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⮞ Chapter Sixteen: Let’s Start a Riot Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Captain!Taehyung, Doctor!Jimin, Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 28k+ Summary: Five years after disappearing into the shadows, Jungkook Jeon is forced back into the open when bounty hunters finally catch his trail. What begins as another desperate escape leads him to Helion Prime, a world on the brink of annihilation, and into the path of the Necromongers, a fanatical empire bent on conquest and conversion. As old allies resurface and a larger war unfolds, Jungkook becomes entangled in a conflict far greater than survival. Whispers of prophecy, an extinct warrior race, and a ruthless leader known as the Lord Marshal begin to circle him, marking him as a target for forces that should not even know his name. Hunted across frozen wastelands and scorched prison moons, he must confront the truth of who he is and what he may be destined to become, as the line between hunter and hunted begins to blur. Warnings: graphic death, graphic bodily injury, religious death cult, character death (sorta?), side character death, violence, plotting, manipulation, this is a really tame chapter all things considered, let me know if i missed anything... A/N: One of my favorite chapters to date. Don't think anything I write for this will top those first three chapters, but man I'm really getting into the Sci-Fi groove again. Not to mention, I love Audrey (Leo) as a character so much. I adore this series, and I'm so happy to bring us into the New Year with a new chapter. See you guys in 2026!

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Jungkook began planning his escape less than two hours after arriving on Crematoria. King’s ship would remain on the ground for fifty-six hours, after which the mercenary would either leave with his payment or kill enough of the prison staff to take it by force. Jungkook did not particularly care which. What mattered was that King and his undercutter would be gone while he remained buried beneath the surface, waiting for another transport to pass through.

He had no intention of waiting that long.

By the end of his first shift cycle, he knew which guards abandoned their posts whenever a fight broke out and which remained near the control panels no matter how loud the tier became. He measured the interval between the nightly inspection and the first surface-temperature warning, listened for the maintenance sled traveling beneath the floors, and followed its vibration through the stone until he could feel where the rail curved toward the hangar.

He also watched the mercenaries carry ammunition and supplies through the control room. During shift changes, they left the weapons locker open for several minutes at a time, not because the prison lacked rules, but because no one believed an inmate could survive long enough to reach that level. Crematoria had been designed around the certainty that escape was impossible, and that certainty had made the people running it careless.

Conrad was the first person Jungkook approached. The older man sat on the floor outside his cell with one knee raised, repairing the split seam of his boot with a length of wire pulled from a mattress frame. His fingers were broad and scarred, but he worked the wire through the hardened sole with patient, economical movements.

Jungkook stopped beside him and waited. Conrad continued working for several seconds before finally glancing up.

“You need something?”

“How many cells can you open without the grid?”

The wire stopped halfway through the leather. Conrad’s eyes moved past Jungkook toward the guard station at the end of the tier, where the nearest guard sat with his boots propped on the console. He appeared to be asleep, though one hand remained close to the shock rifle resting across his lap.

“Depends who’s asking,” Conrad said.

“Me.”

Jungkook crouched and took the boot from him before Conrad could object. He turned it over in his hands, examining the wire and the narrow punctures it had made through the sole.

“The manual release runs behind the west wall,” he said quietly. “Old hydraulic system. If the electronic locks fail, the doors can still be opened from a service panel.”

Conrad studied his face. “You found the panel.”

“About ten hours ago.”

Jungkook said it as casually as though he were telling him the time, and that plainness changed Conrad’s expression. Until then, he had been listening as though this were another prisoner’s fantasy, the kind whispered after lights-out to make the walls feel less permanent. Now he sat a little straighter.

“How many people are you planning to let out?”

“Not everyone.”

A riot would have been easy. Open every door, throw a weapon into the crowd, and let panic do the rest. That was how desperate men escaped when they did not expect to live long enough to regret the plan. Jungkook wanted something more controlled. He needed prisoners who could run, carry supplies, follow an order without arguing, and keep moving when the first person beside them died. Releasing the entire tier would only clog the corridors and give the guards more targets.

Conrad appeared to understand without needing the explanation.

“Who chooses?”

“I do.”

He took back his boot and pushed the wire through another hole. “Nakamura’s going to hate that.”

“She hates everything.”

“Not everything.”

Jungkook looked at him. Conrad kept his attention on the boot, though the corner of his mouth shifted with the beginning of a smile. Jungkook stood and walked away before the older man could make the observation any more specific.

Audrey was harder to approach because she noticed anyone approaching long before they reached her. She had claimed a place above the main tier on a broad heat pipe that ran several meters above the cells, high enough to keep her out of reach and close enough to the wall to give her a clear view of everything below. The guards rarely bothered her there. Reaching the pipe required climbing a rusted maintenance ladder and crossing a narrow support beam over open air, and none of them disliked her enough to make the effort.

Jungkook found her there after lights-out, stretched on her stomach with her chin resting on one arm while the other hung loosely over the side. From below, she appeared to be asleep, but before he could speak, she opened her eyes.

“You planning something?”

He stopped beneath the pipe and looked up at her. “Yeah.”

The tier had gone mostly quiet around them. Somewhere below, a prisoner coughed into his blanket, and metal clicked faintly against metal as Conrad continued repairing his boot in the dark. Farther down the corridor, one of the guards muttered over a card game while another laughed under his breath.

Jungkook leaned one shoulder against the wall. “The armory opens when the second alarm starts.”

Audrey rolled onto one elbow and peered down at him. “What second alarm?”

“The one you’re going to cause.”

A grin tugged briefly at her mouth before interest replaced it. “What do I have to do?”

“Start a fight on the upper tier and make it loud enough to pull the night guards away from the station. When the response team crosses the bridge, cut the power feed beneath the east rail.”

Her expression sharpened. “That feed controls the tier locks.”

“For about twenty seconds.”

“It could lock them permanently.”

“Then don’t damage the secondary line.”

Audrey stared down at him. “You make everything sound easy.”

“If you do it right.”

Her eyes narrowed, though she did not argue. “What happens during those twenty seconds?”

“Conrad opens the cells I’ve selected. You take the armory.”

“With what?”

Jungkook reached into his coat and tossed something toward her. Audrey caught it one-handed and held it beneath the weak light spilling from the tier. It was a thin strip of metal, ground narrow at one end and flattened into a crude handle at the other. Fresh scoring still marked the surface where he had filed it from a ventilation plate.

Audrey turned the tool between her fingers, studying the rough edge where Jungkook had ground it down.

“The third pin in the armory lock sticks,” he told her. “Lift it before you turn.”

She looked from the strip of metal to him. “You know a great deal about a room you’ve never entered.”

Jungkook pushed away from the wall and started toward the ladder. Audrey leaned farther over the pipe to keep him in sight.

“And what are you doing while I save everybody?”

He stopped and glanced up at her. “I’m taking the control room.”

That brought her upright.

The control room occupied the highest secure level of the prison, directly above the oldest shaft. Two reinforced doors and a guarded passage separated it from the inmate tiers, and inside were the transit controls, the communications system, the prison maps, and the machinery that operated the maintenance sled leading toward the hangar. Every escape attempt eventually reached the same obstacle. Without control of that room, there was nowhere to go.

“How?” Audrey asked.

“From below.”

She leaned over the pipe and studied him, trying to decide whether he was serious. By the time she made up her mind, Jungkook had already disappeared into the dark.

Trush and Bam were brought into the plan because they knew the infirmary stores and could distinguish antibiotics from stimulants without reading the labels. Alonzo joined because he had spent eleven years repairing Crematoria’s ventilation system before an argument with the former warden earned him a cell on the lower tier. He still remembered sections of the original survey that had never been transferred into the prison’s electronic maps.

Jungkook chose three more inmates who knew how to handle firearms, two broad men capable of carrying wounded prisoners or heavy supplies, and one narrow-shouldered boy small enough to crawl through the utility channel behind the locking mechanisms. No one received the entire plan. Conrad knew which cells to open and where the selected prisoners were supposed to gather. Audrey knew how to create the diversion, disable the power feed, and enter the armory. Trush knew which medical supplies mattered and which would only slow them down, while Alonzo understood that Jungkook needed the surface maps stored in the control system. The others were told where to stand when the lights failed and whom to follow once the doors opened.

If one of them talked, the guards would learn only a fragment, and a fragment would not be enough to stop the rest.

The opening in the control-room floor had existed longer than anyone currently working at Crematoria could remember. It was wide enough for a man to fall through without touching either side, and years of heat, vibration, and careless repairs had warped the rim into an uneven circle of blackened metal. A chain as thick as a man’s forearm hung from the hoist assembly above it and disappeared into the shaft below. Cool air rose from the buried machinery, carrying the smells of old oil, rust, hot wiring, and mineral damp from stone that had not seen daylight in centuries.

King noticed the hole because everyone else in the room made a point of ignoring it.

The mercenaries entered in small groups and spread themselves around the control room in positions that appeared casual until someone looked closely. No one stood with his back to either door, and no one set down a weapon. Men watched one another in the dark reflections of inactive monitors and polished gunmetal while pretending to count credits, finish drinks, or move shell casings across a makeshift chessboard.

The safe stood open against the wall. Bundles of U.D. currency covered the central table, some still secured with bank bands and others divided into untidy stacks by men who had begun counting too quickly. The sight of the money should have eased the tension. Instead, it made everyone more aware of how many people expected to be paid from the same pile.

The Boss stood at the far end of the table and allowed the silence to stretch. King remained near the wall with one hand hanging close to his sidearm. He had worked with most of these men before and knew which ones lied by smiling too much, which ones went quiet when they intended to betray someone, and which became dangerous the moment they suspected there might not be enough money—or enough air—for everyone in the room.

At last, the Boss lifted a photo-plate from the table. “Good news first. Talked it over with my amigos. We’ll cut you in for K.”

“Well, all right.” King smiled and glanced at the five men standing nearest the Boss. “What’s the bad news? Somebody close the whorehouse?”

He laughed loudly at his own joke and clapped his hands once, as though everyone had gathered for drinks instead of a payment dispute. No one joined him.

The Boss’s expression remained flat. “No. It’s worse than that.”

King’s laughter faded.

“Our pilot saw this.”

The Boss slid the photo-plate across the table. It spun once over the scratched metal before coming to rest beneath the hanging lamp.

“It crossed one of the shipping lanes,” he added.

A black warship filled the image. The plate could not properly communicate its scale, but even the flattened projection made the control room feel smaller. Armored terraces rose along the hull like the foundations of a city built sideways, crowded with spires, docking structures, and weapon housings until the vessel resembled a fortress torn from the ground and set loose among the stars. Nothing about its construction suggested trade, exploration, or peaceful transit.

King leaned closer despite himself, while the Boss ignored the image and watched him instead.

“Any idea what that might be?”

King knew exactly what he was looking at, and for one disorienting second, the floor seemed to tilt beneath him. The Basilica should have remained at Helion Prime. He had left quickly, wiped their route, changed headings twice, and buried the undercutter’s registry beneath three false transponder codes. There was no way they could have followed him all the way to Crematoria.

He straightened and forced his mouth into an easy grin. “Never seen anything like it.”

The expression held, but his crew knew him too well. The slight change in his voice was enough. Without exchanging a word, they began repositioning themselves around the room. One man drifted closer to the wall so he could cover the western door, while another angled his body toward the Boss’s guards. The youngest lowered his hand beside his thigh, bringing it near enough to his pistol that he could draw without making the movement obvious.

The Boss noticed all of it. “It came out of Helion Prime. I’ve got a nose for trouble, King, and I’m starting to think yours followed you here.”

King glanced around the room. More hands had shifted toward weapons. One of the chess players had stopped pretending to study the board, and the co-pilot remained against the far wall with her attention fixed on King rather than the Boss.

“Come on.” He forced out another laugh, though it sounded thinner than the first. “We dusted our tracks and got the hell out. There’s no way we didn’t lose them.”

“Them?” the Boss repeated.

Several men glanced at one another, and King realized his mistake as soon as the word left his mouth.

The Boss gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh. “So there is a them.”

King’s smile disappeared. “This is my prisoner.”

He pushed away from the wall and began circling the end of the table, his voice dropping until none of the humor remained. “Mine. Nobody else’s. I brought him here, and I want my money now.”

The Boss turned to keep him in sight. “You stole a prisoner from those people?”

King closed the remaining distance and drove his elbow into the side of the man’s head. The blow snapped the Boss sideways into the table, sending several bundles of currency sliding from beneath his hands and onto the floor.

The co-pilot moved first. She did not draw her weapon, but her hand settled over the grip, making the threat unmistakable. Two guards near the chessboard rose at once, while beside the open safe, one mercenary quietly swept several bundles of credits into his coat while everyone else watched King.

The room divided almost instantly. Men chose positions according to loyalty, fear, old debts, and whichever weapon happened to be nearest. Some looked toward the Boss, waiting to see whether he would recover, while others watched King. Several paid attention only to the money, already calculating how much they could seize before the shooting began.

The co-pilot eased away from the wall until she had a clear view of both exits. One of the chess players tipped his chair onto its side and lowered himself behind it, and a guard near the door widened his stance, keeping his rifle angled down but ready. The credits no longer belonged to whoever had earned them. They belonged to whoever survived the next minute.

King stepped back from the table and closed his hand around the grip of his pistol.

Gunfire erupted before either he or the Boss could draw.

The outer wall buckled inward beneath the first impact. A deep metallic concussion rolled through the control room, shaking dust from the ceiling and sending the hanging lamp swinging wildly over the table. Emergency lights ignited a heartbeat later, flooding the room with pulsing red.

A console exploded beside the table, its screen bursting outward in a spray of glass and sparks. Men scattered in every direction. Some threw themselves behind overturned furniture, while others drew their weapons and fired blindly toward the rear corridor without knowing what had breached it.

A second volley tore through the door and obliterated the chessboard. The pieces, made from spent shell casings, flew across the room and struck the walls with tiny metallic clicks beneath the roar of the weapons.

One guard jerked backward and collapsed before he could raise his rifle. Another fired into the smoke until a shot caught him beneath the jaw and snapped his head back. The Boss disappeared behind the central table with two of his men, dragging a fallen guard’s weapon with him.

King moved toward the shaft because it was the only part of the room not already filled with gunfire. Another impact struck somewhere beneath the floor, making the metal plating jump under his boots. His heel came down on a loose bundle of credits, snapping the band and sending notes fanning across the floor.

His foot slid out from under him.

King struck the warped rim of the shaft hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs, then tipped over the edge. He threw out both hands and caught the hanging chain a moment before he disappeared into the darkness.

His full weight slammed into his shoulders. Pain tore through both arms, hot and immediate, and the shock nearly opened his hands. He swung above the shaft, boots kicking uselessly at empty air while gunfire cracked through the control room overhead. Spent casings and pieces of shattered metal bounced past him and vanished into the black below.

Something moved in the darkness.

At first, King saw only the faint movement of a shape against the shaft wall. Then Jungkook climbed into the red emergency light, one hand closing around the next rung of the ladder built into the stone. Debris rattled down around him, and bullets punched through the floor overhead, but he continued upward with steady, almost casual precision.

He was listening. King could see it in the slight angle of his head as he climbed, separating the sounds of the fight—the number of weapons firing, the length of each burst, the changing direction of the shots—as though the gun battle above were no harder to follow than a conversation in the next room.

Jungkook raised his face, and silver light caught behind his goggles.

King’s fingers tightened around the chain. Several meters below, Jungkook stopped and looked up at him while King tried to pull himself higher. Pain knifed through his shoulders, and his boots scraped uselessly against empty air.

“I can’t fucking stand your ass!”

Jungkook regarded him without expression. “Should’ve taken the money, King.”

He pushed away from the ladder.

King barely had time to brace before Jungkook struck him around the waist. The impact sent them swinging across the shaft toward the wall. King grabbed at his coat and tried to drag him down, but Jungkook hooked one arm through the chain, caught the ladder with his free hand, and used King’s body as leverage to climb past him.

They slammed into the wall. King managed to catch the lowest rung, though his fingers slipped once before closing around the metal. He dragged himself close enough to keep from falling, but Jungkook was already above him, pulling himself through the opening and into the control room.

The shooting had stopped.

Smoke hung beneath the ceiling in slow gray layers, stinging Jungkook’s eyes and filling the room with the bitter smell of burned insulation and propellant. Bodies lay among overturned chairs, shattered consoles, and scattered currency. One of the chess players had fallen across the table with an arm hanging over the edge. The Boss was gone, along with several guards and the co-pilot, while the rear emergency door stood open behind them, revealing the old transit passages buried beneath the prison.

