The rain came in cold needles, dripping from fractured steel and broken concrete, trailing slick lines down Cal's face.
His eyes opened to a world tilted sideways. Gray sky above, blurred edges of rusted girders. Pain flared before memory. He didn't know where he was for a few seconds—just that something had gone wrong. Deeply, sickeningly wrong.
Then he tried to breathe.
Air scraped through his throat like razors, and the weight in his chest pulled his thoughts into clarity.
He couldn't move.
No—he shouldn't move.
He blinked. Rain blurred everything. His pulse pounded in his neck, his ears, the back of his skull, where something warm leaked into the dirt. The copper tang of blood filled his mouth, thick and metallic, coating his teeth.
Slowly, painfully, he turned his head.
A jagged length of steel jutted from the side of his body, impaled clean through just beneath the ribs. A wrecked support rod snapped at the base during the collapse. He could see the end of it, crusted in red, protruding just beneath his back.
His breath hitched. He couldn't tell how deep it went. He couldn't tell if it missed anything vital.
It didn't, he told himself.
He didn't believe it.
Every instinct in his body screamed that he should be dead. That he was.
But instinct didn't matter now.
Cal gritted his teeth, placed both blood-slick hands against the concrete, and pushed.
Pain ripped through him like someone had set his insides on fire. He screamed—a sound raw and broken, barely louder than the rain—but he kept moving. Inch by inch, dragging himself off the metal, feeling it tear as it slid through.
When it came free, he collapsed forward, face-first into the wet ground, coughing blood and rainwater into the dirt.
The cold helped.
It shouldn't have.
He rolled onto his side, one arm clutching his wound, and forced himself to sit up. Darkness curled at the edge of his vision, threatening to pull him under again. He bit down on his cheek—hard—until he tasted more blood.
Can't pass out.
He wiped the blur from his eyes with the back of his wrist and crawled toward the only thing that looked like a hallway—broken panels and collapsed wires guiding him forward like a tunnel carved through debris.
Each breath felt heavier. Each second stretched like an hour.
The lights above flickered weakly, casting long shadows that danced too slowly.
He didn't look back. Didn't check the scene. Didn't stop to question what just happened.
There'd be time for that later.
If he made it out.
The hallway tilted beneath his boots.
Every step came with a promise — that this would be the one to drop him. That his legs would fold, that the pain would spike and his body would finally give up the lie that it was still alive.
But they didn't.
And it didn't.
Cal kept walking.
The steel bar had left more than a wound — it left a burn inside him, like his insides were scraped raw. His shirt clung wet and heavy to his torso, soaked in blood and rain. His fingers trembled with every shift of weight, one hand dragging along the wall to steady him.
Chunks of ceiling hung loose above, the long-dead substation creaking in protest with each gust of wind.
The air tasted like dust and iron. Every now and then, a drop of water hit a live wire somewhere in the rubble with a sharp snap of dying electricity.
He focused on that sound. Not the throb behind his eyes. Not the warm trickle down the back of his neck where his skull had met concrete. Not the blood soaking through the makeshift gauze he'd slapped against his side an hour too late.
The whispers were gone now.
But the silence left behind felt worse.
He reached the outer corridor — narrow, barely standing. The city wasn't visible from here. Just dead lots, broken fences, blackened train tracks that hadn't hummed in over a decade.
No one patrolled out here.
He leaned against a rusted breaker box, chest rising and falling in shallow, controlled hitches. A second longer. Just to breathe.
The concrete beneath his boot cracked.
The noise shouldn't have made him jump — but it did. His head snapped around, vision swimming again.
No one was there.
Just shadows and leaking pipes.
He pushed off the wall and kept going, one step after another, arms tucked close, body folded in on itself like it could shield against the pain.
Eventually, the corridor opened. A side gate, half-hinged. He pushed through it with a grunt, boots scraping metal, and stepped into open air.
The rain hit harder out here.
Like it was waiting for him.
He looked up — just for a second — and that was when he saw the light.
A white circle blinked into existence in the dark, followed by the low hum of small rotors.
A surveillance drone.
SCYTHE standard issue. Mid-range. Old model.
It hovered thirty feet away, scanning the open space.
Then its beam snapped onto him.
It wasn't bright—just enough to burn through the dark and pin him there, hunched and bleeding in the middle of an empty lot. Rain swept sideways in the wind, slashing through the beam like static. Cal raised an arm to shield his eyes.
The drone held its position.
Then it spoke. Its voice was thin, mechanical, the kind of neutral tone meant to be reassuring but never quite pulled it off.
"Unauthorized personnel detected. Area is restricted after curfew. Identify."
Cal's lips were cracked. His voice came out slurred, low.
"Riven. Investigator… Cal. Four-four-seven-one-two."
A pause. He coughed blood into his sleeve. "Injured. Code Gray."
The drone buzzed softly as it processed.
Its beam narrowed.
"Facial recognition scanning. Please hold still."
He didn't move. Couldn't if he wanted to. His legs were already shaking, and the concrete beneath him seemed to shift sideways.
Then a softer beep.
"Identity confirmed. Investigator Cal Riven. Status: Active.
Severe physical trauma detected.Dispatching SCYTHE medical response.
Estimated arrival: six minutes. Remain conscious if possible."
His breath slowed.
Not steady. Not calm. Just… slower.
The edges of the world kept folding inward, black creeping in at the corners of his vision like water soaking into paper. His fingers twitched, then stilled. The cold had gotten inside his coat, under his skin.
He didn't even shiver anymore.
"Six minutes," he murmured, eyes half-lidded. "Don't fall asleep…"
The drone stayed where it was, blinking like it cared, like it might do something other than hover and hum.
His head slumped forward. Chin to chest.
The sound of the rain grew distant.
Then gone.
The next thing he felt was sterile air.
Not cold, not warm. Just... filtered. Flat.
His body ached — everywhere. Dull and thick, like someone had poured him into a bag of broken glass and shook it.
His eyes opened.
White ceiling. A soft buzz overhead. The faint beep of a monitor to his right, pacing out the rhythm of a heartbeat that didn't feel like it was his.
He blinked again. Slowly this time.
The room was quiet. Empty.
No doctors. No nurses. Just a tray of gauze and sealed instruments on a rolling stand, and a light strip that flickered every few seconds near the door.
SCYTHE medbay. He knew the design field-standard issue. Which meant they'd patched him up, probably in the closest satellite unit. Meant someone had heard the call. Meant the drone had worked.
He exhaled. Shaky, but clear.
He was alive.
Alive.
He sat up carefully, ribs flaring, stitches pulling tight. His chest had been wrapped, his side padded and sealed in some kind of synthetic mesh dressing. The back of his skull felt like it had lost a fight with a brick, and his spine ached like it had been twisted halfway out of his body and shoved back in wrong.
But he could move.
He turned his legs off the edge of the bed. Let them hang. Just needed a second.
Then his eyes caught something.
A metal tray.
Simple. Stainless steel. Sitting on the cart beside him, smeared slightly with dried blood.
And in it, just barely warped by the curve of the metal, was his reflection.
He leaned in.
The blood. The bruises. All expected.
But his skin was too pale.
And his eyes—
The irises weren't brown anymore.
They shimmered green.
Faint. Not glowing. Not bright. But there. Unnatural. Wrong.
He stared at them.
No whispers. No movement. Just his breathing.
His hand came up. Touched the side of his face. Cold fingers against colder skin.
No scar. No burn. No mark.
Just something… new.
Something not his.
He didn't speak. Didn't ask the questions out loud.
He just stared at his reflection, silent, still, in a room no one else had entered.