She froze to the spot, the sight of the Shadow-man driving a stake of horror straight through her chest. Over two meters tall, the thing loomed at the end of the corridor, its head skirting the bottom of the ventilation and coolant tubes that had been bracketed against the ceiling. As it stepped in front of the light attached to the wall at the end, part of it went translucent, the white of the light’s mercury base turning a yellow-brown before the creature’s shoulder swirled together again like blown smoke.
For a second, everything slowed down. She didn’t breathe. The Shadow-man stopped in the center of the space. Then, with a movement so precise that it sent a shiver straight through her bones, its head turned toward her.
The soldiers burst into action around her. “Sol’s fucking child, go, go, go!”
Jiayi almost tripped over her feet as she backpedaled, hauling herself around with the edge of the terminal. A blaster cracked behind her, and the red flare of the shot skittered across the surrounding pipes and walls like a jab of lightning. Tuomin pulled her bag off her shoulder and shoved her forward as the blaster cracked again, and then they were all running.
The lights began to flicker. As she threw her head back, the wild, chaotic scene flung into view like a snapshot from a nightmare. Five creatures now walked toward them, their movements long and grotesque, pinpointed by flashes of blaster fire which they dodged like movie mannequins—or ghosts. Quick, staticy jerks that swept half their mass to the sides, as if they didn’t have to obey the limits of the station’s artificial gravity. Around them, the darkness seemed to grow.
One light, mid-way down, caught her attention as it went out.
Not electrical, she thought. Not mechanical.
“Jiayi!” Tuomin hauled on her shoulder, dragging her back around. “Come on, let’s go!”
The metal rang under her feet, jarring her from her thoughts. Her breath came in a raw gasp as she saw just how close the Shadow-men had come. Clio’s bounty, I’ve been staring like a fucking moron.
Ahead, the simple digits in its panel telling them the car was waiting, the elevator’s double-doors swung into view. She sidestepped the bundled wires of the power relay, then skipped over a patched welding plate in the floor. Her borrowed suit tugged at her shoulders when she landed and, for one heart-pounding second, she nearly tripped, but her shoes stomped hard on the floor and she slammed her hands into the wall, steadying herself out.
Shots of blaster-fire cracked behind her, sharp and frantic. Flashes of red and green caught at the sides of her vision. Tuomin turned beside her, his blaster also coming up. Her bag swang wide. She sidestepped again, then lunged forward. Half a heartbeat later, she thudded into the closed doors with her shoulder and mashed at the panel buttons. She almost fell when they opened, tripping inside.
“Come on!” she yelled.
Blasters cracked. Dimas took one Shadow-man down with a shot to the head, but another side-stepped his follow-up shot, jerking so fast it was like watching a skip in a corrupted video file. The hall lit up with the skittering flashes of the three soldiers’ blasters. Outlines of Shadow-men—more than she could count—filled the rest of the hall. Beyond the intersection they’d come from, the corridor was pitch black. She could barely even see the relay bundle anymore.
One blaster hit a cable and a shower of sparks roared out, spitting like fire across the black. Her heart leapt.
Gods fucking roads, how many of those have they hit? If they took out one of the main leads…
She leaned out, banging her hand on outside of the elevator. “Get in!”
Apparently, they’d all had similar thoughts to her, because they all started back. Dimas turned first, then Tuomin. The last man skipped back, still firing. Boots rang out against the metal floor, the vibration reaching her hand where it gripped the elevator’s outer threshold, holding the doors open. The elevator dipped as they leapt inside.
As she made to let go of the outside and push herself back in, the light above her gave a hard flicker. Her eyes widened as she caught the elevator panel doing the same.
She had about half a second to process that before everything went dark.
“No!”
A chorus of swears filled the air around her. Someone found her shoulder and yanked her inside. The air where her head had been filled with the flashes of blaster fire. She let out a yelp as the air seemed to erupt around her, the simultaneous cracks like a dozen thunderclaps at once. The elevator lit up with vague images of red and green. She caught sight of the soldiers in front of her, blocking her way to the door, arms up and trained, faces half-scared and intent.
She pushed herself up from where she’d half-fallen against the wall, then squeezed her way around them. Her reaching fingers found the elevator panel at the front. By now, she’d become so familiar with their design that she didn’t need to see it. The pad of her pointer finger found the dip where metal met touchscreen, and she said a little prayer.
She sagged as she felt the motors come to life within the wall. A second later, the doors began to close.
The three men jumped back with surprised yelps. A blaster round caught the side of one door and crashed back in a series of sparks. They bounced off the soldier’s visor, hit his uniform, and faded as they fell to the floor.