Jungkook stepped over the dead and crossed to the damaged control bank. Before touching the consoles, he checked the corridor. The fleeing guards had dropped ammunition, a respirator, and a blood-smeared glove in their rush. Farther down the passage, the transit alarm had gone silent.

They had not simply abandoned the room. They had taken the underground route and made certain no one could follow them.

He returned to the nearest secondary terminal and tore away the scorched casing. The first cable had fused into a blackened knot, and although the second still carried power, the monitor remained blank. He stripped the insulation from a third cable, spliced it into the prison survey system, and struck the side of the screen with the heel of his hand.

Static crawled across the display before the lower transit route finally appeared. The map showed the lava-tube system running from the prison to the hangar. Under normal conditions, the maintenance sled could have carried them there well before sunrise, but a diagnostic warning flashed along the side of the screen.

Jungkook opened it and found an image of the sled lying below the rail, burned open and twisted onto its side. The drive assembly had separated from the chassis, and half the transit housing had collapsed around it. He looked toward the ruined launcher near the wall. Someone had fired it directly into the mechanism during the retreat, and whether they had done it deliberately or in blind panic no longer mattered.

The route was gone.

A low growl sounded behind him. One of the Hellhounds paced inside its enclosure, its plated shoulders scraping the bars each time it turned. Pale eyes reflected the pulsing emergency lights, and long claws dragged across the metal floor with a steady, grating sound.

Jungkook looked at the Hellhound once before turning toward the corridor. He had people to gather.

He found Conrad in the lower tier, working the manual release on the final row of cells after the electronic locks had failed. Audrey stood beside him with a rifle taken from one of the guards, blood streaked across one sleeve. Nearby, Trush and Bam were emptying an infirmary cabinet into two canvas bags, while Alonzo had already begun removing filters from the ventilation system.

Jungkook stepped into the corridor and surveyed the prisoners crowding the tier. Most were still waiting for someone else to decide whether the riot had become an escape. Several carried stolen weapons they clearly did not know how to use, while others tore through open cells in search of food, coats, and personal belongings, behaving as though a larger meal or an extra layer would matter if the prison sealed around them.

One man held a rifle backward against his chest. Jungkook took it from him, turned it around, cleared the chamber, and handed it to Conrad.

“Control room. Now.”

Audrey looked over. “Why?”

“The sled is gone.”

The words quieted the corridor. Conrad released the final manual lock and straightened, leaving one hand on the mechanism.

“What happened?”

“The guards took the tunnel to the hangar and destroyed the line behind them. They must’ve figured out the Necromongers would come here looking for me, so they ran and left the rest of us to die.”

Trush glanced toward the sealed upper tiers. “Then we’re trapped.”

Jungkook turned to face the prisoners gathering behind them. “Anyone who stays here dies when the cooling grid shuts down. Anyone coming with me carries water, ammunition, heat wraps, and nothing else. We leave through the exterior maintenance shutters and reach the hangar on foot.”

No one moved. Thirty kilometers of exposed ground separated the prison from the hangar, and once the sun cleared the horizon, the surface would become an open furnace. Metal would burn through gloves, stone would blister skin through boots, and anyone caught outside without protection would be dead within minutes.

Jungkook did not soften the plan or promise they would all survive. He simply pointed toward the temperature indicators climbing along the walls.

“We got one speed: mine. You can’t keep up then stay the fuck here.”

Conrad began issuing orders at once, sending two inmates for water and another for oxygen cartridges. Audrey returned to the armory and came back carrying whatever weapons and ammunition had not been taken or destroyed. Trush gathered gloves, strips of cloth, reflective emergency sheeting, and anything else that might keep exposed skin covered, while Alonzo retrieved the old surface survey from the control system and helped Jungkook identify the only route that still appeared passable.

The preparations quickly dissolved into disorder. Men argued over water containers, each insisting he needed more than the next person, while others slipped loose ammunition into their pockets whenever they thought no one was watching. One prisoner tried to hide two respirators beneath his coat. Audrey caught him before he had taken three steps, drove her forearm across his throat, and pinned him against the wall until he surrendered one.

Another man refused to give up a heavy machine gun he had dragged from the armory.

“We’re going outside,” he argued, clutching it across his chest. “You think we won’t need this?”

Jungkook pulled the ammunition belt free and pushed the weapon back into his arms. Without the belt hanging from the feed tray to help steady it, the full weight shifted forward. The man stumbled and nearly dropped it.

“You carrying that thirty kilometers?” Jungkook asked.

The prisoner stood there breathing hard, his arms already trembling. He looked down at the weapon as though he had only just understood how heavy it was, then let it strike the floor.

Anything that slowed them down was useless, no matter how valuable it had seemed while they were still inside the prison.

Jungkook divided the group according to what each person could actually do. Conrad would remain near the center and keep them from spreading too far apart. Trush and Bam carried the medical supplies between them, while Alonzo kept the survey unit zipped beneath his coat to protect it from dust and impact. The prisoners who knew how to shoot were placed along the outside of the group. Those without weapons carried water, cable, batteries, oxygen cartridges, and folded heat wraps.

No one was formally assigned to protect the weakest among them. There were too few capable people and too much ground to cover. The injured and exhausted were shown the route, told where to remain in the formation, and left to decide for themselves whether they could keep pace.

By the time King dragged himself out of the shaft, the prisoners had taken control of the room. He emerged slowly, one hand still wrapped around the chain while the other gripped the rim. Sweat shone across his face, and one shoulder hung lower than the other from the strain of the climb. He remained there for a moment, breathing through his teeth as he looked across the room at Jungkook.

Jungkook did not acknowledge him.

King’s attention shifted to the Hellhound pacing behind the bars of its enclosure. The animal had stopped growling and now watched him with pale, unblinking eyes. He glanced toward the rear passage where the Boss and the surviving guards had fled, weighed the two directions for only a moment, then chose the corridor and disappeared into it without saying a word.

Jungkook returned to the cracked handheld display and marked the route with his thumb. The safest path followed the western sides of the volcanic ridges, where the shadows would linger longer after sunrise. From there, they would cross two open flats, enter a narrow canyon system, and circle back toward the lava tube near the hangar.

The distance was survivable, but only if they were well away from the prison before the sun cleared the horizon. The margin was narrow enough that no one needed to hear it twice.

Jungkook redistributed the water according to carrying capacity rather than fairness. The strongest runners took the heaviest containers, while anyone already injured carried ammunition or nothing at all. He ordered everyone to cover their necks, mouths, wrists, ears, and every other strip of exposed skin. The oxygen cartridges were placed near the center of the group, where they could be shared once they reached the sulfur canyons.

Audrey watched him move from person to person, taking away what they could not manage and shifting weight onto those who could. He never asked whether they trusted him. Trust had nothing to do with it. He knew the route, and they wanted to live.

When the exterior maintenance shutter failed to respond to the controls, Jungkook, Conrad, and Audrey took hold of the manual wheel together. The mechanism had not been used in years and resisted so completely that their first attempt did nothing but strain their arms and shake rust from the housing. They reset their grips and pushed again.

Something inside the mechanism cracked. The wheel lurched forward, nearly throwing Conrad into the wall, and the shutter began to rise with a grinding shriek. Hot air poured through the widening gap, carrying ash, sulfur, and the dry mineral smell of heated stone.

Beyond the maintenance ledge, Crematoria stretched toward the horizon in black ridges, broken flats, and fields of fractured volcanic glass. The distant hangar was little more than a dark shape behind drifting ash and mineral haze.

Several prisoners stepped back from the opening. One man shook his head and refused to move, while another insisted he would wait for a rescue craft because someone would eventually return for the guards.

Jungkook did not argue with either of them. The cooling alarms had already changed from intermittent warnings to one continuous tone, and steam burst from a ruptured line near the ceiling, rolling across the room in thick white sheets. The men who had chosen to remain began shouting for someone to close the shutter again, but no one moved to help them.

Jungkook crossed to the Hellhound enclosure and pulled the release. The gate rose slowly, and the animal emerged with its head lowered, plated shoulders shifting beneath scarred hide. It did not charge. Instead, it stopped just outside the enclosure and tested the room through scent and movement, drawing air through flared nostrils while its claws clicked softly against the floor.

Rifles came up around it, but Jungkook’s voice cut through the sudden scrape of weapons. “Lower them.”

Conrad obeyed first. Audrey hesitated before lowering hers as well, and the others followed when the Hellhound pulled back its lips and a growl began deep in its chest. The animal passed among them without striking, moving close enough for several prisoners to flinch away. It approached the open shutter, paused to scent the hot air pouring through it, then turned and followed the trail King and the guards had left through the rear corridor.

Jungkook stepped onto the maintenance ledge and looked toward the horizon, where a narrow orange line had appeared behind the ridges. “Six minutes until the first shadow moves.”

He swung himself over the edge and climbed down. The others followed, passing rifles, water containers, and supply bags from hand to hand before lowering themselves onto the black stone below. Behind them, the control-room lights flickered once and failed. The open shutter became a dark rectangle in the prison wall, and the men who had chosen to remain were still shouting when the darkness swallowed them.

Jungkook turned east and began walking. The group spread instinctively around him, each person searching for open ground and distance from the others, but he had taken only three steps onto the flat when his heel broke through a pale patch of crust.

The surface collapsed beneath him, opening a narrow fissure that exhaled a rush of yellow heat. The glow from below illuminated the jagged edges of the broken stone and revealed molten rock moving far beneath their feet. The nearest prisoners recoiled, almost colliding with those behind them.

“Single line on the flats,” Jungkook said. “Spread out when we reach solid rock.”

No one questioned him. They began moving, though for the first hundred meters none of them understood the pace they needed to keep. Some ran too quickly and burned through their breath, while others crowded together, stepping on heels and knocking supply bags against one another. Several continued looking back toward the prison as though they expected the walls to follow them.

Jungkook stopped only once, when a prisoner drifted away from the line toward another stretch of pale ground. He caught the back of the man’s coat and hauled him sideways just before his next step landed. The crust collapsed where his foot would have been, and a vent opened with a dry crack, releasing enough heat to make everyone flinch. Far below, molten rock glowed through the fissure.

After that, the line formed without further argument.

Jungkook chose the ground by texture as much as sight. Black volcanic glass held their weight, while gray crust often concealed empty space. Yellow deposits meant sulfur, heat, and stone weakened from beneath. Whenever the wind shifted, he changed direction without warning, reading the movement of the ash to find openings between the ridges.

Conrad repeated every turn so the prisoners at the rear could hear. Audrey moved between the front and the middle, grabbing shoulders, forcing people back into position, and shoving the slowest forward whenever fear made them freeze. The first kilometer still carried the cold of night. Frost cracked beneath their boots even as heat rose through the soles from the ground below. Their breath clouded before their covered faces, but sweat had already begun gathering beneath their layers.

Jungkook stayed at the front, choosing the ground and setting a pace that left no room for hesitation. Conrad kept the middle of the line from folding in on itself, calling out each change in direction and forcing the prisoners to leave enough space between them to see where they were stepping. Audrey moved constantly between them, dragging people back into formation when they wandered and forcing the exhausted to raise their heads whenever fatigue made them stop watching the ground.

Behind them, smoke began to rise from the prison. At first, it came from the vents in thin black streams. Then the sun reached the upper towers, and the exposed metal brightened from dull red to orange. Sections of plating buckled beneath the heat, and windows burst outward, flashing briefly in the distance before smoke swallowed them.

The prisoners reached the first ridge while the flats below remained in shadow. Beyond it, the route dropped through uneven shelves of volcanic rock toward the canyon system. The descent was steep enough that several people had to use their hands, passing water containers and rifles down before climbing after them. Jungkook barely slowed, and anyone who could not match his pace began losing ground almost immediately.

No one went back.

That rule had seemed easier inside the prison, where abandoning the injured was still an idea rather than something they had to watch happen.

The first man fell halfway down the ridge. His boot caught between two rocks, and his knee twisted beneath him with a sound loud enough for the nearest prisoners to hear. He collapsed onto his side and clutched the joint, his face tightening as he tried to stand.

“I’m fine,” he called after them. “Just get me up. I can walk.”

Conrad slowed, and Audrey took two steps back before stopping as well. Jungkook continued down the slope.

The injured man forced himself onto one knee. “I said I can move. Just give me a hand.”

Sunlight crept over the top of the ridge behind him, touching the highest rocks first and turning frost to steam. A second later, heat rolled down the exposed slope in a visible shimmer.

The man’s voice rose into a scream and disappeared beneath the rush of smoke.

Conrad faced forward again. Audrey remained still for half a heartbeat, her jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles stood out along her cheek, then turned and followed. Neither of them tried to slow the group after that.

Beneath the surface, the Boss and the surviving guards were making their way through the lava tube toward the hangar in sealed environmental suits. They believed the layers of volcanic rock above them would provide enough protection, so they moved without urgency at first. They stopped to redistribute water, argued over which equipment to abandon, and assumed anyone left inside the prison had died when the maintenance sled was destroyed.

The first time they opened a surface hatch to check their position, they saw a line of prisoners crossing a distant ridge.

After that, they began to run.

Aboveground, the wind strengthened until the loose ash became a moving wall. Jungkook appeared and disappeared within it, sometimes reduced to a dark outline and sometimes lost altogether. Whenever Audrey could no longer see him, she followed the marks his boots left in the crust. His steps cut deeper than anyone else’s, and she placed her feet where he had placed his, trusting those impressions to keep her away from concealed vents and hollow ground.

The canyon divided ahead of them. Most of the group began drifting toward the wider opening on the right, where the floor looked smoother and the slope less severe, but Audrey searched through the ash and spotted Jungkook already climbing the ridge to the left.

“Left!” she shouted, waving the others across. “Stay left!”

Conrad repeated the order down the line before the rear of the group could disappear into the wrong canyon.

The sun continued rising behind them. Light spilled over the eastern walls in long white sheets, bleaching the stone and forcing the prisoners deeper into the narrowing strips of shadow along the western face. In places, they had to move shoulder to shoulder, pressed between the heated wall on one side and a drop into the canyon on the other.

The air changed as they entered the sulfur channels. Every breath began to burn, and the smell filled their mouths even through the cloth wrapped over their faces, sharp and bitter enough to make their eyes water. Conrad passed the first oxygen cartridge forward while another moved toward the rear. Each prisoner took only enough to clear his lungs before handing it on.

Bam stumbled against the canyon wall, and Trush caught him under the arm before he fell, hauling him upright without a word. At that altitude, with sulfur in the air and heat building beneath their clothes, speech cost more breath than either man could spare.

A metal hatch rose from the flat ahead and opened without warning.

Fraga climbed out of the lava tube with a rifle already shouldered. He saw Audrey first, then the line of prisoners behind her, and brought the weapon around.

He never found Jungkook in the scope.

Jungkook dropped from the ridge above him with an anchoring spike he had torn from the hatch assembly. He landed behind Fraga and drove the spike through the top of his helmet before the guard could turn. The rifle discharged once, sending the round into the ash, and Fraga folded beside the hatch.

Jungkook dropped into the tunnel before Fraga’s body had finished sliding to the ground. The prisoners reached the opening seconds later, with Conrad and Trush taking positions on opposite sides of the hatch and firing down the shaft while Audrey covered the surface, scanning the ridges and the brightening canyon behind them. The guards below answered with blind bursts that struck the hatch rim and sprayed fragments of metal across the flat.

Inside the tunnel, the confined space turned every gunshot into a physical blow. Jungkook kept beneath the guards’ firing angle and moved toward the muzzle flashes. The passage was too narrow for them to stand abreast or bring their rifles around without striking the walls. Their armor protected them from glancing blows, but it also made them slow and awkward in such close quarters.

He caught the barrel of the first rifle and drove it sideways into the stone hard enough to bend the weapon at the receiver. Before the guard could release it, Jungkook slammed him backward into the man behind him. Both went down together and blocked the passage, causing the next burst to strike the falling bodies instead of Jungkook. He was already moving over them before the shooter could adjust.

Above, Audrey watched the opening and fired only when a visor, shoulder, or weapon appeared beneath the hatch. She ignored the wild shots striking the underside of the rim. They did not have enough ammunition for her to answer every sound.

The tunnel magnified everything—the crack of gunfire, boots scraping over stone, bodies striking the walls. Men shouted through the darkness, their voices overlapping until it became impossible to distinguish an order from a scream. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the noise stopped.

