10-11-2355 | 12:32
Ridgeline, North Peaks — Crescent Containment Zone.
—
The crescent shudders and holds. The hard light walls flex like something alive testing its strength, white lines quivering where Lina Vance slams against them. Ryn's hands are planted on the mesh. His boots press into the rim of the sink. He can feel the field's hunger in his palms and answer it with his weight.
"Bishop, Irie, maintain the field," he says, voice flat with command. Eyes on the trapped Rendling, he checks the line, the anchors, the anchors' faces. The team moves with the practiced calm of people who have rehearsed disaster and kept showing up.
He turns his head, impatient. "Where is Dax?"
Bishop's hand goes to a spike at his boot. He does not look up at Ryn right away. When he does, his expression is one measured in too many breaths. "He stayed," he says. "He said he was holding the last animal for cleanup."
For a second the ring at Ryn's thumb feels like a pulse out of time. He does not let the knot form in his throat. He has files and ghosts in the edges of his awareness; he knows the names and the nights. "Why didn't you help him?"
Bishop swallows. "We cleared the evac, then we—then we found a blind on the magway. Kaito fought through it. He got hit on the exit. We dragged what we could, then ran back when the feed came clean. Dax was still in the mouth."
Before Ryn can breathe the sentence whole, movement at the trail mouth catches his eye. A mud-smeared figure staggers into the sink with a support on each arm. It is Kaito, slate smashed and blood streaking his temple, one boot canted wrong. He looks like a man who has been punched by a city. Behind him Bishop and three others come in carrying two Harbor enforcers, faces white, one convulsing and then still. Their kit is torn. Their armor is dented. The team that used to be clean is dirty and moving like they had to drag their own luck back through a thistle patch.
Ryn's head snaps to Kaito. "Kaito, you okay?" The question is a scalpel. Kaito tries to smile through the blood and fails.
"Hit the seam," Kaito says, words ragged. "Grid popped. Someone laid a blind atop my spoof. We walked into a trap to pull the enforcers out. Got scraped. We got three down." He jerks a thumb toward the stretcher Bishop and two others shoulder. "We hauled them. I patched as best I could. They need Med."
Ryn processes this fast. The crescent is two breaths from a collapse if she hits it again the wrong way. Lina still slams the mesh, claws ringing it like a bell.
He looks back to Bishop. "You all just left him?"
Bishop's jaw tightens. "He ordered us to. Said he would bait the last one, stop it from slipping into the maintenance seam while we exfil'd the enforcers. He said if he stayed it would keep the door open for the evac. He said go. We did what he asked."
Something hot and ugly tightens in Ryn. The file flashes through his head and it is not a memory he wants. He does not judge in public. He makes decisions.
"No one moves," he says, voice narrower this time. "Irie, Bishop, you hold the left anchor and the crescent. Sera, get the drones up and sweep the outer ring. Kaito, you are done on comm. Sit. Wrap that head and breathe. The rest of you, stabilize the downed enforcers and hold them off the magway until med evac hits Bay Nine."
Hands move. Orders land like tools. Irie is already unrolling a med strap, Bishop scrambles to the anchor and buries his boots deeper. Sera's fingers dance across a pod; drones blink awake like birds. Kaito allows two teammates to guide his shoulders and sits against a rock with his slate dark as a grave.
Ryn does not wait for permission. The ring at his thumb buzzes faint. He looks one last time at Lina thrashing, a woman carved in wrongness clawing at the light. "Hold," he tells them. "Keep the bandage tight. If it tears, strap and report."
Then he steps away.
The ground answers beneath his feet as he launches, a clean column of air that snaps needles back and empties birds from branches. He cuts the canopy, nothing wasted in his motion. The sink collapses behind him into focused faces and breath.
He drops into the cave mouth and the world narrows to the one figure on the stone. Dax is there where Bishop said he would be, helmet split, shoulder hanging, blood dark across his collar. He is not the man who is easy to miss. He is the man who is hard to forget.
A Rendling is between Dax and the mouth, still hot, still shaped like teeth and corrosive. It turns at Ryn as he lands, focus sharpening into a single, homicidal intent. For a moment the creature looks like a single lever and Ryn is the tool someone forgot to label.
