Logan POV
We went in quietly.
The service corridor behind the food court was a long concrete throat that swallowed sound. The only things moving were air and dust. I kept my hand up, two fingers out, the signal Mitch already knew meant slow and low. He gave me one curt nod and fell in behind my shoulder, the way we'd practiced in the dark upstairs. No chatter. No nerves. Just work.
The stink hit before the light did, copper and rot knotted together with old fry oil, wet cardboard, and something sour that clung to the back of the throat like bile. It got worse with every step. By the time we reached the last bend, I could taste it.
I rolled my wrist and pointed to my eyes, then two fingers. He understood. Look twice, then look again.
We slid to the edge of a shattered counter, and I eased one eye around the corner.
The food court sprawled out like a dead star, light bleeding from a handful of guttering oil fires and a couple of stolen LED lanterns. Shadows lay thick as tar in the far corners. Shapes moved through them anyway.
Goblins. Dozens on dozens.
Most slept in tangled heaps, bodies piled on mats of canvas and stolen blankets, their breathing a wet, animal chorus. Others milled, drifting in loose paths with bowls of dark slop, feeding the bigger ones or ladling into dented pots balanced on trash-can fires. A few prowled in half-awake patrols, pairs and trios with clubs and short spears, nudging sleepers with their heels when they shuffled past. Hobgoblins towered over the mess, heavy shoulders rolling as they stalked the open lanes. When one barked, heads snapped in its direction. When one kicked, bodies scrambled out of the way.
I counted in sweeps. Center first, then left to right. Rough numbers without obsessing, then refine on a second pass. It's a habit that keeps you alive: enough detail to act, not enough to freeze.
Eighty, minimum. Closer to a hundred when I factored in the patrols I could see on the mezzanine railing, the glints of eyes in the vendor stalls, the slow lifts of heads from the nests. Six hobgoblins guarding the dais; two more roaming the lanes; armored piecework that still looked mean: layered leather, scrap metal plates cinched over corded muscles. I filed that and kept going.
Then I saw the center.
What used to be three food-court islands, registers, counters, and menu boards with smiling sandwiches had been smashed together into a dais and rebuilt with bones. Not a metaphor. Bones. Femurs braced like struts. Ribs woven like a lattice. The whole thing stained dark, the edges greasy where hands had touched a hundred times. Atop it, a slab, broken stone from somewhere else, maybe a décor fountain, maybe a staircase tread, scratched over with curling grooves that shimmered faint green.
And above the slab, the air shimmered.
A slit hung there, silent and slow, as if the space had been cut with a thick blade and was struggling to stitch itself closed. It pulsed with the same sick green as the carved grooves, each throb syncing to the beat of a staff thumping the slab.
The Shaman.
He was smaller than the hobgoblins, taller than the common goblin, draped in stitched hides that still bore scraps of hair. His skull was ridged like old bark, his eyes too bright, a fever-yellow. Every time he brought his staff down, the grooves on the slab answered with light, the rift quivered, and the air around him tightened. The nearest goblins twitched when it happened, shoulders jerking, grips tightening on weapons, chests rising like they'd inhaled something sweet and caustic at once.
I watched three pulses. Four. The guards never took their eyes off the ring outside the dais. Six elites ringed him in a loose circle, hobgoblins who looked like they wanted a reason to break something.
I pulled my head back a hair, blinked stinging sweat out of my eye, and scanned left.
The cages weren't built for strength, just control, overturned shelving units lashed together with welded shopping carts, wire twisted into rope, and then into more rope. Crude, but effective. It wouldn't have held a fighter with strength left to fight. But for the women trapped inside, starving, battered, too weak to stand, it was enough.
There were a lot of them. I counted by faces, not bodies. Twenty and then twenty more, and then I stopped before I overshot and forced myself to breathe and recount. The number held somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, depending on who was curled behind someone else, who was lying by a support pole I couldn't see past, who shifted and revealed another set of eyes. The ages made no pattern. Some faces still had roundness to them that said school years not far behind; others had lines like the ones my mother had by forty, earned from long hours and night shifts. Most of the youngest clung to each other, shoulders shaking. Some stared through me like I wasn't there.
Several cradled swollen bellies with both hands. More than several. Half, maybe. More than I wanted to count.
My hands stayed steady. That's not bravado; it's discipline. If your hands shake on recon, you miss something, and then someone else dies later because you did.
