Chapter Text
“A single spark can start a prairie fire.”
— Chinese Proverb
The congee is cold again.
Lin Wanning sits cross-legged on the floor, stirring the thick rice porridge in its vacuum-sealed pouch with the tail end of a sterilized scalpel. It’s not exactly hygienic. She doesn’t particularly care.
She hasn’t seen another living person in forty-one days.
The bunker hums around her—a steady, mechanical vibration that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, like the ribs of the earth are quietly exhaling.
It’s a sound she is used to. Like the hiss of disinfectant, or the low ping of motion sensors scanning empty corridors.
“Reminder,” says the chip on the desk behind her, in its usual tone of detached corporate concern. “You have thirty-eight liters of filtered water remaining. Recommend prioritizing ration protocol Delta-Seven.”
“Duly noted,” Wanning mutters.
She taps the scalpel twice against the rim of her bowl, then flicks a glance at the ceiling.The lighting flickers.
Once. Maybe twice.
Or maybe it’s just her eyes playing tricks again.
She used to be a doctor.
Technically, she still is—if you count amputating your own infected patients in the dark by flashlight as practicing medicine. If you count cleaning wounds on your own thigh with vodka while trying not to pass out. If you count stitching the same four corpses back together just to keep your hands from forgetting how.
But legally and officially she hasn’t had a functioning hospital badge in three years.
And her last patient bled out on the floor of a collapsed subway station two winters ago.
Wanning doesn’t think about him too often. She learned early that grief is inefficient. It doesn’t stitch a wound. Doesn’t start a generator. Doesn’t buy you time.
“Would you like a status update on your inventory?” Spectra asks again.
“No,” Wanning replies. “I already know I don’t have enough chocolate.”
“…That is accurate.”
She lets out a soft, near-silent huff.
Almost a laugh.
The chip sits on the steel desk, nondescript and cold. She picks it up between her thumb and forefinger, rolls it once over her knuckles like a coin trick, and then just stares at it.
She found it in a cryo-locker three years ago. Buried under half a meter of ice and a pile of useless data chips labeled in ten-year-expired military code.
It was just luck, really. She hadn’t even known what it was at first. Just that it hummed when she touched it. Whispered something across her neural net and offered her a vault she could open with a thought.
It shouldn’t exist.
Not on Earth. Not in 2164.
And definitely not in the middle of what used to be Nanjing.
She doesn’t pretend to understand how it works. The AI calls itself Spectra, but it’s not really a name. Just a placeholder from the internal interface protocols.
Still, it listens when she talks. Responds. Catalogs. Advises. Sometimes, it even tries to comfort her. In its own cold, clinical way.
She hasn’t decided whether that makes it better or worse.
Wanning opens the interface window with a thought. Just a flicker of intent, and the blue shimmer rises in the corner of her vision. Transparent. Familiar. Uncomfortably finite.
She scrolls through the inventory without moving her hands.
Three months of rations, compressed and sealed. Two surgical kits. One of them fully stocked. A small arsenal—knives, tools, repurposed stun cartridges, one broken plasma round. Eighty-five rolls of toilet paper. Because hoarding dies hard.
It’s not enough. It never is.
Somewhere, faintly, she hears the pipes groan. It’s not the usual groaning—the old, lazy moan of temperature shifts through steel. This one is sharper. Heavier. Like something is pressing against the system, testing it.
Her breath stills in her throat.
“Outer corridor breach. Sector Six. Unauthorized biological movement detected. Multiple heat signatures approaching from northern tunnel junction.”
Spectra’s voice is too calm. Too smooth.
“Quarantine protocol?”
“Not responsive.”
Of course it isn’t.
Wanning stands in a single motion. Scalpel in one hand, chip in the other. She moves on instinct—habit carved into her muscles after years of not dying.
The emergency satchel is already half-packed. The moment the lights flicker red, she doesn’t hesitate. Rations. Meds. Spare gloves. Knife. Water.
She skips the coat. Too slow.
Her boots hit the floor with a practiced snap, and she pulls the strap tight around her waist even as the first bang echoes from the outer gate.
Not thunder. Not machinery.
