They called it Genesis.
The name on the billboards, the glass towers, the trembling lips of terminal patients who signed dotted lines while a million stock options hissed behind mirrored boardroom windows.
In the final age of More, the world was hungry for salvation: a patch for the cancers that bloomed in bodies fed by plastics and sugar and a hundred thousand chemical conveniences. They wanted a pill that would burn out the rot. They wanted a needle that would buy them more birthdays. They wanted forever, shrink-wrapped and FDA-approved.
And the boardrooms, oh, they listened. They built the dream from spliced code and harvested cells, sculpted it in secret vaults beneath the skyscrapers while the men upstairs laughed over carbonated water and equity charts. Genesis would cure the tumors. Genesis would mend broken genes. Genesis would make them immortal, one injection at a time , for a price only the desperate would pay, and only the rich could make a fortune from.
And when the last few honest scientists , men like Connor Hale, lab coat stained with coffee and regret, raised a hand to say "It's not ready, it's not safe, the code does more than heal". The machine swallowed them whole. A bribe here. A career buried there. The FDA's rubber stamp clattered down like a judge's gavel. Approved for emergency use. Approved for last-chance trials. Approved for the hungry masses who would do anything not to die.
They called the first wave the Miracle Turn. Stage Four patients walking again, tumors shrinking like salt in rain. Headlines full of smiling children holding up tiny fists, hair growing back beneath the fluorescent lights of hospital wards. The President on the evening news, hailing American innovation.
But beneath the triumph, the code twitched. The same reprogrammed strands that turned cancer cells to ash began to flicker in healthy tissue. Something new whispered in the blood. A quiet suggestion to the brainstem: Don't sleep. Don't starve. Don't stop.
In boardrooms and think tanks, they knew. They saw the flickers, brain scans crawling with unfamiliar sparks. They thought they could control it. Tweak it. Patent it again, sell the fix next fiscal year. Always another profit margin.
They never stopped to ask what would happen when the code outgrew the cage.
Connor Hale did.
He shouted it in back rooms and filed secret reports. He watched his funding vanish. He watched colleagues get reassigned or disappear altogether. He watched patients die, and then not die. He knew exactly what Genesis would become.
And when the doors of the first hospice cracked open, and the patients rose, when they turned on nurses with that glint in their pupils like starlight reflected in an oil slick—Connor ran. Not because he was afraid of dying, but because he was afraid he wouldn't.
Now the world is ash and teeth and the soft static of forgotten broadcasts.
Some cling to barricades and ration tins and prayers to old flags. Some crawl underground to pick at the bones of the machine that started it all. Some roam the concrete plains, moving faster than the old myths said they should, jaws slick with the proof that hope eats hope.
And somewhere in that new kingdom of ruin and greed and neon rot, a man named Connor Hale waits behind reinforced glass and dying servers, listening for the last echo of a cure he already knows will cost him everything.
Because the dead do not sleep. The dead do not starve. And the dead do not stop.
* * *
Ethan Rost had fire in his bones before he had hair on his chin. His father, William Rost, taught him how to shoulder a hose before he could shoulder his own grief. His grandfather before that, back when the station had horses instead of ladder trucks, used to say, "A real man runs in when the devil's already got the place."
By fifteen, Ethan could roll a line, charge a hydrant, and eat stale donuts with the same stained-glove grin as the other boys at the house. He was the station mascot, the kid perched on the old engine during Fourth of July parades, plastic hat too big for his ears. His mother hated the smell of smoke that clung to William's coat, but she never asked him to hang it outside. Fire was family. Ash was just the price.
When the towers fell, not the old towers, the new ones, the ones that cracked during the city's final boom before the world turned, Ethan was there. Helmet fogged, lungs raw, dragging strangers through corridors that peeled like burnt skin. They called him a hero on the local news. His father only slapped his shoulder and said, "Told you, boy, you don't run from the flame."
Ethan Rost didn't just follow his father into the fire, he outpaced him. What William built as legacy, Ethan sharpened into legend. By twenty-five, the kid they used to call "Station Pup" was Captain Rost, helmet gold-striped and eyes so clear the boys half-believed he could see through walls before the flames did.
