The moon was bleeding again.
I watched it through a crack in the rusted hull of the Cassandra, a dead freighter half-sunk in the Illinois Mud Sea. The night sky looked like someone had smeared cherry jam across a black lens. The newsnets called it the "Helios Anomaly." The street preachers called it "The Snout of the Beast."
Me? I called it a pain in my ass because the Red Shift screwed with sonar, and I was trying to find a 22nd-century catalytic converter in forty feet of toxic sludge.
My name is Cade Thorne. I'm a Salvager. Well, that's the polite term. Scrap Rat is what the Up-Siders call us. The ones living in the spires of Neo-Chicago, drinking real water and breathing filtered air. Down here in the Stilts, we breathe rust and fight for canned peaches.
My leg ached. A souvenir from a bulkhead collapse three years back. The local doc said, "Bone necrosis, kid. You'll be lucky to walk at forty."
I was twenty-three.
Beep. Beep.
My wrist-slate pinged. A shape moving fast through the muck, twenty yards starboard.
"Gator?" I muttered, thumbing the safety off my harpoon rifle. The rifle was a piece of crap. The capacitor whined louder than a Stilt-side hooker.
Then I smelled it.
Not gator. Gator smells like mud and fish. This smelled like a copper mine and wet dog that hadn't been bathed since the Resource Wars. The smell hit the back of my throat and my gums started to itch.
That was new.
KRAK-OOM.
The hull next to my head peeled open like a tin can. The claw that came through was the size of my torso. Matte black, dripping with the viscous black water of the Mud Sea. The thing pulled itself into the cabin.
It was a Rager. Feral.
I'd seen them on the mandated PSA vids. They show the cute ones, the Tier-1s that look like mangy wolves. This wasn't cute. This was a nightmare of exposed sinew, exposed ribs, and a jaw that unhinged sideways. Its eyes weren't red. They were white. Blind. It hunted by sound.
My harpoon rifle went thwump.
The bolt hit its shoulder. It didn't even flinch. It just swiveled that empty white gaze toward the sound of my heartbeat.
"Oh, f—"
I didn't get to finish the prayer.
It moved. Not a run. A vibration. It was just there, in front of me. The smell of copper flooded my senses. Its teeth closed on my shoulder.
The pain was a white-hot supernova. I heard my collarbone snap like a dry twig. But in that split second of contact, something else happened.
The world inverted.
I wasn't in the ship. I was standing on the surface of the moon. The real moon. The one behind the red smear. And I saw a chain the size of a continent, broken. And a voice—not words, just a Howl that sounded like the galaxy ending—crashed into my skull.
Then I was back in the Mud Sea.
Drowning.
Bleeding out.
The Rager was gone. Shredded. Chunks of it floated around me like a meat cloud. My shoulder was... healing. I could feel the bone scraping, knitting, changing.
I clawed my way to the surface of the mud and vomited water and bile.
My leg didn't ache anymore.
I looked at my hands. The nails were caked with black gore—Rager gore. And my reflection in the oily water showed me a face I didn't recognize: pale, gaunt, but with irises the color of molten silver.
I felt the hunger. Not for food. For the hunt. For the sound of a neck snapping. It was a voice in the back of my skull, louder than reason.
Rip. Kill. Howl.
No.
I gritted my teeth. I'm Cade Thorne. I'm not a monster.
My wrist-slate crackled. The emergency band. A voice, female, crisp and annoyed.
"—coded signal detected. Unauthorized bio-signature in Sector Seven. This is Helios Accord Enforcement. Please state your ID code or we will neutralize the target."
In the distance, I heard rotors. Black VTOLs, Helios "Cleaners." They didn't rescue Ragers. They nuked the grid square.
I looked at the silver eyes in the reflection.
Neutralize the target. Right.
I took a deep breath, felt the new power humming in my veins like a live wire, and dove back into the black water. I needed to find a shadow, and fast.
Because the moon was bleeding, and apparently, so was I.
I swam blind.
The Mud Sea was a graveyard of old Chicago—submerged skyscrapers, rusted maglev tracks, and the bones of twenty million people who didn't make it out during the Collapse. The water was thick. Oily. Tasted like battery acid and regret.
But I could see.
Not with my eyes. The silt was too thick for that. It was something else. A pressure map in my skull. Every ripple in the water, every chunk of debris drifting past—I felt it. Like the world had suddenly switched from standard definition to full-sensory immersion.
The VTOLs passed overhead. Their searchlights cut through the murk like white spears. I pressed myself against the rusted hull of a submerged taxi, holding my breath.
