"Maybe we abort the run," Livia suggested.

  "No," Silas decided. "Not without the test subject. She could be the key to understanding controlled Domain advancement."

  Cassius's swarm suddenly contracted, his wasps buzzing with agitation. "My forward scouts are detecting life signs."

  They descended to Sublevel 2, finding more carnage. Eight guards scattered throughout the corridor. Some had tried to run. They took fatal light-burns straight through the spine. Others had managed to draw their weapons, though it hadn't helped. Their rifles were melted, the polymer frames reduced to abstract alloy puddles.

  "Something's off," Livia observed, examining the security station's remains. "They wiped the servers but left the emergency power running. Killed everyone but didn't collapse the stairwells or seal the sublevels."

  "So?" Cassius asked.

  "So they went through the effort to eliminate witnesses and erase evidence, but did nothing to slow down anyone coming after them." She gestured at the bodies. "They don't care if more people show up."

  They reached the stairwell to Sublevel 3. The reinforced door had been cut through. The edges were mirror-smooth, still warm to the touch.

  "Photon lance," Cassius identified. "Mil-spec. Combined with how they dismantled those Sequence Five guards? This is corporate or Church."

  Automated turrets hung from the ceiling, their barrels melted into drooping metal flowers. The laser grid system that should have diced any intruder was shattered, its emitters cracked from internal overload.

  But it was the cells that made them pause.

  Every door stood open. The containment units were empty, their restraints disengaged, monitoring systems dark. Whatever had been held inside was gone.

  They didn't have to look far.

  The first body lay crumpled against the wall a few feet from its cell. Bone spurs erupted through its skin, a failed attempt at Forge Domain integration. Its skeleton had tried to become armor and torn its body apart in the process. Someone had put a fist-sized hole through its chest.

  The second sat slumped near the corridor junction. Its flesh was partially phased, existing in multiple states simultaneously, signs of Void Domain corruption. A clean light-beam through the brain stem had ended its suffering.

  The third was the worst. Multiple Domain signatures, forced into coexistence. Scales, chrome, organic mutations, all fighting for control of the same body. It lay just outside its cell, decapitated. The head rested with deliberate care next to the torso.

  "These were failures. Early attempts at forced advancement." Silas realized.

  Cassius's beetles were examining the containment units. "The cells were opened from the outside, before they were killed. Our mysterious Lucent combatants let them out first. Gave them a moment of freedom before..."

  "Before ending their pain," Livia finished. "Whoever killed them didn't just execute them. They euthanized them. These were mercy kills."

  “Come on let’s head out, the files said Subject 23 was in a stasis chamber. Deep storage, Sublevel 4.” Silas said.

  They found the stairwell to Sublevel 4. Unlike the previous doors, this one was intact but unlocked. Recently accessed, the electronic lock showed an entry timestamp from ten minutes ago.

  Silas unholstered the Dawn Cleaver. Gravitational distortions rippled down the edge. "We need to move fast. Cassius, send your swarm ahead. Livia, prepare a Zone of Negation. We might need to delete their light."

  They descended into Sublevel 4.

  Cassius's swarm spread out. Through compound eyes, he saw into the lit laboratory. "Two signatures ahead. Looks like our new friends. "

  They approached carefully, using the doorway for cover. Through gaps in the medical equipment, they had a perfect view of the laboratory.

  At the center stood the stasis chamber, its frosted glass surface obscuring the figure within. Vital signs pulsed steadily on the monitors. Whoever was inside was alive.

  "The question is whether we sedate her immediately or attempt communication first. What do you think, Wilson?" the man wearing a golden visor said, turning the syringe over in his hands.

  "Sedate her Christian," Wilson replied through his weeping mask. He studied the stasis chamber's readouts. "The test subject has been in forced stasis for six months. Psychological state is unpredictable. The research notes indicated violent episodes."

  "The research notes also indicated they were torturing her," Christian countered. "I'd have violent episodes too."

  "True, but we need her cooperative, not combative. The Archbishop wants her stable for interrogation."

  Christian twirled the syringe between his fingers. "So we drug her unconscious and drag her out like cargo? Very compassionate."

  "Compassion isn't in our mission parameters. Extraction and intelligence gathering are."

  Behind the medical equipment, Cassius pushed a message to Silas. "We could hit them now. Surprise attack. You take one, my swarm takes the other, Livia provides support—"

  Silas cut him off with a gesture. "No. Let's observe what happens. We let them be the test subjects for when the stasis pod opens. Whatever comes out will add to the confusion when we engage. It'll make it easier to grab and run, or fight if we have to."