Station 33 wasn't just any house, it was the house in the city's concrete ribcage. Right in the stuttering, neon-lit heart of Manhattan. When the sirens howled from 33, people stepped aside on the sidewalks and murmured prayers they didn't even know they still remembered. Because if the devils danced in the towers again, if the old bones of the city rattled under sparks and screaming metal—Station 33 would hold the line.
And Ethan lived for that line. The quiet pressure on his shoulders, the legacy his father handed him like a smoldering torch, it didn't crack him. It tempered him. Made him more than William ever dared to dream. He wasn't just the boy holding a hose anymore, he was the man pulling rookies from falling stairwells, dragging half-burned children out from under roof beams older than the city's secrets. He earned the medals they pinned on his dress blues, real silver, real weight, though none of it weighed more than the simple nod his father once gave him after a warehouse blaze that should've buried them both.
And because the city was cruel but still good in its bones, it gave him Angela. His high school miracle, the girl who danced barefoot on his boots at prom and never let go. They said goodbye under the yellow lamps of the old station bay when she left for college, and said hello forever when she came back with that same spark in her eyes.
Rebecca and River came after. Two names, two soft storms of noise and laughter in a house that smelled like fresh bread and scorched gear. Ethan was good at being a father. Better than his own father, he thought, not because William failed, but because Ethan wanted more. Wanted to run toward the fire at work and away from it at home.
It was perfect. Or as perfect as any dream America ever hawked on neon billboards and cereal boxes.
Captain Rost, hero of Station 33. Angela, still in his bed every dawn. Rebecca with her scraped knees and River with his endless questions about engines and ladders. A flag out front. A mortgage. A grill that never quite lit right.
A life.
Until the real fire started.
Cancer, the doctors said.
Stage three. Then stage four.
Too many burning plastics. Too many chemical smogs that whispered death into his lungs when he kicked down drywall to pull strangers back to life. Maybe it was just the job. Maybe it was just bad luck. The American Dream's fine print, hidden behind the glossy pages.
Angela held his hand through it all. Rebecca too young to understand. River old enough to try not to cry, to pretend he'd be the man of the house while Dad got better.
They told him Genesis would fix it , the new trial, the new hope. They said he'd stand on the firetruck again, teach River to shoulder the hose. They said the code would burn out the rot.
They said he'd live.
And they were half right.
* * *
The room was dimly lit, shadows crawling up the walls like wet vines. Only the old TV hummed, some grainy black-and-white crooner singing about dreams that never die on a channel the night nurse always left on. She said it was soothing, that the old songs made the end feel more like a soft bed than a cold slab.
Ethan Rost lay there, half propped by too many pillows, a tangle of wires and tubes knitting him to the whirring machines. The Genesis drip, a clear bag hanging from the IV stand like a miracle in plastic. The bag pulsed a slow, perfect heartbeat into the needle buried in his vein. It was supposed to be hope. It felt like surrender.
He was half-conscious, mind drifting through warmth and the heavy velvet of morphine. But always, always, it drifted home. To Angela's laugh echoing down their narrow hallway. To Rebecca's little fists pounding on his chest when he came home smelling like smoke and victory. To River's endless "Why, Dad? Why this? Why that?" The million questions of a boy who thought his father was a god.
He wondered if they'd remember him that way, a god, or just another man turned ash by the same fire he spent his life fighting.
The door creaked open, a hush of rubber soles on the linoleum. The doctor stepped in, all crisp white coat and bright teeth that hadn't tasted regret in a decade.
"How's our hero doing today?"
The voice was syrupy, thick enough to smear over the humming old song. He didn't wait for Ethan to answer, because Ethan's mouth was dry and his tongue was lead and heroes don't get to talk when the end comes with a contract and a smile. The doctor flipped through a tablet, thumb dancing over charts that only told him what he already knew. Terminal. Terminal. Terminal. But not hopeless. Not when Genesis wrote the check.
"Your numbers are holding, Captain. The Genesis is working its way through every cell, searching, burning out the bad bits. Revolutionary stuff. You're helping build the next chapter for all of us, you know that?"
Ethan's eyes flickered, dry, but burning. Not at the man. At the lie. But he forced his throat to croak out something, anything.
