“Yes, blood for blood, his bitter loan came due. He paid with death.” ― Euripides (Electra)

  * * * *

  The floor trembled beneath their boots as another explosion rippled through the complex, distant yet thunderous, sending a faint cloud of dust from the overhead ducts.

  The metallic hallway flickered, the overhead lights struggling to remain powered through the shifting pulses in the grid. A siren wailed in the background—dull and distorted, as though even the alarms themselves were choking on the ash and smoke of a base beginning to collapse.

  Rex kept pace with Tatius, his steps soundless despite the faint clink of the holstered gun at his side. He didn’t flinch at the rumble overhead, nor at the faraway cries—hunters screaming orders, scrambling to contain the intrusions from the east and west wings.

  In his left hand, the holographic projection from his wristwatch pulsed to life again, casting an eerie blue light against the pallor of his face.

  “Take the next corridor,” Rex muttered, the map shifting as he zoomed in. “Turn left. The hidden elevator should be just behind the storage bay.”

  Tatius grunted in acknowledgment, his jade-green eyes narrowing. His Gift flared faintly beneath his skin—he could feel the subtle shift in the particles in the air, and the faint tremor of distant footsteps.

  Something, or someone, was coming.

  Tatius’s arm snapped out before Rex could take another step, gripping him by the front of his shirt and yanking him backward. Hard.

  They slammed against the cold steel of a wall and dropped into the shadows behind a set of overturned service carts, half-covered in grime and shattered equipment.

  Rex didn’t argue. He drew his gun with one hand and dimmed the holo-screen with the other, watching the corridor with narrowed, alert eyes.

  Footsteps—sharp, rhythmic, and heavy, marched into view.

  Four of them. Black uniforms. Reinforced plates down their arms. Matte helmets concealing their faces. And that insignia.

  Elite hunters.

  “Intruders! We have intruders!”

  “Breeches in the east and west wings! Lock down Levels One and Two!” The lead hunter barked into their communicator, his voice gravelly and clipped.

  Tatius held his breath. Rex didn’t even blink.

  The hunters rushed past, their weapons drawn, unaware of the two shadows that had flattened themselves against the wreckage of forgotten machinery. Only when the echo of their boots had faded did Tatius finally exhale, slowly and quietly, the tension rolling from his shoulders.

  “That was close,” Rex murmured, his voice hushed.

  Tatius didn’t respond. He stood and motioned for Rex to follow. “Let’s go.”

  They moved swiftly through the remaining hall, weaving through the scattered equipment and flickering lights, each step taking them deeper into the unregistered sector of the hunters’ base in Kald—a place so buried in darkness, it hadn’t even been on the original ESA blueprints.

  When they finally reached the far wall of the storage bay, it was as unremarkable as the others—just a smooth, steel panel. But Rex’s map pulsed brighter.

  “It should be here.”

  Tatius stepped forward, running his gloved fingers across the surface of the wall. His Gift stirred faintly, sensing something embedded—something mechanical. He tapped twice, then pressed his palm flat. The faintest click echoed.

  A segment of the wall hissed, sliding open with a whisper to reveal a narrow elevator shaft—dusty and long-forgotten. A flickering panel beside the door held a single, cracked button, blinking dimly.

  “We can’t guide you from here,” Raul’s voice crackled in their ear. “You’ll be going in blind. Tatius, please. Don’t be reckless.”

  “I never am,” Tatius muttered, stepping inside the lift.

  Rex joined him. He didn’t speak. He simply raised his gun in one hand, his caramel hair falling over his brow in the dim blue light, and pressed the single button.

  The elevator hummed. Then descended.

  Neither man spoke during the ride.

  The silence was heavy. Too heavy. The kind that wrapped around the chest like a vice, like an omen of something about to go horribly wrong. The deeper they went, the colder it became, the temperature dropping by the second until even Rex could see his breath fog in front of him.

  The walls vibrated even as more explosions rocked above. The decoy teams were doing their part. Sera, Allen, and Jonan in the east wing. Taylor, Misha, and Lucas in the west.

  Buying them time. But for what?

  When the lift finally came to a shuddering halt, the doors creaked open—revealing a dark corridor bathed in cold white light and silence. Two elite hunters were already standing there. Talking, perhaps, unaware of the elevator’s activation.

