Page 2 of The Monster You Made
I trigger the false corridors. The first breach team pours through the wrong wall, swallowed by flash charges. Their screams echo down the ventilation shafts, sharp and brief. I watch on the monitors, expressionless. Another feed drops. Another corridor fills with fire.
My reflection stares back at me from the dark glass of the screen. Eyes hollow, jaw tight, a man carved down to bone. This is what she left behind. And still, I can’t hate her for it.
I lean toward the mic, my voice carrying through the empty halls. “You came for me. You should have brought more.”
Gunfire answers. I welcome the sound. Let them come. If the Crown wants me buried, they’ll have to dig through their own dead to do it.
The gunfire rattles the walls, a hard metallic chatter that vibrates through the floor. Dust shivers down from the ceiling.
My systems trace heat signatures across the entry points, three-man teams fanning out, tight formation, methodical. Not Crown street soldiers. These are clean, disciplined. Cadmus fingerprints, maybe. Or the Crown trying to prove they still have order in their veins.
I move down the main corridor, boots silent on steel grates. The bunker isn’t just concrete and wire. It’s a labyrinth I built, part sanctuary, part weapon. Most men trust walls to protect them. I prefer traps. The kind that bleed invaders dry.
The air tightens, warm with cordite and sweat. I pause at the junction, ear tuned to the rhythm of boots approaching. Three sets. Close. I let them come.
Their beams slice across the dark, thin white arcs moving over the walls. I wait until the lead man clears the threshold, then trigger the plate beneath his foot. A hiss of pressure, then steel bolts fire upward through his legs, pinning him to the ceiling with a wet crack. His scream ricochets down the hall. The other two swing their rifles, disciplined, but too slow. I’m already moving.
I fire twice. One drops with a hole between the eyes; the other staggers, armor absorbing the first shot but not the second. His weapon clatters across the floor. Silence follows, broken only by the gurgle of the pinned soldier above, blood dripping steady onto the steel below.
I step over them and collect their rifles. Modified, suppressed, standard issue for a unit trained to erase quietly. Not the Crown’s style. The Crown preferred the theater, spectacle. Cadmus plays for permanence. My throat tightens. So they’ve come.
On the monitors, more blips fan across the lower levels. Twelve total. Coordinated. They’re not just here to kill me, they’re here to wipe the slate clean. Remove every trace. Crown, Cadmus, it doesn’t matter which flag they fly. Vera was right to run. Anyone who stands still long enough in this war is erased.
Her face flickers again on the projector as if mocking me. Vera, alive in pixels while flesh-and-blood soldiers die in my halls. I don’t know if she’s safe. I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive me. But I know this: if they catch her, they’ll hollow her out until there’s nothing left but obedience. That, I won’t allow.
A sharp hiss in the vents breaks my thought. Gas, thin and fast, pouring through circulation lines. They’re trying to flush me out like a rat. My filters hold, but only for an hour—long enough to take them down. Not long enough if reinforcements are pending.
I climb to the second tier. From here, I can see them on thermal, two advancing in the east corridor, three sweeping the server vault. I touch the detonator clipped to my vest. The vault is rigged. One press and decades of secrets, surveillance, the Crown’s archives, all burn with them. It feels right. Let them choke on ashes.
The east corridor squad advances into range. I fire once, the round sparking off the wall beside their heads. Not to kill. To herd. They retreat exactly where I want them, into the kill box. The charge goes off under their feet, a roar that shakes the floor. Smoke boils upward. When it clears, only fragments remain.
The purge runs faster on my screens. Whole sectors dissolve. Networks I bled for collapse into static. The Crown will never rebuild them. Cadmus won’t find scraps worth salvaging.But with every file erased, with every bridge burned, I feel my anchor slipping. I’ve built my life on control. Without the system, what am I? A man with too many ghosts and too much blood on his hands.
Footsteps approach again. I shoulder the stolen rifle, every muscle locked. For a moment, I wonder if I’ll see her, if Vera will step out of the shadows like a hallucination, eyes sharp, voice steady. But it’s only another soldier, face hidden by a visor. I put a bullet through it before the thought can linger.
The bunker shakes. Breach charges on the north wall. Reinforcements. They’re not stopping. My lips curl into a bitter smile. Good. Let them keep coming. Let them see what it costs to touch what’s mine.
I reload, the sound sharp in the silence. My voice is rough when I whisper, not into a mic, not for them, but for myself: “Vera, wherever you are, don’t come back. Don’t ever come back here.”
Another alarm screams. Another wave descends. I bare my teeth and move to meet them.
The next wave folds into the killbox like obedient beasts. Metal screams. Bone answers. I move through the smoke on practiced feet, no hesitation, no mercy, hands steady as a metronome.
The rifle is an extension of my arm; the scope is a cold eye that shows only math and breath. There is a rhythm to killing when you know you must: inhale, find the gap, exhale the bullet, and close the distance. I close the distance.
A man falls through a doorway at my shoulder, eyes wide, the world reduced to a red smear. For a second, the room tilts, and I think of the courthouse steps, sunlight on a face that didn’t know it was watched. Then I push the thought away. Sentiment is a weakness I can’t afford. I aim for the next chest and the next, bone and muscle answering like a dark choir.
The bunker is full of steel and ghosts. I used to move through it with a curator’s care, placing files like artifacts, archiving breaths into folders labeled with cold shorthand. Tonight I set those artifacts alight, one by one, as if burning a gallery of my own sins. Paper ignites with a whine that reminds me of a woman wailing. The servers cough and die, blue LEDs blinking out like dying stars.
In the central vault, a mirror still holds the echo of her silhouette; someone once left a scarf caught on a console, thin fabric that smelled faintly of rain and jasmine. I touch it and the scent flares memory until my teeth ache. It’s absurd; an artifact turns into a relic, then into a deity. I throw the scarf into the flames. It curls, blackening, and I feel something inside me unclench.
They come in waves. The command structure on their radios is tight, echoed commands, clipped. Someone above them thinks this is a surgical extraction. The irony is that surgery happens with a scalpel and light; these men come with hammers.
I move deeper into the bunker, toward the archive level. The steps are stone and steel, echoing like a metronome. Each footfall is a sentence. If anyone was going to find me here, they would find a man who’d chosen to stay and to fight.
I breach the archive antechamber and drop a smoke canister into the stairwell. It blooms like a rotten cloud, the air thick and metallic. I feel the heat from the server racks even through my vest, a living thing. For a moment, there’s a clarity, everything reduced to survival: breath, bullet, beat. My hands work with an automatic calm: wires cut, feeds isolated, hard drives pulled and smashed. The old rituals of erasure take on a ceremonial cadence.
They come for the vault. They want the dossier. They want the proof that can make a throne tremble. Whoever hired them believes power is buried in paper and pixels. Perhaps they’re right. Power is a ledger, a ledger is a secret, a secret is a leash.
