Episode 2: The Law of Crews
⸻
Cold Open
He woke to a ceiling he didn't trust.
White panels hummed with tired fluorescent light. A cracked vent rattled like a weak cough. Someone had taped a plastic "GET WELL" balloon to the metal bed rail; it hovered on a fraying ribbon like a joke from a kinder world.
Ghost stared at it until the balloon's grin looked like a threat.
He remembered fire. Screams. Doors locking. Footsteps running the wrong way—away from him. He remembered swinging a bent metal pipe until his arms gave out and the dog-things pinned him behind glass. He remembered the minute where he accepted he would die.
Then gunfire. Hunters. A woman with a scar and a voice that didn't ask permission. You're marked now. Candidate. You'll need a crew.
Ghost squeezed the bed rail until the balloon shifted and bumped his cheek.
"Get that off me," he said, voice rough.
The balloon didn't move. Of course it didn't. He swung his legs over the bed, testing. Pain flared low in his ribs, sharp and nested. The healers had done what they could, but Hunter infirmaries worked on triage math: don't waste full miracles on half-dead candidates.
He stood anyway.
On the curtain, someone had clipped a notice: CANDIDATE #7125: TEMPORARY CLEARANCE — OBSERVATION, CREW INTAKE NEXT.
He tore the notice down, crumpled it, and palmed the door plate.
It slid open to a corridor of metal and concrete that breathed like a machine. The Hunter Outpost's atrium was a stacked nest of catwalks and glass-walled rooms, humming with elevator cables and mission klaxons. On the far wall, a monolithic screen poured data into the air: red bars for live incursions, amber lines for supply routes, white dots pulsing where crews moved. The room smelled like coffee and gun oil.
A dozen Hunters glanced at him and looked away. Not cruelty—calibration. Everyone learned to measure a stranger at a glance: gait, scars, how much fear hid in their shoulders. Ghost walked with nothing to offer but stubborn gravity. That was enough to be ignored.
He took the stairs down, one hand on his ribs, eyes tracking the big screen. The left side displayed the laws like prayer:
• HUNTER LAW #1: NO SOLO RUNS. CREW MINIMUM: TWO. IDEAL: THREE.
• HUNTER LAW #2: MISSION EXP TALLIES TO THE CREW, SPLIT BY IMPACT.
• HUNTER LAW #3: PRESTIGE AFTER 1,000 LEVELS. RESPECT THE GAP.
• HUNTER LAW #4: LIES ARE CHEAPER THAN FUNERALS. SAY WHAT MATTERS.
The last one made him scoff. Say what matters? If anyone had said We locked the door and left you, maybe he wouldn't have this much poison behind his ribs.
"Candidate." A voice cut cleanly through the noise.
He turned. The scarred woman from the hospital stood with a slate in hand, the long greatsword strapped along her spine. Up close, the scar etched her cheekbone in a white hook; it made her look like she'd smiled once and someone tried to erase it with a knife.
"Commander Vale," she said. "You're walking. Good. Orientation's a waste on the horizontal."
"Ghost," he replied.
"That the name you'll keep?"
He shrugged once.
"Fine." She flicked her slate and a small drone lit up, throwing a blue rectangle between them. Candidate Record – #7125. The hologram mapped the hospital incident in cold lines: outbreak spike, structural fire, six kills marked—none assigned to him. It also displayed an ECG of his heart during the attack: a surge that hammered like a drum at the end, then calmed like a hand on it.
"What's that?" he asked before he could stop himself.
"Your heart doing something interesting," Vale said. "Most people's rates spike then crash. Yours spiked, then stabilized under pressure. Either you wanted to live very badly, or you adjust to terror like it's a temperature. Either way, it keeps bodies moving. Bodies that move keep crews alive." She studied him. "Do you want to move, Ghost?"
He held her stare. "I'm not dying in hallways other people lock."
"Good answer." She flicked again. "We're assigning you to provisional Crew Sable-9 for intake and drills. Two members. You'll make three when you prove you can stand."