I tapped twice on the counter with a fingernail to pull Mitch's eye. He slipped up beside me and eased a look over the lip.
He didn't flinch. Not at first. He's a kid by years, but not in the ways that matter. Some lives force you to learn too much too early. His breathing stayed level. His jaw set. I pointed: patrol, corner, rift. He followed each sightline, chin tilting a fraction as he absorbed the shapes and edges.
A woman's cry split the heavy drone of goblin sleep. One of the hobgoblins shoved two smaller goblins off a woman by her hair, boots driving into ribs and backs as he cleared a space with kicks. It didn't look like he was saving her. It looked like he wanted work done and didn't want interference. He snarled at the ring of onlookers until they backed away and then jerked his chin at a pair of goblins with ropes. They dragged her clear by the arms and left a smear like someone had spilled soup and tried to wipe it up with their hands.
She screamed once. It cut off into a pant. She screamed again, rawer. The sound turned several heads in the pen, and one of the women there started to rock, hands white-knuckled on her knees, a soundless sob stuck somewhere she couldn't free it.
I counted my breaths. One. Two. Three. Kept them slow. Always make your breath an order you can follow when nothing else is obeying.
The woman on the floor arched and then folded, and something moved that should not have moved the way it did. The goblins leaned in, jeering, excited. The hobgoblin guarding the lane planted his boot on a fallen tray and stuck his thumbs in his belt, bored and interested at the same time. Five breaths later, the thing came out slick and shrilling, all teeth and wrinkled skin. A female goblin with a scar across one eye darted in like she'd been waiting for this exact moment, scooped the newborn up by its armpits, and held it up. A ripple of excited chirrs went out through the nearest nests.
She didn't take it to the dais. She bee-lined left, past the end of the cages, to a corner they'd fenced off with more shelves and tarp. The noise spilling from there was high and constant, thin crying and wet suckling sounds. The "nursery," if you can call a pit stuffed with twenty squirming goblin young a nursery. The female pushed the newborn among them and then grabbed a tin bowl, plunged it into a pot, and jammed the scoop toward the infant's mouth. It gagged, swallowed, gagged again, swallowed again, like a reflex it hadn't learned yet.
The mother didn't move. Her face had lost the shape of pain and gone hollow. Her eyes were open, and not seeing.
Two goblins took her by the ankles and wrists and hauled her toward the café counter that had become a butcher's line. I shifted my weight to see it better and wished I hadn't.
The counter was slick. That's the word that fits. Slick with fat gone tacky and blood turned black on aluminum. Limbs lay in a row like someone had dumped a bag of mannequins and they hadn't fallen right. Torso halves, men, most of them, were burned on the outside and pink in places on the spit. The pot's lid rattled with the roll of a boil, and whatever was inside burped to the surface and sank again with a burp that smelled like pennies and old soup.
A goblin lifted a crude cleaver and brought it down with a thock. They hacked the dead woman into manageable segments, shoved them into the pot, and stirred.
Mitch didn't make a sound. He just stopped breathing for a heartbeat and then dragged a ragged breath back in through his teeth. His hand slid along the counter until it found an edge and clamped down hard enough that the tendons stood up along his knuckles. He's seen bodies. He's made bodies. But there are lines human brutality draws and still recognizes as a line. This wasn't that. This was something else. Something purposefully, systematically wrong.
I didn't touch him. Not yet. You leave a man in his silence until he asks you to take some of it from him.
A hobgoblin strode to the pen with two goblins at his heels, each carrying a bowl. They reached through the wire, grabbed the closest woman by the hair and chin, and tipped the slop to her mouth. She turned her head, squeezed her lips shut. The hobgoblin cracked her across the face with a backhand, not hard enough to break anything, just hard enough to end the brave part. When her mouth opened on a cry, the goblin jammed the bowl against her teeth and poured. It ran down her chin and neck. She gagged, choked, swallowed. When they finished, they moved on to the next.
Mitch's hand opened and closed on the counter like he might punch, and he knew what would happen if he did. He swallowed again, and a line of spit shivered between his lips and broke on his tongue. His jaw clenched hard enough to creak, anger aimed not at the risk to us but at the nightmare forced on those women; turned into breeding stock and then made to choke down cannibal soup as if that was all their lives were worth.
I marked the patrols again to keep my head where it needed to be. One line along the far tile, three goblins with spears, two with torches. A pair up on the mezzanine, moving past the railing with a club and a stone axe. One trio is circling the dais in a slow clockwise motion. The cadence would hold if nothing changed. Something always changes.