He does not hesitate. He slams a hand into the animal's neck and sends a shock of kinetic force that rolls down its spine. Muscles lock. The creature collapses like a puppet whose strings were cut by a cleaner hand. It lies inert, and for a breath nobody moves because the silence that follows violence is heavier than the violence itself.
Ryn drops to his knees beside Dax. The commander stares past him, eyes lodged in an old door and a woman who closed it. The grief on Dax's face is a map Ryn has seen before. He does not speak to it. He speaks to the body in front of him, the hurt that he can fix.
"Dax," Ryn says, hands already moving, tearing at Dax's suit with precise, practiced motions. He finds the torn shoulder, the ribs that do not want to be still, the flank where claws slit through reinforced layers. "Snapped shoulder," he says, voice rough. "Multiple cracked ribs, probable internal bleed. Laceration on the right flank. Neck puncture. Keep pressure."
Dax tries to speak and the sound is small. Ryn slaps a patch on the neck, then another down the flank. The patches bloom and pull skin like tiny, angry suns.
"Med evac is inbound," Dax says, voice thin. "Two minutes if the lanes hold."
Ryn does not look up. He lifts Dax with a careful, engineered motion. "We can't wait that long," he tells the man.
Ryn takes to the air with Dax on his back. He keeps the thrust low and velvet smooth so the injured man does not become a projectile. The team below roils into motion, anchors humming, med techs closing ranks. Kaito breathes out a series of numbers into the slate and clamps his hand over the bleeding at his temple. He is injured and steady. That is all it takes for the rescue to breathe.
As they lift above the tree line, Ryn keeps Dax tucked and still against him. He does not ask what Dax saw in the cave mouth. He does not point out the ghost. He flies them toward Bay Nine on a wash of air and a promise: hold the line. The crescent behind them quivers and then steadies, people leaning against light to keep the city safe one stubborn, human minute at a time.
The gurney hums like a sleeping thing when Ryn sets down with Dax at the containment crescent. Irie is already there with gloved hands, moving fast and sure. She clamps straps, checks pupils, murmurs instructions the way a priest reads a rosary. Bishop props the wounded against the field and breathes like a man who almost stopped believing in air.
Ryn straightens. He watches Dax for a second, the commander's jaw slack, eyes raw. He does not ask. He gives Dax a look that is promise and promise kept, and then he turns toward the rim of the crescent.
For a heartbeat everything holds. The hard-light wall is a pale ring against the dark bowl of the sink. Lina Vance's rendling form is inside it, a hammering, ratcheting thing of black skin and wrong angles and corrosive snot. Her muscles bunch, and every time she snaps at the mesh the field shrieks like a thing being forced to sing.
Then she finds a seam in the anchors. She rips with the violence of something that has learned geometry by chewing it up. The hard-light coughs and then tears. A spray of black goo lashes across Bishop's chest and he howls, clutching at burning fabric. The scientist at the console is knocked sideways, instruments skittering.
Ryn sees the scientist go. He does not think. He blasts a breath of compressed air that catches the falling person mid-plummet and shoves them back into the shallow safety of the ground. The scientist lands in a heap, coughing and alive because Ryn hit physics before fate could finish.
Ryn turns his attention back to Lina. She bolts through the broken arc like a shadow on fire, hair plastered with resin and teeth bared. She is running for the maintenance seam as if she smells the seams under the city and knows how to open them.
Ryn does not hesitate. He gathers a storm in his hands. Air bends and teeth of wind grow around him. The trees become a pressure cooker and he opens the valve. A vortex lifts Lina like trash in a drain, the world folding around her in a wild blue cone that whips needles and dirt into a halo. She thrashes and screams and the sound is wrong in the chest.
Ryn climbs the vortex, meeting her as she spins. He grabs the blue glow at her chest the way someone would grab a drowning rope, palms pressed to whatever physical center the Rendling's code uses to steer itself. He leans all his weight into it, into the thing that is not a heart but a program pretending to be one.
"Hold her," he shouts down. His voice is a blade. "Keep the anchors. Move the injured to Bay Nine now."
Sera's fingers are a blur on her console. The readouts flash red and then purple. "Her DNA prime is rewritten," she calls back, breathless with data and fear. "There is multisequence contamination in the blood. You cannot just pull the code, Ryn. It will scramble and fight you."