Farther ahead, the Boss reached an inner pressure hatch and sealed it before Jungkook could enter the next section. The locking bolts slammed into place one after another, followed by the sound of footsteps retreating through the passage beyond it toward the hangar. Jungkook examined the lock once and dismissed it. Breaking through would take time they did not have.

He climbed back to the surface. Audrey saw the blood coating his hands and the front of his coat, but she did not ask what had happened below. She merely stepped away from the hatch and followed when he started running again.

Sunlight had begun entering the canyons in long, narrow blades, each one creeping steadily across the ground and cutting off paths that had been safe only seconds earlier. They crossed another ridge and descended into a channel that ended against a sheer wall.

Jungkook reached it first and began climbing without hesitation. He drove his fingers into narrow cracks and pulled himself upward, testing each hold before trusting it with his weight. The stone was already growing warm, and small fragments broke loose beneath his boots and struck the prisoners waiting below.

Conrad followed. Audrey wrapped a strip of cloth around her burned palm, gripped the rock with both hands, and climbed after him, but the heat was rising faster than they were.

Near the top, she reached for a shallow crack and felt the edge crumble beneath her fingers. Her injured hand slipped. Her other arm took her full weight for an instant before that grip failed as well, and she fell away from the wall.

Jungkook had already pulled the winch cable from his pack. He looped it around a projection in the stone, braced one boot against the ridge, and threw himself outward just as the sunlight swept across the rock behind him.

He reached Audrey before she fell past, catching her beneath one arm as the cable snapped tight above them. The force slammed them both into the wall, but Jungkook twisted his body between Audrey and the stone, taking most of the impact across his shoulder and ribs.

For a moment, they hung suspended in the open heat.

Conrad seized the cable with both hands and leaned back with his full weight. Jungkook climbed one-handed, keeping his other arm locked around Audrey’s ribs while Conrad pulled from above. The line cut into Conrad’s palms, and his boots slid over loose grit until he found a crack in the stone and braced himself against it.

Jungkook reached the edge first. He shoved Audrey high enough for Conrad to catch the back of her coat, then hauled himself over after her. All three collapsed beneath a narrow overhang just as the thermal wave swept through the canyon.

The heat struck the exposed rock with a sound like a furnace door opening. Sharp cracks raced across the canyon floor, splitting the stone before dust and steam burst from the fractures. The air beneath the ledge grew hot enough to burn their lungs, but the rock above them held back the worst of it.

Audrey lay curled on her side, dragging in shallow breaths. One arm remained folded against her chest, and the cloth wrapped around her burned palm had darkened with blood and sweat. Her fingers trembled uncontrollably.

Jungkook released the cable from around his waist and pulled it free of the anchor point. His injured side tightened when he bent, but the only sign he gave was a brief pause. He coiled the line around his forearm and stood.

Audrey looked up at him. He did not offer her a hand, and she did not ask for one. She rolled onto one knee, used the wall to force herself upright, and followed.

They had reached the final ridge before the hangar, and only a fraction of the group remained. The crossing had taken the others by degrees. Some had fallen to the heat, some had missed a foothold or stepped through thin crust, and others had been caught by gunfire in the lava tube or simply reached the point where their bodies would no longer obey them. No one had enough breath left to count the missing.

Those still standing barely resembled the prisoners who had left the control room. Ash had worked into their skin until every face looked gray. The cloth around their hands and mouths had stiffened with sweat, blood, and burned fibers. Several had lost pieces of clothing to the heat, and every breath came ragged through swollen throats.

The hangar lay beyond the ridge, but no one cheered when they saw it. They were too tired to trust anything that looked like escape.

An armored unit had taken position on the far side of the structure. Audrey did not recognize their equipment. Their armor was dark and close-fitted, unlike the bulky environmental suits worn by the prison guards, and their weapons carried no visible ammunition feeds. They moved with exact, practiced coordination, spreading across the ground without speaking. Near the center stood a tall commander beside a machine mounted on articulated legs, its single mechanical eye sweeping the ridge.

Two soldiers broke from the formation and began climbing toward the fugitives. At the same moment, the hangar doors started to open. Heavy panels withdrew into the surrounding rock, and more black-armored warriors emerged from inside, forming ranks as they came with their weapons raised toward the ridge.

Jungkook stopped at the crest and watched the two forces approach from opposite directions. He understood before anyone else did.

Neither group had come for the prisoners.

He kept the survivors inside the final strip of shade while sunlight crept closer behind them. The men nearest the rear began pushing forward, desperate to escape the heat, while others raised their weapons without knowing which direction to aim. Jungkook did not move.

The two armed units reached the crest almost at the same time. They saw one another and opened fire.

The ridge disappeared beneath smoke, ash, and bursts of distorted air. Gravity rounds struck the ground with enough force to lift sheets of stone, while the opposing force answered with weapons that flashed white through the haze and cut dark figures from their feet.

Jungkook led the prisoners directly into the collision.

They ran through the space between two armies that had expected to find only each other. Warriors turned too late, confused by movement coming from the center of the battlefield. Jungkook reached the first before the man could bring his weapon around, drove his blade through the gap beneath the breastplate, and dragged the body in front of him as the next volley struck.

Audrey stayed close enough to follow the path he opened. She watched where his knife found seams in the armor and aimed for the same places—the narrow line beneath a visor, the joints behind the knees, the exposed connections at the shoulder. She fired only when she had a clear target, while Conrad and Trush covered the rear and shot at anyone who tried to close behind them.

Bam disappeared in the smoke. Audrey heard someone shout his name once, but there was no answer and no time to search. The ash folded over the place where he had been, and the group kept moving.

Near the hangar entrance, the Boss emerged from the underground passage with King several steps behind him. Both men looked scorched and exhausted, their suits torn from the fighting below.

The Boss saw Jungkook and fired, but the shot vanished into the smoke.

For a single second, King and Jungkook looked at one another across the battlefield. Smoke drifted between them, briefly hiding one from the other. King’s injured shoulder had soaked one side of his coat, though he still held a pistol in his good hand.

The Hellhound burst from the smoke on his left.

It struck King across the chest and drove him into the ground. He twisted as they fell, and the animal’s jaws closed over his shoulder instead of his throat, its teeth punching through the coat and deep into flesh.

King screamed and shoved his forearm against the Hellhound’s neck, struggling to keep its head away from his face. He fired once into the dirt beside them, but the animal held on. The second shot went off beneath its jaw.

The blast did not strike cleanly, but the noise and muzzle flash startled the Hellhound enough to make it release him. King rolled away, dragging one arm behind him as blood poured through the torn shoulder of his coat. He scrambled toward the rocks and disappeared into the smoke before the animal recovered, heading back toward the prison.

Fear had made him unsteady, and the blood loss was not helping. Jungkook doubted King even knew where he was going anymore.

He did not follow.

The Boss charged from the hangar entrance with an empty pistol in one hand and a knife in the other. He came forward with enough momentum to make the attack look dangerous, but it never became a fight. Jungkook stepped inside the swing and drove his blade beneath the man’s ribs. The Boss’s charge carried him another half step before his legs gave out. Jungkook pulled the knife free and let him fall.

The remaining fugitives reached the berm bordering the runway, with the hangar standing just beyond it and its open doors visible through the ash.

A gravity bolt crossed the battlefield.

It struck Jungkook in the side and continued through Conrad behind him. The force lifted both men from the ground. Jungkook hit the slope and rolled hard against the stone, while Conrad landed several meters away and did not move.

Audrey turned at the sound of the impact. She saw Conrad lying on his back with one arm bent beneath him, then spotted two warriors advancing on Jungkook before he could rise.

She ran at them.

Fear had burned through panic and left something simpler behind. She did not think about surviving or winning. She thought only of keeping them away from Jungkook, and every part of her body became useful for that purpose.

The first soldier caught the broken rifle across the side of his helmet. Audrey struck him again before he recovered, then a third time, driving the stock into the visor until the helmet shifted crookedly on his head. He grabbed for the weapon. She let him take the barrel, stepped into him, and drove her knee into the gap beneath his chin.

He went down choking.

The second warrior struck her across the shoulder and spun her sideways. Pain flashed down her arm. When he reached for the restraint at her waist, she caught the exposed joint of his glove between her teeth and bit until he jerked back.

Audrey twisted free, seized the ridge of his armor, and used his recoil to pull him off balance. His helmet struck the stone once. She hauled it up by the edge and slammed it down again, then a third time.

He stopped moving.

Audrey planted herself over Jungkook, breathing hard, the broken rifle raised in both hands.

The commander approached through the heat. The soldiers around him gave way without being told, and he drew his blade as he walked, its metal catching pale light through the ash.

Behind Audrey, Jungkook forced himself onto one knee. One hand pressed against his side, and blood ran between his fingers before disappearing into the dark cloth of his coat.

The commander stopped in front of him.

“So,” he said, looking down at Jungkook, “you do know how to kneel.”

Audrey raised the rifle higher, but the commander did not look at her.

The world slowed around Jungkook.

Dust stopped in the air. Gunfire stretched into a distant metallic groan, and a drop of blood fell from his hand and hung above the stone without landing.

Imelda stepped through the stillness carrying a shard of black rock in one hand. Her expression was calm, but something in her eyes held the weight of a grief Jungkook could not name.

She knelt before him and pressed the stone into his palm.

Memory opened inside him, not as images at first, but as pressure around his throat, heat against newborn skin, and terror older than language. He felt hands that had never held him with kindness and air denied before he had understood what breathing was.

“Remember what they did,” Imelda said.

Her fingers closed around his hand, forcing the black shard deeper into his palm.

“Remember who you are.”

Time snapped forward.

The force that erupted from Jungkook split the plateau. Rock burst outward in a widening ring, lifting soldiers from the ground and throwing them through the air. Armor tore open along the seams and folded inward beneath the pressure, while weapons broke apart before they struck the ground, scattering pieces through the ash.

The blast tore through both armies and carved a crater into the place where Jungkook had knelt.

Audrey was thrown behind a shelf of basalt. She struck the ground on one shoulder and slid through the ash until the rock stopped her. For several seconds, she could hear nothing. The world continued moving around her in a silence so complete that even her own breathing seemed distant.

When she forced herself upright, the battlefield was almost unrecognizable. Bodies lay scattered across the ash, some still trapped inside armor that had melted and curled around them. The ridge had been flattened in places and split open in others, while beyond the destruction, the hangar doors remained open.

Jungkook lay motionless at the center of the crater.

Audrey stumbled down the slope and dropped beside him. She pressed two fingers against his throat and found a pulse so faint that she nearly missed it. His breathing was worse. Each breath caught shallowly in his chest, followed by a pause that lasted far too long before the next one came.

She grabbed the front of his coat and shook him. “Jungkook.”

His head moved with the force of it, but his eyes remained closed.

“Jungkook, wake up.”

She shook him harder, but nothing changed.

The surviving commander emerged through the smoke with several soldiers behind him. Audrey snatched a rifle from the ground and fired before any of them could speak. The round struck the commander’s armor and glanced away, and a heartbeat later, gravity shots slammed into the ground around her, blasting stone and ash into the air. The rifle wrenched violently from her hands and flew across the crater.

Audrey reached for Jungkook’s knife, but the commander caught her wrist before her fingers touched it and drove her facedown into the ground.

She fought without restraint, kicking backward and twisting beneath his weight while biting at the gauntlet holding her arm. When a soldier closed a restraint around one wrist, she whipped the attached chain across his faceplate. Another caught her legs, but she drove her heel into his knee and nearly tore herself free.

It took two soldiers to hold her lower body. A third leaned over her to secure the other arm and caught her elbow beneath the helmet for his trouble. They forced both wrists behind her and locked the restraints together, but Audrey continued fighting.

She dug her fingers into the ground and tried to drag herself toward Jungkook, ignoring the stone tearing beneath her nails. When the soldiers hauled her backward, she kicked so violently that they finally lifted her completely off the ground to keep her from finding anything solid to push against. Even then, she twisted toward him, stretching one arm as far as the restraints allowed.

Sunlight reached Jungkook before it touched the rest of the crater. It crept over the broken rim and found the toes of his boots, and the leather began to smoke almost immediately, sending a thin gray curl into the shimmering air.

Audrey saw it and lost whatever control she had left.

“Move him!” she screamed. “Get him out of there!”

The soldiers did not react.

She cursed them, their commander, and whoever had sent them. She threw herself forward with such force that the restraints cut through the burned skin around her wrists. Blood ran beneath the metal, but the pain only made her pull harder.

Across the crater, the Purifier emerged from behind a fractured wall of stone. He had survived the blast with little visible damage, though something in his expression had gone unnaturally still. The certainty that had shaped his face before was gone, leaving behind an emptiness that made him seem almost detached from the destruction around him.

“The Lord Marshal ordered me to remain if his death could not be confirmed,” he said, his voice carrying evenly through the heat. “I will witness the destruction of the body. The transport will return for me after the day line passes.”

Audrey understood none of the titles. She knew nothing about the Lord Marshal or the doctrine that allowed the Purifier to speak about death as though it were an administrative duty. She understood only that they intended to leave Jungkook in the sun.

“Then leave me too.”

The commander looked at her.

“I’ll stay,” she said. “You don’t need me. Leave me here.”

When no one answered, she attacked again. She drove her heel into one soldier’s knee and twisted hard enough to drag another off balance. The commander watched her struggle and recognized something the others had dismissed as panic.

Pain did not make her submit. It only changed the direction of her attack. When one soldier trapped her arm behind her back, she turned into the hold instead of away from it, forcing her shoulder beyond its natural range until something tore and her hand slipped free. When another caught her around the waist, she threw her head backward into his visor again and again until blood began running through her hair.

She had survived Crematoria without training, rank, belief, or anyone’s protection. She had crossed the surface, fought armed guards, and run directly into a battle between forces she did not understand. Even now, surrounded and restrained, she did not know how to surrender.

There was nothing disciplined about her violence. She did not stop to consider whether resistance was useful or wise. Survival had been stripped down inside her until it existed beneath thought, older than pride and stronger than fear. Something feral had endured where a more civilized person might have broken.

The Campaign could make use of that.

To Taehyung, conversion was more than a practical solution for a valuable captive. It was the only answer the Faith allowed. Strength without purpose became waste, while violence left undirected served only hunger, terror, impulse, or chance. Conversion stripped those lesser loyalties away and gave suffering meaning beyond surviving one more hour.

Audrey was not ready to understand any of that, but readiness had never been necessary. The harder she fought, the more certain Taehyung became. Weak captives submitted because there was nothing left inside them worth protecting. A powerful convert had to be torn away from something strong enough to make surrender feel impossible.

He ordered the soldiers to take her alive.

Audrey answered by driving both heels into one soldier’s chest and hurling her weight toward the crater. The others caught her before she reached the edge and carried her toward the transport, but she continued kicking until one of them lost his grip. Her shoulder struck the ground hard. She rolled with the fall, came up running, and made it several steps toward Jungkook before Taehyung caught the restraints behind her wrists and dragged her backward.

“You can board,” he said, “or you can burn here.”

It was the first choice he had given her that she understood.

Audrey looked toward Jungkook. The sunlight had climbed beyond his boots and reached his legs, while smoke rolled over his body in thickening waves. Heat distorted the air above the crater until his face had begun to disappear.

She believed he was dead.

Whatever hope had kept her fighting toward him collapsed, leaving behind the simpler instinct that had carried her through every terrible place she had ever known. She would not die here. Not like this.

Audrey stopped trying to return to him. The soldiers loosened their grip enough to let her stand, and she walked toward the transport because being carried felt too much like surrender. Even with her wrists bound, she pulled away from every hand that touched her. She counted the soldiers, watched where they carried their weapons, marked each doorway, and memorized every turn without knowing where any of them led.

Taehyung did not mistake any of it for obedience. He saw material that had not yet been shaped.

She would resist conversion. The ones worth converting often did. Faith accepted through comfort produced servants who broke the moment comfort vanished. Faith forced into something savage and made to hold could produce a warrior.

Audrey began fighting again as soon as they fastened her restraints to the transport wall. She screamed, kicked the nearest soldier in the thigh, and tore more skin from her wrists as she strained toward the lowering ramp. Through the narrowing opening, she watched smoke close over Jungkook until there was nothing left of him she could see.

The ramp sealed, and the locking mechanism shuddered through the compartment with a heavy, final sound.

Audrey found herself inside another cage.