"Angela?"
It was half word, half breath.
The doctor's smile twitched , professional pity. The nurse said his wife and kids were getting a vending machine coffee downstairs. No reason to drag them back into this sterile box if they were finally getting some air.
"She'll be right back, Captain. You rest now. Let the cure do its work."
He leaned in, checked the drip, patted the sheets as if Ethan were a child wrapped too tight in blankets.
"Tomorrow you'll feel stronger. We'll talk about standing up again. Maybe even a little walk down the hall. How about that, huh?"
He didn't wait for Ethan's answer, just scribbled something on his chart and slipped out. The door clicked shut behind him like a coffin lid that hadn't quite found its latch.
The crooner on the TV was singing "...dreams never die, they just drift away..." and Ethan's eyes blurred as he turned to the bag dripping its code into his veins. He pictured the first time River fell asleep on his chest, a tiny furnace of trust. The first time Rebecca told him "You smell like smoke, Daddy, are you fire?"
Maybe he was. Maybe he'd always be. Or maybe, tomorrow, he'd be something else entirely. Something the fire could never touch.
He closed his eyes and drifted under the old song, fingers twitching against the plastic rails like they still wanted to hold a hose, to break a door, to pull someone, anyone, from the fire.
And in that warmth, he saw her.
Angela.
Barefoot in that old flannel robe she never let him throw out, hair a tangled halo, eyes tired but still trying to be brave for both of them. She sat on the edge of his hospital bed, not this one, but the bed he remembered, their bedroom, painted soft yellow by a sun that didn't know about tumors and code and the hum of machines.
She touched his cheek, fingertips cold but alive. "Hey, fireman."
Her voice was smaller than he remembered. Cracked by sleepless nights and prayers whispered into stale coffee.
"Hey," he rasped. It didn't hurt to speak here. In this flicker, he could breathe again. No plastic needles. No code under his skin. Just her.
Angela leaned closer, her forehead resting against his. He could smell her hair, that drugstore shampoo she always complained about but never changed.
"You have to come home," she whispered. "You promised. You promised me and the kids. You promised."
He felt her tears hit his neck, tiny warm reminders that love doesn't die clean.
"I know," he said, voice breaking. "I know, Ange. I'm trying. God, I'm trying."
He wanted to bury his face in her hair, breathe her in until the rot turned back to ash and the fire carried him out clean.
She pulled back, cupped his face like she did when he came home from his shifts reeking of smoke and cheap station coffee. "Do you remember what you told me the day Rebecca was born?"
He swallowed. It didn't stick in his throat here. "That I'd never run from the fire. That I'd always come back."
Her smile cracked open and broke him. "So come back, Ethan. Come back to me. Come back to us."
Her thumb brushed the scar at his hairline, the one he got pulling that kid out of the third-story window before the roof collapsed. She kissed it like it still bled.
"I love you, Ange."
"I love you too. Always."
She leaned in, lips warm on his. The kiss tasted like home: fresh bread, Sunday mornings, the swing in the backyard creaking under Rebecca's squeal and River's laughter.
He wanted to stay.
God, he would've set himself on fire all over again to stay. But in the distance, something cracked. Something deep. A dark ripple under the warmth.
Angela's kiss turned to ash on his tongue. The bed dissolved into metal rails and the cold hum of machines. The crooner's voice turned hollow.
She faded first, her hair the last thing he saw, drifting like smoke.
Then the warmth went. Then the memory of home.
The last thing he heard was her voice, so far away:
"Come back, Ethan. Please... come back..."
* * *
Eyes snapped open. No slow flutter. No gentle return to the humming TV or the crooner crooning about dreams. Just light. Blinding, sharp, warped through a film of tears and static.
Ethan tried to breathe, but the breath came out wrong. Not a word. Not a name. A sound, ragged, raw, something clawing up his throat like nails down a steel pipe. It was him, but not him. The voice didn't belong in a hospital bed with sheets tucked tight and a drip singing salvation into his veins.
It was animal, primal, a bellow that ripped through the hum of the TV and rattled the metal tray by his bed. He heard the machines whine in protest, alarms chirping. Somewhere outside the glass, footsteps rushed. Someone yelling Code! Code!