  Christian had reached a decision. "Fuck it. We're opening it. If she's hostile, we'll restrain her. But I'm not dragging an unconscious woman through a corpse-filled facility without at least trying diplomacy first."

  Wilson sighed, the sound distorted through his mask. "Your bleeding heart is going to bite us in the ass one day."

  "Good thing that today's not that day."

  Christian approached the stasis chamber's control panel. He pressed a severed digit against the biometric plate. The chamber responded immediately. Pressure equalized with a sharp hiss, coolant venting in white clouds.

  Wilson's hand moved to his photon-blade, fingers wrapping around the grip. "If she attacks, I'm not holding back."

  "Noted."

  The chamber's frosted glass panels began sliding apart. Cryogenic vapor spilled across the deck, burning off in the climate-controlled atmosphere. A silhouette rendered through the chemical fog. She stumbled forward, catching herself on the chamber's edge.

  She pushed into the light. Each movement showed the effort of muscles that hadn't been used in months. Early twenties, athletic build that had been diminished by extended stasis. Short dark hair, matted with residual stasis gel. Her medical gown was torn, revealing pale skin covered in surgical scars. Incisions made along her arms, shoulders, spine and chest.

  Her left forearm showed exposed Void Domain implants, dark crystals that deleted ambient light. Along her spine, glowing nodes pulsed erratically with corrupted rhythms. Failed neural integration, systems that couldn't quite sync with her nervous system. She tried to stand, legs giving out immediately. Caught herself on the chamber rim, breathing ragged, body trembling from the effort.

  "Where... where am I?" Her voice was hoarse, cracking. "What day is it? How long—"

  Christian stepped forward, hands visible and empty, making himself non-threatening. "You're safe. The facility's been neutralized. We're extracting you."

  Her eyes focused slowly, sweeping across the room. She looked at Wilson first, then Christian. Her body went rigid.

  "Church," she breathed, backing against the chamber, panic rising in her voice. "You're Lucent Church. No. No, I'm not going to be trapped by someone else. I won't—"

  "We're not here to take you into Church custody," Wilson said. "We're here to get you medical treatment."

  "Liar!" Her hands sparked with unstable energy, Forge and Void Domains conflicting. "They always lie. The researchers lied, the doctors lied, everyone—"

  The metal around her began warping. Surgical tables bending, walls groaning, reality itself protesting the uncontrolled Domain manifestation.

  Christian remained calm. "Bridge. That's your name, yes? Bridge Forester?"

  She froze at the sound of her name. Her eyes went wide.

  "The people who did this to you are dead," Christian continued. "All of them. We killed them. You're the only living person in this facility besides us."

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  Bridge processed this, still terrified, still ready to fight or flee. "You... you killed them?"

  "All of them," Wilson confirmed. "They won't hurt anyone else."

  She tried to stand again, and this time her legs held. Swaying, malnourished, weak. But upright. Conscious. Aware.

  And that was when Silas got a clear look at her face.

  His breath caught. Eyes went wide behind his combat visor. The graviton nodes in his palms pulsed involuntarily, reacting to his shock.

  "No," he whispered. "No way. The odds... what is she doing here?"

  Cassius noticed immediately. "What? You know her?"

  Silas didn't answer. He couldn't. The last time he saw her, she was eighteen, standing next to him at graduation. Life had dragged them down completely separate paths.

  Until now.

  "Silas," Livia pressed, reading his body language. "Do you know that woman?"

  "Just someone I knew from another life."

  In the lab, the situation was escalating. Bridge's unstable Domain was affecting everything around her. Medical equipment sparked and failed. The lights flickered. Christian and Wilson exchanged glances, preparing for violence.

  "We need to move," Cassius urged. "If she loses control completely—"

  "New plan," Silas said, keeping his voice low. "We take all three. We just need to separate them from the girl. Livia, I will need you to delete light in a localized zone."

  "I can do that. Fifteen seconds, maybe twenty if I push it."

  "That's all we need. Cassius, how fast can you get the girl out if we create an opening?"

  "Six seconds if I go full swarm. But Silas, this is—"

  "Necessary," Silas finished. He watched Bridge sway on her feet, fighting the blackout, fighting to control powers that were tearing her apart from the inside. "We’re doing this. We will buy "

  Christian was approaching Bridge slowly, hands still raised. "We can help you. The Church has resources, medical facilities—"

  "The Church has resources?" Bridge's voice cracked with rage. "Where was the Church when I was being cut open? When they were performing experiments on my body?" The lights exploded.