"I don't do crews."
"You do if you want to hunt." Vale's tone didn't sharpen. It didn't need to. "Law #1 is older than me. Too many bones in the solo pile. If you think proximity is the same as trust, you'll be dead within a month. Some people need to stand near someone when the wall comes down, even if they don't like them." A small smile that barely earned the name. "You look like someone who doesn't like anyone. That's fine. Stand anyway."
He should have argued. He didn't. The memory of claws skidding sparks off tile filled his mouth with old iron.
"Where?"
Vale tilted her chin toward a lower catwalk. "Observation Deck Three. You'll meet them on the way to drills."
She turned away, then paused. "One more thing." She tapped the Hunter laws on the massive screen. "#4. You don't have to say much. But say what matters."
Ghost said nothing. Vale didn't seem surprised.
⸻
Act I — Sable-9
Deck Three overlooked Drill Halls like a balcony over a blood-sweat gym. Down below, crews squared off against mechanical horrors that walked out of nightmares. Turrets tracked movement and fired chalk rounds that painted bruises on exposed skin. The air stung with propellant.
Two figures waited by the rail.
The first leaned on it with a prowler's ease, short dark hair pushed back, jaw set like a dare. Twin blades rested sheathed at her hips, the handles dark leather worn smooth by a thousand draws. She wore a sleeveless vest over patterned wraps that left her arms free and scarred. The scars didn't look like losses. They looked like ledger entries.
The second stood with a tablet half-raised, eyes flicking between Ghost and the drills below with the same cautious scanning. Messy curls tied back, utility harness bristling with small devices and canisters. Not mage—tech, Ghost assumed. The Hunter world took whatever worked: magic, engineering, faith, fear.
"I'm Ira," the bladeswoman said without preamble. Her voice had gravel where laughter might go. "I cut things that think they're harder than me."
"Kael," the other said, offering exactly one nod. "Field support. Terrain toys, sensor webs, smoke. Sometimes I make doors where walls are."
"Ghost," Ghost said.
"I heard." Ira's eyes flicked once to his ribs, then down to his hands. Not to check if he shook. To see if he clenched. "They pulled you out of a hospital. Congratulations. You're now very slightly more alive than most people outside."
Kael tapped his tablet and a holo-map opened small between them. "Sable-9 is two until you pass intake. Then we're three. Commander Vale thinks your nerves are uncommon."
"I didn't see you fight," Ira added, eyes on him. "I saw the report. You were cornered. You didn't die. Good. But don't confuse survival with proof. Out there, if you hesitate, I bleed. If I hesitate, you bleed. If he hesitates"—she jerked her chin at Kael—"we all bleed and some monster takes our bones for counters."
Ghost met her stare without a single flinch. He didn't hate her for saying it. He hated how much he agreed.
"What do you want from me?" he asked.
"Not much," Ira said. "Just don't run. Don't break. Don't lie stupidly. If you're weak, say weak. If you're slow, say slow. If you're hurt, say hurt. We'll carry one another until we don't. And when it says Run, run in the direction we choose."
"Also," Kael said mildly, "don't shoot me, stab me, or step in my mines. That's ninety percent of crew intake."
Ghost lifted his hands a fraction. "I don't have a gun."
"Yet," Ira said.
He didn't answer that.
Below, a buzzer blared. A crew broke through a knot of mechanical quadrupeds, their leader vaulting high on a shock-staffe to plant a foam explosive. The blast threw chalk in a blossom. They finished in under the clock and jogged out laughing the kind of laugh that looked like crying in reverse.
"Your turn," Kael said.
⸻
Act II — Intake Drill
They issued Ghost a training pistol with two magazines and a Note: Return With All Rounds Accounted For or Fill Out A Very Long Form. He weighed it in his palm. It felt like the balloon—silly. His finger found the trigger like it knew the way. He pushed the feeling aside and slammed a mag home.
The Drill Hall shifted configuration with a growl. Walls slid apart to form a miniaturized city: narrow alleys, broken cars, boarded storefronts with nothing inside. Foam smoke crawled at ankle level. Overhead, lights strobed ruin-red.
