The rusted metal of the ladder was slick with rain and something thicker, something biological that had long since dried into the corrosion. Croft’s hands, raw and aching, found their grip in the dark. Above, a single circle of slightly less-dark grey marked the maintenance hatch. Their exit. The air tasted of ozone, wet concrete, and the faint, sweet smell of decay that clung to the city’s lower levels. He looked at Sabine, her face a pale smudge in the gloom, illuminated only by the faint, erratic glow from a malfunctioning junction box twenty meters below.
— Ready? — she whispered, her voice tight. The word was a formality.
— No, — Croft said, his own voice a low rasp. He shifted his weight, planting his feet on the final rung. — Go.
Together, they pushed. The heavy iron disc resisted, groaning on hinges that hadn't moved in decades. Rainwater cascaded down, cold and filthy. With a final, coordinated shove, the hatch scraped open, revealing a sliver of the storm-lashed night sky over Sector Delta-Nine. The sudden noise of the downpour was a physical blow after the relative quiet of the shaft. Freedom was a sky full of acid rain and the promise of being hunted on open ground. It was better than being trapped in a cage.
He started to haul himself up, but the night didn't answer with rain. It answered with fire. Not the concussive bark of a CI-Div kinetic weapon, but a silent, searing lance of blue-white energy that vaporized a chunk of the iron hatch beside his head. The metal glowed cherry-red for a second before hissing into darkness. Panacea Protocols. Vole’s personal touch. He dropped back down, the heat of the near-miss blooming on his cheek.
Sabine was already pulling the hatch closed, the particle bolts from Vole’s kill-team stitching a silent, incandescent pattern across its surface. They were pinned from above. The price of trusting Kennet’s escape route was stepping from one trap directly into another, more elegant one. Below them, a heavy, definitive sound echoed up the shaft. A deep, resonant thump-clank. A magnetic lock. Hasek’s team had sealed the tunnel behind them.
They were trapped. A vertical coffin, with corporate assassins above and government purists below. There was no escape. The logic was as clean and brutal as a redacted file. His parasites, silent for a moment in the face of immediate physical threat, began to stir. The Equity-Aggressor started a frantic internal lecture on the asymmetrical power dynamics of corporate warfare, while the Patriot-Primal screamed about being cornered by traitors. The noise was building.
— Julian! This way!
The voice cut through the rising internal static. It came from a side conduit, a narrow utility passage he hadn't even seen in the dark. A figure emerged, silhouetted against a dim service light. Tall, slender, moving with an unnerving calm. Dr. Oran Kennet. He had come himself. A flicker of impossible hope ignited in Croft’s chest, a dangerous, illogical anomaly.
Kennet carried no rifle, no heavy Scrubber. In his hand was a Locus Scalpel, a delicate neural interface device that looked more like a surgeon's tool than a weapon. Its emitter glowed with a soft, steady light, a stark contrast to the violent energies tearing at the hatch above.
— They can’t hold a firing solution if their motor control is compromised, — Kennet said, his voice as calm as if they were in his sterile observation room. He aimed the Locus Scalpel up the shaft. — I'm creating a window. You have to move the second it opens.
He activated the device. A complex, shimmering lattice of light projected upwards, passing through the iron hatch as if it were glass. It wasn't an attack; it was a message, a piece of viral code aimed at the nervous systems of the men above. The particle fire became erratic, shots going wide, striking the walls of the alleyway outside. Kennet was giving them a chance. A choice.
But the system had its own immune response. From the darkness below, a new sound. A rising, dissonant hum. A weapon charging. Hasek’s team. They weren't using scalpels. They were using hammers.
A wave of pure, disruptive energy surged up the shaft. It had no color, no visible form, but Croft felt it in his teeth, a vibration that promised to unmake things. A neural scrambler. A crude, brutal weapon designed to turn a thinking mind into static. It was aimed at him, the anomaly, the source of the contamination.
He had no time to react. Kennet moved, a blur of motion in the cramped space. He didn't dive. He simply stepped, placing his body between Croft and the invisible wave of force. He shoved Croft hard against the wall of the shaft.
Kennet took the full blast.
There was no explosion. No blood. Just a sudden, profound stillness. The light in Kennet’s eyes, the kind, intelligent light that had told him to be a rebel, went out. His body went slack, a puppet with its strings cut. He collapsed onto the grated floor, his Locus Scalpel clattering beside him, its gentle light extinguished. His face was vacant, a mask of perfect, empty peace. The man was gone, only the shell remained.
The psychic shock of it hit Croft like a physical blow. The sacrifice. The sheer, pointless waste. In the chaos of the energy blast, Sabine was knocked against the wall. A sharp crack of plastic and metal. The armored data-slate, the one containing The Weil Theorem, was jolted from her grasp.
It skittered across the grated floor. For a moment, time seemed to slow. Croft saw it, a small, dark rectangle tumbling end over end. It was everything. The cure. The hope. The reason for Kennet’s death. It reached the edge of the grating. It teetered for a fraction of a second.
Then it fell, disappearing into a narrow, filthy drainpipe below. Gone. Lost in the city’s dark, forgotten guts. The single most important object in the world, erased by a moment of stupid, brutal violence.
The mission was a total failure. The hope was gone. The mentor was gone.
And then, the final wall came down. The psychic trauma, the layered impact of loss upon loss, was too much. The carefully constructed architecture of his mind, the one thing that kept him sane, shattered. The REM Diagram, his clean white room, his sanctuary of reason, fractured. He felt it break. The infinite grid pixelated, tearing like digital fabric. The containment cubes holding his parasites dissolved.
The calm, analytical voice of the Analyst, his own rational self, was speaking, logging the event. 'System integrity failing... cascading error... signal lo—'
The voice cut out. Replaced by a roar of pure, unfiltered static. His last bastion of sanity, his internal compass, was gone. He was alone in his own head with the monsters. The parasites, free from their cages, surged into the void, a screaming, contradictory tide of absolute belief.
The world dissolved into noise.
