Gideon felt it settling in his chest—something heavier than anger, colder than fear.
It wasn't just defeat.
It was grief.
Grief for what he'd built.
Grief for the quiet, hard-won order he'd carved out of the Junkyard's chaos.
Piece by piece, it was being dismantled by forces he couldn't see, couldn't fight, couldn't even understand.
He still didn't know where Vega was.
No body had been found in the burned warehouse.
That meant hope, and hope in the Junkyard was a sharp thing—it cut deeper the longer you held it.
Vega could be alive.
Vega could be dead.
Vega could be somewhere in between, and not knowing was its own kind of torture.
And now these strangers—these clean, cruel people who moved like they owned this space—were hunting Arden.
For what?
Some grudge?
A mistake?
A look they didn't like?
Gideon had no idea.
Arden was just a smart mouth with a good mind.
He wasn't a fighter. He wasn't a threat.
But they wanted him gone, and they were willing to burn through everyone else to get to him.
And Tenn.
Tenn, who fixed things.
Tenn, who talked to machines like they were people.
They wanted her, too. Not to kill—to take.
That was worse, somehow.
Death was simple.
Theft was personal.
Gideon stared at the frozen pod in the lab, the Doll inside it pale and perfect and empty.
He thought of the Red Dogs—his people—huddled in the cold, listening for Cinder's presence.
He thought of Vega missing, Arden running, Tenn trembling.
He thought of the burned warehouse, the broken gate, the silence where there should have been voices.
Life had never been fair.
He knew that.
He'd carved his place out of that unfairness.
But this—this felt different.
This wasn't the Junkyard's random cruelty.
This was something deliberate, something cold and clean and systematic.
They weren't just losing a fight.
They were being erased.
And nobody even bothering to tell them why.
The cold wasn't just in the air anymore—it was in Gideon's thoughts.
It made them slow, thick, heavy with dread.
He was staring at the frozen pod, at the pale, empty face inside, and for a moment he wasn't in the lab.
He was somewhere else.
Somewhere quiet and final, watching everything he'd built turn to ash and ice.
He blinked hard.
His eyes burned.
Not now.
Don't float away now.
He ducked behind the hulking, frost-coated shell of one of Tenn's machines—some half-built generator with wires like frozen veins.
Out of sight of the others, he raised a broad, calloused hand.
He slapped himself.
Not a tap.
A sharp, stinging crack against his own cheekbone, hard enough to jerk his head to the side.
The pain was bright, clean, immediate.
It cut through the fog in his mind like a knife through mist.
He took a sharp breath, the frozen air scraping his throat.
The world snapped back into focus—the hum of the failing lights, the smell of freezing air and cold metal, the tense silence of his people waiting behind him.
When he stepped back into view, Nino was watching him.
The older man's eyes were narrowed, not with judgment, but with a slow, dawning concern.
He'd seen Gideon angry.
He'd seen him tired.
This was different.
Nino's voice was a low gravel-whisper, barely stirring the air between them.
"...You okay, boss?"
Gideon rubbed his cheek, feeling the heat blooming under his palm.
He forced his voice into something rough, casual.
Something that sounded like the Gideon he was supposed to be.
"This cold f*cking room is messing with my mind," he grunted, waving a hand as if swatting away a fly. "Making me stupid. Can't think straight."
He didn't meet Nino's eyes.
He turned instead to the frozen pod, to the Doll inside.
The excuse hung in the air, thin and transparent.
Nino said nothing.
He just watched Gideon's back, his own expression tightening.
He knew a lie when he heard one.
And he knew when his boss was holding himself together by sheer force of will—one stinging slap at a time.
The silence after Gideon's slap still hung in the air—a brittle, waiting quiet.
Then a giggle.
Light, cold, and terribly close.
It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once—from the frozen pipes overhead, from the dark mist coiling in the corner by the broken wall, from the very air between the silent machines.
It was the sound of someone watching.
Someone who had seen Gideon's moment of weakness behind the machine, who had heard the sharp crack of his palm against his own face.