A sign buzzed alive: SIMULATION // CODE: HUNGER STREET
OBJECTIVE: ESCORT — CIVILIAN DUMMY FROM BLOCK B TO SAFEHOUSE F.
THREATS: HOUND-CLASS (MECH), SPITTER DRONES, ADAPTIVE WALLS.
AMMO: LIMITED.
CLOCK: 08:00.
"Stay on my shoulder," Ira said as the entry gate opened. "Kael leads with the map. We have two minutes before the walls reconfigure. If we get separated, we meet at any door with a crimson stripe. If you see hounds' eyes: shine, move, don't feed them your panic."
"Copy," Kael said. He tossed two metal seeds low; they rolled and sprang into wire-slim trip sensors that projected a faint grid only he could read on his tablet. "Ghost, right side. Don't cross my trip-lines unless you want to lose ankles."
Ghost nodded. The door rolled and the simulation breathed hot air into their faces. Foam smoke hugged their shins. Somewhere beyond the first corner, metal claws scraped.
They moved.
Kael kept a measured pace, eyes glued to the shifting map as blocks clicked and swung like a giant toy. Ira moved like a shadow with opinions, every step economical, the twin blade hilts kissing her palms in rhythm.
Ghost scanned, the pistol aimed low, finger straight. The more he walked, the more his ribs reminded him they existed. Pain shrank the world into a hallway. He kept moving.
"Contact," Kael said, small and calm.
Two hounds came low and fast, heads swinging, glowing optical sensors tracking. Ghost's brain said shoot and his hands obeyed. The first two shots were clean, center-mass, and wrong. The hounds stumbled then recovered. Ira did the right thing: she didn't look to see if he'd learn. She moved. Steel flashed. Her right blade caught a jaw hinge and pried, her left may as well have been a guillotine.
Ghost adjusted, breath short—aim high. The next shot took an optic clean and the hound folded like a puppet cut from wires.
"Better," Ira said without warmth. Praise wasn't the point.
They rounded a corner and froze. The alley straight ahead had been a corridor. Now it was a maw—walls sliding, teeth-like barricades ratcheting down. Kael cursed softly and rerouted them left into a storefront with a stuttering sign: PHAR—something. On the floor, the civilian dummy waited: a weighted mannequin with a painted face that somehow still looked expectant.
Ira slung it over her shoulder. "You shoot, I cut, he sneaks. Move."
Spitter drones woke from the ceiling like dropped spiders and began to cough pellets that burst into gumming foam. One globbed Kael's sleeve and he twisted, swore, cut it free with a pocket blade. Ghost sighted and shot. The first drone died. Two more zipped. He tracked, shot again, chamber clicked—
And the click was sudden as winter.
Empty.
He glanced at the counter display: 0. He'd miscounted.
"Reload!" he snapped to himself, already dropping the mag, already slamming the next—
Something inside his chest… answered.
A pressure, like the one his heart learned in the hospital, pushed outward. Not heat. Not cold. A rightness that felt like it was supposed to be there all along—but that someone had hidden in his bones as a cruel joke.
The pistol felt suddenly wrong. Like a toy. Like he'd been chewing bark while a table of knives waited behind his molars.
He shoved the feeling down and slammed the reload anyway. The gun snapped shut. He fired, drones shattered, a hound skidded into the doorway with a metal howl and Ira kicked it back out with a bladed punctuation mark.
"Time?" Ira yelled.
"Four minutes, seventeen," Kael said. "Walls shifting again—Ghost, two o'clock!"
Ghost didn't think. He pivoted, fired, pivoted back, fired again. A hollow space opened in his chest under the noise and lived there. His ribs raged when he twisted, but the pain folded neatly around a focus he didn't recognize as his.
They punched through two more hound clusters, burned through half of the second magazine, and made it to Safehouse F with two minutes on the clock. The door slammed shut and flooded the room in neutral white. The civilian dummy chirped something like thank you in a voice crafted by a sadist.
