CHAPTER 21: UNDER THE SKIN OF THE EARTH [4]

In the end, it was Ethan who went for the final hit.

"Cover!" He shouted and broke into a sprint that felt like sin.

The rest of the group reacted as soon as he shouted.

Kara cleared his lane, spear whistling through the air. Holt’s bullets stitched a neat zipper into the first creature dumb enough to step there. Mira stole the air from another and it collapsed into Jonas’s waiting hands, who threw it aside like trash. Reid stepped with Ethan for three beats, then peeled left to draw fire.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

His Rifle pulsed with pinpoint accuracy.

Reid managed to cause enough distraction, buying Ethan the chance.

And then, Ethan hit the heart.

Heat blew through his mask like a summer oven. The surface wasn’t actually surface, it was something halfway between flesh and glass, both hard and soft at once. He slammed the Sunder on it, palming it to the spot where the pulse felt thinnest. Then he counted.

’Three...’

’Two...’

The Conductor’s chord rose, letting out a shrill and desperate tone. The mantle opened from the ceiling like a parachute dropped wrong, membranes billowing, trying to smother the charge and the men beneath it.

’One...’

Ethan dove and grabbed Reid’s collar, yanking both of them behind a rib of living crystal.

For a moment, nothing happened, then the world misfired!

BZZZT!

The charge didn’t just explode, it untoned.

The heartbeat stuttered...

Ba...dum...ba...

For a heartbeat, nothing, then a lurch like a drunk step, then a rolling shudder as the lattice forgot which way the next beat should travel. The light went from amber to white, to black, to all three at once. Then the hum crashed into a thousand broken notes.

CRKSH!

Every creature in the chamber convulsed.

Some simply folded, crown-fronds wilting. Others spun in place, lost. The Conductor reeled like a puppet yanked by two masters.

"Now!" Reid roared, his eyes blazing with murderous intensity.

They all charged, and then hit it like the end of a bad song.

BAM!

Kara’s spear pinned the second strut. Jonas’s spike found a seam above the hip and pried it opens. Holt took its hands when it reached for the floor again. Mira’s wind didn’t blow; it pressed, turning the mantle against the Conductor’s own joints. Ethan fired the wire and took the cable that ran from its mask down into the floor.

The mask cracked, and light leaked like breath.

For a terrible instant, Ethan saw something behind the amber; not a face, not really. Rather, what he saw was an arrangement of bone like someone had tried to remember a face from a dream. Where eyes might be, two dull stones that reflected their ghost-light and nothing else.

The Conductor sang one last note. Not a command, not a call.

Just... hurt.

Then Reid’s blade went through the mask and into the dreaming bones, cleaving through everything in between, and the note died with the hum.

"..."

Silence came like snowfall.

The heartbeat tried to pick itself up, but it stumbled and settled into a weak, erratic twitch. Above, the nursery sagged as if exhausted. Sacs dulled. Membranes drooped.

The creatures that hadn’t died outright lay stunned, twitching with little leftover signals that had nowhere to go.

The Conductor, the Maestro, the Music Director that controlled the hive was gone, and so the performance died with it.

With no one alive to interpret the musical score, set the tempo, and guide the musicians through their performance, everything scattered.

Ethan realized he was shaking only when he stopped.

Mira leaned against a column, forehead damp. Holt checked magazines with hands that didn’t tremble because they’d learned long ago to move anyway. Jonas looked disappointed that the world had failed to require more breaking.

Ethan threw a sideway glance at him. That guy was abnormal.

Kara wiped her spear and stared at the Conductor’s body like she was trying to invent a word mean enough, but in the end she just pursed her lips.

Reid’s gaze tracked the tendrils from the heart up into the dark, curiosity laced with caution still hidden in the depths of his eyes. "This was one".

"One of what?" Ethan asked, voice small in the big dead room.

Reid didn’t answer right away. He crouched beside the mask fragments and lifted a shard between his thumb and forefinger. It was warm; it pulsed. He set it down like it had asked to be put to bed.

"Of whoever’s writing the new rules of the world," he said at last. "And we just tore a page out."

He looked at Ethan. "You still headed west?"

Ethan swallowed. He thought of the broadcast, of the quarantine zone, of people throwing fire and lifting trucks and calling themselves order. He thought of the forest that breathes, of the bridge that ate, and of the den of wolves that might be his pack or his grave.

"Yes," he said. "And I think the people there need to know this... that this isn’t just monsters."

Kara snorted. "You think?"

Jonas clapped Ethan on the shoulder, almost exactly as hard as friendship. "Let’s take a trophy."

Holt gestured at the heart. "We don’t have time for trophies. You guys seem to forget that we’re still underground. Besides, this will draw scavengers. And something bigger, if bigger exists."

Mira tilted her head, listening to a silence only she could hear. "Bigger exists."

Reid nodded once. "Pull out. Same way we came, fast and careful. Mark the path. We’ll burn this place when we have fuel to make it matter."

They turned to go.

As Ethan backed toward the ridges, he looked one more time at the broken mask. The light in the shards guttered. For a heartbeat he thought the mask looked back. Yes, it did; not with eyes but with the idea of eyes.

And in that not-look he felt something like recognition. He shuddered.

DING!

~----~

[System Advisory]

[Observation Logged: Non-bestial hive coordinator exhibits structured command, adaptive countermeasures, and para-linguistic signaling.]

[Improvisation Pool Expanded!]

~----~

The Wheel warmed under his skull, satisfied and hungry.

They climbed.

Behind them, the heart misfired again, then resumed its weak, stubborn beat. Above them, the nursery breathed shallow.

And somewhere beyond the tunnel’s bends, beyond the gully and the forest and the ruined highway, a quarantine zone waited with its own walls, its own illusions of safety, and people who thought they understood the shape of the enemy.

They knew nothing.

Ethan didn’t know how to tell them what he had learned in the dark.

But he would.