Cinder's voice followed, smooth and flat as ice, echoing in the frozen tomb of the lab.
"Getting cold feet now?"
The words weren't loud.
They were precise.
They seemed to form in the mist itself, swirling around Gideon's squad, touching each of them with a chill deeper than the frozen fog.
"Two of your squad leaders will be gone if y'all don't continue your adventure, though."
A pause.
Deliberate.
Letting the image form in their minds—Arden and Tenn, somewhere in the white maze, hunted.
"Wouldn't that be sad?"
She didn't say it like a threat.
She said it like a fact.
A piece of trivia.
The saddest part was the lightness in her tone—as if their lives, their loyalty, their fear, were nothing more than notes in a song she was already tired of hearing.
Gideon's hands curled into fists at his sides.
The sting in his cheek was gone, replaced by a deeper, colder burn in his chest.
She had seen him slip.
Gideon knew what had to be done.
They had to move.
Arden and Tenn were out there in the freezing dark, and every second they stayed put was a second closer to Cinder picking them off.
But charging forward now—blind, desperate, straight into the teeth of a hunter who was clearly herding them—wasn't bravery.
It was suicide.
She wanted them to run.
She wanted them scared and predictable.
He stood frozen, not by the cold, but by the choice.
Advance and walk into a trap.
Stay and let his people die.
Nino's voice cut through his racing thoughts, low and steady.
The older man had been watching the shadows, the mist, the way Cinder's voice seemed to come from the walls themselves.
"…I suggest we make a separate team, Boss."
Gideon's head turned slowly.
He didn't need to ask what Nino meant.
He saw it in the man's tired eyes, in the set of his jaw.
A distraction.
A sacrifice.
One group goes loud, draws her fire, makes a racket.
The other slips through, quiet and fast, to reach Arden and Tenn.
A decoy.
Gideon's brows knotted, his face hardening into something grim and immovable.
"…I refuse."
The words came out flat and final.
He wasn't just rejecting a tactic.
He was refusing to order his own people into a death sentence.
He'd already lost too many today—faces he knew, voices he'd heard in the mess hall, now gone between one breath and the next.
He wouldn't split what was left of his squad just to feed them to Cinder one group at a time.
Nino held his gaze, his expression unreadable.
He didn't argue.
He just let the silence sit between them, heavy with the unspoken truth: sometimes, the only way out was through.
And sometimes, through meant leaving someone behind.
Far back in the mist-shrouded hallways, Cinder watched.
Not with her own eyes.
Not from a vulnerable position.
She observed through the sterile, floating perspective of a V-Tech Anopheles drone—one of several she had deployed into the sub-levels long before the first shot was fired, before Gideon's squad had even known they were being hunted.
The drones were barely larger than her palm, sleek and insect-like.
Their latest-generation camouflage didn't just render them invisible to the naked eye—it bent light, absorbed sound, and masked thermal signatures.
To Gideon's people, the air was empty.
To Cinder, it was full of eyes.
But their true capability was more subtle, more psychological.
Each drone could project a hard-light glyph, casting not light, but shadow—a shaped, moving darkness that played on primal fears.
It manipulated perception, triggering the brain's instinct to see threats in the gloom.
The silhouette Gideon's squad had fired upon earlier—the lean, rifle-shaped shadow standing motionless in the mist—had never been Cinder.
It was a drone, holding perfectly still, projecting a fear-glyph into the haze.
Even the killing shot—the silent, searing red lines that had taken three of them—was a drone's work.
A focused searing flechette, fired from a different angle entirely, while the shadow-drone held their attention.
Misdirection.
Misdirection on a level Gideon's Junkyard-born senses weren't built to comprehend.
Cinder watched Gideon now, his face strained behind the machine.
She saw the slap.
She heard the whispered argument with Nino.
She observed the fear, the loyalty, the desperate calculation—all from a cold, silent remove.
Then a thought bloomed in Cinder's mind—cold, precise, and quietly vicious.