"Clear," Kael said, breathing hard. Foam web clung pale to his harness; he pulled it off in sheets. "One more objective to pass intake: Holdpoint. Thirty yards, outside. Same drones. More hounds. Ammo cache halfway. Clock dropping. Basic rule: control the lane, pick your shots."
Ghost nodded, set his shoulders, checked his mags. Ten left, ten in the mag. Plenty if he made them count. He could make them count.
And then the wall threw them a new trick.
⸻
Act III — The Holdpoint
They stepped out into a long corridor like a throat lined with metal. A crude barricade bisected it: waist-high sheet steel, holes cut for firing lanes. At the far end, a steel shutter rattled up to reveal the "ammo cache"—a crate with four magazines—and next to it, a red lever.
Kael glanced at the lever. "Of course."
"What?" Ghost asked.
"Lovely game design," Ira said, rolling her shoulders. "Pull lever to unlock exit. Harass with hounds while you're greedy for bullets."
"We can hold," Kael said. "Ira, left lane. Ghost, center. I'll float and drop stunners down the pipe."
The lights dimmed. A siren wailed. The steel shutter clanged lower again and clawed up as if the hall itself couldn't decide whether to help or eat them.
Hounds came. Ghost braced and fired in rhythm—one, two, adjust, one, two, breathe. He didn't spray. He didn't panic. He placed shots where they waited to matter, like something in him had drawn a diagram of the world's weak points while he slept.
"Good," Ira said through teeth. Her blades flashed like thoughts too fast to catch.
Drones dropped and Kael sent a pop of concussive air down the corridor that flipped them like coins. He tossed a little cube behind the barricade and a soft field shimmered: hounds that staggered too close hit it and faltered, snapping in confusion.
"Thirty seconds," Kael said. "I'll make the run."
"I'll go," Ghost said.
Ira didn't glance back. "Why?"
"Because I need the bullets."
"Honest," she said. "Go."
He vaulted the barricade at a crouch and ran hunched, hounds lunging to cull him out. He aimed while moving and hit what he needed to hit. A drone dropped a foam wad that splatted his shoulder and made his sleeve stick to his bicep. He hissed, shook it off like gum. The ammo cache stared up, four mags nested like a promise.
His chest pressure swelled.
You don't need these, something in him whispered so quietly it sounded like his own voice several rooms away.
He reached out anyway, thumbed two mags into his vest, grabbed the other two—
A hound hit him like a car.
They tumbled, teeth snapping inches from his face. He drove the pistol under its jaw and fired. The gun banged and the hound spasmed, heavy weight rolling off his chest. He staggered up, lungs flaring with flame. Pain hammered his ribs. The world bobbed white then red.
"Ghost!" Kael—urgent. "Back!"
He ran.
The siren keened. The lever shivered in its housing and dropped with a cruel clang—reset. Ghost yanked it with one hand as he sprinted, felt it resist and then give. The corridor lights swapped from hungry red to neutral. The wave of enemies shivered and paused as the simulation algorithm processed an insult.
He dove behind the barricade as Ira carved down a pair that tried to hop it. Kael slapped a shock puck on the barricade's edge; a hound took a mouthful of metal and learned about God.
"Exit's green," Kael panted. "We fall back in five. Go on my ping—"
He didn't get to finish.
Every light died.
In the sudden dark, the only sound was hound claws scraping metal and the soft thik-thik of drones unlatching themselves like clever fruit.
"Grid's down," Kael said uselessly.
"Hold," Ira murmured. "We don't run blind."
Ghost's eyes widened to useless circles. The pistol's iron sights were ink. His mind did the ugly math: three targets now, five in a breath, ten in a wave. Ten bullets in the mag, maybe twenty in his vest. If the drones spit foam they would gum the lanes; if the hounds jumped in confusion they would overwhelm the barricade.
He felt the familiar click of fear's hand closing around his throat.
And the heartbeat he'd carried since the hospital answered.