  Tatius didn’t wait.

  The moment the doors were fully open, he surged forward in a blur. His Gift churned around his limbs—earth kicked up from the metallic flooring, propelled in jagged shards that pierced one hunter’s chest with a sickening crunch.

  Rex, moving in perfect synchrony, had already fired. The second hunter slumped to the floor with a hole clean through his helmet.

  Silence again. Except for their breathing.

  Rex exhaled and wiped his face with the back of his glove. “Security’s pretty light here.”

  Tatius nodded, glancing around. “Not many hunters even know about this place, so I’m honestly not surprised. And with the situation in Eldario now…” He trailed off, his voice bitter. “They’re probably working with a skeleton crew.”

  “You ever done this before?” Rex asked, his eyes scanning for motion.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Plenty. Usually with one of the others in Aegis.”

  Rex nodded. “I haven’t in a while. But before Ashenridge, I was a mercenary. Did a lot of bounty hunting.”

  Tatius cast him a sideways glance. “That where all the money came from to rebuild Zone 0?”

  Rex gave him a crooked smile. “Among other things.”

  They moved deeper down the corridor, the temperature continuing to fall. Distant echoes of gunfire rumbled from far above—the base was truly under siege.

  When they finally reached the end of the hallway, a steel door taller than either of them loomed in silence, embedded into the wall like a tombstone. A single digital panel blinked red beside it.

  “Electronic lock,” Tatius muttered, kneeling beside the panel. His brows furrowed. “Raul?” He pressed two fingers to his communicator. “Help us.”

  There was static for several moments. Then Raul’s voice echoed over the communicator, tense. “I can’t hack it where I am. Level 3 isn’t part of their grid. It’s isolated.”

  Tatius hissed under his breath.

  “You’re no hacker,” Raul continued, “but you’re decent enough. I’ll guide you. Just tell me what you see.”

  Tatius unstrapped the circular lens from his watch and hooked it into the interface panel, following Raul’s instructions step-by-step—running diagnostics, rerouting inputs, and looping static data to trick the lock into accepting a false code.

  His breath fogged in front of him. His fingers shook—not from fear, but cold.

  Minutes passed. Then, with a soft beep, the lock disengaged.

  The door groaned open.

  “We’re in,” Rex said into his comm.

  “Be careful,” Elijah’s voice came through, his voice low, almost trembling. “I’m getting a real bad feeling. If that is the manufacturing facility…”

  “Then the Gifted who were taken are probably here,” Rex finished grimly. “If they weren’t sent to the other sites.”

  The room beyond was shrouded in near-darkness. And cold. So cold their bones felt like they’d turned to glass.

  White mist coiled along the floor like smoke. The lights overhead flickered slowly, casting half-shadows across the rows and rows of beds.

  Not beds. Gurneys. Hundreds of them.

  Each one occupied.

  Tatius stopped breathing.

  “…No,” Rex breathed, his voice raw.

  The Gifted strapped to those beds weren’t alive. Not really.

  Their bodies were paper-thin—just skin stretched over brittle bones, with hollow cheeks and wide, vacant eyes that stared through the ceiling. Wires fed into their arms, into their necks, into the veins along their temples. Tubes carried a thick red liquid from their bodies into the black machines beside them—machines that pulsed faintly, like parasitic hearts.

  Tatius staggered to the nearest bed. A child. Barely ten.

  Pale. Her lips blue. Her pulse was barely a whisper.

  “Raul…” Tatius whispered hoarsely.

  “What do you see?” Raul asked quickly, his voice sharp now. On edge.

  “Rows. Beds. Each one has a machine beside it. Gifted strapped down. Blood’s being siphoned. I think they’re… They’re powering the machines.”

  Silence.

  “Can you shut them off?” Lucas’s voice burst through, layered over gunfire and screams.

  “No can do,” Tatius murmured. “I don’t think we can unplug them without triggering something. These machines—they’re all linked. If one registers tampering, it might kill them all.”

  Then came Sera’s voice. Quiet. Unshaking. “…Do it anyway.”

  Tatius froze. “Sera?”

  “The way they are now,” Misha’s voice broke in, firm, but heavy. “Death’s better than this. We can’t save them.”

  Tatius hesitated. But Rex didn’t. He stepped toward the girl, knelt before her, and gently placed his gloved hand over her sunken face. “See you in the afterlife,” he whispered.