But none of it reached him, not really. All he could feel was heat. Not the clean bite of flame licking sweat off his neck in a warehouse inferno. This fire started inside, deep in the marrow, where the Genesis drip had been dancing for days, rewriting the rot cell by cell. Now the rot fought back. Now the code dug its claws in and screamed: STAY.
His hands convulsed, spasms cracking the quiet as knuckles slammed against his ribs. He curled, knees twisting under the blanket, mouth wide, sound pouring out in ragged loops.
This isn't fire.
His mind, somewhere behind the static, knew. Fire was honest. Fire took and took until there was nothing left but ash. This, this burned but never consumed. It fed on him and promised he'd never burn out.
He tasted metal, realized his teeth had cracked through his tongue. Didn't care. Couldn't stop it. The primal code flooded his nerves, sizzling every connection he'd ever trusted to lift a hose, pull a child, hold Angela's hand steady while the doctor lied about hope.
He felt it all, the code crawling behind his eyes, rewiring the part that stops. The part that says lie still, sleep now, let go. Gone. Ash under the Genesis spark.
Somewhere, through the roaring static, he heard a voice, thin, muffled, like it was calling down a long hallway he'd never find the end of:
"Sir? Captain Rost? Ethan? Can you hear me?"
Gloved hands tried to hold him down. A nurse's pale face. Fear in her eyes, not for him, but of him. The predator inside him knew her heartbeat before Ethan could stop it, a soft, drum-thrum of warm.
He felt his hands break the tape holding the IV. Plastic tube yanked from his arm, blood spurting on white sheets, painting salvation red.
His scream cracked once, then dropped to a growl so deep it vibrated his teeth loose. The nurse stumbled back, her lips moved: "Security! Now...now!"
He felt the heat gush across his tongue: thick, salty, alive. A taste that should've made him retch, but his throat only opened wider. For a heartbeat he thought he could spit it out, clamp his jaws shut, but the thing inside him wanted it. His mind reeled, fighting to remember the taste of his wife's cooking instead, but all he tasted was iron and ruin.
He wanted to vomit. His guts twisted, bile surged, but the code strangled it back down. There was no room for sick, only hunger.
Ethan tried to say Angela. Tried to say Rebecca. River.
What came out was teeth snapping together like a bear trap.
The crooner on the TV sang "dreams never die, they just drift away...".
The machines screamed.
The nurse screamed.
And inside the new fire, Ethan Rost watched his hands, curl into claws, clutching the edge of the bed as if trying to hold himself down.
The code didn't listen. The predator didn't pause.
Fire was honest. This was forever.
At first, he thought he'd died, a clean break. The screaming body below him, writhing on hospital sheets stained with bright arterial hope, that was someone else now. Ethan floated above it, half-folded into the flicker of overhead fluorescents, looking down on the thrashing frame that still wore his eyes, his hands, his last name stitched on a plastic wristband.
For one moment, just one, he felt weightless. Like maybe the fire had done him a kindness, burning out the rot and letting his soul drift away on a curl of smoke like his grandfather's old cigars.
But the body didn't stop. And the code didn't let him go. Like a hook punched through his sternum, the predator yanked him back in.
The lights blurred. The TV died with a soft electric sigh. The nurse's scream snapped off in a wet choke. Ethan felt his feet slam to the tile. Felt the animal in his bones test the joints like a new machine. It knew how to move faster than he ever did running headlong into burning stairwells.
It bolted.
The corridor was chaos. Orderlies lunging, security fumbling for tasers that would never fire in time. His hands, the same hands that once pulled children from blazing rafters, sank into fabric, flesh, hot wet screaming. He felt a throat under his palm, then not his palm, just the sharp snap, the desperate rattle.
And then he left again. Above, ceiling tiles flicking by like clouds. He watched himself from some cruel perch as his body sprinted, on all fours at times, lunging at shapes that fled down the hallway like trapped animals.
Then the hook dragged him back.
Eyes wide. Warm gush against his chin. Teeth locked on something soft, the inside of a bicep, a shoulder, a face. The taste he didn't want, copper and salt and the memory of old steak nights with his crew after a hard save.
He tore away. The soul fled. The predator stayed.