A bulb lighting up in a dark room.
If Gideon refused to split his squad, then she would force his hand.
Fear and loyalty were predictable.
But a forced choice, under pressure, with a timer ticking?
That revealed character.
That creates mistakes.
She channeled her voice through the network of drones hovering unseen throughout the frozen lab.
The sound didn't come from the hole in the wall or the hallway door.
It came from the air itself, from the frost on the pipes, from the shadows between the frozen workbenches.
"Y'all are so… sloooooooow."
Her voice was a drawn-out sigh, dripping with theatrical boredom. "Aren't y'all gonna make a move sooner? Your friends won't wait forever."
She let the implied image of Arden and Tenn—alone, hunted—hang in the chilled air for a heartbeat.
Then her tone shifted, brightening with false cheer.
"To make things go faster—and more interesting—let's play a game!"
The word game hung in the silence, ugly and wrong.
Gideon's squad shifted, eyes darting to the mist, weapons tightening in their grips.
"Since there's just… seven of you left," Cinder continued, as though counting pets, "let's split your squad into two teams. A group of three, and another that's a group of four."
She paused, letting the math settle. Letting them glance at one another—counting, weighing, fearing.
"Since I'm quite a generous person," she said, her voice sweet and poisonously light, "I'll let the three-person group pass. Free and clear. They can go find your missing leaders."
Another pause.
Longer this time.
The hum of the frozen lab felt like a held breath.
"The group of four will remain. And they will play with me."
Her voice hardened, losing all pretense of playfulness. It became flat, absolute, final.
"By the way… this is an order. You have one minute to decide."
The silence that followed was total.
It wasn't an offer.
It was a wedge, driven straight into the heart of whatever loyalty Gideon had left.
A cold sweat broke across Gideon's brow, beading and freezing in the sub-zero air.
The chill of the room couldn't touch the heat coiling in his gut—the hot, helpless understanding of what was happening.
Around him, the others shifted.
Their breaths came in shallow clouds.
He didn't need to look at their faces to know they were all thinking the same thing.
This is a trap.
She's lying.
She won't let anyone pass.
They had no reason to trust her word.
Every move she'd made so far was a lie—a shadow, a voice from nowhere, a kill from an angle they couldn't see.
This "game" was just another way to stir the pot.
To make them turn on each other.
To make them choose who lived and who played decoy for her amusement.
"Thirty seconds left!" Cinder's voice chimed through the drones, cheerful and sharp as breaking glass.
The sound acted like a live wire dropped into water.
Everyone flinched.
Nino turned, his weathered face set into hard lines. "Boss. Go. Choose two more members."
His voice was low, urgent.
He wasn't asking.
He was telling Gideon to pick the three who would run—and by doing so, to choose the four who would stay behind to die.
All eyes locked onto Gideon.
But it wasn't hope he saw in their faces.
It wasn't eagerness to be saved.
It was a raw, naked intent to be chosen—for the game.
Because staying meant a fight.
Staying meant a chance, however slim, to face the hunter.
To go down swinging.
To matter.
Being picked to run meant being spared.
It meant living with the knowledge that you left your squad behind to die so you could crawl away.
In the world they came from, that kind of life wasn't a gift.
It was a sentence.
Gideon's throat tightened.
He looked from face to face—each one he knew, each one who had followed him into this frozen grave.
His mouth felt full of ash.
He had thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds to choose who he sentenced to run.
And who he sentenced to stay.
Gideon's voice came out rough, scraped raw by the cold and the choice tightening like a wire around his throat.
He looked at Nino—really looked at him—and saw the understanding there.
The acceptance.
No argument, no protest.
Just a grim, steady readiness.
"…Nino," Gideon said, the name heavy with everything he couldn't say. "I'm sorry."
It wasn't just an apology for picking him to stay.
It was for everything—for the trust, for the years, for leading him here, into this frozen room where choices were all traps and time was running out.
Nino didn't flinch.
He just gave a slow, shallow nod, his eyes never leaving Gideon's.