The realization struck all at once: the sealed walls, the restraints, the soldiers who did not react to insults or fear, and Jungkook disappearing behind smoke while she was taken somewhere she had never agreed to go. For several seconds, she fought without purpose, throwing her weight against the cuffs because movement was easier than understanding what had happened.

She stopped screaming only when she ran out of breath. Then she lowered her eyes to the lock.

Survival returned before grief had time to settle. It always did. She tested how far the chain extended, watched which soldier paid attention to her hands, and learned whether the restraint tightened under steady pressure or sudden force. She noted the way the transport shifted beneath them and how often its movement forced the guards to adjust their footing.

She did not have a plan, but that had never prevented her from believing one would come.

The Purifier waited until the transport had disappeared into the burning sky. Only then did he rise and cross the crater.

Heat closed around his armor the moment he entered the light. He ignored it, bent over Jungkook, and hooked his hands beneath the Furyan’s arms. The body was heavier than it appeared, dense with muscle and bone, but the Purifier dragged him steadily toward a narrow opening hidden behind a wall of fractured basalt. Jungkook’s boots cut two black trails through the ash.

Sunlight had already blistered the exposed skin across Jungkook’s face, neck, and hands. Some of the burns had split open beneath the heat, but by the time the Purifier dragged him into shadow, the damage had begun repairing itself. Torn flesh tightened along the edges, the blisters slowly flattened, and new skin formed beneath the ruined layers, leaving pale scars where the worst of the wounds had been.

The Purifier watched the healing in silence.

A strong Furyan, he thought. Noble blood.

The cave beyond the opening was shallow, though the stone inside remained cool. He dragged Jungkook farther from the entrance, away from the reach of the light, before lowering him carefully onto the ground and stepping back.

For several seconds, Jungkook lay motionless. Then his chest lifted with one shallow breath.

Outside, Crematoria burned brightly enough to erase every track leading into the cave.

Helion Prime turned slowly beneath the Armada, its wounded atmosphere still bruised by smoke, orbital debris, and the fading scars of the invasion. The Basilica held position above the planet while, nearer to the capital, a Conquest Icon hung against the curve of the world. It was immense enough to dominate every view from the city below without seeming large beside the planet itself—a black monument suspended over the conquered, built as weapon, memorial, and sermon. It commemorated the resistance Helion had offered and announced, with brutal clarity, what that resistance had earned.

Inside the Basilica, Taehyung’s elevation began before the assembled command and priesthood.

No one had replaced his armor. The same plates he had worn on Crematoria remained locked around him, scorched nearly white along one side by the planet’s gravity-driven heat and gouged across the chest where the Furyan blast had struck. Attendants had repaired the damaged seals, reinforced the joints, and replaced whatever threatened to fail, but they had left the visible ruin untouched. To polish away the burns would have been to erase the evidence that he had survived them.

Commanders stood in ordered ranks beneath the suspended nave of the Necropolis, each separated from the next by precisely the same distance. The Purifiers occupied the inner tier in their layered black robes, their silhouettes somewhere between priests and armored executioners. Behind them waited the handlers of the Quasi-Dead, doctrinal officers, and representatives of the converted houses whose wealth and privileges endured only because the Faith continued to find them useful.

Pia stood near the dais, watching.

Zhylaw approached with the Purifier Principal at his right hand. The arrangement was deliberate, and everyone present understood what it meant. This was not merely a promotion granted to a commander who had survived an impossible campaign. It changed who could direct fleets, who could speak in the councils convened after conquest, who could enter the sealed chambers where doctrine and military policy became indistinguishable. More dangerously, it brought Taehyung closer to the machinery of succession.

Zhylaw stopped in front of him and placed one hand upon the scorched plate covering his shoulder.

“A Purifier has fallen in due service,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the chamber. “A commander has returned bearing proof that the Campaign survives every hand raised against it.”

His gaze passed over the gathered ranks before settling again on Taehyung.

“Taehyung Kim, you are named First Among Commanders.”

There was no applause. Necromonger rank was acknowledged through obedience, not celebration. Every commander lowered his head. Some did so with genuine reverence. Others bowed while calculating what the elevation meant for their own positions.

Under the law of you keep what you kill, every step that brought Taehyung nearer to Zhylaw also made the space between them more dangerous.

Taehyung bowed. “My life remains in service to the Campaign.”

“See that it remains useful.”

Something shifted behind Taehyung’s eyes, so briefly that anyone less attentive might have mistaken it for pride. Pia knew better. It was colder than pride, closer to the slight adjustment of a hand around the grip of a blade. He accepted the praise, measured its value, and put it away.

“Convoke the others,” Zhylaw said, already turning from him. His attention moved on with the same ruthless efficiency he brought to conquered worlds. “This is a day of days.”

An aide bowed and departed immediately.

Zhylaw continued toward the upper passage, his cloak whispering across the polished stone. Officers fell in behind him without hesitation, the rigid formation around the dais dissolving only to reform at his back like smoke drawn toward a flame.

Taehyung remained where he was.

Light moved slowly across the obsidian floor beneath his boots. Incense continued to burn in the iron vessels lining the nave, bitter enough to coat the back of the throat. Through the high viewing apertures, the Conquest Icon remained suspended above Helion, its dark shape motionless against the glow of the planet.

Taehyung was no longer looking at it. His thoughts had gone elsewhere.

Pia crossed the chamber toward him, her steps measured and nearly silent. The vast interior of the Basilica seemed to swallow sound before it could travel, but she had always understood how to move through silence without appearing diminished by it. She stopped beside him and leaned close enough that he could not pretend she was merely passing.

“You should look pleased,” she murmured.

“I am honored.”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

Taehyung watched the last of Zhylaw’s retinue disappear into the passage above. “I didn’t see Jungkook die.”

Pia’s expression did not change.

Taehyung drew a slow breath through his nose, his control too deliberate to be mistaken for calm. “He didn’t move like anyone I’ve fought before. He killed half my unit before the blast even reached us.”

Pia stepped behind him. She came close enough that the warmth of her body reached him through the damaged armor, close enough that he became aware of the quiet rhythm of her breathing. Her fingers brushed the edge of his breastplate and followed the gouge in the metal with deliberate familiarity.

“If you say he died,” she said, “then he died. The Campaign has already declared it.”

She let the words settle before adding, more softly, “Hasn’t it?”

Taehyung turned his head and met her gaze. Whatever uncertainty had been there moments earlier was gone, pressed down behind the hard stillness of his face.

“It has.”

They began walking toward the lower passage together.

“This is what I saw in you,” Pia said. “From the beginning. I knew you would reach this place.”

At the foot of the steps, she caught him lightly at the back of his armor and stopped him. The gesture would have seemed intimate to anyone watching, but there was calculation even in the pressure of her fingers. She leaned forward and brushed her lips against his.

“Now,” she whispered against his mouth, “celebrate your greatness.”

A faint smile touched her lips as she drew back. Makani’s influence had entered his language without his noticing, but Pia had noticed. Pia noticed everything that might one day become useful.

“You brought someone back from Crematoria,” she said. “The young breeder.”

Taehyung gave no answer.

Pia studied him with an interest she did not entirely manage to hide. “You want to question her before they begin.”

“I want to know whether she carries information about the Furyan.”

Taehyung left without inviting Pia to follow and did not look back to see whether she did. By the time he reached the detainment wing, he was alone.

Audrey’s cell was cleaner than anything she had seen on Crematoria, though there was nothing comforting about it. The spotless metal walls and cold, unwavering light made the room feel less like a prison than a place where people were brought to be cut open. There was nowhere for dirt to collect and no shadow deep enough to soften the edges, so every bruise showed against her skin, along with the burns on her arms, the split flesh around her wrists, and the dried blood the attendants had missed when they stripped her, washed her, and forced her into a dark intake tunic. A Necromonger seal had been pressed into the fabric near her shoulder. She had tried to tear it off before they finished locking her inside, wrenching at the cloth until her fingers cramped, but the material only stretched and settled back into place.

After that, she tested the cell itself. The door had no visible hinges and no mechanical seam she could reach. The wall panels were fitted too closely for her fingernails, and the vent above the bench was narrow enough to stop her arm at the elbow, though she kept forcing it inside until the skin peeled from her knuckles. She pressed her palm against the containment field covering the doorway and held it there while the current numbed her hand to the wrist, teeth clenched as she searched for some weakness in the charge. There was none. When that failed, she crawled beneath the bench and wedged her fingers under the metal lip where it had been bolted to the floor. She pulled until the wound around her wrist split open again and blood ran between her fingers, but the bench refused to move. A warning charge snapped through the frame and threw her backward hard enough to empty her lungs.

She lay on the floor with her mouth open, unable to breathe, while the room tipped slowly around her. When air finally returned, it came in a ragged scrape that burned all the way down. Audrey rolled onto her side, waited only long enough for her arms to stop shaking, and pushed herself upright to try again.

The cell door opened while she was standing on the bench, examining the ceiling panel for the third time.

Audrey dropped to the floor and turned toward the doorway. One wrist was bleeding, and the fingers of her other hand still twitched from the electrical charge, but she planted her bare feet and lowered her weight, ready before Taehyung had fully stepped inside.

He entered alone. The corridor behind him appeared empty, though Audrey knew it was not. She could feel the soldiers waiting beyond the threshold in the unnatural silence, in the complete absence of whispering, shifting armor, or restless movement. Necromongers did not fidget. They stood still until they were needed.

Audrey attacked before the door finished closing.

She crossed the cell fast and reached for the exposed skin above his collar. Taehyung caught her wrist, but she had expected him to, and drove her knee into his side while twisting toward the knife at his belt. Her knee struck armor. Before she could recover, his forearm slammed across her chest and sent her into the wall. The impact jarred her teeth, but she pushed away from the metal almost as soon as she hit it and came at him again.

This time, Taehyung caught her by the throat.

He lifted her until her feet left the floor and drove her back against the wall hard enough to blur her vision. Audrey clawed at his wrist, kicked at his knees, and tried to hook one heel behind his leg, but Taehyung only tightened his grip until her breath stopped. She kept fighting anyway, even as the strength began to leave her legs and darkness gathered at the edges of her sight.

His face remained still throughout it. There was no anger in him, no strain, and no satisfaction. He watched her with the cold, practical attention of a man restraining an animal that might still bite.

He held her there until her kicks weakened and her hands began to slip from his wrist. Only then did he release her.

Audrey dropped to one knee and caught herself against the floor, choking as air tore back into her lungs. She barely had time to drag in a second breath before Taehyung seized the back of her tunic, forced her over the bench, and pinned one arm behind her. Audrey snarled and twisted beneath him, trying to throw her weight sideways, but he pushed the arm higher until pain burned through her shoulder and down into her chest.

“Move again,” he said, “and it breaks.”

His voice was flat, stripped of anger or warning. He did not need to threaten her; they both knew he would break the arm if she forced him to.

Audrey went still beneath him, though every muscle remained tense. Taehyung kept her pinned until her breathing slowed and the struggle in her body changed from blind resistance into something controlled. Only then did he release her. He stepped back without haste, secure in the knowledge that she had never come close to overpowering him, while Audrey rolled away from the bench and rose into a crouch with her injured arm held tightly against her side.

“You finished?” he asked.

“Not even close.”

His gaze moved briefly to the blood running over her fingers before returning to her face. Whether the answer pleased him or merely confirmed what he had already decided, Audrey could not tell.

“The Furyan is dead.”

“You left your priest behind to make sure,” she said. “He could be lying.”

“I’m certain the breeder is dead.”

His voice hardened around the final word, and Audrey felt her anger rise to meet it. She wanted him to argue. She wanted him to give her something definite enough to strike at, something solid enough to hate, but his certainty was cold and impersonal, untouched by what Jungkook’s death meant to her.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

Taehyung studied her again, taking in the torn skin around her wrists, the blood on her hand, and the way she still kept her weight forward despite the pain in her shoulder. “To see whether you were worth taking.”

Her mouth twisted. “Fuck you.”

“Emotional,” he said. “Wasteful. Too eager.”

Audrey lunged before he finished speaking, but Taehyung struck her across the face with a single economical movement that sent her hard to the floor. He neither hesitated before the blow nor showed any satisfaction afterward. He simply watched her brace her palms against the metal and force herself upright again, her arms trembling beneath her weight.

“But you continue,” he said. “That has value.”

Audrey spat blood beside his boots and looked up at him through the hair that had fallen across her face. “You dragged me off that planet because you need another soldier?”

“The Campaign always has need of soldiers.”

“I’m not one of yours.”

“Not yet.”

Taehyung turned toward the door as though the matter had already been settled. Audrey caught the edge of the bench and pulled herself to her feet, keeping one hand braced against it until the room steadied around her.

“I’ll kill you before that happens.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Then you’ll have to improve.”

The door opened, dividing the wall to reveal the pale corridor beyond. Taehyung had nearly crossed the threshold when Audrey heard herself call after him.

“Wait.”

He stopped but did not turn all the way around.

Audrey hated that she had called him back. She hated the weakness she could hear in her own voice and the small, desperate part of herself that needed an answer from him because there was no one else left to give her one.

“Did he die before the sun reached him?”

Taehyung studied her without sympathy, though there was no deliberate cruelty in his expression either. Whatever he saw in her face failed to move him.

“I didn’t remain to watch.”

He stepped into the corridor, and the door sealed behind him.

Audrey remained beneath the cold white light, staring at the blank wall where Taehyung had disappeared. The silence settled over the cell again, so complete that she could hear her own breathing and the faint rush of blood in her ears. She stood there until the pressure of it became unbearable, then turned and drove her fist into the wall. Pain tore through her swollen knuckles, but she struck the metal again, harder this time, and by the third blow blood had smeared across the spotless surface.

Taehyung had not remained to watch. That meant Jungkook might still be alive. He might have found shelter before the sunlight reached him, killed the priest, stolen a ship, or managed one of the impossible escapes that had always seemed to come naturally to him. It also meant he might have died alone while she was dragged aboard the Necromonger vessel.

Audrey tried to hold on to the first possibility, but the second kept forcing its way beneath it until she could see the rock as clearly as though she had never left. Jungkook lay where he had fallen, too badly injured to move, while the sunlight crept steadily toward him and the soldiers carried her farther away. She had fought them. She had kicked, bitten, and clawed until it took three soldiers to lift her from the ground, but none of it changed what had happened. They had carried her away alive, still breathing and cursing, while Jungkook remained behind.

Whether he had survived or not, she had left him there.

The strength went out of her legs, and Audrey slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. She drew her knees against her chest despite the pain the position sent through her ribs and stayed folded there beneath the merciless light, her jaw clenched and her eyes fixed on the blood drying across her knuckles. She did not cry. She had spent too much of her life learning how not to.

The grief stayed inside her instead, hard and airless, lodged behind her ribs with everything else she had never managed to bury properly. Her mother, her father, her grandmother, the Rykengolls and the things they had done, Y/N, Jungkook—each name brought back a room, a smell, a voice, or a hand she had failed to hold on to. Audrey pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes until sparks burst through the darkness. She wanted it all to stop.

She did not know how much time passed before the door opened again.

Three people entered, none of them wearing armor. The first was a Purifier, his narrow body wrapped in layered black cloth with strips of metal scripture hanging against his chest. His skin was so pale it looked gray beneath the white light, and faint veins showed through at his temples. A woman followed close behind him, tall and almost painfully thin, her head shaved except for a dark strip of hair running from her forehead to the base of her skull. The skin around her eyes had the same bloodless cast as the Purifier’s. The last was a male attendant carrying a restraint harness in one hand and a sealed metal case in the other.

Taehyung did not return.

Audrey pushed herself to her feet. Her legs had stiffened while she sat against the wall, but she kept that from showing as the Purifier looked past her to the blood smeared across the metal.

“You injured yourself.”

Audrey glanced at his pale face. “You people always this observant?”

The woman moved closer, her steps smooth and measured but unnaturally restrained. She did not carry herself like someone calm so much as someone in whom strong reactions no longer rose easily.

“What are you called?” she asked.

“Audrey.”

The Purifier motioned to the attendant. The restraint harness unfolded in his hands with a soft metallic click, and Audrey shifted her weight, planting her feet more firmly beneath her.

“Put that on me and lose the hand.”

The Purifier glanced at the blood drying across her knuckles. “You mistake this for a negotiation.”

The attendant stepped forward, but Audrey struck before he could touch her. Her fist caught him across the mouth, and she seized the front of his tunic as he reeled, driving her knee into his stomach. When he folded around the blow, she reached for the short weapon at his side.

