The screech of tearing metal was the only funeral bell Miller was going to get.
Kaelen didn't wait to see the rest of her emerge. The moment that slender, pale hand punched through the hydraulic door like it was wet cardboard, his survival instinct—the only thing he had left—overrode his terror.
He turned and bolted.
His boots slammed against the metal grates of the maintenance corridor as he scrambled away from the sound of the failing seal. Behind him, the door finally gave way with a sickening, metallic groan. He heard the light, rapid thud-thud-thud of Miller hitting the floor.
"Hey... Kaelen," the voice drifted after him, a hollow, mocking imitation of a friend.
Kaelen didn't look back. He couldn't. His lungs were burning, each breath through the respirator feeling like he was inhaling ground glass. He burst out of the maintenance tunnel and into the transition corridor—a long, glass-walled umbilical that connected the research labs to the Grand Atrium.
He heard her behind him. She wasn't running like a human; she was leaping, her body coiling and exploding forward in bursts of speed that blurred his vision. Every time her feet hit the ground, the floor tiles cracked. She was moving too fast for her own skeletal integrity, but the virus didn't care about long-term damage. It only cared about the harvest.
"She's gaining... she's actually gaining on me," Kaelen wheezed, his internal monologue fracturing into pure panic. "If I don't reach the Atrium... I'm dead. I'm just cellular fuel."
He burst through the final set of fire doors and into the Atrium. It was a massive, hollowed-out space, five stories high, filled with the skeletal remains of decorative trees and high-end kiosks. He looked left. A row of shattered storefronts. He looked right. A wide, sweeping staircase that led to a dead end.
There was nowhere to hide. The "Uncanny" presence behind him was a physical weight. He could hear the rapid-fire tap-tap-tap of her nails against the marble.
Panic, cold and sharp, seized his muscles. As he sprinted past a decorative mezzanine, he twisted his torso, desperate to see exactly how many seconds he had left.
That was his mistake.
His heel struck a patch of jagged, shattered safety glass from a fallen skylight. His foot slid out from under him as if he'd hit ice. Kaelen's world tilted. He tried to grab the brass railing, but his momentum was too great. His hip slammed into the waist-high barrier, and gravity took over.
He flipped over the rail, a short, sharp cry escaping his throat before the air was knocked out of him.
Crashed.
He hit the center of a massive, circular fountain forty feet below. The impact wasn't soft. The water was shallow—only three feet deep—and it was a stagnant, muddy gray, thick with decades of silt and the copper-tinged remains of thousands of "wish" coins that now sat uselessly at the bottom.
Kaelen gasped, his head breaking the surface, but his respirator was flooded. He coughed, choking on the foul, metallic water. He scrambled to find his footing, his hands sliding over the slimy coins, but before he could stand, the sky above him darkened.
Miller had jumped.
She didn't fall; she descended like a stone. She hit the water with a violent splash, the force of her landing sending a wave of gray muck over the fountain's edge. Before Kaelen could even wipe the silt from his eyes, she was on him.
Her slender hands, now stained a dark, bruised purple from the strain of her own power, clamped around his throat and shoulders. She shoved him down.
The back of Kaelen's head hit the concrete floor of the fountain. The muddy water rushed over his face. He thrashed, his fingers clawing at Miller's wrists, but it was like trying to move solid iron. She didn't have the "limiters" of a human. She was pushing with the full weight of her overclocked muscular system.
Under the water, Kaelen's vision began to spark. The dark red bruising under Miller's eyes was the last thing he saw through the gray soup of the fountain—her black, dilated pupils staring into his soul, devoid of anything resembling mercy. His lungs screamed. His strength faded. The coins beneath him felt like cold, dead scales.
Is this it? he thought, his consciousness slipping into the gray. Am I just the cells that keep her moving for another hour?
Suddenly, the weight was gone.
A violent crack echoed through the Atrium—the sound of a baseball bat hitting a wet melon.
Kaelen surged upward, his head breaking the surface, gasping and retching as he dragged air into his waterlogged lungs. He wiped his eyes just in time to see Miller fly through the air. She hit a nearby popcorn cart with enough force to shatter the glass and flatten the metal frame, flipping the entire unit over in a spray of stale, yellowed kernels.
Standing in the fountain next to him was a child.
