It happened too fast.
One moment, the gunfire was steady—controlled, calculated—tracers zipping through the fog like fireflies with murder in their eyes.
The next, we hit the ditch.
Hard.
The van launched sideways as something exploded under the front axle. The wheels screamed. Metal twisted. Gravity flipped.
Kol didn't have time to swear before the windshield shattered inward and the whole damn world turned upside down.
The vehicle rolled once—twice—before slamming into a jagged slope and settling, sideways and groaning, in the ravine below.
Everything went still.
Too still.
My ears rang like bells in a broken chapel. Blood dripped from somewhere above my temple. I couldn't feel my right arm.
But I was alive.
Barely.
Moaning. A cough. A wet, rattling breath.
Kol's voice: "Status—who's up—?"
I forced myself upright. Broken glass crunched under my hands as I pushed off the crumpled floor panel. My ribs screamed. My vision blurred.
"Here," I managed. "Still breathing."
One of the others, Jun, was slumped against the door. His leg bent the wrong way.
Another crew member—Rae? Maybe Torrin?—was crawling toward the emergency kit, fingers shaking.
I didn't see the others.
Didn't have time to count.
Because behind me, from the back of the cargo hold—
Came a click.
Not mechanical.
Biological.
Then came the thud.
The third crate—the prototype—hit the side wall of the van as the latch burst open.
Then it split.
Don't look, Nyx said. Run. MOVE.
But I couldn't.
Not yet.
Not while the rest of the team was still bleeding out around me.
And not while that thing was unfolding itself like a shadow stretching in the light.
It wasn't like the hybrids we trained or trafficked.
It wasn't like Nine.
It was something else.
Something older.
It crawled out of the crate not like a prisoner, but like something that had been waiting for an invitation.
Its body was humanoid—barely. Long limbs. Overstretched joints. Skin that shimmered with oily scales in the flicker of the emergency lights. Its eyes were… wrong.
Too many of them.
All of them black.
All of them looking straight at me.
It didn't snarl.
Didn't roar.
It smiled.
A slow, sharp twist of lipless flesh that didn't belong on a face at all.
And then—
It moved.
Kol got to his feet just in time to take the full brunt of its charge.
It didn't pounce.
It glided.
Too fast, too smooth. Like a serpent made of nightmares.
It hit Kol center mass and flung him through the back doors of the truck with a crash that echoed through the trees.
I scrambled for the pistol at my hip.
Fired once.
Twice.
The bullets hit.
They didn't stop it.
It didn't bleed.
It shrugged.
Like a man brushing off rain.
Then it turned to me again.
It spoke.
I don't know what it said.
Not in words.
But something in me understood.
A low hiss. A suggestion. A message carried in muscle and bone:
Run.
And I did.
Out of the truck.
Into the forest.
Mud and blood in my mouth, my ears ringing, Nyx screaming in my head.
Back to the wreck, Rhea. Grab the others. You can't leave them—
"I know!"
But I couldn't go back.
Not yet.
Because the thing was behind me, and I didn't know what would happen if I stopped.
Trees blurred. My foot caught a root. I stumbled. Rolled. Scrambled to my feet again.
The smell of the thing was everywhere.
Not rot.
Not blood.
Just wrong.
Like copper and ozone and old, wet stone.
Like a door left open in a house that should be empty.
I ducked behind a ridge of moss-covered boulders and crouched low.
Waited.
Held my breath.
But the sound never came.
No footsteps.
No rustle.
Nothing.
Like it had vanished.
Or worse—like it was still watching.