The woman caught Audrey by the hair and yanked her backward. Audrey twisted with the pull and drove an elbow into her ribs, hard enough to force a grunt from her, but not enough to break her grip. The Purifier did not move to help. He simply raised one hand and touched two fingers to the control at his wrist, sending the containment field snapping across Audrey’s spine.

Every muscle in her body locked at once. She hit the floor facedown before she could brace herself, the current still tearing through her as the attendant dragged one arm behind her and fastened the first restraint around her wrist. Audrey kicked blindly and caught him in the thigh, but the woman dropped a knee between her shoulders and forced her chest flat against the metal.

Audrey turned her face just far enough to breathe. “Get off me.”

The woman leaned closer, her voice quiet and nearly without feeling. “I said the same thing.”

For half a breath, Audrey stopped struggling. It was all the attendant needed to secure the second restraint around her wrist.

The woman lifted her weight from Audrey’s back, and Audrey rolled immediately, lashing out with one leg. The kick never reached her. The Purifier activated the harness, and the restraints tightened at once, dragging Audrey’s arms hard against her sides until the metal locked them there. She twisted against it anyway, straining until pain pulled through her shoulders, but the harness did not give.

“You can continue,” the Purifier said. “It will change nothing.”

“Then come closer and find out.”

He crouched just beyond the reach of her legs and watched her fight the restraints without any sign of concern. “You’re in pain.”

Audrey let out a breathless laugh. “You needed a priest to figure that out?”

“Not the pain in your body.”

The woman remained standing over her, looking down with the same distant calm. “I remember my own conversion.”

Audrey looked up at her more closely. There was something wrong with the woman’s eyes. They were alert and focused, but whatever had once lived behind them seemed to have withdrawn somewhere far away. Her skin had the same gray-white cast as the Purifier’s, and faint marks disappeared beneath the line of her jaw. When Audrey’s attention settled on them, the woman touched one with two fingers.

“I fought until they broke my arm,” she said.

“Should’ve fought harder.”

“Perhaps.”

There was no anger in the answer, no offense or wounded pride, and Audrey despised her for it. The Purifier opened the metal case beside them, revealing several narrow instruments, a vial filled with dark liquid, and a strip of worked metal shaped into the Necromonger sigil. The sight of it tightened something low in Audrey’s stomach before she could stop the reaction.

The woman noticed. “The fear remains at first.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I remember saying that as well.”

Audrey glared up at her. “Do all of you talk like corpses?”

The woman appeared to consider the question rather than take offense. “Afterward, voices from before sound very loud.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you still carry everything at its original weight.”

Audrey stared at her while the Purifier removed the dark vial from the case and held it beneath the light.

“Conversion changes the body,” he said. “The blood cools, and the senses alter. Hunger, fear, grief, desire—everything becomes quieter.”

“Dead, you mean.”

“No,” The woman turned her head toward the sealed door as though listening to something beyond it. “Distant.”

The word carried more feeling than anything else the woman had said, though her expression remained unchanged. Watching her, Audrey began to understand that the stillness was not emptiness so much as distance, as though the woman were speaking about a life that belonged to someone she had once known.

“My home was near an inland sea,” she continued. “There was white stone everywhere, and red flowers grew along the walls. I remember that I had a sister.”

Audrey frowned. “You remember or you don’t?”

“I remember the facts.” Something small moved across the woman’s face and disappeared before Audrey could identify it. “I do not remember why losing them once made me unable to breathe.”

Audrey went still, and the Purifier watched as the meaning settled over her.

“That’s what you do?” she asked. “You cut pieces out until nothing hurts?”

“We remove nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“The memories remain,” the Purifier said. “They simply cease to govern the flesh.”

Audrey pulled against the harness, and the metal cinched tighter around her wrists. “So I remember everybody, but I stop giving a shit.”

The woman tilted her head slightly. “The words you use now will no longer fit afterward.”

“You loved your sister?”

“I believe I did.”

Disgust twisted Audrey’s face.

“I remember her hand in mine. I remember hiding beneath her bed during a bombardment, and I remember killing the man who struck her.” The woman paused, though whether she was searching for the memory or merely arranging the words, Audrey could not tell. “Those memories belong to me. The pain does not.”

Something cold shifted in Audrey’s stomach. The thought should have horrified her, and it did, but beneath the revulsion was something else she did not want to examine too closely. It sounded like sleep—real sleep, without dreams or sudden violence. No waking with her hands around someone’s throat because a door had opened too quietly, no hearing her mother’s voice whenever she smelled rain, no seeing Jungkook beneath the advancing sunlight every time she closed her eyes. The possibility entered before she could stop it, quiet and treacherous.

The Purifier rose. “Who you were before conversion does not vanish. That life becomes remote, like a place seen across a great distance.”

“And what’s left?”

“Purpose.”

Audrey laughed, though the sound came out thin. “You mean orders.”

“Orders are simple. Purpose is not.”

“Same shit with better clothes.”

The Purifier showed no reaction. “The Campaign does not mourn what it survives.”

Audrey’s expression hardened. “Then the Campaign never gave a damn about anything.”

The woman lowered herself into a crouch beside her. Up close, Audrey could see the unnatural pallor beneath her skin and the faint dark vessels around her eyes.

“I gave a damn about too much,” she said, and the near absence of emotion in her voice made the words worse. “I spent years carrying people who were already dead. My mother. My sister. A man I followed through three campaigns because he once promised to take me home. Every choice I made belonged to one of them.”

Audrey said nothing.

“The dead never released me,” the woman continued. “Conversion did.”

“You mean you forgot them.”

“No.” The woman raised one pale hand and studied it with the same distant attention she might have given an object belonging to someone else. “I can still see my sister’s face. I simply cannot feel her dying.”

Audrey swallowed before she could stop herself, and the Purifier noticed.

“What do you feel?” he asked.

“Fuck you.”

“What do you feel when you remember the Furyan?”

Audrey strained against the harness before she realized she had moved, and the restraints tightened around her arms while the woman watched with that same bloodless calm.

“Don’t say his name,” Audrey warned.

“Your body has already answered,” the Purifier said, his voice still low and even. “Your heart accelerates, your breath shortens, and your muscles prepare to fight an event that has already ended.”

“He’s not dead.”

“Then why does the possibility feel like death?”

Audrey threw herself toward him. The harness snapped tight and dragged her back before she crossed half the distance, metal biting into her wrists as the wounds beneath the restraints tore open again. The Purifier did not flinch.

“He left me.”

The words escaped in a broken rush of breath, and the room went quiet around them. Audrey stared at the floor, hating the admission as soon as she heard it outside herself.

“He didn’t mean to,” she said quickly. “He didn’t choose it.”

No one answered.

“He came back for me before.” She shook her head hard, as though the movement might dislodge the images crowding into it. “He always came back.”

Her voice broke on the final word. The Purifier allowed the silence to remain, offering none of the lies living people used when they wanted grief made quieter for their own comfort. He did not tell her Jungkook was somewhere better, that pain was sacred, or that suffering proved love.

“He may remain with you for the rest of your life,” he said at last.

Audrey looked up.

“Every time you sleep, every time someone else leaves, every time you begin to care for another person and remember what caring costs.” Her breathing turned shallow as he continued. “Or he can become a memory.”

“He already is.”

“No. He is a wound.”

Audrey looked away because that was the word for it. She had kept treating Jungkook like someone she might still save, because accepting anything else meant allowing the wound to close around him. If it ever did—if she could one day remember him without feeling as though something inside her were being torn open—she did not know what that would make her.

The woman reached toward her, but Audrey jerked away before she could make contact. She stopped without offense and let her hand fall. “After conversion, you will still remember that you loved him. You simply will not feel as though you died with him.”

Audrey’s eyes burned. She wanted to spit in the woman’s face and keep fighting until the restraints cut through flesh and struck bone, but instead, to her own disgust, she heard herself ask, “How long?”

“The conversion begins at once,” the Purifier said. “The body continues changing afterward. Your skin will pale, your eyes may darken, and everything in your mind will grow quieter.”

Audrey absorbed that in silence before looking back at the woman. “Are you happy?”

The woman seemed to search through the question rather than react to it. “At times.”

Audrey let out a short, disbelieving breath, and the woman continued before she could dismiss the answer.

“Happiness mattered more before. So did sorrow and fear. Everything was sharp then. Everything entered me and stayed.”

The answer sounded too clean, and Audrey knew it could not be the whole truth. The woman had not chosen the stillness in her face or the bloodless pallor of her skin. Something had been taken from her, whether the Necromongers admitted it or not.

But Audrey was tired of sharp things. She was tired of every memory entering her like a knife and finding all the old wounds waiting beneath it.

The Purifier loosened the harness enough for her to sit upright. Audrey drew herself up slowly, her hands closed around the restraint straps as though gripping them might keep the rest of her from coming apart.

“Taehyung thinks I’ll fight for you.”

“He believes you could become useful.”

Audrey looked toward the open case and the instruments arranged inside it. “What happens if I say no?”

“You’ll die.”

The bluntness of the answer should have angered her, but instead she found herself appreciating the honesty more than she wanted to. There was no promise that she would be released, no attempt to disguise captivity as choice. Only death or whatever waited on the other side of conversion.

She thought of Jungkook, though not of the man lying helpless beneath the advancing sunlight. She remembered the one who had found her after years apart and looked at her as though the child he had known still existed somewhere inside what she had become. From there, her thoughts drifted to Namjoon’s house in New Mecca—the food left covered for her, the place kept open at the table, the questions she had mistaken for chains because no one had ever taught her the difference between being watched and being cared for.

All of it hurt, even the good memories. Especially the good ones.

Audrey lowered her head. “I’ll still remember them afterward?”

The woman answered more quietly. “It will feel as though it happened to someone you once were.”

Audrey closed her eyes. The thought frightened her, but the relief that came with it frightened her more. She did not want to lose Jungkook. She only wanted to stop losing him again every minute she remained awake.

“What do I have to do?”

The attendant lifted the harness, checking the restraints before taking hold of the chain attached to it.

“You endure,” the Purifier said.

Audrey gave a tired, humorless laugh. “That all?”

“It is what you do best.”

They brought Audrey to the Conversion Hall in restraints, and she walked because the only alternative was allowing them to carry her. The chamber lay deep within the Basilica, far below the inhabited tiers, where its circular walls rose so high that their upper reaches disappeared into darkness. Shafts of white light fell through the incense smoke, catching on black armor, carved bone, and narrow strips of scripture embedded in the stone.

Converted clerics stood around the outer ring, every face pale beneath the descending light. Some had gray-white skin drawn tightly over the bones, while others bore dark lines beneath the jaw or along the temples where the body had been opened and remade. None of them looked entirely well, or entirely alive in any way Audrey understood the word. She searched their faces for fear and found little, and even less grief. They watched her with the cold patience of people who remembered terror but no longer felt any obligation to share it.

At the center of the chamber stood a metal table encircled by black stone. The moment Audrey saw it, she stopped, and the restraint chain pulled taut between her and the attendant.

“No.”

The attendant made no attempt to force Audrey forward. Instead, the Purifier crossed the chamber and took his place beside the metal table, his expression unchanged.

“The body must die before it can be corrected.”

“I’m not lying on that.”

“You will.”

Audrey tightened her grip on the restraint chain. “Come make me.”

“They will.”

The voice came from behind her, cold enough that she recognized it before she turned. Taehyung stood at the entrance in full armor, his face as unreadable as it had been in the cell.

“Here to watch?” she asked. “Still think I’m worth it?”

His gaze passed over the restraints and the blood dried around her wrists. “If you survive.”

Cold bastard. That sounded more like him.

Audrey tore the chain from the attendant’s hand and charged. She managed two steps before Taehyung intercepted her, driving a fist into her stomach hard enough to fold her in half. He caught the back of her neck before she could fall, turned with her momentum, and slammed her onto the metal table so hard that the instruments laid out beside it jumped against their trays.

She kicked and twisted while the attendants closed in, but Taehyung forced one arm flat against the table and held it there until they secured the restraint around her wrist. When Audrey snapped at his hand, he caught her jaw instead and drove the back of her head against the metal. White light burst across her vision.

“Lie still,” he said.

“Go to hell.”

His fingers tightened until pain spread through her jaw and into the side of her face. “You mistake defiance for strength.”

“And you mistake that armor for a personality.”

Taehyung’s grip tightened again, and Audrey smiled through the pain. There he was—not angry, exactly, but closer than before.

The last restraint locked across her chest, pinning her to the table. Taehyung released her only after the attendants had secured her legs, then stepped back while she tested every fastening she could reach. The metal held. Nothing shifted, and the harder she fought it, the more brutally the restraints bit into the wounds at her wrists.

The Purifier moved into view above her with the dark vial held between his fingers. “Once begun, conversion cannot be reversed.”

“Good sales pitch.”

“You asked for the pain to end.”

Audrey turned her head toward Taehyung. He stood beyond the ring of black stone with his hands clasped behind his back, watching her as though she were a weapon undergoing inspection before service. He had promised her nothing. The others had promised distance, and at that moment, distance was enough.

The Purifier pressed an instrument against the side of her neck. Cold entered first, sharp enough to steal her breath, and then the cold became fire.

Audrey screamed as her back arched against the restraints. The chamber fractured into white light and black shapes while something spread beneath her skin from the injection point, racing through her in burning lines. Around the table, the clerics began to speak—not her name and not words of comfort, but doctrine recited in one low, unbroken voice.

Life is the threshold. Pain is the tether. What was before must recede.

Audrey fought until the skin at her wrists tore open completely and blood ran beneath her hands. She barely felt the attendants tighten the restraints before the Purifier opened the flesh beneath her collarbone. The blade registered as a line of heat, followed by the deeper pressure of the metal sigil entering the wound.

Agony tore through her chest. She screamed again, louder this time, and something inside the sound broke loose.

The memories came all at once—her mother’s hands, her grandmother’s voice, chains cutting into her skin, the white room, Y/N turning back, Jungkook lying beneath three suns. They collided inside her until she could no longer tell which pain belonged to which face or which loss she was being forced to live through again.

The woman from the cell appeared beside the table and placed one pale hand against Audrey’s temple. “It will pass.”

Audrey tried to wrench her head away, but the restraint beneath her neck held her fast. “It doesn’t,” she gasped. “Nothing fucking passes.”

“This will.” The woman’s face blurred above her, pale and distant through the shifting light. “Hold the memory. Release the pain.”

“Don’t tell me to let him go.”

The cold continued spreading through her, sinking deeper until even her heartbeat began to slow. The terror remained, but its edges were softening, and the room seemed to draw away from her. Even the agony in her chest was changing, becoming something she could observe rather than something that consumed every part of her.

“Jungkook,” she said.

The name sounded strange—not meaningless, only distant, as though someone had spoken it from the far end of a long corridor. She could still see his face clearly: the goggles, the shaved head, the faint curve at one corner of his mouth whenever something amused him more than he wanted to admit. The sight should have torn through her. Instead, it hurt less than it had only moments before.

Panic surged through Audrey. “No.”

She strained against the restraints, but the movement felt slow and disconnected from the fear driving it. “No, bring it back.”

The woman kept her hand against Audrey’s temple. “You asked for release.”

“I didn’t ask to stop—”

The sentence slipped away before she could finish it. Stop what? Caring, hurting, remembering? The differences between them had seemed important before, but now she could no longer hold them apart.

“The former self recedes,” the Purifier said above her.

Audrey searched for anger and found it, though it no longer filled her entire body. What had once been a fire had collapsed into a single coal, still hot but contained. Taehyung remained at the edge of her vision, all cold armor and colder eyes, a man who had looked at her and seen only the soldier she might become. She still wanted to kill him. The thought had not vanished. It simply no longer felt urgent.

That frightened her enough to make her fight once more, but the fear weakened almost as quickly as it rose. Her body was already changing. She could feel her heart settling into a slower rhythm as the heat drained from her skin, while the voices around her deepened and blurred together until the hall seemed to breathe as one enormous creature.

Her mother’s face appeared next. Audrey remembered its shape and the feeling of being held, but the familiar ache did not follow. Then came her father, her grandmother, Y/N, and Jungkook. Every one of them remained inside her, recognizable and intact, yet none could reach her as they had before. Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes and disappeared into her hair, and although she felt them moving across her skin, she no longer understood why her body continued to make them.

The woman wiped one away.

“Who are you?” Audrey whispered.

“I no longer use the name I had before,” she replied. “You may call me Jaci.”