Ryn smells burnt resin and blood and the metallic tang of the ring at his thumb. He hears Kaito mutter a curse because a pistol he dropped is floating now, hovering like an insect between two hands. Kaito lunges and nearly misses, his laugh a sharp, terrified thing. "My pistol," he says. "Come on. Seriously."
Bishop, holding a scorched patch across his chest, gives a ragged, brittle chuckle at Kaito's panic even as his face tightens with worry. "Keep your hands on things that are staying here," he grunts.
Dax, strapped and patched and pale as paper, pushes himself up a fraction on the gurney and locks eyes with Ryn. Pain makes his words sharp. "You have to dispatch it," he snaps. "You have to kill her. Now."
"No," Ryn says, setting his jaw so hard his teeth ache. He is wind and water and a quiet like a closed fist. "I will not."
Dax's mouth lifts in something that is almost a laugh, ugly with fear. "Ryn, she kills. We have to make the call. If we let her live she rips more. You know what she was before."
Ryn sucks in a breath that tastes like stormwater. The vortex howls. Leaves peel from bark as if the sky itself wants down. He feels the code pushing back, a knot of anger rewiring his hands, trying to shove his fingers off the prize. He pushes harder and the wind goes somewhere thousands of degrees hotter inside him.
He does not pull. He rewrites. He takes the malignant pattern and he reshapes it with the same language that wrote it, but he speaks gentler; he speaks in values that are not consumption. He threads salt and clean water into the pattern and forces new order into the old sequence. He is not soothing flesh. He is reauthoring a program that learned cruelty.
Sera's console blares until her gloves buzz. "Power output is off the charts," she yells. "He's doing something different. We can't predict the feedback."
Kaito finally snatches his pistol out of the air like a child catching a falling star. He points it with hands that do not stop trembling. "Please don't blow our faces off," he mutters.
"Storm collapsing," Bishop shouts, voice a ragged instrument. "Take cover. Now."
Ryn answers with a sound that is not a word. It is a pressure, a lowering of the sky. The vortex tightens, becomes not a tornado but a machine, gears of air meshing with currents of water and something that smells like living tissue. The world fills with a low, keening frequency that rattles teeth and makes lights blink.
Then Ryn throws everything he has in one clean push. The sound is a boom you feel in the teeth. The vortex collapses like a lung exhaling hard.
For a second nothing moves. Then the black skin of the Rendling recoils, like ink drying and cracking. It shrinks into nothing and vaporizes off the ground in a wet sigh. Air cools and settles. Every leaf that spun falls back to the earth like dust to a table.
In the hollow where the monster stood there is a small, shivering form. A teenage girl lies curled in a ragged bundle, pale as paper, breathing shaky and shallow. Her skin is marked with symmetrical blue veins mapped across neck and face like a calligraphy of code. Her lips part and tiny, sharp fangs peek out like a child's bad habit.
Ryn drops to his knees and gathers her like a thing you scoop up because it is alive and because he has no other ceremony for survival. He checks her pulse and finds it thin and thready. He cups her face with hands that are careful and astonished.
"She's alive," he says, the words almost holy and already practical. He tucks her into a life support pod with the softness of someone who has carried too many people out of darkness. Irie moves in with medic drills that are all rhythm and muscle memory. Bishop barks numbers at Kaito who scribbles them into his slate with a shaking finger.
Dax watches from the gurney. His lips form something tight and unreadable. The grief behind his eyes is older and deeper and Ryn does not touch it. He only secures Lina, straps monitors, sets the transport to life support and whispers, "You are not a monster. You are not lost."
Irie clamps the pod closed. The medic transport doors hiss and seal. Ryn holds the girl until Irie pulls her free and then he lets the pod take over the heartbeat.
They move her into the skiff like they have moved every fragile thing back from the edge. The crescent thins and holds. The forest exhales and the team breathes through the same broken rhythm.
On the rim Bishop swipes his hand across his face, smears grime and a little blood. "Christ," he says.
Kaito lays his pistol where it belongs and swallows. Sera stares at her console and then at Ryn as if trying to file a miracle.
Ryn looks at Dax, and for once neither man offers to explain the world or name the mercy. They have both done that work already. They have both lost and kept and chosen. The skiff slides out of the sink and the medic transport rises. The night does not fix around them, but it moves them forward, one grave, furious inch at a time.
—