They moved like wolves.

  Elias had spotted them an hour after dawn—four figures picking their way across the Skin Flats with the coordinated efficiency of people who'd done this before. Three men and a woman, armed with weapons that looked too well-maintained to be improvised. They didn't stumble. Didn't hesitate. Didn't waste movement on fear.

  Climbers. Experienced ones.

  "Should we talk to them?" Lira floated beside him, her translucent form barely visible in the Tower's ambient glow. "Maybe they know where the stairs are."

  "Maybe." Elias kept his voice low, watching the group from behind a ridge of calcified tissue. "Or maybe they're the kind of people we don't want to meet."

  "How can you tell?"

  "I can't. Not yet."

  That was the problem. In the world before—the world of hospitals and protocols and civilized behavior—you could make reasonable assumptions about strangers. Most people followed rules. Most people didn't want to hurt you.

  The Tower had different rules.

  He made a decision. "We'll follow them. Keep our distance. See where they go."

  "Like spies?"

  "Like survivors."

  They trailed the group for the better part of two hours, Elias using every scrap of fieldcraft he'd learned in places where being seen meant being shot. He kept to low ground when possible, used the ridges and folds of the flesh-terrain for cover, and never let himself get closer than a hundred meters.

  The group didn't seem to notice. They were focused on something ahead—something Elias couldn't see yet.

  Lira stayed close, her presence a constant chill against his side. She'd learned to dim her glow when they were moving tactically, reducing herself to little more than a shimmer in the air. Smart girl. She'd always been smart.

  Had she always been smart?

  The thought came unbidden, and Elias pushed it away. Of course she had. She was his daughter. He'd watched her learn to read, watched her struggle with math, watched her spend hours trying to teach their cat to fetch. She was smart and stubborn and kind.

  She was Lira.

  The group ahead stopped moving.

  Elias dropped into a crouch, pulling Lira down with him—or trying to; his hand passed through her shoulder, and she simply followed his lead. They were on a slight elevation now, looking down into a shallow depression where the Skin Flats buckled inward.

  Someone else was down there.

  A solo Climber. Young, maybe early twenties, with a heavy pack and the nervous energy of someone who knew they were being watched. He was trying to navigate around the depression, sticking to the edges, clearly hoping to avoid whatever might be lurking in the shadows below.

  He hadn't seen the group.

  "Daddy," Lira whispered. "What are they doing?"

  Elias didn't answer. He was watching the group spread out, two circling left, two circling right, moving to cut off the solo Climber's escape routes with practiced precision.

  He knew what they were doing.

  He'd seen it before, in different terrain, different circumstances. Ambush geometry was universal.

  The solo Climber realized his mistake too late.

  He turned to retreat the way he'd come and found two of them blocking his path—the woman and one of the men, weapons drawn, faces expressionless. He spun, looking for another route, and saw the other two emerging from behind a ridge of bone.

  Trapped.

  "Easy now." The leader's voice carried across the depression, calm and almost friendly. He was tall, shaved head, a scar running from temple to jaw. "Nobody needs to get hurt here."

  "What do you want?" The solo Climber's voice cracked. He was trying to sound brave, but his hands were shaking on his weapon—a length of pipe wrapped in wire. "I don't have anything."

  "Everyone has something." The leader smiled. "Blood, for instance. You've been harvesting, haven't you? We saw you take down that Dermling pack yesterday. Very impressive for someone climbing alone."

  "That's—that's mine. I earned it."

  "Sure you did. And now you can share it." The leader spread his hands in a gesture of false reasonableness. "Call it a tax. The cost of doing business in our territory."

  "Your territory? The Tower doesn't belong to anyone!"

  "The Tower belongs to whoever's strong enough to take it."

  Elias watched from the ridge, every muscle in his body screaming at him to move. To intervene. To do something.

  Don't, the tactical part of his brain whispered. Four against one is suicide. Four against two is still suicide. You can't save him.

  "Daddy." Lira's voice was tiny, frightened. "They're going to hurt him."

  "I know."

  "We have to help."

  "We can't."