The Purifier removed the sigil, and the attendants closed the wound before wrapping dark cloth around Audrey’s chest and shoulders. By the time they released the restraints, she no longer recoiled from their hands.

Her body felt heavy and unfamiliar, as though she had awakened inside a form that had been subtly rearranged while she slept. The hall, however, had become unnaturally clear. She could hear fabric shifting several rows away and distinguish incense from metal, old blood, and the faint mineral scent beneath the clerics’ skin.

Taehyung approached the table and studied her eyes, her breathing, and the stillness that had replaced the constant readiness in her limbs. “Can you stand?”

Audrey considered the question before answering. “Yes.”

Her voice sounded lower.

Taehyung offered no hand. The attendants helped her sit, and when her bare feet touched the cold floor, Jaci remained nearby, watching without concern.

“I remember him,” Audrey said.

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Not as it did.”

Audrey searched inside herself and found Jungkook still there, though he had moved far away. She could see him leaving New Mecca and returning for her on Crematoria. She remembered the weight of his hand dragging her upright, but the memories seemed to belong to another Audrey now—a younger, more desperate girl who had spent her life chasing people who could not stay. Something that might once have become grief began to rise, but it faded before it could take hold.

The Purifier stepped in front of her. “What stands?”

Audrey looked around the hall at the pale faces watching her, people whose former lives had receded into the same haze now gathering over hers. They had once loved, mourned, and feared with enough force to break themselves. Now they simply stood.

She understood the appeal. It was not happiness or peace.

It was silence.

“A convert,” she said.

The clerics bowed their heads, and Taehyung turned away without praise or welcome.

“To the training tiers,” he told the attendants. “Assess her when the changes stabilize.”

That was all. He made no claim that she had become important to him and offered no recognition beyond her possible usefulness. Audrey watched him leave and realized that, once, his indifference would have enraged her. Now she considered the blade at his side, the weaknesses in the joints of his armor, and how much discipline she would need before she could defeat him.

The thought was clean. Useful.

An attendant placed a dark cloak around her shoulders, and against her newly pale skin, the cloth made her hands appear almost bloodless. Audrey studied them. They did not look like the hands that had clawed at Crematoria’s stone trying to reach Jungkook, or the ones that had stolen food, picked locks, broken noses, and clung to people long after they were already gone.

Those hands belonged to someone she remembered—someone exhausted, desperate, and in pain. Audrey could still see her clearly. She simply no longer felt trapped inside her.

When the clerics opened their formation, Audrey stepped among them. No one welcomed her aloud, but they did not need to. Their stillness made room for her, and for the first time she could remember, Audrey entered a place without wondering how much it would hurt when she lost it.

The girl she had been would have called that monstrous.

Audrey remembered thinking so, but the thought no longer troubled her.

Jungkook wasn’t sure when the noise stopped. Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe the roar, the screaming, and the tearing heat were still ripping through the world, rolling on without end like a storm that did not understand how to finish. Maybe he had simply sunk beneath it, the way a body slips under water when the surface becomes unbearable. One moment he had been on the runway with ash in his lungs and fire in his hair, the air splitting apart as though the planet itself were tearing loose its final breath. The next, everything had dimmed, then gone dark, and at last cool.

It was quiet too, or quiet enough to feel like mercy.

Pain returned in pieces, scattered and cruel, as though his body were trying to reassemble itself from wreckage without instructions. It lived deep in places he had not known could hurt, inside bone and behind muscle, dull and constant and impossible to reason with. His skin felt burned raw, hypersensitive, as if whatever he had dragged up from somewhere primal had scorched him from the inside and left the damage buried beneath the surface. Every breath scraped. Every swallow tasted of metal. Every attempt to move felt borrowed from someone stronger, someone whose body had not nearly been sacrificed at the edge of extinction.

Something tugged at him.

At first, it registered only as sensation: pressure beneath his shoulders, the steady pull of his body across the ground, the rough shift of metal under his weight. Jungkook tried to tense, to resist, but his body answered like a broken instrument. Whatever strength he had possessed, he had spent it back on the runway with the fire and the screaming. Even so, the grip on him was not rough. Whoever had hold of him did not yank or wrench or treat him like debris.

It was careful. Almost considerate.

That alone set his nerves humming.

Jungkook forced his eyes open through the haze. The ceiling swam into view above him, metal ribs and hanging cables smeared into bands of shadow and pale light, as if the world had been sketched in a hurry and abandoned halfway through. He blinked hard and tried again. This time, the figure leaning over him came into focus: a man in blackened armor, the plates dulled by soot and heat, their edges scuffed and pitted. Etched sigils caught the light like scars that had somehow learned to shine.

The Purifier’s face was calm in a way that felt obscene against the backdrop of Crematoria. It was the kind of calm that did not belong anywhere near a world built to burn. The inferno beyond the hangar doors might as well have been a rumor for all the effect it had on him, distant and abstract, as though the planet had not spent the last several hours trying to consume everything that touched its surface. There was no triumph in his expression, no strain and no fading trace of battle. Only presence, solid and unmoved, as if destruction passed around him rather than through him.

“You’re heavier than you look,” the Purifier muttered as he shifted his grip and hauled Jungkook the last few steps.

The words were so ordinary, so casually human, that Jungkook’s thoughts stumbled over them. His chest hitched sharply, and a dry, cracked cough tore from his throat like rusted metal dragged across stone. When he managed to speak, his voice came out just as raw, scraped down to the bone and threaded with ash and disbelief.

“You’re not dead.”

The Purifier made a low sound that might once have been a laugh in another life. Here, it sounded more like acknowledgment, irony accepted without comment.

“Neither are you,” he said. After a pause that seemed to carry the weight of the universe’s poor sense of humor, he added almost thoughtfully, “You should be.”

He guided Jungkook into the curved shadow of the hangar wall and lowered him with a care that felt almost insulting in its gentleness. Cool metal pressed against Jungkook’s spine, grounding him and pulling him back from the fever haze gathering at the edges of his vision. The heat inside the hangar remained brutal, but it was contained now, stagnant and heavy, thick with the smell of burned fuel and scorched stone. Beyond the open doors, the runway steamed where fire had passed over it. Bodies lay scattered in the harsh light, still smoldering, their outlines wavering as though the heat itself were trying to erase them from memory.

Jungkook lifted a trembling hand and wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of it, smearing dark red across his skin. The movement sent a sharp electric cry through his shoulder, and he swallowed against the taste of iron and smoke.

“Why’d you help me?”

The Purifier stepped back a few paces and sat opposite him, lowering himself with an ease that felt deeply wrong in a place like this. He rested his forearms on his knees, posture loose and almost casual, like two men sheltering from rain rather than survivors sitting among the dead. It was the same unsettling stillness he had carried in battle, the sense that violence flowed around him instead of through him, bending itself to accommodate his presence.

He did not answer immediately. His head tilted slightly, as though he were listening to the distant crackle of flame, the groan of cooling metal, and the planet’s long, wounded exhale as it tried to remember how to breathe.

“Because the man I was before all this would have helped you too,” he said at last.

He gestured vaguely, taking in the armor, the scripture carved into blackened steel, and the darkness that clung to him like something that had swallowed him whole but kept his shape.

Jungkook narrowed his eyes, pain sharpening his focus. “You saying there’s still a man under all that?”

The Purifier’s mouth curved slightly, though there was no mockery or pride in the expression. If anything, it looked sad.

“Once,” he said, “we were all something before we became Necromongers.” His gaze drifted beyond Jungkook, unfocused, as though it had settled on a horizon too distant for either of them to see. “Breeders. Thinkers. Dreamers. People with lives. People with names.”

He fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter. “I don’t remember mine anymore.”

The confession settled between them like ash after a fire had burned itself out. Something tightened in Jungkook’s chest that had nothing to do with broken ribs or scorched lungs. It felt like anger, though not entirely his own, the kind that rose on behalf of someone who could no longer summon it for himself.

“That’s the first thing they take,” the Purifier continued, as though he had heard the thought before Jungkook could shape it. His gloved fingers flexed once, slowly, then became still again. “Your name. The sound you answered to when someone loved you. The word that meant you belonged somewhere.”

Jungkook said nothing. The silence between them was not hostile, only heavy, like deep water when you realized you could not see the bottom. The Purifier seemed to withdraw into it, his voice losing the measured cadence of rank and doctrine as he turned toward a memory he had not visited in years.

“I remember waking on the slab with blood still wet on my hands.” His gaze dropped to his palms as though he could see through the gloves and armor to whatever remained beneath them. “I remember the conversions after that. The orders. The silence. I remember believing.”

Outside, the wind shifted through the wreckage with a low, restless sigh. Ash drifted past the open hangar doors in pale flakes and settled over scorched earth and twisted metal like snow falling from a dead sky. From a distance, the world might almost have looked peaceful, provided no one examined the ash too closely or asked what it had once been.

“Then I saw you fight today,” the Purifier said.

Something in his voice sharpened, not loudly, but with the precision of a man moving closer to a blade while knowing exactly how far he could go before it cut him. Jungkook raised his head, and dizziness rolled through him hard enough to bend the edges of the hangar. He forced himself to remain upright. He had learned long ago that weakness invited consequences, even when the body had nothing left to give.

“You used the Wrath,” the Purifier said. “Until today, I had only heard rumors.”

His eyes narrowed, and for the first time Jungkook saw something in them that came dangerously close to awe. The Purifier leaned forward with his forearms resting on his knees, lowering his voice as though the question might break beneath anything louder.

“You felt it, didn’t you?”

Jungkook’s mouth had gone dry. His throat burned with every breath, too raw for him to swallow properly, but denying it would have meant carrying a lie he did not have the strength to maintain. He nodded once.

“All of it.”

The Purifier studied him with an expression Jungkook could not easily name. There was pity in it, perhaps, for what the gift had already cost him and what it would continue to demand as long as he lived. There was reverence too, quiet and unspoken, for whatever the Wrath had preserved when the universe had tried so hard to erase it. Beneath both lay something more dangerous: recognition. It was the look of a man seeing in someone else the force that might unravel everything he had been broken and remade to become.

Ash drifted through the hangar and settled over scorched steel and shattered concrete, leaving the two of them suspended in a silence that felt like the space between one life and the next.

“You understand why you cannot face the Lord Marshal,” the Purifier said at last.

There was no command in his voice now, no ritual cadence or authority borrowed from scripture. He spoke plainly because there was no reason left to pretend.

Jungkook’s eyes hardened. Whatever weakness remained in them seemed to burn away beneath the force of his resolve, leaving something sharp and steady behind. “I have to.”

The Purifier shook his head once. “He’ll tear you apart.”

“Maybe.” The calm in Jungkook’s own voice surprised him. Pain still screamed through muscle and bone, constant and punishing, but it no longer controlled the shape of his thoughts. “Maybe not.”

The Purifier did not argue. He turned toward the hangar entrance, where a thin blade of sunlight had begun to creep across the floor. It moved inch by inch, patient and merciless, swallowing the shadows and setting warped metal aglow as though the world were being rewritten in fire.

“I was meant to give you a message if Taehyung failed to kill you,” he said after a while. His voice had gone neutral again, though not entirely distant. “It came from the Lord Marshal himself. Stay away from Helion. Stay away from him, and you will no longer be hunted.”

Jungkook’s jaw tightened, but before he could answer, the Purifier continued.

“Taehyung will likely report you dead. That gives you a chance to do what no man has managed before.”

Outside, Crematoria waited. Its sun was not a sunrise but a sentence, an executioner that never hurried, never relented, and never forgot its work. The light climbed the wall and spread farther into the hangar while heat followed behind it in slow, invisible waves, bending the air until the chamber shimmered like a mirage. Beyond the open doors, the planet burned with the same calm inevitability it always had, ready to erase whatever remained in its path.

“The Necromonger in me,” the Purifier said, almost conversationally, “warns you not to go back. It wants you to stay away from Helion, from the Lord Marshal, from all of us.”

He let the words settle before continuing.

“But the Furyan in me wants you not to listen.”

The advancing light touched the edge of his armor, glinting along the etched scripture and catching on the symbols that had once promised salvation.

“He hopes you won’t listen,” the Purifier added, quieter now, his voice thinning as though he were speaking only to himself. “God knows I’ve dreamed of it.”

He shifted his weight and began to stand. The movement was slow and deliberate, assembled with the care of a man who knew this might be the last time his body obeyed him.

“I can’t live with that contradiction anymore.”

Jungkook pressed both palms against the floor and tried to rise. Pain flared through him at once, hot and violent, tearing across ruined nerves and draining what little strength remained in his limbs. His arms shook, his vision swam, and he fell back against the wall with a sharp breath of frustration.

“Don’t.”

The word came quietly, but it carried the weight of everything he had not said and everything he still might have.

The Purifier turned his head. For the first time, his smile held no sadness and no regret. It was clean, unburdened, peaceful in a way Jungkook had not thought possible for someone wearing that armor.

“You still don’t understand,” he said gently. “Helping you is my last act of defiance.”

Then he turned away and stepped into the light.

The sun took him at once. Heat struck his armor with a shriek, metal hissing and buckling as doctrine and scripture met the simple, merciless truth of Crematoria’s fire. The plates warped, the seams flared white, and every prayer carved into the steel vanished within seconds, erased without ceremony while the flesh beneath blistered and split.

The air filled with the choking stench of burned metal and flesh, but the Purifier did not scream. He kept walking as though he were entering water, warmth, or something cleansing rather than cruel. One step became another, his outline blurring as the armor melted away and the distinction between man and flame disappeared with it. When the light finally swallowed him completely, nothing remained but a white-hot mark on the ground.

Jungkook stayed pressed into the deepest part of the shadow with his back against scorched metal, staring at the place where the Purifier had stood. The last traces of him dissolved into the shimmering air while heat rolled through the hangar in slow, oppressive waves, crawling over Jungkook’s skin and seeping into his lungs. Around him, the structure creaked as metal contracted and protested, a low, mournful sound that felt almost like breathing. Beyond the open doors, the planet continued its work without pause or malice, the sun climbing with the same steady patience it had shown for centuries.

Jungkook closed his eyes and let out a slow, measured breath, discipline holding the edges of him together even as something in his chest tightened sharply enough to steal space from his lungs. Grief came first, sudden and without ceremony, followed so closely by respect that he could not tell where one ended and the other began. Perhaps there was no difference. Perhaps they were simply two names for the same ache.

The image remained behind his closed eyes: a man walking into fire without hesitation while his armor screamed around him and his faith burned away faster than his flesh. It had not been surrender. It had been choice, defiance stripped down to its final and most irrevocable form.

Jungkook swallowed against the tightness in his throat and forced himself to remain grounded in the present. Whenever he reached for the future, it fractured into heat, darkness, violence, and loss. Every path seemed to end in something sharp, something that would demand more from him than he knew he had left to give.

Even so, one thing remained steady.

He would not turn away.

When Jungkook opened his eyes, the glare had dimmed just enough for him to look toward the scorched place where the Purifier had vanished. The white-hot wound in the floor was already beginning to fade. He pressed one hand against the wall and pushed himself upright, slowly enough to keep from blacking out, while pain flared through his ribs and shoulders in bright, familiar lines. He welcomed it. Pain meant he was still alive. Still capable of moving.

After one final look at the scorched ground, he turned toward the hangar doors and the heat beyond them.

Forward was the only direction left.

The conversion did not end when the instruments were removed. Audrey understood that before the wounds in her neck had even stopped bleeding.

Six candidates had entered the Conversion Hall, but only four emerged. One had been condemned after the Greater Quasi-Dead uncovered an old military oath buried beneath his recitations. Another had refused the final passage when the Purifier ordered her to place the Faith above the children she had left on Helion Prime. She had screamed their names until attendants carried her through a side door, and no one explained where either of them had been taken. The Purifier called both outcomes correction.

Audrey walked between the two remaining converts in a rough robe burned black around the hem, a mark of their low standing among the newly made. Until they completed their instruction, they ranked beneath established soldiers, clerics, attendants, and even servants who had already passed through the same rites. At her throat, the fresh spikes of the Mark pressed into swollen flesh, and the muscles beneath her jaw had stiffened until turning her head became difficult. Every step sent pain through her neck and shoulders, but the sensation arrived as though from somewhere beyond her body, delayed and strangely imprecise.

She knew she was hurting. She simply could no longer feel why it mattered.

That should have frightened her. Perhaps it did, for a moment. Something tightened low in her stomach, a brief remnant of alarm, but it faded before she could hold on to it and joined everything else in the same gray distance.

