The first thing Beatrix learned was that five hundred people running in the same direction created a physics problem with screaming.

  The second thing she learned was that physics didn’t care about bullets.

  The stampede hit like a tidal wave of flesh and chrome. She was carried forward ten meters before her boots found purchase. To her right, a man with hydraulic leg augs misjudged the shove of the crowd and went down. He didn’t get back up. The sound of his augs crunching under hundreds of boots was wet and final.

  Then the shooting started.

  Gunfire, lasers, the sharp crack of slug throwers. People at the edges of the herd had decided the best way to get ahead was to make the herd smaller.

  “Left!” Beatrix barked, already shoving towards a jagged spine of collapsed deck plating. Julius was a half-step behind her, Electra and Saladin flowing into cover with them like practiced components of a machine.

  “They’re burning ammo like it’s free,” Julius growled, peering around the metal.

  “It is free,” Saladin said, his voice flat. “Haven’t you heard?”

  They couldn’t stay. The cover was temporary. Beatrix scanned ahead. The initial broad plain funneled into a canyon of wreckage a kilometer ahead, the first major bottleneck. That’s where the real slaughter would begin. But between here and there…

  Her enhanced vision, dialed to maximum sensitivity, saw what others missed. The air over the gray sand shimmered. Not with heat. With gravitational distortion.

  Great. The floor’s drunk.

  “Forget the shooters,” Beatrix said, the plan forming as she spoke. “The real threat’s the floor. Look at the sand drift, see how it lifts in patches and falls in others? Gravity wells. The station’s rotation is shot. Whole zones are unstable.”

  Saladin followed her gaze, his eyes narrowing. After a moment, he gave a slow nod. “She’s right. It’s a minefield you can’t see until you step in it.”

  “So we pick a path,” Electra said, pulling up her datapad. The map flickered. “The anomalies aren’t on the schematics. They’re too new.”

  “We watch the runners ahead of us,” Beatrix said. “They’re our probes. We see where they stumble, where they float, and we plot a route through the gaps.”

  It was another scav’s rule from Bodhi. Always let someone else trigger the trap.

  They moved, not with the panicked rush of the herd, but with the calculated precision of a unit. Beatrix led, her eyes tracking the fate of those twenty meters ahead. A woman surged forward only to be yanked sideways as if by a giant hand, her ankle snapping with an audible pop. A man leaping over debris suddenly found himself soaring too high, too far, crashing down in a heap of broken momentum.

  The shooters became a secondary hazard, their aim thrown off by the same gravitational hiccups. A laser beam meant for them curved upwards, scorching the ceiling. The chaos was their cover.

  Then they saw the mechs.

  Ahead, a full tactical unit: three heavy combat mechs, each three meters tall, moving in a triangle formation. Their mass made them stable in the gravity soup, their armor shrugged off stray fire. They were a moving fortress, plowing through the anomalies and the competition alike. And they were heading straight for the canyon bottleneck.

  “We go around,” Electra said instantly. “They’re drawing every gun on the field.”

  “Going around adds half a kilometer through the worst of the anomaly zone,” Beatrix countered, her mind racing. “But we don’t go around. We use them.”

  Julius stared at her. “Use them? They’ll crush us.”

  “No. They’re a shield.” She pointed. “Their formation creates a dead zone in their wake, their own armor blocks fire from behind and the sides. The gravity anomalies are weaker directly behind them; their mass stabilizes the local field. We stay fifty meters back, in their shadow. They clear the path, we get a free ride to the canyon.”

  Saladin was silent for three seconds, analyzing. Then he nodded, once. “It’s smart. High risk, but the only strategic advantage on the field. I concur.”

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Electra chewed her lip, looking from the mechs to her map. “It… it cuts right through the predicted worst of the flux. It’s the safest physical path. I’m in.”

  Julius looked at the three of them, his expression caught between frustration and respect. “Fine. But if that shield turns around, we’re paste.”

  They fell in behind the mech unit, a tiny shadow to their thundering passage. It worked. Stray fire pinged off mech armor. The crushing gravitational surges lessened to a manageable tug-of-war. For a few hundred meters, they had a clear run.

  [00:22:17 | 8.1 km left]

  The canyon entrance loomed, a jagged mouth of torn metal. The mechs waded into the narrow opening, their cannons beginning to fire forward at targets deeper in. The sound was deafening.

  “Now we break,” Beatrix said. “Before we get trapped behind them in the choke. Electra, the underground entry?”

  “Two hundred meters east! There’s a maintenance hatch!”

  They peeled away from the mechs’ shadow, sprinting across a stretch of open, shimmering ground. The gravity here was a funhouse mirror, one step weighed a ton, the next sent her stumbling forward with too much momentum.

  They reached the hatch. Electra bypassed the rusted lock in eight seconds. The door slid open on shrieking rails, revealing a dark maw.

  “In! Now!” Saladin urged, covering their six.