Suddenly, everything was quiet. A ringing filled her ears, probably a result of the blaster fire. They must have been yelling, too, because she heard echoes of that in it, as well.
The world seemed to stand still for a moment. Everyone was still, staring at the door.
Then, so quiet it could have been in her head, a faint scrape came from the other side of the door.
Those things are still out there.
“Oh my gods, move!” She shoved at the soldier next to her and popped her netlink out of her pocket, her heart racing. The thin light of its screen illuminated the surface of the door panel, and her panicked eyes scrutinized its surface. The door-closed button had worked. If she wanted it to move…
She double-tapped the upper middle of the pad, where ‘five’ would normally sit.
The elevator lurched upward. She kept praying as the gears toiled outside. A second scrape sounded across the outside of the elevator, and the entire thing swayed, but the sound was already farther down than it had been, and she thought the sway was from the shift of the soldiers next to her rather than anything coming in—though she did give the escape panel in the ceiling a sudden glance. With her netlink still aglow in her hands, the square shape of the hatch came as little more than lines amid the soldier’s shadows.
The lights flickered back on when they reached the fifth floor, and they all spilled out of the doors. Shaking, and gasping in all of the breaths she realized she hadn’t been breathing, it was a minute before any of them spoke. The elevator sat open, its interior lights on and welcoming. She stared at it, then tipped her gaze to the rest of the hall. They were alone, it looked like, in a modified office hallway. Here, a private company had leased the space for the past three decades. Some small-time medical imaging firm, if she remembered right. They’d asked for a power extension last year. Yamaguchi had handed the contract to municipal, and it was still going through system bureaucracies to attain all the permissions due to a cross-hatch of utilities with another company in the upper wings.
It didn’t look as though anyone had come into work today.
“That… was intense,” Tuomin said, his face pale and recovering.
“I thought I was going to die.” Dimas, standing the farthest into the hall, looked up and met her eyes. “I think I love you.”
With his steel blue uniform covered with riot armor and a combat helmet over his head, he was a hard edge against the soft-modeled walls and domestic office windows around him. Suddenly, everything seemed to overwhelm her. She dropped her head until the beige floor filled most of her vision and lowered herself down to it, not so much crumpling as folding.
“Has anyone heard anything?” The third man, the last out of the elevator, had stopped with his ear to his comm and his head tilted. “Sarge, you there?”
“I was too busy screaming to hear anything,” Dimas said.
“Me too.”
Movement shaded part of the light to her right, and she looked up as Tuomin set her bag next to her. Down the hall, the third man looked up suddenly and caught her eye.
“How did you get the elevator moving?” he asked.
“It’s not an electrical problem,” she said. “And it’s not mechanical. I told you that.” Well, she’d told them that before, and she hadn’t completely realized it when she’d acted on that assumption—it had only been when the doors had closed that she’d confirmed the theory—but everything was swimming together in her mind. Her heart might have stopped beating so fast, but the adrenaline still loaded her system. It felt like, at any moment, she’d need to take off running again.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the things are still working, but the lights aren’t showing up.” She bowed her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “If I had to guess, the same thing might be happening to the lights on Harbin. Energy output is still the same, they just aren’t showing.”
“How is that possible?”
She laughed at that, the incredulity of the situation finally getting to her. “How the fuck should I know? Do I look like an opticologist or what-the-fuck-ever?”
A small silence filled the hallway. Tuomin shifted beside her, and a click sounded as he adjusted some strap or another. She didn’t look up, but she got the impression that the three were exchanging looks about her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I really don’t know.”
“That’s… not your fault. You’ve done more than enough.” The third man cleared his throat. He sounded closer this time, as if he’d moved a few steps since she’d last looked up. “I’m sorry we couldn’t keep you safe.”
She snorted. “I think you get a pass on that, considering we were attacked by a wall of demons.” Well, maybe not a wall, but it had certainly looked like that toward the end, especially with the darkness. “I really do think they’re somehow hiding the light, not just disabling the circuits.”
“I don’t think we have access to an—” The man struggled with the word for a moment, “—opticologist on station anymore.”
“Actually, I’m not sure if that’s the right word for them,” she tilted her gaze back up, meeting him with a sidelong stare, “so there may be hope yet.”
He snorted. “Maybe.”
She drew in a heavy breath, then let it out again. After a moment, she rolled her shoulders and leaned back, propping herself up with her arms behind her.
“So,” she said. “Now what?”
He flinched, just a little bit. Dimas and Tuomin both looked at him, and the three exchanged a few seconds of silence. At the end of it, he let out a sigh and seemed to deflate, his shoulders shifting down and his chin dropping a few inches down.
“Well, Preston isn’t responding, so now we go find a station line and call command. They’ll figure out something.”
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