The Purifier led the procession while guards followed several paces behind. They were no longer escorting prisoners. The converts belonged to the Faith now, which meant military authority yielded, at least temporarily, to religious command. Audrey watched the Basilica as they passed through it, noting sealed archives, relay alcoves, guard stations, and service corridors concealed behind ceremonial walls. Some lifts were restricted by rank, others by doctrine, and several by both.

She noticed these things automatically. Once, memorizing exits had meant the difference between being trapped and getting free. The habit remained even though the panic that had created it no longer did. The Basilica was larger than any prison she had known, but it still followed patterns. Doors required power, systems required maintenance, and soldiers grew careless inside routine. Faith did not remove weaknesses. It only taught people not to call them that.

They entered the Lord Marshal’s audience chamber beneath the ancient stones of the Necropolis. Zhylaw waited before the dais rather than seated above it, with the Purifier Principal standing at his right, pale hands concealed inside the long sleeves of his black robes.

“Kneel,” the Principal ordered.

The converts lowered themselves in unison, and Audrey’s body followed before she had consciously decided to move. For an instant, the polished black floor beneath her knees turned gray. She saw another room, another set of restraints, another clean surface prepared to receive blood. She remembered being small enough for an adult hand to close around both of her wrists at once.

The memory remained perfectly clear. The terror did not.

That was worse.

Audrey waited for her pulse to quicken, for anger to rise or her muscles to prepare for violence, but nothing came. The girl she had been would have hated kneeling. This body seemed indifferent to it.

Zhylaw walked slowly before them. “You entered the rite burdened by names, bloodlines, loyalties, and false devotions. What was useful has been retained. What was corrupt has begun to recede.”

He stopped in front of the first convert. “What were you?”

“A defense officer of Helion, Lord Marshal,” the man replied, his voice flat.

“What are you?”

“A weapon of the Campaign.”

Zhylaw moved on. The woman beside Audrey had worked at a municipal water station and answered with the same immediate obedience, her face slack and her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the chamber.

When the Lord Marshal reached Audrey, the half-dead shape that existed slightly ahead of his body leaned closer. Its hollow gaze traveled over the wounds at her throat and seemed to pass through the back of her skull.

“What were you?”

The approved answer waited in her mind: nothing, no one, an error corrected by the Faith.

Instead, Audrey heard herself say, “A convict from Taurus One.”

The Purifier Principal glanced toward her, but Zhylaw did not appear displeased.

“Raise your head.”

Audrey looked up. At close range, the Lord Marshal did not resemble a madman. There was no feverish fanaticism in his expression, nothing wild enough to dismiss as insanity. His certainty was colder than that. He regarded cruelty the way another man might regard mathematics.

“You traveled with the Furyan.”

“Yes.”

The word moved painfully through the fresh wounds in her throat. It should have carried something with it: Jungkook’s face, Crematoria, the sunlight crossing the rock toward him. The images came clearly, but the grief did not follow. Audrey felt only a faint pressure behind her ribs, like a hand resting against a door that would no longer open.

Zhylaw studied her. “Commander Taehyung believes him dead. If he survived, what would he do?”

Audrey thought of Jungkook as she had known him: the way he moved when he understood he was being hunted, the patience beneath his silences, the ability to remain still until everyone around him began inventing explanations for his absence.

“He’d stay dead,” she said. “He’d wait until people stopped looking, until believing it made them careless.”

A slight change passed across Zhylaw’s face. Approval, perhaps.

“Then you understand why you will not be assigned with the others.”

Audrey held his gaze. The Campaign could not reproduce itself without conquest, and every living convert represented something useful—labor, military force, technical skill, or another body capable of producing future converts before the biological changes became complete. Waste was treated as sin whenever usefulness remained possible.

“You have combat instinct,” Zhylaw said. “Commander Taehyung judged it worth preserving.”

Preserving. Audrey lowered her eyes to her hands. They no longer resembled the ones she remembered. The veins beneath the skin had darkened, and the nails had taken on a blue cast near the beds.

“You will remain under Taehyung’s military authority,” Zhylaw continued. “The Purifier will retain authority over your instruction.”

Two masters. Once, the arrangement would have sharpened immediately into strategy. She would have begun measuring the distance between them, searching for rivalry, resentment, or contradiction. Now she merely understood what had been decided.

“I will serve.”

“Service is not a gift you offer us.” Zhylaw stepped closer. “It is proof that the woman who entered our custody no longer governs the body before me.”

Audrey looked at him. Somewhere inside her, something objected. The feeling was faint, but it had not disappeared entirely.

“The Furyan belonged to a people who mistook survival for sanctity,” Zhylaw said. “You will help us correct what remains of that error.”

Jungkook beneath Crematoria’s sun. Namjoon’s blue door. Samara lifting the lid from a pot and telling her there was enough food if she intended to stay. Her mother saying her name.

Audrey remembered all of it, but the memories seemed preserved behind glass. She could see every detail and touch none of them.

Zhylaw mistook her stillness for obedience. He turned toward the other converts and ordered them assigned according to their utility: warrior service, labor, technical division, or further instruction where required. The Campaign, he said, wasted nothing capable of remaking.

The converts rose when commanded and were led from the chamber. Audrey remained on one knee until Zhylaw stopped beside her again.

“Some misunderstand the law,” he said. “You keep what you kill is not permission. One who takes power and survives the taking proves the dead were unworthy to retain it.”

Audrey considered the law. Once, it would have stirred something violent inside her, and she would have imagined taking Taehyung’s blade, driving it through his throat, then reaching Zhylaw and using the Campaign’s own doctrine to strip everything from them. The thought still formed with perfect clarity, but it carried no heat.

“Do you understand?” Zhylaw asked.

“Yes, Lord Marshal.”

“Say it.”

“You keep what you kill.”

The words settled into her mind with clean precision. They were not a promise, not yet, but a rule, and rules could be remembered until they became useful.

The chamber doors began to open, and Zhylaw turned his attention to the guards. “Take her to Commander Taehyung. She will be useful, not as a relic of the Furyan, but as a soldier.”

Audrey rose while his gaze moved over her once more, assessing the result of the conversion as though inspecting a newly forged weapon for flaws.

“She walked beside something rare,” he said. “Proximity to strength leaves its own discipline.”

He was wrong. Jungkook had not taught her discipline. He had taught her that survival did not have to mean submission. The distinction still existed in Audrey’s memory, though she could no longer tell whether she believed it or merely remembered that she once had.

“Taehyung will oversee her training,” Zhylaw continued. “She will learn from those who understand silence, conquest, and control.”

Audrey inclined her head. “I will serve as commanded.”

“Later.”

Zhylaw turned toward the armored viewing aperture at the far end of the chamber. Its shutters opened with a deep mechanical groan, revealing Helion Prime beneath the Icon: blue water, green-brown land, and threads of light spreading across the planet’s dark side, entire cities reduced by distance to faint illuminated veins.

Audrey recognized the world, but the recognition did not strike her as it should have. She knew what existed below them—the streets she had walked, the markets where Namjoon stopped to speak with nearly everyone he knew, Samara’s clinic, and the house with the blue door where the table was never quite large enough once guests began arriving. She knew those places mattered.

Her body remained calm.

“Helion Prime has been permitted to confuse tolerance with sovereignty,” Zhylaw said as the planet turned slowly beneath them. “It has mistaken restraint for weakness. That error ends today.”

Audrey stared at the lights. One of them might have been New Mecca, but the thought came without pain. She hated that absence more than she would have hated grief, though perhaps hate was no longer the right word. She noticed what should have been there and found nothing in its place.

“The fleets are in position,” Zhylaw continued. “The rites have begun. Before this cycle ends, Helion will receive the peace it refused to choose.”

Audrey lowered her head. “Yes, Lord Marshal.”

“You will witness the conquest. You must understand what you have entered.”

He moved closer, his shadow falling across her as the guards took their places on either side.

“Taehyung will determine where you stand.”

Then Zhylaw turned toward the planet and gave the order. “Let the fleet assemble. Let the Icons place our name across the sky.”

The doors closed behind Audrey as the guards led her into the corridor, and almost immediately the Basilica began to change around them. Power moved through the decks in a rising vibration while weapons came online and the engines adjusted the ship’s position with a deep mechanical tremor. Somewhere above, great bells began to ring. Among the Necromongers, celebration did not mean joy. It meant readiness.

The guards took Audrey through narrower passages stripped of ceremony, where ribbed metal replaced carved stone and the lower, more practical lighting cut every face into hard planes of gray and white. Several new converts had already been gathered ahead of them, most taken from Helion. Despite the identical robes, remnants of the world they had belonged to remained visible. A young man still had dirt beneath his fingernails. One woman’s hair had been cut unevenly before the rite, leaving rough clumps close to her scalp, while another bore the pale band where a wedding ring had recently been removed.

They moved when instructed and stopped when instructed, but none of them spoke. Their eyes held the same distant quality Audrey had seen in Jaci before her own conversion. Some appeared only faintly aware of the corridor around them, their bodies functioning while whatever had once reached their faces remained buried too deeply to surface.

Audrey watched them and knew she was not like that.

She did not understand why. Perhaps the conversion had not finished changing her, or perhaps pain had carved too many pathways through her to be quieted in a single rite. The Purifier might even have been right when he suggested there was simply more inside her to fight through. Her emotions had been dulled, but her thoughts remained her own. She could still question what she saw and recognize that questioning was possible.

That had to mean something.

The guards ushered the converts into a holding chamber and sealed the doors behind them. There were no benches or windows, and nothing had been left attached to the walls that could be torn free and made into a weapon. The converts spread through the room without instruction and waited. One man stood facing a blank wall, while another lowered himself to the floor and rested his hands on his knees. Near the back, a woman began moving her lips in silent prayer, though nothing changed in her expression.

Audrey leaned against the wall and waited for her thoughts to return to Taehyung. They did almost immediately. He had taken her because she was useful and for no other reason. He had seen violence that could still be shaped and delivered her to the Faith before injury, imprisonment, or grief could ruin it. He did not care whether conversion brought her peace. He cared whether she could be made to kill on command.

The memory of him standing over Jungkook returned intact: the armor, the blade, the waves of heat rolling across Crematoria. Audrey knew she wanted him dead, but the desire no longer surged through her limbs or tightened her hands into fists. It had become quieter and colder, something she could examine without being consumed by it.

Perhaps that made it more dangerous.

She tried to imagine taking his knife. The old Audrey would have pictured the blood and felt the grip in her palm, the resistance of flesh, and the release that followed. Now she saw only the practical obstacles: the joints in his armor, the length of his reach, the difference in their strength, and how much she would need to improve before attempting it.

Taehyung had been right about that.

The thought did not feel like betrayal. It felt useful.

Across the chamber, the young man with dirt beneath his fingernails finally spoke. “Do you think they’ll spare our families?”

His voice was barely audible, but several of the other converts turned toward him. Their expressions remained empty. They had heard the question; whatever it should have awakened in them simply never reached their faces.

Audrey studied him more closely. He was younger than she had first thought, and although he had tucked his hands beneath the folds of his robe, she could still see them trembling against the cloth.

“They said conversion protects the household,” he continued. “If we serve.”

No one answered. Audrey knew what the Campaign’s promises were worth. A household might be spared if it proved useful, though spared could mean converted, separated, or assigned across different ships until no one in the family saw the others again. The Necromongers could call any of those outcomes mercy.

She could have told him that, but she did not know whether the truth would help. Once, she might have lied and said his family would be fine because sometimes a lie was the only thing keeping a person upright. Now she could no longer summon the instinct.

“They may live,” she said.

The young man turned toward her. “Do you think they’ll spare them?”

Audrey considered the question again. “I don’t know.”

His face tightened. The answer had hurt him, and although Audrey recognized the pain immediately, she felt no instinctive need to repair the damage. That disturbed her enough to make her push away from the wall and cross the chamber.

The other converts watched her approach with the vague attention of people noticing movement rather than intention. Audrey stopped in front of the young man and asked, “What district?”

He hesitated before answering. “South bank. Near the old reservoir.”

“Military family?”

“No.”

“Useful trade?”

“My mother teaches. My brother repairs transit pumps.”

Useful. The Campaign valued teachers who could be retrained and engineers who understood infrastructure.

“There’s a chance,” Audrey said.

The young man searched her face. “You believe that?”

“No.”

His hope faltered, and Audrey reached for gentler words only to find they were farther away than they had once been. “But they have skills. That matters here.”

It was not comfort, but it was all she had. The young man lowered his head, and Audrey remained beside him for another moment because leaving immediately seemed wrong. She remembered that much. Only then did she return to the wall.

The vibration beneath the floor deepened as the Basilica continued preparing for conquest. Helion Prime waited below them, and so did Namjoon, Samara, and Dae.

Audrey closed her eyes. The memories came easily: M6-117, the darkness, the cries of bioraptors echoing through the stone. She had been thirteen when Namjoon caught her wrist and pulled her into motion.

“Don’t look back,” he had told her. “Run with me.”

She remembered his voice exactly, steady despite the creatures behind them, and the way his hand had been firm without ever hurting her. They had moved through rubble and shadow until the shrieking faded into the distance. Afterward, when Audrey’s hands would not stop shaking, Namjoon had placed his cloak around her shoulders and sat nearby without asking questions. He had simply stayed.

Audrey examined the memory with the same detached attention she now gave everything else. She knew she had loved him. The knowledge remained intact, fixed in her mind like a fact recorded in a file: Namjoon had protected her, offered her shelter, and become more of a father than anyone else she remembered. She waited for the warmth that should have followed, but found only a dull pressure beneath her ribs. It was not nothing. Something remained, weaker than before but stronger than anything she had seen in the other converts, and Audrey held on to it.

After M6-117, Namjoon had taken her into his home on Helion Prime. She remembered the narrow room, the uneven floor, and the sound of prayer carrying through the house at dawn. She remembered stealing food even after she understood no one intended to deny it to her, and breaking her leg after jumping a fence while Namjoon tried to smooth things over with the shopkeeper and she cursed anyone who came near enough to touch her.

That was when she met Samara.

The clinic had smelled of antiseptic and hot dust. Samara had ignored every threat Audrey made, reset the bone, and told Namjoon to stop apologizing for her. Audrey still remembered the surprise on his face, as well as the realization that came later, when she understood he had fallen in love.

The details remained astonishingly clear: Namjoon inventing reasons to visit the clinic, Samara pretending not to notice, the careful courtship that followed, and the wedding after that. Samara had become part of the house gradually, first tolerating Audrey, then trusting her enough to leave food on the counter and complain when she tracked dust across the floor. The old Audrey had been terrified by how easily it all became normal.

When Samara became pregnant, Audrey left. No one had asked her to go, and Namjoon had wanted her to stay. She knew that now, though the truth was that she had known it then as well. She had left because the house was becoming something she could lose.

The realization should have hurt. Instead, it arrived with the same distant clarity as everything else, a mistake made by someone she remembered being.

The vibration of the Icon moved through the wall. Helion Prime waited below, and Namjoon might still be there.

Audrey opened her eyes. She did not want Namjoon to die, and that much remained real. The desire no longer struck hard enough to choke her or send her heart racing, but it held steady inside the haze. Namjoon should live. So should Samara and Dae.

She did not yet know what she could do for any of them. She was trapped inside the Basilica, newly converted, untrained, and watched by guards, priests, and commanders who understood treachery better than most governments understood law. The Audrey she had been would have thrown herself at the first opening, stolen a weapon, taken a guard hostage, broken into a launch bay, and trusted rage to carry her through whatever came next. Now she could see how useless that would be. A failed attempt would help no one. It would only draw attention to her, invite the Campaign to examine whatever the conversion had failed to erase, and perhaps lead them directly to Namjoon.

The possibility stopped her. Fear stirred somewhere inside her, small and distant but unmistakably present. She did not want them to know he mattered.

Audrey looked around the chamber. Most of the converts remained exactly where they had first settled. The woman near the rear still moved her lips in silent prayer, while the man facing the wall had not shifted his weight once. They seemed finished in a way Audrey was not. Her mind had not gone quiet enough. She still remembered wanting things, and she still cared whether certain people lived or died. The feelings no longer ruled her body, but neither had they vanished.

Perhaps the conversion had failed. Or perhaps it had worked differently because she had chosen it for the wrong reason. She had wanted the pain to stop, and mostly it had. No one had promised her what would remain once it was gone.