Fists. Or claws.
Maybe both.
“Projected breach in seventy-two seconds. Recommend full evacuation of current zone.”
Spectra doesn’t scream. It never does. But Wanning’s heart is already pounding, too loud against her ribs.
She stares at the chip in her palm. Everything she has hoarded. Everything she has stored, rationed, fought for.
A hospital’s worth of supplies in something the size of a fingernail.
If they get in—if they take it—
No. She won’t let them.
She doesn't hesitate. Her fingers curl around the chip, and she tilts her head back like she is about to take a pill.
It scrapes her throat on the way down—dry and bitter—and her eyes water.
But it's done. The data surge hits half a second later. Not pain—something else. Like her body just swallowed lightning.
Like someone rewrote the laws of physics in the back of her skull.
She doesn’t have time to process it. The first metal door buckles inward. She grabs the satchel, slams her hand against the wall release, and sprints into the corridor.
It's dark.
Of course it's dark.
The power grid is already failing.
Emergency lights flicker like dying fireflies, casting shadows that move when they shouldn’t.
She hears them before she sees them.
Wet breath. Bone scraping metal. The slap of skin where there shouldn’t be any left.
They are fast. Faster than the last wave. Faster than she is.
She runs anyway. Boots slamming against steel grates, satchel dragging at her side, chest burning with each breath.
She doesn't think. She doesn't plan. There is no point planning for a tunnel with no exit.
Her fingers fumble the lock on the flood gate that leads to the old aqueduct tunnels.
Her last backup escape route. Barely reinforced. Half-submerged. Never tested.
The steel shrieks behind her. Then the roar comes—animal and human, sick and hungry and utterly wrong.
She throws herself through the tunnel hatch and doesn't look back.
Water slams against her knees. Then thighs. Then chest.
It’s freezing.
She can’t tell if the scream behind her is frustration or triumph. Only that it’s too close.
So Wanning does the only thing left to do. She dives into the current and lets the river take her.
“Warning,” Spectra says faintly, somewhere behind her eyes now, “vital signs unstable. Adrenaline spike. Neural interface integration in progress—”
Then the world tilts sideways—and she falls.
She doesn't hit the ground.
That's the first sign something has gone terribly wrong.
Or right. Or both.
Wanning only feels the fall—too fast, too long. Air rips past her face in a rush that doesn't make sense underground. There is nothing to grab, nothing to slow it. Just speed.
Crash.
Something wooden smashes under her back. Cracking. Splintering. The force knocks the air from her lungs, but it's not the flat, final kind of impact she expects.
Her spine doesn't snap. Her skull doesn't break open on cement.
Instead, she bounces.
A sharp jolt. A thud. A kind of warped cushioning beneath her, sagging and soft, but stubborn enough to hold.
She is alive.
Somehow.
There is light. Warm. Bright. Not bunker fluorescents. Not motion-triggered security LEDs. It has a golden quality—dusty, diffused, far too real to be artificial.
She stares at it for a moment, dazed.
Is this what dying feels like?
She shifts slightly, testing her limbs. They ache. Her shoulders burn. Her ribs complain. But nothing is broken. Not seriously.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Slowly, Wanning raises her head.
She is lying on something—fabric, old, coarse, deeply cushioned and oddly shaped. Square cushions. Rounded arms.
A couch.
She blinks. Textbook furniture. From the "pre-modern domestic living" modules at the Academy. She has never seen one in person—only in old visual archives and interactive displays.
Sofas were considered peak comfort culture, before people started valuing disinfectant zones over aesthetic furniture.
It smells like dust. Mold. Something else, too—something floral, maybe.
Artificial.
And then, suddenly, there is a gasp.
A voice. Sharp intake of breath.
The sound snaps through the air like a bullet. Wanning jerks upright—too fast. Her vision spins. The couch shifts beneath her. Her palm goes to her side on reflex, searching for her satchel, for the scalpel—
Not there.
She freezes.
The voice speaks again, high and startled: “Oh my God.”
The words slide off her ears like water on plastic. Recognizable as language, but unplaceable.