It was gentle. Not a drum. Not a shock. An opening. A door in his chest he could step through if he chose. He let his breath extend, slow, and the pressure wasn't pressure anymore. It was permission.
Something in his hand changed.
It wasn't a heat or a glow; it was a certainty. The training pistol went quiet in his palm—not sound. Noise. The toy-shallow kind. Under it, another weight resolved like a star finding focus.
He didn't think. He couldn't. He was too busy not dying.
His fingers slipped off the training pistol's grip—his other hand was already rising. It closed around nothing that was somehow there.
A shape bloomed between his fingers: compact, elegant, matte as night under water. It was the size of a breath held too long. Its slide was a whisper. Its edges were made of offense; its core hummed like a tether between his bones and the thing that wanted to keep him alive.
His mini automatic pistol.
It didn't appear with a flash. It arrived like it had always been in his hand and he'd simply remembered how to hold it.
Ghost exhaled.
The dark wasn't dark anymore. Not with the pistol's faint, almost nonexistent line guiding his eye—no light, just knowledge of where the world's soft places lived. He aimed where the claws would be, not where they were. He fired.
Bap—bap—bap—bap.
The recoil was a promise kept. The muzzle flash was modest and controlled. Four sounds, four falls. A drone dropped from the ceiling to spit foam at Kael's face—Ghost clipped its belly mid-fall and it pinwheeled into the barricade with a sad metallic pong.
Ira didn't turn. She didn't need to. The rhythm told her what she needed to know: someone was handling the lane with a metronome in their wrist.
"Two more," Kael breathed.
Ghost could feel them, like pressure points in a muscle he'd lived in all his life. He pivoted, shot on the pivot, shot again without seeing, knew he'd seen anyway.
Bap. Bap.
Silence. The kind that listens.
The lights stuttered back to dirty white. The world was suddenly full of edges again. Ghost blinked hard. The mini pistol… sat in his palm like it belonged there. He curled his fingers slightly, and it answered like bone answers to muscle. His chest felt clear as a winter sky.
He kept his face a wall.
Ira slid one eye toward him, just enough to count his breaths. Kael's gaze dipped and stuck for half a second on the weapon. But Ghost's other hand—practical, boring—still held the training pistol. The shadow of the truth hid in the angle of his body, in the way the barricade cut the line of sight to his right hand.
"Exit," Kael whispered, voice threading the moment.
They moved, quick and hooked low. The simulation clock, now mercifully visible again, ticked down beneath a baleful siren face. They cleared the last turn, hammered the pad. The exit door blew and the staging bay opened like a mouth to spill them onto steel.
A buzzer barked twice. Then the intercom's bored voice declared, SABLE-9 — INTAKE DRILL: PASS.
Kael leaned on his thighs and laughed once, dry. Ira rolled her shoulders and sheathed her blades like a ritual done right.
Ghost half-closed his hand.
The mini pistol evaporated in a soundless sigh, stitching itself back beneath his skin, or into the negative space that waited for it. In his left, the training pistol sat dumb and empty. He clicked the mag out, checked it, clicked it back in. Normal. Harmless. Lies cheaper than funerals.
Ira's eyes cut to him again and stuck for half a beat longer this time. She didn't ask what she thought she saw in the dark. She didn't ask how a candidate with hospital ribs could place shots like that, clean as a surgeon with a grudge. She simply nodded once.
"Not terrible," she said.
Kael wiped foam off his harness with the air of a man shrugging off a bad joke. "Not terrible at all."
Ghost didn't smile. He didn't know how to, anymore.
⸻
Act IV — Aftermath
They sat on the edge of the catwalk, feet dangling over the Drill Hall while the next crew took the stage. Below, a pair of rookies imploded into each other's lanes and learned about yelling. Ira tossed Ghost a protein packet that tasted like sawdust learning to be beef.
"Eat," she said, tearing into her own. "If you faint on mission I'm going to carry you and then complain about it forever."