"…Go, Boss."
Then, with a deliberate motion, he held out the heavy shield generator.
The humming wall of faint hexagons flickered as he passed its weight into Gideon's hands—the symbol of the line, of holding fast, of being the wall between the pack and the storm.
He wasn't just handing over equipment.
He was passing the role.
The last line of defense was moving forward.
The ones staying behind would have nothing to hide behind but their own bodies.
Gideon took the shield.
It felt colder than the room. Heavier than any weapon he'd ever carried.
"…And zero!"
Cinder's voice cut through the heavy silence, bright and crisp.
A timer hitting bottom.
She let the moment hang, the air thick with the unsaid goodbyes, the weight of the shield in Gideon's hands.
"What a tearjerker that was," she remarked, her tone detached, almost clinical.
As if she'd been watching a mildly moving scene in a dull play. "Don't worry. As I've said before—I'm being generous. I'll let the three-person group go through."
She made it sound like a favor.
Like a gift.
Gideon didn't look back.
He couldn't.
He tightened his grip on the shield generator, its low thrum vibrating up his arm.
He nodded once to the two he'd chosen—a young woman with a sniper rifle and a grizzled older fighter with a sawed-off shotgun.
Their faces were pale, their jaws set.
They didn't look relieved.
They looked sick.
Together, the three of them moved toward the jagged hole in the wall—the path Arden had smashed in his own desperate flight.
They stepped out of the frozen lab and into the mist-choked hallway beyond.
The signs of struggle were everywhere, painted in the frost.
Scuff marks in the icy grime.
A spray of frozen condensation where someone had been shoved hard against the wall.
A single, discarded energy cell from one of Tenn's tools, half-buried in the frost.
They were walking through the traces of Arden and Tenn's panic.
Every step felt like walking on a grave that hadn't been filled yet.
The mist closed in behind them, swallowing the lab, swallowing Nino and the three others left behind.
Cinder's voice did not follow them.
The only sound was the crunch of frost under their boots, the hum of the shield, and the deafening silence of the choice they'd just been forced to make.
Back in the frozen lab, the silence after Gideon left was deeper, heavier.
It was the quiet of a door closing.
Of a choice made final.
Then Cinder's voice drifted back into the space, not from the hole in the wall, but from the cold air itself.
Light.
Curious.
Almost polite.
"So," she said. "To those who are remaining… are you ready?"
Nino shifted his weight, his boots scraping on the frost-coated floor.
He didn't look at the other three with him.
His eyes were on the mist, on the shadows between the machines, on the places a shot might come from.
He lifted his rifle, the motion slow, deliberate.
The sound of the bolt sliding home was loud in the quiet.
He spoke, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that held no fear.
Only a tired, cold understanding.
"The game was never fair from the start… isn't it?"
It wasn't a question.
It was an acknowledgment.
A statement of fact.
They had never been players.
They were the pieces.
And the board was tilted from the very beginning.
The mist seemed to grow still.
The game was about to begin.
***
A familiar, deep-seated anger began to burn in Jessa's chest—an old, bitter fire she hadn't felt in years.
It wasn't just anger.
It was recognition.
It was the same helpless, boiling rage she'd felt as a child, watching the Reclamation Unit drag her older brother away.
She'd clung to his leg, screaming, until a gloved hand pried her fingers loose one by one.
He hadn't fought back.
He'd just looked at her, his eyes hollow, repeating words she didn't understand like a broken recording:
"Illegal glyph coding."
"Tier 3 offense."
"Aether contamination."
Corporate words.
Clean, cold words that meant nothing in the dusty alley where they lived, but everything to the men in polished armor who took him anyway.
They spoke in a language meant to erase him, to turn her brother into a case file, a violation, a problem solved.
Now, that same feeling was rising again—choking, metallic, and utterly familiar.
It wasn't just her own fear.
It was the rage of being powerless.
Of being talked over, defined, and discarded by people who saw her as a thing.
A object.
A tier.
The Pink Dress's borrowed wrath didn't feel foreign anymore.
