
"Sweet dreams, my prince," Vex said, smirk playing at the corner of her mouth, warm and entirely unkind.
“On the bright side, you don’t have to tip anyone.”
The world folded. Senses blinked out one by one, scent, sound, breath. Somewhere behind the dark, I thought I heard Vex laugh.
Then nothing. Just the faint taste of metal and the words still echoing in my skull: Dead enough to pass.366Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6zwQsFs1YZ
and then Add to home screen.