  "But—"

  "Lira." He turned to look at her, and the anguish in his eyes must have shown because she fell silent. "If I go down there, they'll kill me. And then who saves you?"

  She didn't have an answer.

  Below, the solo Climber made a break for it. He lunged toward the smallest gap in the encirclement, pipe swinging wildly, screaming something that might have been a battle cry or might have been pure terror.

  He made it three steps.

  The leader moved with brutal efficiency, sidestepping the wild swing and driving something into the Climber's gut—a blade, short and cruel, angled upward. The young man's scream cut off in a wet gurgle. He folded around the wound, legs giving out, and collapsed to the flesh-floor.

  The others converged.

  Elias turned away. He didn't need to watch what came next. The sounds told the story well enough—the wet thuds of secondary strikes, the rasping breath of a dying man, the casual conversation of people for whom murder had become routine.

  "Please," the solo Climber whispered. The word carried in the Tower's strange acoustics, clear and broken. "Please, I just wanted to find my sister. She's on Floor 5. I just wanted—"

  A final, meaty impact.

  Silence.

  Lira was crying.

  Not the way living children cried—there were no tears, no heaving sobs, no reddened eyes. Instead, her form flickered and distorted, her edges blurring as grief destabilized whatever energy held her together. She made small, keening sounds that weren't quite human, and Elias felt each one like a blade between his ribs.

  "Why didn't you help him?" The accusation in her voice was worse than the grief. "He was alone. He was scared. And you just watched."

  "I couldn't save him, sweetheart."

  "You didn't even try!"

  "Because trying would have gotten us both killed." He kept his voice steady, even as something cracked inside him. "I'm sorry. I know that's not what you want to hear. But I can't help anyone if I'm dead."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "So you just let them murder him?"

  "Yes."

  The word hung in the air between them, ugly and honest.

  Below, the group was methodically going through the dead Climber's belongings. They'd harvested his blood already—Elias could see the dark stain spreading across the flesh-floor where they'd opened his arteries—and now they were dividing up his supplies.

  "This is wrong," Lira said. Her voice had gone flat, the grief hardening into something else. "All of this is wrong."

  "Yes. It is."

  "Then why does the Tower allow it?"

  Elias didn't have an answer. He watched the killers finish their work and move on, heading deeper into the Flats, laughing about something he couldn't hear. They didn't look back at the body. Why would they? It wasn't a person to them anymore. Just a resource that had been processed.

  He waited until they were out of sight. Then he waited longer, counting minutes, making sure they weren't doubling back.

  Finally, he stood.

  "Where are we going?" Lira asked.

  "Down there."

  "Why?"

  He didn't answer. He wasn't sure she'd understand. He wasn't sure he understood.

  The body lay where they'd left it.

  He was younger than Elias had thought—nineteen, maybe twenty. Barely old enough to have lived before the Bleed, young enough that most of his memories would be of the ruined world that came after. His face was frozen in an expression of surprise, as if death had come too fast for him to process.

  His name had been stitched into his jacket. Marcus.

  "He was looking for his sister," Lira said softly. She'd followed Elias down into the depression, her form still flickering with residual distress. "Floor 5, he said."

  "I heard."

  "Do you think she's still alive?"

  "I don't know."

  Elias knelt beside the body, his medical training taking over despite everything. The wounds were precise—fatal strikes to the liver, kidney, and femoral artery. The killers knew anatomy, knew how to bleed someone out quickly and efficiently. This wasn't random violence; it was slaughter refined into a science.

  Harvested Blood: 0 L

  The notification appeared unbidden, mocking him. Of course there was nothing left to harvest. The killers had already taken everything.

  Almost everything.

  Elias's hands moved to Marcus's pack, unbuckling straps, checking pockets. Inside, he found a water skin (half full), dried rations (enough for two days), a small knife with a chipped blade, and a photograph.

  The photograph showed two people—Marcus and a young woman who looked enough like him to be family. Sister, probably. They were smiling, standing in front of a building that might have been a school before the Bleed reduced it to rubble.

  "She's pretty," Lira said, looking at the photo. "Do you think Marcus was going to show her this when he found her?"

  "Maybe."