Detach. Return. Detach. Return.
On and on.
Bodies like paper walls before a hurricane, no resistance. Claw marks on glass. Bloody footprints across polished floors that once gleamed under the hum of polite hospital charity galas.
Somewhere, buried beneath the gnash and the static, a thought flickered like a flare in a drowned city:
"Let Angela be home.
Let Rebecca be home. Let River be home.
Please, not here. Not here. Not here."
The predator didn't care. The code only knew warm. Knew motion. Knew that the mind's prayers meant nothing once the hunger wrote its commandments into bone.
He heard it, somewhere far behind the crunch and the panic, the soft echo of his own voice, smaller than the growl that poured out of his mouth:
"Run. Not them. Please, not them."
But the doors kept opening. More bodies stumbled into view. More heat. More prey.
The fire that never dies, the fire that eats you alive and leaves you awake to watch.
* * *
He floated again. Ethan Rost, Fire Captain, husband, father, hovering above the monster that wore his skin like a stolen coat. Down below, it was a machine—every tendon tuned for slaughter, every nerve humming with the new code's demand:
Warm. Move. Tear. Feed.
He drifted, but not clean, not free. He could still hear the teeth tearing. Could still feel the warm slide of muscle strands on his gums, even while his mind clawed at the ceiling tiles for mercy. Each time the hook dragged him back down, the smell filled his nose, sweet rot and copper. It made him want to gag again, but the predator buried the gag reflex somewhere he couldn't reach.
He realized then: the monster didn't just wear him it ate him too, one heartbeat at a time.
He felt teeth close around a shoulder, tasted hot copper, the press of cartilage splitting. The hallway was full of shrieks, the wet slap of feet slipping in fresh blood. Orderlies, visitors, a doctor trying to swing a fire extinguisher, all the same to the thing inside him.
Ethan tried to scream "Stop!", but his throat was an echo chamber for the predator's growl. He drifted out, up near the cheap ceiling tiles stained with old leaks, watching himself leap over a fallen gurney to pin a man against a wall, jaws snapping into soft throat.
When he felt the neck snap in his mouth, Ethan's mind howled—"No! Not like this!" But the beast inside him didn't flinch. He felt the soft pop like breaking kindling for a fire he never asked to light. His hands, slick with warmth he couldn't scrub off. He squeezed his eyes shut inside the static but he could feel it anyway. The code wanted more. The man inside just wanted to wake up screaming.
He left. He returned. Over and over, until he almost welcomed the out-of-body drift. The only moment when the horror flickered softer.
The only mercy.
"Please... no more. Not like this," he thought, or maybe he prayed. But the static swallowed the plea. No god in this new world. Just teeth and code and the memory of fire that wouldn't die.
If he could've cut his own throat he would've, just to shut out the taste.
Then, the flicker changed.
Somewhere in the static haze behind his eyes, a whisper. A voice not his. A ragged sound like wind rattling the windows of an abandoned house.
"God help me, please!"
Ethan's focus slammed back into the beast's skull, eyes wide, lungs full of the copper stench. But the voice stayed inside. Not down the hall. Inside.
Another voice joined it, weaker, childlike, trembling through the new circuitry where his memories used to live.
"Mom? Mommy? I don't... I don't want to...."
He stumbled, the predator's lunge glitching for a heartbeat. The code surged, forced his hands up, claws latching onto warm flesh again. But the voices multiplied. Dozens. Hundreds. Like old CB radios in a bunker, all crackling at once.
"Can't stop..."
"Bit me, bit me, help!"
"I don't want this..."
"Run, run, please run!"
Ethan felt the claws drive into a ribcage, but behind his teeth, his mind screamed back:
"Who are you?!"
The answer wasn't a word, it was a chorus. The bitten. The hospice beds. The experimental trials. The desperate who begged for the cure that never cured, only converted. And now they moved inside the same dark fire, all trapped, all watching their own bodies tear through the living.
One voice cut clearer than the rest, low, calm, a man's tone wrapped in ragged static.
"Don't fight it too hard, friend. You'll burn yourself up faster."
Ethan felt the beast pivot, teeth snapping at a fleeing nurse. His mind clung to that single voice like a beam in a firestorm.