  They plunged into darkness. The hatch clanged shut behind them, muting the cacophony of the race. The air was cool, stale, and thick with the smell of rust and decay. Flickering emergency strips cast a sickly yellow light.

  The maintenance tunnel was cramped, but the gravity was a blessed, steady pull. They ran, their boots echoing in the confined space.

  Then they heard the screaming.

  Not the short, sharp screams of combat. This was a long, drawn-out sound of pure, grinding agony. It was ahead of them. In their path.

  Julius didn’t break stride. “Ignore it. Keep moving.”

  “We can’t,” Beatrix said, slowing.

  “It’s a distraction! Someone crying for help to slow people down!”

  “The sound’s coming from our only path,” Beatrix shot back, her voice cutting through the echo. “That’s not a distraction; it’s an obstruction. We clear it, or we lose. Virgil, scan ahead. Is there a bypass?”

  Saladin had already stopped, his head tilted. “She’s right. It’s in the way.” He looked at Beatrix. “Go.”

  They advanced, weapons ready. Around a gentle bend, they found the source.

  A woman, young, pinned under a massive fallen conduit. The beam had sheared from the ceiling, a clean break of corroded metal. It lay across her left thigh. The leg was a ruin, boot pointed one way, knee another. Blood soaked the gray fabric of her pants, dark and wet. Her face was chalk-white, her lips blue-tinged. She’d been clawing at the deck, her fingertips raw and bloody.

  When she saw them, a frantic hope shattered her pain-glazed expression. “Please… I’ve been… I can’t move it…”

  “What’s your name?” Beatrix asked, kneeling beside her, her scavenger’s eye already assessing the load.

  “L-Laura. Please, just lift it… I can crawl…”

  Julius loomed over them, his face a stone mask. “We lift it, we lose five minutes minimum. She’s not qualifying. We are.”

  “The tunnel is blocked,” Beatrix said, her voice low and precise. She pointed to the beam ends. “See? It’s wedged against the wall there and the floor junction there. We can’t squeeze past. We have to move it to proceed. The question isn’t if, it’s how fast.”

  She stood, addressing the team. “Full extraction would take ten minutes, stabilizing her, dragging her clear. We don’t have ten minutes. We do a scavenger’s lift.” She pointed to Saladin. “You’re the strongest. Take the thick end, it’s the fulcrum. Julius, you’re here, at the mid-point. Electra and I will take the lighter tail end. We don’t lift it clean off. We lift it three inches, just enough to break the wedges. On my mark, we lift and hold. Laura, the second it moves, you pull yourself backwards with your arms and your good leg. Don’t wait. Just go.”

  She looked at Laura. “It’s going to hurt. A lot.”

  “I don’t care,” Laura gasped.

  Saladin studied the setup, then gave Beatrix a curt, professional nod. “Let’s go.”

  They took their positions. Beatrix ignored the calculations Virgil was running about time loss and slot probabilities. This was a simple problem: a blocked path. You cleared it.

  “On my count. One… Two… Three!”

  Muscles strained. Metal groaned. The beam lifted, a bare few centimeters. Laura screamed, a raw, tearing sound, and scrambled backward, her shattered leg dragging a gruesome trail across the deck.

  “Clear!” Beatrix shouted.

  They dropped the beam. It crashed down, the impact vibrating through the tunnel floor. Laura collapsed against the far wall, sobbing, hugging her ruined leg.

  Electra moved toward Laura, her face pale. “We should at least…”

  “No.” Julius’s voice was cold. He was already moving down the tunnel. “We cleared the path. We go.”

  Beatrix looked from Laura’s broken form to Julius’s retreating back. The fracture in their makeshift team wasn’t just philosophical now; it was a physical crack, widening with every step. Saladin paused, his gaze resting on Beatrix. It wasn’t approval or disapproval. It was an assessment. He’d seen her command a crisis. He’d followed her lead.

  Now he saw the cost, and who was willing to pay it.

  “You heard him,” Beatrix said to Electra, her own voice sounding hollow. “We go.”

  They left Laura sobbing in the flickering yellow dark and ran, the two minutes and forty-seven seconds already a phantom limb of lost time, aching with every stride.

  Beatrix didn't look back. She ran, the crash of the beam and Laura's choked sob echoing in the metal tunnel behind them, mixing with the thunder of their own boots. Virgil's update glowed, a cold counterpoint to the heat in her veins.

  [00:43:18 | 3.1 km left | Slots remaining: 12]

  Julius ran beside her, his breath coming in angry gasps. "Three minutes," he spat, not at her, at the universe. "Three minutes we're never getting back."

  Beatrix didn't answer. She just ran faster, pushing her enhanced legs, trying to outpace the sound of a woman's name, Laura, and the terrible, quiet understanding that in saving a life, she might have just thrown away her brother's.

  Ahead, a slash of harsh, artificial light cut the tunnel's gloom. The surface exit. And from beyond it, the sound of the remaining pack, and the final, uncrossed kilometers.