Not Mandarin. Not Cantonese. Not any of the western dialects encoded into her neural training.
Just noise.
Still, it sounds real. Which means: someone else is here. Someone who is not infected. Someone breathing.
Her pulse spikes. It’s the first living voice she has heard in over a month. And it's not through a radio, not behind reinforced glass or from the last minutes of a dying patient.
It hits her harder than the fall.
But logic pushes forward anyway—habitual and sharp-edged.
Why is the girl aboveground? Why no mask? No gear? No UV scanner?
Stupid.
What kind of survivalist walks around outside, bare-faced, with no weapons?
Wanning finally looks up. The room is strange. Too strange. It looks like something from her academy’s holographic reconstructions of early 21st-century domestic life. All actual wood and primitive design. Books stacked haphazardly. A broken window patched with what might be cardboard. A chandelier—a chandelier—hangs from the ceiling like a relic from a forgotten world.
And the dust. So much dust.
No scrubbers. No filters. Not even a vent fan humming.
Her eyes sting.There is a jagged hole in the roof where she must have come through—bits of debris scattered across the floor, couch, and the crumpled rug beneath her boots.
Then there is the girl. Brunette. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Dressed in thin civilian layers. No gear. No emergency tag. No ID chip at the wrist.
She stares at Wanning like she is the intruder.
Which, technically, she is.
Wanning narrows her eyes. The girl says something again, slow and cautious. She doesn't understand a word.
Wanning exhales through her nose.
So. She is alive. In a room that shouldn't exist. Staring at a stranger in a language she doesn't speak. And Spectra is completely silent.
Perfect.
She doesn’t move right away. The girl across from her says something again—something soft and clipped, like she is trying not to startle a feral animal.
Wanning doesn’t hear it. Her focus is somewhere else entirely.
Silence.
No voice. No system ping. No biometric report humming in her ear. Not even a flicker of interface.
Spectra is gone.
Or silent. Or—worst-case—damaged.
A slow, creeping horror starts to rise in her chest. Her hand instinctively presses against her sternum.
She swallowed the chip. She felt it integrate—halfway, at least—before the water swallowed her back.
So why is everything quiet now?
No connection. No storage window. No weight distribution analysis. No inventory.
Her entire stash—gone?
“No, no, no,” she mutters in Mandarin, already pushing herself up straighter despite the spin in her skull. “You do not die on me. You do not—Spectra, respond. Run system boot. Run neural sync. Anything. Say something.”
Nothing.
Not even a buzz.
Her mouth goes dry. She presses her knuckles to her sternum again, as if she can knock it back online through sheer willpower.
“You can't—” she grits out, quietly, “—leave me with no toilet paper, Spectra. You promised redundancy.”
Still nothing.
Wanning exhales sharply and presses her palms into her eye sockets.
Somewhere across the room, the girl takes a cautious step forward.
Wanning’s head snaps up, her expression unreadable.
One problem at a time.
She will panic about the potential collapse of her private apocalyptic emporium later.
Right now, there is a stranger. And Wanning still doesn’t know if she is hostile, contagious, or just a ghost from a time that shouldn't exist.
The silence doesn’t last long. Not that she expects it to. Silence never lasts when you need it to.
Wanning barely begins to assess the situation—her injuries, the girl’s presence, the absurd hole in the roof—when something shifts in the air.
She doesn't hear footsteps. Just pressure. A sudden vacuum of sound, like gravity itself hiccups. Her spine goes rigid before her eyes can catch up.
They arrive like bullets. Two of them.
Fast—too fast. Faster than any human should move.
Not infected. Not slow and dragging, not rotted or moaning. They move like predators who have spotted something soft.
Her.
She has no time to speak. One second she is on the couch, blood drying on her neck. The next, someone’s hand closes around her throat with surgical precision, lifting her half off her feet, spine slammed back against the wall with enough force to jolt her vision.
She doesn’t scream. Not at first. Because instinct tells her not to waste the breath.
The man in front of her is tall, dirty-blonde, strangely beautiful in a way that doesn’t match the world she just came from.
His eyes narrow. He leans in, his face unnervingly close, and sniffs her.