  "What will happen to her now? If she's waiting for him?"

  "I don't know, Lira."

  He tucked the photograph into his own pocket. He didn't know why. Some vague notion of honoring the dead, maybe. Or just the need to carry something forward from this wasted life.

  "I'm sorry," he said to the body. The words felt inadequate. "I'm sorry I couldn't help you."

  Marcus didn't answer. The dead never did.

  Elias should have walked away.

  He should have taken the supplies, said a prayer or whatever passed for one in this godless place, and left Marcus to whatever afterlife the Tower provided. That would have been the decent thing. The human thing.

  Instead, he reached for his knife.

  "Daddy?" Lira's voice was confused. "What are you doing?"

  "They didn't take everything." His voice sounded strange to his own ears—distant, clinical, the way he used to sound in the operating room when he needed to separate himself from the horror on the table. "The body still has value."

  "Value? He's a person."

  "He was a person." Elias positioned the blade at Marcus's wrist, where the radial artery ran close to the surface. "Now he's dead. And the dead don't need blood."

  "But—"

  "Do you want to fade?" The question came out sharper than he intended, and Lira flinched. "Do you want to disappear, Lira? Because that's what happens if I can't collect enough blood. Your soul integrity keeps dropping, and eventually there won't be enough of you left to save."

  She was silent.

  Elias made the incision.

  HARVESTING INITIATED

  SOURCE: HUMAN (DECEASED)

  QUALITY: HIGH

  YIELD: 1.5 L (RESIDUAL)

  The blood came slowly—gravity-fed rather than pump-driven, the heart having stopped long ago. Elias collected what he could, using the same technique he'd employed on the Dermlings but unable to escape the knowledge that this was different.

  This was a person.

  This was Marcus, who had a sister on Floor 5, who had smiled in photographs, who had wanted something other than death.

  Harvested Blood: 1.5 L

  The number appeared in his vision, cold and absolute. Combined with what he'd gathered from the Dermlings, he now had a reasonable reserve. Enough to survive. Enough to keep climbing.

  Enough to keep Lira from fading.

  He wiped his hands on his pants and stood, refusing to look at what he'd done.

  "I'm sorry," Lira whispered. He wasn't sure if she was talking to him or to Marcus.

  "Let's go," he said. "We need to find shelter before dark."

  They walked until Elias's legs burned and his mind went numb.

  The Skin Flats gave way to rougher terrain as they moved toward the transition zone between floors—ridges of scar tissue and outcroppings of bone that provided natural shelter. Elias chose a spot carefully: a shallow cave formed by two overlapping plates of calcified flesh, defensible from multiple angles, hidden from casual observation.

  "This will do," he said, more to himself than to Lira.

  The cave was cold and smelled of copper, but it was dry and secure. He set his pack against one wall and sat down heavily, his body finally acknowledging the exhaustion he'd been ignoring for hours.

  Vitality: 100/100

  Full health, at least. The Tower's system considered him uninjured, undamaged by the violence he'd witnessed and the choice he'd made. Physical wounds could be quantified and healed. The other kind couldn't.

  "Are you okay, Daddy?"

  Lira had settled beside him, her form more stable now that they'd stopped moving. She was watching him with those too-blue eyes, concern radiating from every flickering pixel of her being.

  "No," he admitted. "I'm not."

  "Because of what you did? To Marcus?"

  "Because of what I didn't do. And then yes—because of what I did." He leaned his head back against the wall. "I watched a man die, Lira. I had the skills to try to help him, and I chose not to. Then I... I harvested him. Like he was a Dermling. Like he was meat."

  "You did it for me."

  "That doesn't make it right."

  "Doesn't it?"

  He looked at her—really looked, trying to see past the ghost to the daughter beneath. "Is that what you want? For me to become a monster to save you?"

  Lira was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was small but steady.

  "I don't know what I want anymore, Daddy. I don't know what I am anymore." She hugged her knees to her chest—a gesture from life, preserved in death. "But I know I don't want to disappear. And I know I don't want you to disappear either. So if doing bad things keeps us together..."

  She trailed off, unable to finish.

