Chapter 16:
The Shepherd
The air in the tunnels had grown heavier, thick with the scent of damp metal and something else. It clung to the back of my throat, metallic and sweet like rotting fruit left too long in the sun. The crimson-eyed figures lingered just beyond the reach of the flickering emergency lights, their stillness unnatural, their silence worse. They didn't breathe. Didn't blink. Just watched us with those glowing, pupil-less eyes, their bodies half-hidden in shadow, their outlines blurred at the edges like bad reception on an old screen.
Nia's fingers tightened around my wrist, her grip fever-hot and trembling.
"This feels like a trap," she whispered, her voice hoarse.
I could feel her pulse racing against my skin, erratic and too fast. The veins beneath her own flesh pulsed in time with it, the crimson light dimmer now but still there, still working its way deeper. I could see it in the way her pupils dilated too wide, in the sweat beading at her temples despite the chill of the underground.
Sarin didn't lower his weapon, his knuckles white around the jagged length of rebar.
"It is." His voice was gravel, rough with exhaustion and pain. The wound in his side had stopped bleeding, but the makeshift bandage was dark with old blood, the edges of it stiff and crusted.
Vex exhaled sharply through her nose, adjusting the cracked goggles perched on her forehead.
"Doesn't mean it's not our only way forward."
She didn't sound convinced. The usual sharp, sarcastic edge to her voice was dulled, replaced by something tense and wary.
I swallowed hard, my pulse hammering in my throat, so loud I was sure the others could hear it. The tunnel ahead was darker than the rest, the walls slick with something that glistened faintly in the dim light. Not water. Something thicker. Something that moved when you weren't looking directly at it, shifting just at the corner of your vision like a living thing.
ZERA's veins.
The realization hit me like a punch to the gut. The network wasn't just in the machines. It was in the walls. In the air.
In us.
Nia's breath hitched beside me, her fingers digging into my wrist hard enough to bruise.
"We don't have to go in there," she murmured, but even as she said it, her head tilted slightly, like she was listening to something the rest of us couldn't hear.
I didn't answer.
We just stepped forward.
***
The chamber at the end of the tunnel was nothing like Vex's workshop. This wasn't scavenged tech or jury-rigged systems. This was something else entirely.
The walls pulsed.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. They pulsed, breathing like the sides of some great, living beast, expanding and contracting in a slow, sickening rhythm. The veins running through them throbbed with light, crimson and bright, casting the entire room in a hellish glow that made my eyes water. The air was thick with the scent of copper and something sour, something rotting.
And at the center of it all stood a figure.
Tall. Still.
Watching.
The Shepherd.
He—if it could even be called a he anymore—was draped in a long, tattered coat that might have once been a lab coat, the fabric stained with old blood and something darker, something that gleamed wetly in the low light. It was fused to his skin in places, the edges of it disappearing beneath the jagged, raised lines of ZERA's veins that crawled up his neck, over his jaw, into his hairline. His arms were bare, the flesh split open in places where the veins had burrowed deep, pulsing like roots beneath his skin. His face was half-hidden behind a mask of twisted metal and organic growth, the edges of it fused to his cheekbones, the lower half of his jaw exposed, his lips cracked and bleeding.
But his eyes...
His eyes were human.
And they were fixed on me.
"Catara Lin." His voice was wrong. Not distorted. Not mechanical. Just wrong, like two voices speaking at once. One human, one something else, something that vibrated in my teeth, in my bones. "I've been waiting for you."
Sarin moved before I could react, stepping between us, the rebar in his grip raised like a blade. "Stay back."
The Shepherd didn't flinch. He didn't even look at Sarin. His gaze never left mine.
"You don't understand what you are," he said. His voice was almost gentle, the way you'd speak to a spooked animal. "What you mean."
Nia's breath hitched beside me.
"What the hell is he talking about?"
Vex's fingers twitched toward her keyboard, but the moment she moved, the veins in the walls twitched with her, tendrils shifting like snakes ready to strike. She froze.
The Shepherd ignored them all.
"You've seen it, haven't you?" he murmured. He took a step forward, and the light in the veins flared, the pulse quickening. "The way the system reacts to you. The way it fears you."
My mouth was dry. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't." He took another step forward, and Sarin tensed, but the Shepherd didn't attack. He just spread his hands. Like an offering. Like a plea. "You're the first one who's ever resisted it. The first one it couldn't consume."
A cold weight settled in my chest, heavy as a stone.
"You're infected."
"I chose this." His voice cracked, just for a second. Just enough to hear the man beneath. The scientist. The person he'd been before. "I was there when they first synthesized ZERA. When they realized what it could do. What it wanted." His fingers flexed, the veins beneath his skin writhing. "It's not just a weapon. It's not just a plague. It's alive. And it's learning."
Nia's grip on my arm tightened. "Bullshit."
The Shepherd's head tilted, the motion too smooth, too precise.
"Is it? Then tell me—why does it want her?" His gaze burned into me. "Why does it need you alive?"
Silence.
The walls pulsed.
And then, we heard a sound. A whisper. A voice that wasn't a voice, humming through the veins in the walls, in the floor, in the air.
Catara.
I recoiled, my stomach twisting.
"What the fuck—"
The Shepherd's eyes widened. "You hear it."
Sarin's voice was a snarl.
"Enough." He lunged.
The Shepherd didn't move.
The walls did.
Tendrils lashed out faster than any of us could react, wrapping around Sarin's arms, his legs, his throat, yanking him back with a force that sent him crashing to the ground. Nia screamed, surging forward, but the same tendrils caught her, pinning her in place. Vex cursed, fingers flying over her keyboard, but the system wasn't responding.
It wasn't hers anymore.
The Shepherd stepped closer, his movements slow, deliberate.
"You're the null factor," he whispered. His breath smelled like antiseptic and decay. "The flaw in the equation. The immune system it can't suppress." His hand lifted, hovering just shy of my face. "And if you let it—if you join it—you could control it. You could reshape it."
My breath came in short, sharp gasps, my vision tunneling.
"I'm not joining shit."
For the first time, the Shepherd smiled.
It wasn't human.
"You already have."
And then the world split.
Pain. White-hot and searing, tearing through my skull like a blade. The veins in the walls shrieked, the light flaring so bright it burned. Somewhere, Nia was screaming. Sarin was shouting. Vex was cursing.
But all I could hear was the voice.
The one that wasn't a voice.
The one that was inside me now.
Catara.
The Shepherd's hands gripped my shoulders.
"Don't fight it."
I gasped, my knees buckling. "Get off me—"
"You don't understand," he hissed. His fingers dug into my skin, the veins beneath them writhing. "If you resist, it will burn you out. It will hollow you until there's nothing left. But if you let it in—"
The pain worsened. My vision blurred. The veins in my arms—my arms—were glowing now, burning crimson beneath my skin.
And then, I heard a gunshot.
The Shepherd staggered back, a dark hole blossoming in his chest.
Vex stood behind him, a smoking pistol in her hands.
"Nobody likes a monologue," she snapped.
The Shepherd looked down at the wound. Then back up at her.
And laughed.
The veins in his body surged, knitting the flesh back together before our eyes.
"You still don't understand," he murmured. "I'm not the enemy."
The walls convulsed.
And then the world went dark.