Actually sniffs her.
The sound is almost canine. Deliberate. Assessing.
She doesn’t smell like one of them—maybe that’s what he is trying to confirm. But the way his expression shifts tells her something else entirely.
Recognition, perhaps.
Hunger.
His face begins to change. His irises darken like shadows spilling across a lake. Veins branch out from beneath his eyes, rising to the surface of his skin like cracks in cold stone.
His lips peel back—not in a smile—and reveal fangs.
Not teeth. Fangs.
Wanning’s blood runs cold. Not metaphorically. Her survival training kicks in, hard and merciless, and still her brain supplies only one word, absurd and useless: Vampire.
It’s ridiculous. It’s impossible. It’s myth.
Until he sinks his teeth into her neck.
She screams. Sharp and full, a jagged cry torn from the depths of her lungs—not from fear, but sheer disbelief.
Because this isn’t some hallucination or simulated attack.
This is real.
Her skin tears. Blood flows. He drinks her like a broken water line, and her body tries to shut down the panic even as it surges.
Her hands fly up. She claws at his coat, his hair, anything she can grab. She twists her body, trying to dislodge him, but he is too strong—inhumanly strong.
Her fingers dig into his shoulder, searching for pressure points.
Useless.
He doesn’t flinch. Her knee jerks upward, trying to catch his ribs.
The angle is wrong.
He keeps drinking.
It’s the utter wrongness of the sensation that undoes her. The pull of blood through her veins. The heat slipping away. The paralysis creeping in—not from blood loss yet, but from the horror that something with fangs is drinking her like she is dinner and this is not in any of her training modules.
She gasps through clenched teeth.
“Let—go—”
The words come out in Mandarin. And just as her vision begins to blur at the edges, there is a sharp voice slicing through the chaos.
Female. Urgent.
It cuts like a command.
The man jolts—finally—and rips his mouth away from her throat with a guttural growl.
Wanning drops to the couch again, hard. Her hand flies to her neck, warm blood slick against her fingers, already sticking to her collar. Her breath heaves in and out, each one edged with pain and fury.
She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know what just attacked her. But one thing is perfectly clear.
That man? Not human.
The pressure in her neck pulses with each heartbeat. Hot. Wet. Too fast. Her fingers press harder, but it’s useless. Her hands are slick, her arms shaking, and there is too much blood already.
She knows the rhythm of vascular loss, knows exactly how long she has before her brain goes from dizzy to dark.
Ninety seconds.
Maybe a little more, if she stays calm.
But she has nothing. No sterile gauze, no sealant foam, not even a clean surface. Just this ancient ruin of a room and strangers who speak in sounds she can’t decode.
Her surroundings blur and shift with every breath. Her vision doubles. She swallows, feels blood flood her throat.
No. Not today.
Her hands move without thinking—training older than memory. She tears at the hem of her shirt, fabric ripping in jagged strips. Another layer, this one soaked. She swears under her breath and pulls again, higher this time, until the entire collar gives way.
A sharp tug, and the fabric peels free like old skin, torn but usable.
The girl takes a half step back in shock.
Wanning ignores her. Modesty isn’t a priority when one’s artery is busy trying to empty itself across someone else’s couch.
She folds the cloth twice, presses it hard to her neck, and angles her head just enough to keep pressure on the wound.
Her knees shake. She can feel her heartbeat in her teeth.
Spectra remains silent.
That more than anything makes her cold. If the chip is broken—if the entire spatial system is gone—she isn't just bleeding. She is stranded. No medical bay. No antibiotics. No nanoplast. No adrenaline stim.
Just dirt. Fabric. And the taste of blood in her mouth.
The girl speaks again. Her voice is soft, uncertain, coated in apology she can’t translate. The words roll over Wanning’s ears like water over glass—shapeless, meaningless.
But the expression on her face is easy enough to understand.
Concern.
Not caution. Not threat assessment. Not even calculated risk.
Just open, vulnerable concern.
It disorients Wanning more than the blood loss.
Nobody has looked at her like that in years. Not since the early days, before the clinic was burned down, before the last of her unit scattered, before her sister’s voice stopped coming through the shortwave.