The Shaman slammed his staff against the stone, and the grooves in the altar glowed sickly green. This time, the light didn't just pulse; it spread, crawling like veins through the carvings and spilling into the cracks of the floor. The chant that followed was low and guttural, a rhythm that scraped against the air.
Two goblins dragged a man forward, scrawny, wild-eyed, barely able to stand. They forced him onto the slab. His struggles didn't last long. The Shaman's staff came down again, and the chanting rose. A knife flashed, and the man's scream was cut short, blood soaking into the carved lines. The glow deepened, brighter now, feeding the rift that shimmered above the altar like stretched glass.
The air warped. The rift flexed. Then, with a sound like tearing fabric, five goblins stepped out, new arrivals, bows and arrows clutched in their clawed hands. They hissed and yipped as they were herded down the steps, swelling the numbers of the pack that already infested the food court.
The cadence broke when one patrol turned sooner than it should have. A hobgoblin barked something sharp, and the trio reversed direction and cut inward toward a knot of sleepers, booting a few as they went. The ones with bowls scurried to the side to give them room, and a pot rattled lid-first across tile.
I tapped the counter and pointed down. Mitch slid flat to the floor without a sound. I dropped with him and we let the patrol's footfalls pass our position by two yards. One of them stopped, sniffed, and lifted his head. I held my breath until my lungs went hard. He hawked spit and let it hit the tile beside the counter and lumbered on.
When they were well past, I let the breath go in a thin stream through my teeth and tapped Mitch's shoulder twice, quick—good. He nodded without looking at me.
We waited through one more strike of the staff. The rift above the altar shivered, edges warping like heat over asphalt, then stretched a fraction wider before snapping back. It didn't tear further, not yet. Whatever pressed against it from the other side wasn't frantic. It was steady. Patient. Testing the seam, waiting for the right moment to force its way through.
We couldn't stay. The longer we watched, the more likely some small variable would drift our way and make us variables too.
I took one last pass, this time for routes. The west corridor could take a diversion if they wanted to pull elites; it fed into a chokepoint of stalls and a broken fountain that would slow down tall objects. North corridor, glass storefronts, and a row of kiosks that could burn. If fire mattered to goblins the way it mattered to people, their attention would pivot. East corridor? It ran straight and clean, fat conduit right to the altar. The easiest path is often the most trapped, but I didn't see sets of wires or fresh dig marks. That didn't mean they weren't there; it meant I needed someone quieter than me to find them when the time came.
The pen sat nearest a boarded café, half hidden by tarps. Two routes in, one wider than the other, both coverable by a team that could move quickly and carry weight. They'd need hands to carry, not just fighters. Wei Shen's people could do it if they held their nerve.
I felt Mitch tremble once.
Not the big shake of a man coming apart. The controlled aftershock of someone who has spotted a cliff edge in the dark and taken three steps backward quickly, and then forced himself to stop like nothing happened.
Time to go.
I slid back into the shadow of the counter, then the deeper shadow of the service corridor. Mitch followed, his steps exact. We moved at the pace that doesn't trip ears, too fast and you drag attention behind you, too slow and you spend it all before you're done.
We didn't speak until the stink thinned and the hum of the court faded into the general hum of the dead mall.
Mitch braced his hands on the wall and bent his head. He wasn't swearing. He wasn't talking. His shoulders rose and fell like he'd run stairs.
I rested a hand at the base of his neck for a second. Not a squeeze. Just presence. "Breathe," I said, quiet enough that the word barely left my mouth. He did. In. Out. Counting without numbers.
He straightened by degrees. His jaw worked like he was chewing anger he couldn't swallow. His eyes were red. He wiped them hard with the heel of his palm and nodded once like he was nodding to some order he'd given himself.
We moved again.
We didn't head straight back. We cut across two side corridors first, circled a gutted clothing store, then doubled back past the neon café again just to be certain. Every step was deliberate, every pause stretched long enough to listen. Paranoia wasn't wasted energy down here; it was survival. By the time we finally angled toward the escalators, the mall had settled back into that hateful quiet I'd gotten used to—air sighing through broken vents, the occasional tick of cooling metal, the whisper of something small skittering behind a grate. Only then did we start the climb, until Jasmine stepped out of the shadows and stopped us.