  And then he grabbed the machine’s main handle, and pulled.

  There was a snap. And a burst of light. Sparks shot from the machine’s core.

  Then the next machine followed. Then the next. And the next.

  All down the line.

  The Gifted twitched one last time. Then lay still. And just like that, the power went out.

  And the silence that followed was endless.

  For several moments, neither Tatius nor Rex said anything.

  “Come on, we have to find where they’re storing the data of Blue Pandora,” Rex said at last, and Tatius nodded, even as they emerged through the door at the end of the room.

  The hallway beyond was narrow, metal-grated floors ringing under their boots, with cold fluorescent lights flickering overhead with a subtle stutter that mirrored the instability of everything this country had become.

  This entire facility was a tomb, Rex thought—one that spoke of the hunters’ hunger to devour anything Gifted, even the corpses they created.

  He glanced sidelong at Tatius, whose jade eyes were unreadable as ever, the red scarf at his neck fluttering lightly with each step. There was a quiet gravity in his posture, a finality that made Rex’s stomach knot tighter with every passing second.

  They reached the thick double doors at the end of the corridor—smooth steel with no obvious handles, but as they neared, a panel scanned their presence and let out a sharp hiss, the locks disengaging.

  The doors parted.

  Five scientists looked up from a semi-circle of terminals in the center of the room, each face lit in the ghostly glow of screens. The gleaming glass of tall cylinders lined the walls—dozens of them, each housing dark red capsules suspended in clear fluid.

  “Who—” One began, rising.

  “Intruders?!” Another gasped.

  But they never got to finish.

  Tatius moved first. A ripple of sand burst forth from the ground, seizing one man by the throat and slamming him against the wall hard enough to snap bone.

  Rex drew the sleek black knife at his hip and closed the distance to a second, slashing across the throat in a blur. Another tried to reach the emergency console, but a spike of compressed earth skewered his chest before he could scream.

  Two more died seconds later, their throats crushed, and skulls shattered. There were no cries. Only the sudden stillness of death, and the rustling of sand as it slithered back beneath Tatius’s boots.

  The stench of blood was immediate.

  Rex took in a slow breath, his eyes scanning the room. “Main terminal room,” he muttered. “And those…” He gestured toward the capsules lining the walls, “are the completed forms of Blue Pandora.”

  Tatius stepped closer, his fingers brushing the surface of the tube. Inside, the red capsule seemed to pulse faintly, almost alive. The substance was no longer just a prototype. It had matured into something terrifying—precise and replicable. A tool of annihilation.

  “They’re still in the testing phase,” Rex said grimly, tapping at the screen on one of the terminals. “Trying to get it into liquid form. This is it. This is the center of their research.” He pressed his comms. “Raul, we found the place.”

  Crackling static then echoed, “Good. Tatius, you know what to do.”

  Tatius nodded and stepped toward the central chair, his boot nudging aside the twitching leg of a fallen scientist. He pulled out the small black scrambling device Raul had handed him earlier before the start of the entire operation—a brutal, elegant piece of work, with four wiry limbs that curled like spider legs and a pulsing red center that blinked in sync with his heartbeat.

  He plugged it into the main console and began to type, fingers flying across the keys. Code blurred across the screen. A low, mechanical beep sounded. Then another.

  Suddenly, the terminal turned red.

  UNAUTHORISED ACCESS DETECTED.

  A robotic voice followed, sterile and emotionless, “Unauthorised access detected. Self-destruction protocols will be initiated if user fails to identify within ten seconds.”

  Tatius stilled. His fingers curled over the keyboard.

  “Tatius?” Rex asked, low and tense.

  Slowly, Tatius turned to him. “Rex, get out of here. I’ll complete the initialisation.”

  “What?” Rex’s voice sharpened. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Tatius pressed one finger to his comms. “All of you. Get out of here. Go.”

  From the earpiece, Raul’s voice came instantly, panicked, “Tatius, don’t be stupid! This isn’t worth it!”

  “For me,” Tatius said quietly, “time stopped the day Claudia and Ness died.” His voice carried a strange calm—resigned, hollow, but resolute. “It might be the Goddess’s guiding hand that I meet my end here. Claudia and Ness died in Blackpool. It seems like fate that I’ll die here.”