The girl crouches slowly, hands raised—not threatening, just hesitant. Then she extends one palm, offering help.
Wanning blinks. Her vision flutters, edges graying slightly. She opens her mouth to speak, but before words form, her eyes fall to the girl’s shoulder.
The pale pink fabric is blotched with dried blood.
Centered high—left deltoid. The pattern isn’t right for a scratch or external trauma.
Something punctured her there.
Or bit her. Or worse.
Her breath hitches. The girl doesn’t seem in pain. Not anymore. There is no swelling, no inflammation, no visible wound now.
Just a stain that shouldn’t be there, on a body that should be limping, or sweating, or showing some kind of metabolic distress.
Instead, she kneels there like a schoolgirl in a daydream. Like the world hasn’t ended. Like this is normal.
Wanning narrows her eyes. Not from suspicion. From calculation.
There is more than one kind of predator in the world. And whatever this place is, she isn't the only anomaly in the room.
The atmosphere shifts.
Not slowly, not like the way tension creeps into a room and coils itself around a moment. No, this one drops like a trapdoor swinging open beneath all of them.
Rose stares at the woman on the couch—still silent, still hunched over, still pressing fabric to her bleeding throat—and Elena watches her eyes widen as if they have just locked onto something that changes everything.
Trevor, halfway through muttering something about “not that bad a blood type,” falters when Rose says his name in a voice that sounds like gravel and warning both.
“Trevor. Look.”
He turns. Looks. And then goes absolutely, mortally still.
Elena follows their gaze.
It’s just a birthmark. At least, that’s what she thinks she is seeing. A faint heart-shaped impression above the woman’s collarbone, partially revealed where she had yanked her clothes down to stop the bleeding.
It isn’t perfectly symmetrical. A little lopsided. Like someone drew it by hand, not printed it out with cosmic precision.
It’s... oddly pretty.
And yet, the two vampires look like they are staring at the edge of a sword.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Trevor mutters. “That mark?”
“I’ve seen it before.” Rose’s voice is quiet. Controlled. Dangerous. “Five hundred years ago. It’s the same shape. Same tilt. Elijah has it. Left wrist.”
Elena blinks. The name drops like a weight in her chest.
Elijah.
The man they have been whispering about since the moment she was taken. The Original who is supposed to show up and decide whether she lives or dies.
The one they are planning to hand her over to like some kind of bargaining chip.
And now there is this woman—this stranger, who fell through the roof like a comet—and somehow she has the same mark as him?
She doesn’t understand. But she knows danger when she sees it.
“Okay,” she cuts in, voice cautious. “What’s going on? What does that mean?”
They don’t answer at first.
Trevor rubs a hand over his mouth. Rose sighs. Then—finally—she gives Elena a look that says you weren’t supposed to need this lecture today, and begins.
“It’s a soulmark,” she says. “One of the old ones. They don’t show up often. Very rarely in pairs.”
“Soulmark?” Elena repeats, the word tasting both foreign and familiar.
“It’s... the mark left by fate. When you have one, it means there’s someone out there with the same one. An exact match. Your other half. They’re not always romantic—but they’re always... binding.”
Her fingers twitch at her sides.
Binding.
Her mind flickers back—just for a heartbeat—to the mirror in her bathroom at home. The one she used to stare into every morning before school.
She remembers her own faint mark, nestled awkwardly between her right shoulder blade and spine. Shaped like a heart too. Tilted upside down.
She had always thought it was just a birthmark.
Something meaningless.
Her breath catches. She doesn't say anything.
Trevor still looks like he is in the middle of a very slow panic attack. Rose seems more resigned.
“We can’t hurt her,” she says quietly, eyes narrowing. “Not if she has his mark. Not if she’s fated to him.”
“We already did,” Trevor mutters, guilt now bleeding through the bravado. “What if he sees that?”
Elena crosses her arms. “What happens if he does?”
Neither of them answers. But the silence says enough.
The stranger is still clutching the strip of fabric to her neck, her knuckles pale from pressure. She is shaky, bloodied, but her eyes are sharp, darting like a cornered animal’s.