  Glass showered down. Emergency lighting kicked in, bathing everything in red. Under the crimson glare, Bridgelooked like something dragged out of a nightmare. Scarred, augmented, bleeding energy in ways no normal Domain user ever should.

  "That's our cue," Silas said.

  Silas burst through the doorway, leaving a trail of solid-light duplicates in his wake. To the Church operatives, it looked like a dozen Silas’s had suddenly materialized, all moving at different angles, all wielding massive gravitational blades.

  Wilson reacted first. His photon blade cleared its sheath in a blur. He swept it through the after-images, which dissolved on contact.

  Christian's visor flared, discharging a spread of light-beams that carved through more duplicates. "Wilson, we've got company!"

  But Livia was already throwing her Silence Bomb. The grey sphere sailed through the air, detonating between the two Church operatives.

  Reality warped. Light ceased to exist in a fifteen-foot radius.

  Wilson and Christian, suddenly blind went back-to-back, photon-blades creating a defensive circle even without sight. But they couldn't see Cassius's swarm flooding through the darkness, hundreds of wasps and beetles flowing towards Bridge.

  The swarm engulfed, carrying her away. She screamed, but the sound was deleted along with the light. In six seconds, she was out of the lab.

  Silas swung the Dawn Cleaver at Wilson's last known position. Even blind, Wilson somehow sensed it coming, bringing his photon-blade up to block. Gravitational distortion met pure light.

  The Zone of Negation collapsed, light flooding back. Christian's visor pulsed rapidly, sweeping across the room. His head turned, tracking the empty stasis chamber, then snapping toward Silas and Livia.

  "Silence, Swarm, and... something else." He identified.

  "The girl?" Wilson asked, not taking his eyes off Silas.

  "Gone. Extracted via swarm." Christian's hand was already moving to his communicator. "I'm calling for backup—"

  Livia's Echo Clone materialized behind him, grabbing his wrist. He spun, photon-blade sweeping through the clone. The clone detonated with conceptual deletion. For twenty seconds, the concept of "communication" stopped existing in that space. His communicator became a useless piece of plastic. His vocal cords produced no sound. Even sign language would have been meaningless.

  Christian's eyes widened behind his visor as he realized what had happened.

  Wilson pressed his attack on Silas, photon-blade moving in patterns too fast to track.

  Silas's neural accelerator flared hot against his spine as he activated Relativistic-Perception. The world lurched, then slowed.

  Wilson's blade crept forward through thick air. Silas could see everything. The angle of the edge, the rotation of Wilson's shoulder, the subtle shift in his hips that telegraphed the follow-through. He had an eternity to decide what to do about it.

  He shifted left. The photon edge drifted through the empty space where his neck had just been. Wilson was already committing to a second strike, but Silas read the movement like an open ledger. Wrist turning. Elbow elevating. Center of gravity transferring to the lead foot. A diagonal shear, upper left to lower right. Silas angled the Dawn Cleaver to catch the deflection, letting Wilson's own momentum drag him forward.

  Off-balance. Ribcage exposed.

  Silas drove the Cleaver into the gap beneath Wilson's guard. The weapon bit deep. He reversed his grip and cracked the heavy pommel straight into the weeping mask. Wilson's skull snapped sideways. Silas predicted the counter before the signal even reached Wilson's muscles. He planted his knee precisely where the operative's midsection was about to be.

  Three seconds. Four strikes. Each one placed with the calm of a man with all the time in the world.

  The world snapped back into motion. Silas's reflexes dulled immediately. His nervous system choked, struggling to sync with the sudden rush of time.

  It should have been enough. Wilson staggered, mask fractured, bleeding beneath his armor. But he didn't fold. His body straightened, training overriding damage. Silas saw the next strike coming and knew he was too slow. His arms responded a half-second behind his brain, and the blade carved across his ribs. The armor held, barely, but the heat bled through.

  He had to finish this fast.

  The Dawn Cleaver swept low. Wilson jumped to avoid it, but the gravitational field caught him mid-leap. His body suddenly tripled in weight. He crashed to the floor, cratering the tiles.

  But Wilson didn't stay down.

  He pushed himself up. Slow. Deliberate. Tripled gravity should have permanently grounded him. But somehow he was rising. The muscles in his neck stood out like steel cables as he forced himself from prone, to a knee, and then to a standing position.

  His photon-blade had never deactivated. Even under the intense gravity, his grip remained steady. The blade pulsed once. It extruded into a twelve-foot lance of raw, condensed photons that carved a blinding arc toward Silas.