It felt like a key turning in a lock she'd buried long ago.
The rage wasn't just hers.
It was every injustice, every loss, every time someone with a cleaner uniform and a colder voice decided her life was theirs to rearrange.
And it was roaring back to life.
The Pink Dress watched Jessa's face contort, her chest heaving against the ropes, the raw and ancient fury igniting behind her eyes. The glyph at the girl's fingertip pulsed with a low, satisfied violet light, drinking in the emotional resonance like dark nectar.
A soft, approving sigh escaped her lips—a sound of genuine pleasure.
"Good… good," she murmured, her voice a velvet hum. "I can feel your anger. Very, very well."
She tilted her head, milky eyes fixed on the trembling girl as though observing a perfect, blooming flower.
"It's not just surface noise, is it? It's old. It's deep. It has roots."
She took a slow step closer, the frills of her dress whispering against the filthy floor.
"Hold onto that. Don't let it go. It's not a curse… it's a gift. The only one people like us ever get."
Her smile widened, serene and chilling. "...Let's put it to use."
"For now," the Pink Dress said, her tone light and instructional, "try using the conduit I gave you."
She gestured with a pale hand toward the pristine, bone-white device in Jessa's bound grip. "I don't want the player I've chosen to lose so suddenly, you know?"
It was said like a coach giving advice.
Like she was invested.
It made Jessa's skin crawl.
Her hands, still tied at the wrists, fumbled with the strange conduit.
The movements were clumsy, restricted, but not unfamiliar.
Her fingers found the activation glyph—not by sight, but by a memory of touch, a ghost of muscle memory.
A faint, white light pulsed within the device, cool and sterile against her skin.
She was holding onto a thread of sanity—a thin, fraying line tethering her to herself.
The borrowed rage roared in her veins, but beneath it, the Jessa who survived, who observed, who learned, was still there.
Watching.
"Hoh?" The Pink Dress's voice lifted with a note of genuine, icy curiosity.
She leaned in slightly, her milky eyes narrowing. "You have experience using that?"
A pause.
The air seemed to grow colder.
"I'm impressed," she murmured, the words laced with something sharper than praise. "For someone of your… hierarchy… to possess knowledge you were never allowed to."
She tilted her head, the picture of innocent inquiry.
But the question that followed was a needle, aimed straight at the heart of every rule Jessa had ever broken.
"Where'd you even get that knowledge?"
Jessa's breath hitched.
The names came out in a raw, choked whisper, pushed past the gag of rage and rope.
"…Kai… and Lucent."
The admission felt like a betrayal.
Like handing over a secret that wasn't hers to give.
But in the face of those empty white eyes, lying felt impossible.
And worse—pointless.
The Pink Dress went very still.
"Kai… and Lucent," she repeated slowly, tasting the names.
Letting them linger in the bloody, stale air.
Then, a smile spread across her face—wide, serene, and utterly empty.
"I see." Her voice was a soft, melodic chime. "In this wretched world… it seems there are still people who hold kindness in their hearts."
The words were gentle.
Understanding.
Almost tender.
But her face told the opposite story.
Her milky eyes held no warmth, no gratitude.
Only a cold, bottomless amusement.
The kindness she spoke of was not a virtue to her—it was a weakness.
A fascinating flaw in a broken system.
She turned smoothly, her frilled dress whispering, and glided toward the heavy metal door.
With a touch that seemed too slight for the weight, she pushed it open.
Cold hallway air, smelling of dust and distant smoke, washed into the room.
She stood in the doorway, a silhouette of saccharine pink against the gloom beyond.
"You are now free," she said, her voice light, as though granting a wonderful gift. "Free to rampage as much as you want."
As she spoke, the violet glyph still glowing at her fingertip began to change.
The color deepened, darkened, drowning in its own light until it was no longer violet, but a pulsing, venomous black-red.
The air around it seemed to vibrate with a silent, hungry frequency.
The invitation was not an offer of escape.
It was the unleashing of a weapon.