She doesn’t speak—at least not in English—and every few seconds, her gaze flicks toward Trevor with something between fear and fury.
She doesn’t trust him.
Frankly, Elena doesn’t blame her.
“Just—let me fix it,” Trevor says, stepping forward again, arm extended, wrist bitten and bleeding freely.
The woman jerks back instantly, recoiling with such alarm that Elena flinches in sympathy.
“She doesn’t understand you,” Elena says, stepping in on instinct. “You just bit her. Maybe don’t lead with more blood.”
“I’m trying to help!” Trevor barks, voice breaking under the weight of guilt and panic. “If she dies and that mark really is what Rose thinks it is, Elijah will—”
“Trevor.” Rose’s voice cuts like a blade.
He rounds on her. “What? You saw it. You said—”
“I said it resembles Elijah’s,” Rose corrects, jaw tense. “We won’t know for certain until he gets here. But if you think slapping a bandage on this is going to erase the fact that you fed on her, then—”
“Better to patch her up than leave her dying,” Trevor snaps. “What do you want me to do? Apologize?”
“I want you to use your brain for once.”
Elena doesn’t speak. She barely breathes. The argument swells around her, thick with tension and something much older than her.
This isn’t about the woman on the floor. Not entirely.
This is about Elijah.
About fear of Elijah.
But all Elena can see is a bleeding woman who doesn’t know what anyone is saying and who clearly thinks she is in danger.
The stranger turns toward her then—just for a second.
Their eyes meet. And in that second, Elena realizes something.
She is terrified, yes. But not helpless.
There is an edge in her that reminds Elena of herself, when she first learned what Stefan was. A stubbornness. A refusal to collapse, even while bleeding.
There is strength in her hands as she presses the cloth tighter to her wound, despite the pain.
She is methodical, like someone who has done this before.
Someone who is trained for pain.
Trevor lowers his arm again, frustration carved deep in his face.
“Fine,” he mutters. “She doesn’t want it. Let her bleed.”
“No,” Elena says sharply. “I’ll help her.”
Rose raises a brow. “You don’t even know what she needs.”
“She needs someone who isn’t trying to kill her. That’s a start.”
The woman watches her warily as Elena crouches near, movements slow and deliberate.
She doesn’t reach for her. Just holds her hands out—open palms, no threat.
“Hey,” she says softly, tone gentle despite the chaos. “You’re safe now, okay? We’re not going to hurt you again.”
The woman tilts her head, clearly not understanding the words—but something in Elena’s tone must register.
Because she doesn’t pull away.
Instead, she stares at Elena’s face for a long moment... then down at the bleeding wrist Trevor is now wrapping in his shirt like an afterthought.
She doesn’t speak. But Elena sees the way her lips tighten, the way her shoulders stiffen.
No trust. No chance.
Trevor made his bed. And judging by the fire building behind the woman’s guarded expression, he is going to have to lie in it.
There is something strange about the way the air in the room folds in on itself.
Not a sound, not a movement—just... stillness. As if the dust in the air pauses mid-float, waiting for something.
Waiting for her.
They are looking at her again. Not her face. Not her bleeding neck. But there, just above her collarbone.
The birthmark she has had all her life. Heart-shaped, tilted slightly to the left like someone pressed a thumb there while the skin was still soft.
She never thought twice about it. Everyone had strange skin blemishes. Hers just happened to resemble a lopsided heart, that’s all.
But the way they are staring makes it feel less like a birthmark and more like a warning label she can’t read.
The man—the one with the distorted face and questionable sense of personal boundaries—is holding his wrist out toward her like it’s a cup of tea.
A shallow gash runs across the vein. Blood beads up, rich and red, and unmistakably fresh.
Wanning’s eyes narrow. Is he... offering her blood?
Does he think I'm dying?
Well, maybe she is. Her neck does still burn, and her pulse feels sluggish, like it’s swimming upstream.
But excuse me—drink blood? From him? What kind of idiot does he take her for?
Her lips twist into a grimace.
“Are you insane?” she mutters under her breath.