When the chamber door opened, every convert turned at once. The movement was so perfectly synchronized that Audrey reacted a fraction late.

A guard entered and looked over the room. “New converts will be assigned for observation. Those called will follow without delay.”

He began reading names. The young man from the reservoir district was summoned first, and he rose immediately before walking through the doorway without looking back. The praying woman followed, then another convert and another, each leaving with the same empty compliance.

When Audrey’s name came, she hesitated.

It lasted no more than half a heartbeat, but the guard noticed.

“Audrey Nakamura.”

She pushed away from the wall. Hearing her full name stirred something inside her, not pain exactly, but recognition. She crossed the chamber while the guard studied the marks along her neck and then looked into her eyes.

“Commander Taehyung has ordered your transfer to the forward observation tier.”

Audrey stepped into the corridor. “Why?”

The guard’s expression hardened. Converts were not expected to ask questions. She lowered her gaze before curiosity could be mistaken for disobedience, though he answered anyway.

“You will witness the claiming of Helion Prime.”

The doors sealed behind her, and Audrey followed the guard deeper into the Basilica with her pace even and her face composed. Beneath that stillness, she repeated three names to herself: Namjoon, Samara, Dae. They no longer hurt as they once had, but the absence of pain did not mean they were gone, and it did not mean she intended to let them die. She simply had no plan yet.

For the first time in her life, Audrey understood that caring and acting were not the same thing, and that violence was not the only proof something mattered. She could wait. She could watch, learn what the Basilica intended to do and when, and determine what might still be changed before it was too late.

Behind her, the bells continued to toll through the ship, announcing conquest in slow, holy notes. Audrey walked toward the observation tier among people who believed conversion had made her theirs. She no longer knew exactly who she was, but she knew she was not like the converts who moved only when commanded. Something inside her remained awake, and for now, that would have to be enough.

Time behaved strangely on Crematoria. The sun remained above the horizon for fifty-two hours at a stretch, burning the meaning out of minutes until there was nothing left but heat, shadow, and the slow advance of the day line across the hangar floor.

Jungkook waited in the deepest corner while the metal walls ticked and groaned around him, expanding beneath the heat. Dry currents moved through the hangar carrying the taste of ash, scorched wiring, and old blood, and every breath scraped on the way in and burned on the way out. He kept breathing anyway.

His body had begun repairing itself before the Purifier dragged him into shelter. The burns across his face and hands had closed enough to stop weeping, and torn muscle had started pulling itself tight beneath the bruised skin. One rib still shifted whenever he breathed too deeply, and something low in his back sent a warning through his legs if he moved too quickly, but none of it was fatal.

He sat with his knees raised and his forearms resting across them, his head lowered against the glare. From a distance, he might have appeared asleep, but he was counting.

The sunlight crept across the floor in a narrow white line. It had already swallowed the outer platforms and most of the launch apron, and within a few hours the remaining shade inside the hangar would disappear with it.

The prison complex still held one ship: King’s. It was fast enough to get off-world and ugly enough that no one would look at it twice. The last time Jungkook had seen it, the vessel had been locked in the lower launch bay beneath the main detention block, its engines kept warm and its fuel cells charged because men like King never trusted a prison to remain secure for long. Smart, but not smart enough.

Jungkook flexed his hands and watched a faint tremor pass through his fingers before settling. Whatever the blast had done to him remained beneath the skin, a low pulse buried in muscle and bone. It did not feel like damage, not exactly. Something had awakened inside him, but he set the thought aside. First, he needed the ship. After that came Helion Prime, and then the Necromongers.

He had seen enough of their vessels to understand how they thought: armor on the outside, religion on the inside, too many corridors, too much ceremony, and men who believed stillness alone made them frightening. That would be easy enough to imitate. He would take the armor, learn the signals, and keep his head down until the right throat came within reach.

Zhylaw.

The name settled cleanly in his mind. Jungkook did not need prophecy or an Elemental whispering about fate and balance. Zhylaw had come for him, taken people who had been under his protection, and left him to burn. That was enough.

He ran the approach again, refining it until the sequence felt simple. Reach Helion. Find the Icon. Board in the confusion. Move with the returning forces or steal a shuttle before the fleet finished repositioning. Necromongers trusted symbols, so he would give them what they expected to see: the right armor, the right blade, the bearing of a man who belonged on the deck.

Most people saw what they expected. Jungkook had survived a long time by letting them.

His gaze shifted to the narrow band of sunlight creeping toward his boots, and Audrey returned to his thoughts. He had seen the soldiers drag her toward the transport while she fought them, kicking and biting and trying to reach him even after the sunlight crossed the crater. They had taken her alive. What happened after that was harder to know.

The Necromongers converted whatever they could use, and Audrey had always been useful: fast hands, a mean streak, too angry to notice when she was hurt and too stubborn to understand when a fight was over. They would see value in that.

The muscles along Jungkook’s jaw tightened. If the Necromongers had touched Audrey’s mind, he would deal with it. If they had broken her, he would deal with that too. If they had killed her—

He stopped the thought before it could finish. There was no use feeding a possibility before it existed.

When he shifted against the wall, the damaged rib ground beneath the movement and sent a sharp line of pain through his side before settling into a dull ache. Audrey had survived worse than most people knew. She had been a child when he first saw her on M6-117, all hard edges and watchful eyes, pretending fear was something that happened to other people. She had followed him because she understood the difference between a man running blindly and one who knew how to use the dark.

Later, she had learned how to fight, and she had learned too well. Even then, something in her had remained unfinished. It was not innocence; that had been taken from her too early. It was something smaller and more stubborn, a part of her that still wanted to believe someone might come back.

Jungkook had made that mistake once. Now she had too.

He raised his head toward the hangar opening, where the day line continued its slow advance. A few more hours remained. He had waited inside worse places, and the trick was not thinking about the waiting.

Instead, his mind moved to Helion Prime. Namjoon would still be there unless someone had forced him to leave. He had never been good at abandoning people, even when they deserved it. Especially then.

Jungkook remembered M6-117 and Namjoon watching him across the firelight, speaking softly as though that made his questions less dangerous. He had never pushed, but he had never backed away either. Most men looked at Jungkook and saw a problem to cage or a weapon to point. Namjoon had looked too long, seen the man underneath, and kept behaving as though that mattered.

It was a bad habit, one that had probably only grown worse after Helion.

He had a wife now. Samara. Sharp eyes, sharper mouth, and the kind of attention that noticed what other people believed they had hidden. The first time they met, she had watched Jungkook as though deciding whether she would allow him within reach of the door.

He had liked her for that.

Then there was Dae, small and curious and still unafraid because no one had taught her better. Jungkook remembered her taking hold of one of his goggles with both hands and asking whether he could see through walls. He had told her yes, and she had believed him without hesitation.

His fingers curled against his knees.

The Necromongers had Helion, which placed Namjoon, Samara, and Dae inside the kill zone. That made the decision simple. Jungkook was going back. Everything else was detail.

Eventually, exhaustion found the cracks. Jungkook shifted deeper into the corner with one shoulder pressed against the wall and lowered his chin, allowing his breathing to slow. He did not sleep at first. Instead, he settled into something close enough that his body could begin repairing itself while his mind remained near the surface.

Heat crowded the hangar, metal creaked around him, and the line of sunlight advanced another inch across the floor. At some point, the hangar disappeared.

A city rose in its place, its towers broken and smoke hanging low between them. Ash moved through empty streets while a child laughed somewhere ahead. Jungkook turned toward the sound, thinking of Dae, though he could not be certain it was her. The smoke thickened until a small hand reached through it, and he ran, but the street stretched beneath his feet no matter how fast he moved. The hand slipped farther away as fire rose behind it—not orange, but the merciless white of Crematoria, bright enough to erase whatever it touched. Jungkook reached once more, and the hand vanished.

He woke with one blade already drawn.

Darkness had swallowed the hangar. Jungkook remained still with the knife held low, listening as metal ticked in the cooling air and wind moved across the open bay. Somewhere deeper inside the prison complex, a damaged conduit snapped and discharged with a hard electrical crack, but there were no footsteps and no breathing except his own.

Night had come.

He returned the blade to its sheath and pushed himself upright. His legs resisted, forcing him to wait until the weakness passed before rolling his shoulders and tightening the straps across his chest. The damaged rib protested, but the pain remained manageable. Nothing fatal.

Outside, Crematoria had changed. The blinding white glare was gone, replaced by a bruised purple sky stretched over black stone. Heat still shimmered near the horizon, but the air had already begun losing its teeth, and the temperature would soon fall hard enough to split exposed flesh. The planet never offered safety, only different ways to die.

Jungkook stopped at the edge of the hangar and studied the prison complex below. Floodlights swept through drifting ash while most of the guard towers along the outer wall remained dark after the fighting. What was left of the patrols had gathered around the central blocks and launch controls, drawn toward light and company after surviving the long day.

Good.

He checked his weapons: one steel knife and two blades carved from Raptor Cat claws. His fingers brushed the lock of hair tied near the handle of the second before he lowered his hand and slipped from the hangar. A section of cooling metal groaned behind him, covering his first few steps. After that, the darkness did the rest.

Crematoria was never truly silent. Stone cracked as the temperature fell, damaged structures shifted on their foundations, and steam hissed from broken lines before vanishing into the cold. Jungkook moved with those sounds, taking one step when metal complained and another when loose rock slid down the crater wall, leaving nothing for anyone to hear in the quiet between.

Ahead, the prison rose from the ground like something excavated from a grave. Daylight had left nowhere to hide, but night filled the complex with shadows cast by support beams, collapsed walkways, and fractured walls. Jungkook crouched beside a broken service trench and watched the floodlights sweep across the outer yard until he understood their rhythm: seven seconds left, four across the center, nine before the beam returned.

Two guards crossed an elevated walkway above him.

“Lower cells are still drawing power,” one said.

“The whole place is drawing power.”

“I thought we shut that section down.”

“I thought we were all getting off this rock.”

Their boots rang against the metal grating. Jungkook waited until they disappeared beyond a support column, then dropped into the trench.

The channel narrowed almost immediately. Broken conduits hung from the walls, and scorched insulation curled across the floor, filling the air with rust and ozone. He followed the trench toward the prison foundation until a collapsed support blocked most of the way. Lowering himself, he turned one shoulder and squeezed beneath it. The damaged rib caught against the metal and sent pain through his side, but he continued without slowing.

A service hatch waited beneath a tangle of ruined power lines. Its outer plate had warped in the heat, though the locking assembly remained intact. Jungkook crouched beside it and pressed two fingers to the edge, feeling current hum through the metal.

Still live.

Using the point of a claw knife, he pried open the manual access cover and found the release mechanism fused halfway shut. He worked it loose a fraction at a time until the metal finally gave with a low squeal.

Jungkook froze.

Voices carried from above as a beam of light swept across the trench opening. He flattened himself against the wall and remained there while it passed over the debris, paused, and moved on.

“Nothing,” someone said.

“Never is.”

Their footsteps receded. Jungkook opened the hatch, slipped inside, and sealed it behind him.

The service corridor beyond was narrow and cold, with emergency lights burning low along the floor. Their amber glow climbed only partway up the walls, leaving the ceiling hidden in darkness. Before moving on, Jungkook straightened and changed the way he carried himself. The predator disappeared from his stride, replaced by the loose shoulders and lowered head of an exhausted worker who belonged in the corridor and gave no one a reason to remember him.

At the first intersection, two guards approached. Jungkook stepped into a recessed equipment bay and became part of the shadow while they passed within arm’s reach.

“Still haven’t found the merc,” one said.

“Which one?”

“The big one. King.”

“He left.”

“Maybe.”

Their footsteps faded down the corridor. Jungkook waited one breath longer, then left the shelter of the equipment bay and continued toward the lower launch level.

The bay lay beneath the prison’s main power spine. Most of the direct routes had been sealed after the escape, but maintenance shafts did not care what the wardens wanted. At the end of an inner junction, Jungkook found an access panel with metal bubbled around the lock from the heat and crouched to remove the cover. Three wires remained intact inside: one carried power, another fed the alarm, and the third controlled the magnetic seal. He cut the alarm first, released the lock, and opened the panel onto a narrow shaft descending into darkness.

The air inside smelled of oil and old coolant. Jungkook pulled the cover shut behind him and climbed down by touch, his boots finding each rung without sound. Halfway to the bottom, the muscles in his forearms began to shake, but he ignored them and kept descending until his feet touched the deck.

He paused with one hand against the wall. A low vibration moved through the metal beneath his palm.

Engines. Dormant, but alive.

Jungkook smiled.

The shaft opened behind a row of maintenance lockers overlooking the launch bay. King’s ship sat in the center, secured inside its docking clamps. The vessel was an ugly thing, with an asymmetrical hull, mismatched panels, and fresh scorch marks burned over older ones. It looked exactly like a ship built by a man who cared more about leaving than arriving clean.

Perfect.

Only one mechanic remained near the control station, slumped in a chair with his head tilted forward. Jungkook watched him long enough to confirm he was breathing, though whether the man was asleep or unconscious hardly mattered.

He crossed the bay without making a sound. The mechanic stirred as Jungkook passed and reached toward the alarm control, but Jungkook caught his wrist before his fingers touched it and pressed him back into the chair. Recognition had only begun to enter the man’s eyes when Jungkook covered his mouth.

“Bad night to be curious.”

The mechanic froze. Jungkook struck once beneath his ear, and the man went limp without losing his breath. He dragged him behind the control station and left him there. There was no reason to kill everyone, only the people who refused to move out of the way.

At King’s ship, Jungkook ran one hand over the cool metal of the hull. “Miss me?”

The access hatch opened after a brief bypass, and he climbed inside. The cockpit smelled of sweat, gun oil, and the cheap stimulant King used during long hunts. A strip of dried ration wrapper still clung to the edge of the console.

Jungkook dropped into the pilot’s seat. The controls recognized that someone was present but not who had taken the chair, and security prompts immediately filled the primary display.

He looked them over. “Cute.”

Jungkook opened the lower console, crossed two contacts, and killed the security system. Power moved through the cockpit a moment later, bringing the navigation array, life support, and fuel cells online in sequence while engine diagnostics crawled across the display. Both engines were stable. Guidance was degraded, but he did not need perfect.

He wrapped his hands around the controls and looked through the canopy. The docking clamps remained locked, and the manual override sat beside the unconscious mechanic on the far side of the bay. Too far to reach without giving up the ship.

So he rerouted power into the landing struts and brought the engines to thirty percent.

The ship strained against the clamps as warning lights flooded the console. Jungkook increased thrust, and metal screamed beneath the hull. One clamp tore free immediately. The second held, twisting the ship sideways as alarms began to sound throughout the launch bay and red lights flashed along the walls.

Behind the control station, the mechanic stirred awake and lifted his head in time to see King’s ship wrenching against the remaining lock. Jungkook pushed the engines harder. The second clamp snapped, and the vessel lurched sideways, struck the docking arm, and broke through it in a shower of sparks.

Guards poured into the bay as the nose swung around. One raised a rifle, but Jungkook fired the maneuvering jets before he could shoot. The burst of hot exhaust knocked him off his feet and sent the others diving behind the control station.

The launch doors were already closing.

Jungkook shoved the throttle forward. King’s ship accelerated across the bay while the gap narrowed ahead of him. The left wing scraped the edge of the doors, throwing sparks across the canopy, but a second later the vessel tore free and Crematoria dropped away beneath him, all black stone, ruined prison blocks, and a thin crust of frost spreading across the night side.

He climbed hard. Tracking signals appeared behind him as two defense batteries rotated into position. Jungkook killed the running lights and dove toward the curve of the planet. The first shot passed high. When the second followed the heat trail, he cut the engines completely and let the ship fall dark.

For three seconds, there was nothing but silence.

Then he reignited beneath the horizon and broke toward open space.

Crematoria’s gravity loosened its grip, and stars filled the canopy. Jungkook checked the navigation grid and found Helion Prime glowing at the edge of the available chart. One solar cycle, assuming the drive held.

He set the course.

Behind him, the prison transmitted alerts into the dark: a stolen ship, an escaped convict, a dead man refusing to stay dead.

Jungkook leaned back in the pilot’s seat. His side still hurt, his skin carried the heat of Crematoria, and every breath reminded him that something inside his chest had not healed correctly. None of it mattered.

Audrey might still be alive. Namjoon and his family were trapped beneath an Icon. Zhylaw believed the last Furyan had burned.

Jungkook looked toward Helion as a faint smile touched his mouth.

“Let him.”

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