He bit the packet and chewed. It stuck to his teeth. The ache in his ribs had negotiated down from fire to argument.
Kael flicked his tablet open and scrolled their performance metrics. "Two notes," he said mildly. "One: your accuracy stabilized after the grid went down. That's rare. Most people shoot like drunks in the dark."
Ghost swallowed. "Maybe I drink in the dark."
"Cute," Ira said without a laugh. "Second note?"
"Two," Kael went on, "your reload timings were off at the start, then… corrected. By a lot."
Ghost drank water to fill the place a lie would go. "Body remembers things I don't."
Kael's eyes did the subtle gleam of a mind that keeps filing cabinets. "Mm."
Ira shoved her empty packet into the bin and stood. "Commander'll stamp your intake. If she assigns you to us permanent, we work on cadence. I don't need to like you to trust that your shots will be where they should be when they should be there. You don't need to like me to let me cut its throat while you keep its eyes on you. Works both ways."
Ghost rose. The world tilted for half a second, then steadied. He let the railing take some of his weight and looked past the Drill Hall to the big screen, where the Hunter Laws glowed like commandments carved into a storm.
Law #1: No solo runs.
Law #4: Say what matters.
He thought of saying it.
I don't run out of bullets.
I think I can pull a gun out of thin air.
I don't think I get tired the way I should.
He thought of the hospital doors slamming. Of the minute where he'd decided he would not die for someone else's calculus.
He said nothing.
Commander Vale found them before they found her. She had the look of someone whose day fit into a sheath. She glanced once at the Drill Hall metrics on her wrist-band, then lifted her eyes to the three of them.
"Sable-9," she said. "Provisional pass. Ghost, you breathe, you move, you don't freeze when the grid drops. We can work with that."
He nodded.
"You'll run two more drills tomorrow, then field level zeros the day after. Training hunts with supervisor oversight. You'll level if you live. Simple math."
"How simple?" Ghost asked.
Vale's mouth twitched. "You'll spectate one real mission tonight. Watch how crews bleed. Some of them bleed well. Some of them bleed… educationally."
She half-turned. "One more thing, candidate."
Ghost met her eyes. For a small, foolish half-second he thought she would say I know. That she had seen the way the dark had fit his hands.
"Find lodging near the south dormitories," Vale said instead. "You're not a patient anymore. We don't keep beds for people who can walk."
She left them with that. Ira stretched her neck until it popped and Kael made a face like a man who wanted a long shower and a longer nap.
Ghost watched the Drill Hall reset. Machines skated the floor smooth. The walls split and folded and became a different brand of nightmare.
Behind his ribs, the new quiet remained. Not absence. Readiness.
⸻
Ending Beat — The Quiet Gun
Night fell like a lid. The Outpost glowed with bad coffee and better intentions. Ghost found a bunk cell the size of a good coffin and sat on the edge of it, elbows on knees, the dark complete enough to be honest.
He opened his right hand, palm up, and thought—not words, exactly, but a shape.
The pistol answered like the rest of him was a question it had been waiting to complete.
It unfolded into reality without a shimmer, without a show. A sleek thing, a small thing, its edges clean, its slide a whisper. It fit his palm like he'd been born around it. It smelled like cold metal and the first breath after you stop drowning.
Ghost stared at it. The Outpost hummed around him. In the distance, alarms ticked. Someone laughed in a tired hallway.
He raised the pistol, sighted on a point in the wall, and held still until his breath forgot to tremble.
"Not a word," he told the empty room, voice flat as a table. "Not to anyone."
The gun didn't answer. It didn't need to. That was the whole point.
He let it dissolve back into the nothing that wasn't nothing. He exhaled, long and slow, like a man who'd decided to carry a lie until it became a spine.
Outside, the intercom crackled: FIELD MISSION BRIEF — 23:00 HOURS — OBSERVATION SEATS OPEN.
Ghost stood, rolled his shoulders until the ache filed itself under later, and reached for the door.
He didn't know what it meant to level yet.
He only knew that when the lights went out, he didn't run out of bullets.