  Elias reached for her hand, forgetting for a moment that he couldn't touch her. His fingers passed through hers, leaving only cold in their wake.

  "We'll figure it out," he said. "Together. Whatever it takes."

  Sleep wouldn't come.

  Elias lay in the darkness of the cave, listening to the Tower's distant pulse and the skittering of unseen creatures in the night. His mind kept returning to Marcus—to the photograph in his pocket, to the sister who would never see her brother again, to the blood now measured in his reserves like currency.

  Harvested Blood: 2.3 L

  The Dermlings he'd killed yesterday, plus... plus Marcus. That was his total. That was the price of survival.

  He thought about Elena.

  His ex-wife had called him cold once, during one of their final arguments. You compartmentalize everything, she'd said. Your patients, your feelings, your family. You put everything in little boxes so you don't have to deal with any of it.

  She'd been right. He knew that now. He'd spent so much time learning to detach from the horror of the operating room that he'd forgotten how to attach to anything else. Even Lira—even his own daughter—had sometimes felt like a patient rather than a person.

  And then she'd died, and the boxes had broken open, and everything he'd stored away came flooding out at once.

  That was when Elena left. She couldn't handle his grief on top of her own. Couldn't watch him fall apart and try to hold herself together at the same time. The divorce had been finalized three months before the Bleed.

  He didn't blame her. How could he? She'd lost a daughter too.

  "Daddy?"

  Lira's voice pulled him from his thoughts. She was hovering near the cave entrance, looking out at the Tower's bioluminescent night.

  "Yes, sweetheart?"

  "I can't sleep. I know I don't really need to, but I... I feel like I should. Like something's missing."

  "Do you want me to sing to you?"

  The offer surprised him as much as it surprised her. He hadn't sung in years—not since Lira was small enough to need lullabies.

  "You remember the songs?"

  "Some of them."

  She drifted back to his side, settling into a seated position that was more memory than necessity. "I don't think I remember them anymore. It's like... there's a blank space where they should be."

  "That's okay. I'll remind you."

  He opened his mouth to sing—and stopped.

  Because Lira was already humming.

  The melody was soft, hesitant, like something half-remembered from a dream. But Elias recognized it instantly, and the recognition hit him like a physical blow.

  Hush little baby, don't say a word...

  Elena's song. The lullaby his ex-wife had sung every night when Lira was a baby, a melody passed down from her own mother, sung in a minor key that always made it sound more like a dirge than a comfort.

  Lira didn't know that song. She'd been too young when Elena stopped singing it—barely two years old. By the time she was old enough to remember, the divorce had happened, and Elena was gone, and Elias had replaced the lullabies with stories instead.

  "Where did you learn that?" His voice was barely a whisper.

  Lira stopped humming. "I don't know. It just... it was in my head. It felt right." She looked at him with those impossible eyes. "Why? What's wrong?"

  Everything. Everything was wrong.

  SOUL INTEGRITY UPDATE

  CURRENT STATUS: 97.9%

  WARNING: Degradation rate exceeds baseline.

  RECOMMENDATION: Seek stability measures.

  The notification flashed red at the edge of his vision—a warning, a countdown, a reminder that time was running out.

  Below 98%. For the first time since this nightmare began, Lira's soul had degraded past a threshold he hadn't wanted to acknowledge.

  "Daddy?" She was flickering again, picking up on his distress. "You're scaring me."

  "It's nothing, sweetheart." He forced his voice to steadiness. "Just tired. We should both try to rest."

  "Okay." She didn't sound convinced, but she dimmed her form anyway, settling into the approximation of sleep. "Daddy?"

  "Yes?"

  "I love you."

  Three words. The same three words she'd said a thousand times before—at bedtime, at breakfast, at random moments when she'd looked up from her toys and decided he needed to hear it.

  But now they carried weight. Now they felt like goodbye.

  "I love you too, Lira." He closed his eyes. "More than anything."

  She hummed again, softer this time, as she drifted into whatever rest ghosts were capable of.

  Elena's song.

  In the darkness of the Tower, Elias lay awake and wondered how much of his daughter was really left—and how much was something else wearing her face.