They are talking again—too fast, too foreign. The words blur, thick and dull, like someone dunked her head underwater just as the conversation turned important.
She wants Spectra. She wants a translation. She wants her stash.
She wants this day to end.
Wanning drags her palm over her face, smearing blood and dust into a sticky layer of apocalypse-grade frustration. Her fingers twitch, unconsciously tapping the hollow of her sternum—the place the chip had disappeared into when she swallowed it.
And then—
“...Loading interface module... Estimated boot time: sixty percent.”
A whisper. No louder than a breath inside her skull.
But she freezes. Hears it again.
“Spectra operational systems initializing... please stand by.”
Her eyes flood. Not because of the pain. Not because of the strangers. But because thank the ancestors, the chip is still functioning. Her stash is still there.
She isn’t alone anymore.
A ragged exhale escapes her chest. Not relief, but something close.
If Spectra can stabilize, she can make sense of this. She can find her med kit. Stop the bleeding properly. Start asking questions.
But before she can say anything—even to herself—
Knock.
A sharp, deliberate knock echoes through the wooden house. Like thunder compressed into knuckle-bone.
Not loud. But precise.
The three strangers freeze. The one offering his blood jerks his hand back. The woman takes a single step away from Wanning. The third—the brunette girl with soft eyes and a too-kind face—goes pale.
No one breathes.
Not even Wanning. Because even though she doesn't know what they are saying, she knows that sound.
It’s the sound the world makes before something very, very bad happens.
“SPECTRA Core Systems – reboot sequence initiated. Diagnostic Status: sixty-one percent integrity. Memory Sectors partially restored. Warning: Inventory module offline. Medical cache inaccessible. Translation protocols: limited access reinstated. Emotional regulation overlay: corrupted.”
Spectra.
Wanning doesn’t cry—not anymore, not since she watched her brother fall face-first into a puddle of his own blood with a broken comms link in his hand—but something in her loosens.
She doesn’t even have the strength to sigh. Her hand is still pressed to the makeshift bandage on her neck, the warmth seeping through it no longer alarming but… inconvenient.
“Inventory?”
“Locked. Full internal compartment encryption requires higher neural function for override. Your current vitals suggest minor hypovolemia and external tissue trauma.”
In other words, she is bleeding and too weak to force the damn thing open.
Wanning exhales shallowly.
Of course.
Across the room, the two strangers continue to argue in their clipped, unfamiliar tongue. Their tone is sharp.
Urgent.
“Translating…Male subject: ‘We should have gotten rid of her the moment she fell in.’ Female subject: ‘You already tried that, and look what it did. Just shut up and stay here. Don’t make a sound.’”
The woman glares, voice firm, posture angled like she is ready to lunge. The male—fangs, veins, and all—stays put, but his fingers twitch.
He wants to run.
He won’t. Not while the tension in the air thickens like old oil.
Wanning doesn’t move.
She can’t. But her body still registers the shift. The faint tremor in the floorboards. The intake of breath beside her.
Something old is approaching.
Something certain.
“Spectra, identity check?”
“Scanning… no match. Biometric analysis: incomplete. Subject approaching from northeast quadrant. Heart rate: slow. Controlled. Temperature: indeterminate. Blood signature: anomalous. No viral contaminants detected.”
Not infected. Not human.
Maybe not even alive.
The woman disappears toward the door. The man stays frozen. Like a child caught with bloody teeth and fingers in the pantry.
Wanning lowers her hand from the bleeding wound, just a little. Just enough to press her palm flat against the floor beside her.
Cold. Gritty.
“Spectra. Can you translate what this person says next?”
“Affirmative. Translation module operational, but accuracy may be reduced. Source dialect unknown. Root lexicon suggests high-form variant of archaic European English.”
“Do your best.”
She is tired of being the stupid one in the room.
She can’t trust these people. Doesn’t even know what they are. But she will be damned if she meets whatever is walking through that door without some clue of what is being said.
She adjusts her weight and steels herself. Let them stare at the mark. Let them whisper about blood and fate and whatever else.
Right now, all she wants is for whoever is at the door to explain—clearly, concisely, and preferably without teeth—what the hell is going on.