She couldn't have been more than ten years old. She wore a tattered, dirt-stained dress, and her hair was a matted tangle of knots. But it was her stance that chilled Kaelen to the bone. She wasn't trembling. She wasn't afraid. Under her eyes, the same dark red hematoma-like bruising pulsed, and her pupils were already dilated into void-black pits.
Before Kaelen could speak, the girl moved.
She reached down, her small hand knotting into the front of Kaelen's tactical vest. With a grunt of raw, terrifying power, she yanked him out of the water. Kaelen felt his ribs groan under the pressure as he was launched through the air. He flew ten feet, crashing into a row of overturned plastic chairs and sliding across the marble floor until he hit a pillar.
He groaned, clutching his side, his vision swimming. From his position on the floor, he watched the nightmare unfold.
Miller had recovered. She rose from the wreckage of the popcorn cart, her jaw hanging at an unnatural angle from the girl's kick. She let out a sound that wasn't a voice—it was a hiss of escaping steam.
The little girl didn't wait. She launched herself out of the fountain, her feet cracking the marble as she transitioned from a standstill to a full-speed sprint.
The two predators collided in the center of the Atrium.
It wasn't a fight; it was a slaughter of physics. Miller swung a hand with enough force to decapitate a normal man, but the girl ducked, the movement so fast it looked like a glitch in reality. The girl buried a fist into Miller's stomach. Kaelen heard the distinct crunch of Miller's spine snapping outward from the force of the internal pressure.
Miller was thrown backward, but she scrambled to her feet, her body refusing to acknowledge the catastrophic damage. The "Metabolic Fire" was screaming for cells to repair the break. She lunged, her fingers outstretched to "Rip."
The little girl met her halfway. She grabbed Miller's outstretched arms. Kaelen watched in horrific, slow-motion detail as the girl planted her feet and twisted.
The sound was sickening—a wet, splintering noise like a tree trunk being split by lightning. Miller's arms didn't just break; the muscles were torn from the bone, the skin shredding under the torque. Miller opened her mouth to scream, but the girl was already moving for the kill.
The girl leapt onto Miller's shoulders, her small, pale legs locking around the woman's waist. She reached down, her tiny fingers digging into the bruised, red skin of Miller's neck.
Kaelen wanted to look away. He wanted to close his eyes and pretend the world was still sane. But he couldn't move. He watched as the girl's muscles corded and bunched. With a violent, guttural growl, she pulled upward.
The sound of the "Decapitation" was something Kaelen would feel in his marrow for the rest of his life. It wasn't clean. It wasn't a surgical strike. It was a raw, biological tearing. The vertebrae popped one by one, a rapid-fire succession of wet cracks, until the structural integrity of the neck finally gave way.
The girl tore Miller's head completely free from her shoulders.
A spray of thick, dark red blood—the hyper-oxygenated fuel of the Cannibal—coated the girl's face and dress. Miller's headless body twitched once, twice, before collapsing into a heap of useless meat.
The Atrium went silent, save for the heavy, ragged breathing of the child.
The girl stood over the corpse, Miller's head still clutched in her hand. She turned slowly, her head tilting at that same bone-clicking angle Miller had used earlier. She looked at Kaelen. The dark red bruising under her eyes seemed to glow in the dim light.
Kaelen scrambled backward, his back hitting the cold stone of the pillar. "Stay... stay back," he choked out, his hand instinctively reaching for his empty canister.
The girl didn't even acknowledge his fear. To her, he wasn't a person; he was a witness to the harvest.
She dropped the head. It rolled across the marble, leaving a trail of dark ichor. Then, without a hint of hesitation or concern for the man watching her, she dropped to her knees beside Miller's body.
She didn't use a knife. She didn't need one.
Kaelen watched, bile rising in his throat, as the "little girl" began to eat. She tore into the raw muscle of Miller's shoulder with her teeth, her jaw working with a mechanical, frantic speed. She wasn't just chewing; she was harvesting. Every mouthful of live cells was being instantly absorbed, fueling the hyper-regeneration that kept her small body from collapsing under its own power.
The sound filled the Atrium—the wet, slurping noise of a predator at work, the occasional crunch of bone being snapped to get at the marrow.
She ate with a terrifying focus, her black-void eyes never leaving the meat. She didn't care about the blood on her face. She didn't care about the man she had just saved. In this world, there were only two things: the Debt and the Meat.
Kaelen sat in the shadows, the smell of copper and popcorn filling his nose, realizing that he hadn't been saved by a hero. He had simply been moved from one predator's path to another's.