  Silas threw himself backward, time dilating in his perception as adrenaline spiked. The beam tracked so close he felt the thermal bleed. He watched individual photons scatter off his visor. In his wake, the beam bisected the environment. Medical rigs, bulkheads, even a structural pillar. The cuts were so exact that the architecture took a full second to realize it was cut before collapsing.

  Wilson was already pivoting for a second strike, the blade reforming, when Silas fired his Mirror-Edge Chakrams.

  The four discs shredded through the air. Their edges bled refracted light as they curved toward their target. Wilson tried to dodge but the extra weight made him a fraction too slow.

  The first chakram struck his left bicep, its gravitational field activating on impact. The second hit his right shoulder. Both pinned his arms to his sides with additional gravitational anchors. The combined force finally drove him to one knee. The reinforced deck splintered under the load.

  But even pinned, even crushed under gravitational forces that would have incapacitated anyone else, Wilson's photon-blade remained lit. The weapon vibrated in his locked grip. The edge held perfect stability despite the massive tremors in his muscles. His eyes behind the weeping mask tracked Silas with what looked like unblinking focus.

  Christian's visor locked onto Livia. The air around him began to shimmer, heat waves distorting the space as photonic energy concentrated in his weapon. Something massive was building.

  "LIVIA, MOVE!" Silas shouted.

  She dove. The beam erupted from Christian's position. A pillar of raw light as thick as a torso. It carved through the space where she'd been standing, melting a hole clean through the reinforced wall behind her. The edges glowed orange, metal running like water. If that had connected, there wouldn't have been enough left of her to identify.

  "We need to go!" Cassius's voice echoed over the comms. "The girl's secured, but she's unstable. Her Domains are rejecting harder."

  "Fall back!" Silas commanded.

  Livia's clones raised their hands in perfect synchronization, gray energy building between their palms. Then they detonated.

  The shockwave connected. Christian was lifted off his feet and hurled backward, slamming into the far wall. Concrete fractured outward from the impact point. His visor cracked diagonally across the lens, sparking. Medical hardware launched in all directions, surgical tools rained down like heavy shrapnel.

  They ran.

  Through the corridors of Sublevel 4, up the stairs, Cassius's swarm carrying Bridge's unconscious form. She'd passed out from the strain. Behind them, they could hear pursuit. The specific whine of photon-blades cutting through walls, the crash of obstacles being obliterated.

  "Cassius, maximum dispersion!" Silas shouted.

  Cassius's swarm exploded outward, thousands of iron beetles and murder-wasps flooding the corridor. They layered themselves, a writhing, buzzing barrier of metallic bodies that their pursuers would have to burn through.

  They reached Sublevel 2. The executed security detail still littered the deck. The blood pools had oxidized to dark copper.

  A photon-beam sliced through the deck behind them. Slagged concrete dripped through the incision. The beam tracked laterally, opening the breach. Christian had burned through the swarm wall faster than expected.

  "Move," Silas ordered. "Straight for the surface."

  They ran up stairwells, through corridors, past the wreckage of the facility's failed defenses. Behind them, the Church operatives didn't bother following the same route. Light pulsed through the walls. They were carving their own path, burning through floors and concrete in straight lines, turning the facility's structure into molten channels.

  But they were almost out. The exit was ahead, the industrial wasteland beyond. Their transport was waiting, its engines at ready-idle, the loading ramp already lowered. A cluster of Cassius's wasps had activated the startup sequence, anticipating their need.

  They burst from the facility. Bridge was loaded into the transport, still unconscious, her corrupted Domain creating localized distortions. Silas threw himself into the pilot seat. His digits flew across the console. He dumped the standard pre-flight checklist and slammed the emergency launch protocols.

  The transport lifted off just as Christian and Wilson emerged. Photon-beams carved through the air, two lines of superheated light that tracked the transport's ascent. The first beam struck the lower hull, leaving a glowing scar across the armor plating. The second grazed the starboard engine housing, warning lights flashing across Silas's console. In seconds, they were out of range. They climbed into the thick industrial smog that blanketed the sector. The heavy particulate pollution actively scattered the long-range photon tracking.

  "We made it," Cassius said, his swarm coalescing back into humanoid form, though several hundred of his wasps were missing. Destroyed or left behind.

  "We stole from the Church," Livia corrected, her hands trembling slightly from adrenaline. "They'll come for us."

  Silas looked back at Brigid, unconscious in the medical bay. The monitoring equipment told an ugly story. Heart rate spiking and dropping, neural activity off every chart, body temperature fluctuating ten degrees in either direction. She needed help. The kind of specialized treatment that only a handful of underground facilities could provide and they were short on time.