My lungs didn't burn.
They should have. I'd been underwater for four minutes. Five. The old Cade would've been fish food by now. But my chest felt... fine. More than fine. The water was feeding me. Oxygen pulled straight through my skin.
What the hell am I?
The VTOLs moved on. The Cleaners weren't patient. They had quotas. If a bio-signature disappeared for more than thirty seconds, they marked it "Deceased/Displaced" and moved to the next target.
I waited until the rotor wash faded, then surfaced slow, just my eyes and nose breaking the oily film.
The Stilts rose ahead of me—a shantytown of shipping containers, corrugated steel, and desperation, built on the rusted skeletons of old high-rises. Home. For now.
I pulled myself onto a collapsed maglev pylon and crouched in the shadow. My clothes were shredded. The bite wound on my shoulder was... gone. Smooth skin. Not even a scar.
My gums still itched.
I ran my tongue over my teeth. They felt wrong. Sharper. The canines had lengthened just enough to notice. Not fangs. Not yet. But the potential was there, waiting.
Okay. Think, Cade. You're not dead. That's good. You're also... something else. That's bad.
The hunger growled in my stomach. Not for the canned beans I had stashed in my squat. For something warm.
I pushed the thought down. Hard.
No. You're human. You eat beans. You drink shitty synth-coffee. You do NOT crave raw meat.
My wrist-slate buzzed again. Different channel this time. Encrypted. A frequency I'd never seen before.
A text-only message scrolled across the cracked screen.
// UNKNOWN SENDER //
// SILVER-EYES. THE LAMB. MIDNIGHT. COME ALONE. //
Coordinates followed. A location in the Warrens—the worst part of the Stilts, where even the gangs didn't go after dark.
I stared at the message. Silver-eyes. Whoever sent this had seen me. Had watched the whole thing go down.
That should have scared me.
Instead, the hunger stirred again. And beneath it, something else. Something that felt disturbingly like excitement.
The moon hung overhead, fat and red and dripping.
I started walking.
The Warrens were a maze of collapsed tunnels and flooded subway lines. Back before the Collapse, Chicago had a whole underground city—shopping centers, transit hubs, maintenance corridors. Now it was a tomb. A wet, dark tomb that smelled like mold and methane.
And blood.
I smelled it before I saw it. Fresh. Human. Three distinct scents, maybe four hours old.
My stomach lurched. Not with disgust. With interest.
Stop it.
I followed the coordinates to a dead-end tunnel. The wall was smooth concrete, covered in old graffiti. A faded mural of a laughing sun. And beneath it, a door that shouldn't exist—seamless metal, no handle, no keypad.
I touched it.
The metal hummed against my palm. Warm. Alive.
The door slid open.
Inside: stairs. Going down. Flickering lights. And at the bottom, the sound of music. Old jazz. The kind my grandfather used to play on a battered vinyl player before the Red Shift took him.
I descended.
The room at the bottom was... impossible. It was a bar. A real bar. Wooden counter, brass rail, bottles of actual whiskey on the shelves. A fireplace crackling with real wood. The air smelled like peat smoke and leather.
And behind the bar, polishing a glass, was a man.
He was tall. Thin. Dressed in a vest and shirtsleeves like a bartender from a century ago. His face was sharp, angular, with pale skin and eyes that reflected the firelight like a cat's. His hair was silver-white, pulled back in a neat ponytail.
He looked at me and smiled.
"Ah. The new pup. Right on time."
I stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Every instinct—the old human ones and the new other ones—screamed at me that this man was dangerous.
"Who are you?"
He set down the glass and spread his hands.
"Call me Grimm. Welcome to the Slaughtered Lamb." He tilted his head, studying me. "You've had quite a night, haven't you? Bitten by a Void-Touched Rager. Should've died. Should've turned into a mindless meat-puppet like the rest. But here you are. Silver eyes. Clear mind. Mostly."
He reached under the bar and produced a bottle of amber liquid. Poured two glasses.
"The question isn't what you are, Cade Thorne. That's obvious. You're a Stalker. A Newblood. The rarest kind—the kind that keeps their soul intact."
He slid one glass toward me.
"The question is: what are you going to do about it?"
I didn't move.
"Why should I trust you?"
Grimm laughed. It was a dry sound, like dead leaves scraping stone.
"Trust? Pup, you shouldn't trust anyone. Least of all me. But right now, I'm the only one offering answers instead of a Cleaner squad. So sit. Drink. Listen."
He raised his own glass.
"To the Hunt."
The hunger in my stomach growled. The silver in my eyes burned.
I sat.