"Who...?"
The voice crackled a sad smile:
"Name's Elian. I've been in here for a while. You're not alone, Captain. Not anymore."
Another throat tore. The predator roared. Ethan drifted again, hovering in the ceiling lights, hearing them all, the Remnants, the Ghosts, the Passenger Choir.
And beneath the roaring code, one thought echoed:
"The fire's alive. And it never burns out."
* * *
They reached the hospital's front, that wide glass mouth, automatic doors still hissing obediently open and shut while the world bled across its polished floors. Ethan watched through his own eyes, but it was more like staring through a fish tank full of ash and static.
Outside, people ran. Some limped, half-bitten, dragging loved ones, clutching children who wouldn't live to see the sun set again. And the new pack, the wave that had cracked from the hospice floors and research wards, crashed into them like a tide of teeth and hunger.
Ethan felt his hands slam a man to the pavement. Felt the ribs snap under his knees. The body beneath him bucked. Warmth pulsed up his wrists as if fire hoses still pumped life through him. But this fire never put anything out.
"What is happening to us?" Ethan thought, or maybe screamed, or maybe prayed. It didn't matter. The beast didn't flinch. But the voice in the link did, drifting in with a dry, ragged snort that almost sounded like a man lighting a cigarette inside a grave.
"I'd say we're trapped inside the monster within," Elian said. His tone almost amused, like a man half-watching his own funeral from the cheap seats.
"Genesis sold us hope, Captain. Turns out it was just a leash made of meat and code."
Ethan felt his jaws clench, teeth scraping bone. A woman's scream cracked to silence. Warmth spattered his chin. He left his body again for a heartbeat, hovered above himself like smoke curling from a dying match, then slammed back in when the code twitched for the next kill.
"How can you be calm?!" Ethan fired back into the link, each word a jagged spark in the static. "How can you just watch this? Accept this?"
He felt his feet pounce again, the beast that wore his name leaping over a fallen gurney, claws out. Another human shape in its path, too slow, too alive.
Elian's sigh drifted through the psychic hum, half pity, half gallows humor.
"You don't really accept it. You just... get used to the taste of your own screams, after a while."
Ethan's vision blurred as the predator struck, teeth sank into soft flesh. His mind spun, half inside, half out, forced to witness every wet snap, every tremor of the prey's warmth spilling out to feed the cold that would never be full.
He felt tears well behind his eyes, hot, useless. The predator didn't care about tears. The predator didn't care about his wife's voice echoing down the hallways of his mind, begging him to come home. He was sick, not in the gut but in the soul. And the code was the cure that kept him sick forever.
And inside the Choir, dozens of other voices whispered, some whimpering prayers, some mumbling old songs, some begging the code for sleep that would never come.
But Elian's voice cut through them all,tired, raw, a broken match that still burned in the wind:
"We're Remnants, Captain. What's left of the fire that doesn't burn out. And we stay awake so you don't have to die alone."
Outside, the glass doors hissed open again, letting in the next wave. The next hunt. The next proof that the world would never be clean again.
Ethan's mind whispered: Angela. Rebecca. River.
The Choir hummed back: Remember. Remember. Remember.
The beast fed.
The man stayed awake.
* * *
Then came the light—harsh, mechanical, cutting through the hospital's sliding glass doors like a false dawn. Ethan's mind jerked back into the body's sockets, the beast's nostrils flaring as the tang of fresh blood mingled with burnt oil and hot engines.
The roar of vehicles, not the battered ambulances from the early days, not the frantic family cars packed with too many bodies, but military Humvees, all teeth and steel. Tires hissed over broken glass. Doors slammed. Orders barked through bullhorns already half-swallowed by panic.
And then—the rain. Not water. Lead.
They didn't hesitate. No "Hold your fire." No "Civilians first." Just the bark of muzzles and the rattle of metal ripped apart by bigger, hungrier metal. The bullets didn't care who was infected, who was human, who still clung to hope in the stairwell with a child pressed against their chest.
Somewhere in the static, Ethan's mind heard it all at once:
The predator's snarl as its shoulder snapped back, hot sting of a round punching through rotting muscle.
The cries of men and women who thought the uniforms meant rescue.
