CHAPTER 14: THE WRECKAGE AND THE WHISPER

SCRAPE.

...

SCRAPE.

The sound was maddening.

It was slow. Deliberate. The sound of something impossibly strong and tirelessly patient, working its way through tons of rock and steel.

Michael and Jinx stayed frozen, listening, their brief moment of relief vaporized by a new, creeping dread.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the scraping stopped.

The silence that followed was worse.

It was a heavy, suffocating thing, filled with the question of what was waiting for them on the other side of that rockfall.

"Okay," Jinx finally whispered, her voice raspy with dust. "Plan B."

"Which is?" Michael asked, his own voice barely a croak.

"We wait for it to get bored and leave," she said, her usual cynical humor sounding thin and brittle.

Michael pushed himself to his feet, his body protesting with a chorus of sharp pains. A deep, ugly gash ran down his forearm, torn open by a piece of jagged rebar. It was bleeding freely, the dark blood a stark contrast against his dust-covered skin.

"You’re leaking," Jinx grunted, her pragmatism kicking back in.

She limped over to her discarded pack, rummaged inside, and pulled out a small, greasy jar filled with a foul-smelling, glowing green paste.

"Hold still," she ordered, not asked.

Before he could protest, she slapped a generous glob of the stuff directly onto his wound.

The pain was immediate and blinding.

It felt like she’d poured acid and fire ants into the open gash.

"Gah!" he yelped, trying to pull his arm back.

"Don’t be a baby," she snapped, holding his arm in a surprisingly strong grip. "It’s Crawler’s Gut Poultice. The good stuff. It’ll sting like hell for a minute, then it’ll seal the wound and numb the pain. And maybe give you a rash. Fifty-fifty on the rash."

He watched, grimacing, as the green paste bubbled and smoked, knitting the edges of the wound together in a grotesque, accelerated healing process.

It was disgusting.

It was also working.

The searing pain subsided, replaced by a dull, throbbing numbness.

The act was so brutally practical, so devoid of any real tenderness, that it felt more genuine than any words of comfort could have.

She wasn’t trying to be nice.

She was just keeping her temporary asset operational.

He appreciated it more than he could say.

They sat in the dark, the only light coming from the faint glow of her poultice. The silence stretched on, thick and uncomfortable.

"So," Michael finally said, breaking the quiet. "The Ghosts."

Jinx stiffened, her focus going back to the wall of debris.

"What about ’em?"

"That Phase-Ripper you mentioned," he said, remembering her scream of warning. "You said they had it set to ’erase’."

Her shoulders tensed.

"Yeah. So?"

"The Alchemist told me they were a capture unit," Michael pressed, watching her face in the dim green light. "My file said, ’Objective: Capture. Alive.’ But that thing... that wasn’t a capture weapon. You knew what it was. Why would they want to erase you?"

Jinx didn’t answer for a long time.

She just stared at the rockfall, her jaw tight, her knuckles white where she gripped the stock of her rifle.

When she finally spoke, her voice had lost all of its witty, cynical armor. It was just a low, bitter whisper, heavy with old ghosts.

"Because it’s cleaner," she said.

"Erasure leaves no bodies. No evidence. No messy questions for the DGC’s PR department to answer."

She took a shaky breath.

"I used to have a crew," she said, the words coming out slow and painful, like she was pulling them from a deep, unhealed wound.

"We weren’t a fancy Guild. We were just scavengers. Tunnel rats. We called ourselves the ’Rust Dogs’."

A sad, crooked smile touched her lips for a fraction of a second.

"There were five of us. We were family. Not the hugging kind. More the ’I’ll make fun of your stupid haircut but I’ll still drag your ass out of a Crawler nest’ kind."

She fell silent again, lost in the memory.

"We got a tip," she continued, her voice turning hard as steel. "A big one. A wrecked DGC transport in a quarantined zone. Supposedly full of high-grade cores and experimental tech. A retirement score."

"It was a setup."

"A DGC informant we’d trusted led us right into a trap. It wasn’t a transport. It was a failed Chimera experiment. A monster they couldn’t control."

Her eyes were dark, haunted.

"It tore through us. Leo... Sarah... they didn’t even have time to scream."

"I was the only one who made it out of the kill zone. I was hiding in a drainage pipe, bleeding out, watching."

"I thought it was over. But then... the cleanup crew arrived."

She looked at Michael, her electric-blue eyes burning with a cold, pure hatred that made his blood run cold.

"It was a Ghost team."

"They didn’t come to fight the monster. They came to sanitize the scene. I watched them execute the only other survivor, a rookie DGC agent who’d been caught in the crossfire. They didn’t shoot him."

Her voice cracked, just for a second.

"They just... erased him. One minute he was there, begging for his life. The next, he was a cloud of dust."

"They were wiping the slate clean. Getting rid of all the loose ends. Including us."

She finally looked away, her tough, hardened mask firmly back in place, but he could see the tremor in her hands.

"So that’s why," she finished, her voice flat and dead. "They want to erase me because I’m not just an unregistered Hunter. I’m a witness. The last living member of the Rust Dogs."

Michael stared at her, the pieces of the puzzle falling into a new, horrifying picture.

The DGC.

Project Chimera.

General Gideon.

The Ghosts.

It was all connected. A vast, shadowy conspiracy built on a foundation of lies and sanitized with weapons that erased people from existence.

He wasn’t just allied with a cynical scrapper anymore.

He was standing in a tomb, deep beneath the earth, with the last ghost of a forgotten massacre.

And her war was now his.