The silence pressed in from all sides. Not the kind born from a lack of sound, but the kind that bloomed in the absence of someone who used to fill the space with their presence. Juno was gone, and the weight of that had finally settled into their bones.

They moved through the upper trench of Strata 2 like ghosts. The massive industrial corridor stretched on for kilometers, lined with rusted rails and defunct power coils, every flickering emergency light casting shadows like echoes of the past.

Rane walked at the front now. Not because she wanted to, but because someone had to.

Korrin hadn’t spoken much since they left the crash site. He trailed behind her with eyes that were somewhere else entirely. Juno’s loss had hit him harder than he’d admit. They’d been close in that unspoken way—shared jokes, shared bruises, shared drinks back in the Upper Sector. Now, there was only empty space where Juno should have stood.

Sil was quieter than usual too, her fingers working restlessly at her wrist console. She kept rerouting data, scanning atmospheric changes, overanalyzing everything. Distraction was her shield. And Rane understood it.

Eren tried to keep the energy up. He was the youngest and least experienced, but he had heart. He passed out ration bars during their short break, tossed out dry jokes no one really responded to, and patched up a tear in Rane’s jacket with medical tape. His optimism wasn’t delusion—it was survival instinct.

They were down a body. They hadn’t even reached the mission objective yet.

“I still don’t get it,” Rane muttered, adjusting the gas filter on her mask. “That thing… it knew we were coming.”

“You’re assuming it was a ‘thing’ at all,” Sil said, crouched near a pile of half-buried drone parts. “Could’ve been a defense mechanism. Automated. But it... it reacted like it knew us. It waited.”

“It tore through reinforced plating like paper,” Korrin said finally, voice rough. “Juno didn’t stand a chance.”

No one spoke for a moment.

They reached a decompression chamber near a collapsed maintenance tram route. The doors were jammed halfway open, forcing them to squeeze through. Inside, it smelled like ozone and old coolant. Rane flicked her wristlight on, sweeping the beam across the walls. Scrawled messages in old paint lined the bulkheads—warnings, tallies, names long forgotten. The survivors of previous missions, or the final madness of scavengers lost in the dark.

They made camp here. It wasn’t safe, but nowhere was.

Korrin set down the duffel bag he’d been carrying since the crash. Without Juno, their loadouts were mismatched. Sil was covering tech and recon. Eren was juggling medical and support. Rane and Korrin took the brunt of fireteam duties. They’d all had to stretch thin.

As the others settled into muted tasks, Rane found herself staring at Juno’s old gear still packed away in one corner of the room. She hadn’t had the heart to leave it behind.

Later, when the hum of their temporary generator filled the space, Sil approached Rane and sat down beside her. They hadn’t talked much since the fight. Not really.

“She meant a lot to you,” Rane said, watching a moth-like drone flicker near the light.

Sil nodded. “She was always the loudest. The bravest. First into danger, last to retreat.”

“She saved my life,” Rane said. “I didn’t even see it coming. That… that monster, the one in the shell.”

“I ran the diagnostics again,” Sil said quietly. “It wasn't just engineered. It was patterned after something human.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means whatever made it knows what fear looks like. And it used it.”

Rane clenched her fists. “We were supposed to be salvaging lab tech. Clearing access routes. That’s it. Why are we even seeing this level of resistance? This place is supposed to be dead.”

“It’s not,” Sil said. “And I don’t think it ever was.”

Their conversation was interrupted by Korrin stepping in from the other chamber. His posture was rigid, one hand on his sidearm.

“You all need to hear this.”

They followed him to the comms rig, where Eren had boosted a signal using leftover transmission cables scavenged from the tram line. A voice crackled over the radio—garbled, panicked, almost too faint to understand.

“… repeat… protocol breached… they’re loose… lower levels compromised…”

Then a name:

“… subject: MAYHEM …”

Static swallowed the rest.

Sil turned pale. “That’s not possible. The MAYHEM protocol is myth. Old fail-safe legends from pre-War files.”

“I don’t think it’s a myth anymore,” Eren said. “And I don’t think we were sent here to retrieve anything. I think we’re the containment.”

A silence fell over the team that felt heavier than before.

That night, Rane couldn’t sleep. She stood at the edge of the broken hatchway, staring into the dark bowels of Strata 2. Somewhere beyond that steel and dust and memory, something was waiting. Something watching. And whatever it was, it had plans.

For all of them.