The Choir's psychic wail, dozens of Remnants howling inside him:
"NO, PLEASE... NOT YET!"
"DON'T WANT TO DIE AGAIN..."
"RUN! RUN! WE CAN'T!"
He couldn't tell which screams belonged to the corridors behind him, humans trapped in the lobby, riddled by accident, by collateral, and which were the Remnants dissolving mid-thought, their connection flickering out like candles snuffed by a sudden wind.
He tried to hold onto one voice, Elian, but it flickered too, lost under the crack-crack-crack of rifles and the hot copper spray across the polished lobby tile.
Through the beast's eyes, Ethan saw a soldier, visor fogged, shoulders braced behind a big, barking rifle. The predator twitched, ready to leap, but Ethan's mind jerked just enough to stumble. A bullet found a better mark. Another Remnant beside him, a man in a torn hospital gown who once wept for a wife named Rosa, his head snapped back, gone.
Inside the link, that mind popped, like a lightbulb blown in the dark. Gone. Forgotten.
Ethan felt it, the code, the beast, the monster's hunger roaring to surge forward. But under the hailstorm of hot lead, something else crawled up his spine, an old instinct. Firefighter. First responder. Shield the living. It made him twitch left, duck down, drag one Remnant behind a toppled reception desk like muscle memory fighting code.
"Elian...Elian, talk to me!" he begged through the static. But only cold hiss replied—the Choir was all snarls now, all short bursts of fear and dying thoughts.
Outside, a Humvee's gun pivoted, the barrels spun, the lobby windows bloomed into a storm of glass and teeth.
Ethan's last thought, the man Ethan, flickered under the code's shriek:
"If this is mercy, let it find me first."
But the predator was faster than bullets. And the code had no word for mercy.
* * *
Then...silence.
No gunfire. No howls. No bones crunching like dry twigs under boots. Just a hush so deep Ethan thought for a breath, a single breath, that maybe it was over. Maybe the bullet found the right seam in his skull and mercy was, at last, a real thing.
And in that hush. Home.
Sunlight dripping through the old oak's leaves like gold dust on summer skin. Rebecca's giggles as River pushed her too hard on the tire swing, she'd squeal his name, demand he stop, then beg him to push again. Angela's arms around his ribs, warm breath tickling the stubble on his throat. The smell of that roast she never quite got right, too much rosemary, but he'd eat every scrap because that's what home tasted like. A cold beer sweating against his palm. Her lips at his ear, whispering something he couldn't quite hear but didn't need to. It was light. It was clean. It was his.
But then—a grind. A deep, wet growl. A shift of something heavy pressed against his cheek. The warmth of the backyard snapped away like paper catching flame.
He opened his eyes. Not sky, but flesh. Not sunlight, but the dim gray ceiling of the hospital lobby, now cracked with bullet holes and scattered with corpses like discarded costumes. He was under them, half-buried in the ruin the soldiers left behind.
He tried to move, but the beast was already awake. Already stretching its new ligaments like a cat in a fresh kill pile. He felt the bodies slide from his shoulders, ribs popping, muscles coiling as the code demanded:
UP. HUNT. NOW.
The Humvees were gone. Just the stench of oil and powder hanging in the stale air like a confession no one would ever hear. Everyone, dead. Nurses, patients, Remnants who didn't run fast enough. The Choir a thin whisper now, the ones left flickering like half-broken radio signals.
But Ethan? Not yet.
The hook in his chest yanked, the beast stood up, pieces of the dead rolling off its back like loose soil. He felt its legs coil. And then he ran. Out through shattered doors, over slick pavement spattered with spent casings and half-frozen puddles of red rain. The city waited, or what was left of it.
Manhattan's skyline, once his to protect, now just a black crown of smoke and flickering flame. Sirens wailed like wolves. Somewhere, a skyscraper's bones groaned as they fell, sending up a roar that drowned out the last echo of Angela's laugh.
Rebecca's squeal. River's questions. Gone. Bought and traded for the next heartbeat.
The beast ran anyway, aimless, hungry, forever.
Ethan, buried in the back of his own skull, whispered into the static:
"I'm still here."
And the Choir, what was left of it, whispered back:
"So are we."