  “Tatius, please—” Sera’s voice crackled over the line, brittle and pained.

  “It’s been fun, Sera,” Tatius said, a hint of warmth bleeding into his voice, cracking at the edges. “Thank you for everything. There is no stopping this. It’s too important. We won’t get another chance to destroy the manufacturing facility again. Promise me. End this for all of us.”

  “…Tatius…”

  “Let’s meet again,” he whispered, “at the side of the Goddess.” He shut off the comms.

  The silence that followed felt like a thunderclap.

  “You asshole,” Rex muttered, his voice thick, with his fists clenching at his sides. His eyes burned, not with tears, not yet, but with the simmering ache of helplessness. “That’s why you volunteered for this mission, wasn’t it? Mara was supposed to come. But you insisted. You knew. You fucking knew what would happen once we activated the scrambling protocol.”

  “I was kept in one of the hunters’ facilities as a child,” Tatius said, lowering his gaze. His left hand lifted, brushing over the tattooed ‘12’ on his right hand. “Did you think I wouldn’t know the kinds of failsafes they programmed into their core systems?”

  “Tatius, don’t—”

  “This is my punishment,” Tatius said softly. “I killed people. I’ve always said I’d accept whatever came to me. And besides…” He exhaled, the sound like the last breath of a storm, “…I’m tired. I never really left that moment in Blackpool. The moment Ness and Claudia died, time stopped for me. I’ve been breathing since, but never living.” He smiled then, tired and sad. “Promise me, Rex. Help Sera. Help Zest. Help the others. Make sure they succeed. Stop Nicolosi.”

  Rex’s throat tightened. He bit his lip and nodded—one curt, pained motion. “I promise.”

  “Thank you,” Tatius said, and turned back to the terminal. His hands rested gently atop the keyboard, unmoving for now. “I’ll give you a thirty-minute head-start. Once I start the scrambling sequence, this whole place is going up in flames. Not just the lab. The entire facility. You need to be gone by then.”

  Rex stood frozen for one last second, then stepped back. His voice barely carried over the low hum of the servers. “…Let’s meet at the side of the Goddess.”

  He ran. And the door sealed behind him.

  Tatius leaned back in the chair, the scraping of metal on metal echoing faintly through the otherwise still room after Rex’s departure. His eyes lifted to the ceiling—the same ceiling under which children had been turned into chemicals, their lives drained to fuel hatred.

  All in the name of Nicolosi’s vision.

  Outside, Eldario burned—not in flame, but in rot. The government had fallen. The Council slaughtered. The ESA dismantled from within. The hunters—those monsters, no longer pretended to be bound by law. They hunted Gifted openly. They used propaganda and poison alike. They sold salvation in syringes filled with death.

  And Nicolosi… That man had dared to reshape Eldario into a kingdom of blood.

  Tatius whispered, “May the Goddess find me worthy.”

  The seconds passed. And then the countdown began.

  WARNING: Self-Destruction Protocol Will Be Initiated in Two Minutes.

  A timer appeared in red digits.

  Tatius exhaled, his eyes calm, and began to type.

  Lines of code unraveled. Directories vanished. Access roots were burned. Raul’s scrambling device worked flawlessly, tearing through every copy of Blue Pandora’s schematics, destroying backups, encrypted layers, and genetic keys.

  Gone. All of it.

  The system began to scream in protest.

  Somewhere beyond the room, a siren began to wail—a mournful, low howl that shook the walls like the moans of a dying giant.

  Tatius didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look away when the ground quaked beneath him and the room beyond the lab detonated in a blaze of fire.

  Explosions rolled like thunder. The metal plates in the ceiling groaned. One broke loose and slammed into the floor mere feet from him. Smoke trickled in through the vents.

  In the distance, more explosions echoed. East wing. West wing. Even the central wing. The entire facility was collapsing under its own ambition.

  The terminal sparked. The red light of the countdown dimmed as the system short-circuited.

  But Tatius remained.

  His eyes were closed now, and his body still, surrounded by fire and crumbling steel.

  For just a moment, he could hear her laugh—Claudia’s, full and unrestrained, and could even feel the weight of Ness’s hand ruffling his hair, scolding him for being reckless, for pushing too far, for caring too little about himself.

  “I’m coming,” Tatius whispered.

  And then, everything went black.