Wynn was the gentle one. Wynn was reserved. Wynn was quiet. Wynn was slowest to anger and first to reason.

  Not today.

  With a roar that shook stones from the walls and drove the raugs back in screeching shock, Wynn ripped one of the heavy desks from its mounting as though it was held down with wet paper and slammed it into the beasts. Not so much following as pulled in their wake, Kaya and Tyver did what they could to guard Wynn’s back, beating back a tide of grasping mouths. The beasts were blindingly fast by human standards but a martyr was faster, barely. Tyver plied his knife with generations of borrowed skill guided by all the vicious, dirty instinct of a childhood spent in street fights. The tip sank into ears and throats and crueler places, severing tendons and drowning monsters in their own blood. Kaya, with no recall to rely on, simply stabbed at the things and screamed fury into their eyeless faces. When a raug tore the knife from her hand she seized the thing’s skull and drove it into the floor, teeth and bone driving into her skin as it shattered in her hands. Suddenly drenched in grey and crimson muck, she ripped a pair of stones from the floor and began refining her process.

  There were just. So. Many.

  Time seemed to stretch and twist around them as they somehow crossed the room in both seconds and an eternity, breaking into the open space where the raug queen was holding court. Small, keening forms twisted away from them as they approached, retreating to the great bulk of their mother. The beast, several times larger than the raugs that had gone suddenly silent at their backs, rolled to her feet and crouched over the young with a warning snarl. Kaya risked a glance behind her and found a wall drooling, fanged maws only inches away. She backed slowly from the raugs, stones raised and ready.

  “Why have they stopped?”

  “Not stupid,” Tyver said. “We might kill t’queen.”

  “Wynn said not to.”

  “Smart,” he said simply. “Look at us.”

  Kaya did, gasping as she realized her friends were torn nearly to shreds. Blood wept from countless bites and scratches etched across their bodies, places where the army of gene-bred monsters had broken through. With a sudden jolt she realized her own body was savaged as well, though the pain was somehow distant. She examined a particularly vicious bite across her wrist for a moment, then hesitantly prodded at it.

  She had almost forgotten what had been done to her, what it was like to be injured in this body. Had she been human, the hand would have been crushed by the jaws that left that mark. Her martyr’s flesh, gene-forged and threaded with arcane cybernetics from the core-cursed past, held up rather differently. She remembered that the skin she wore wasn’t soft, couldn’t be torn like fabric by something simple like this. It was closer to say her skin had chipped under the damage, compressing under the attack like hardwood. As her fingers brushed at the edges of the bite she felt something catch and tumble away. With slow horror she realized it was a fleck of her own skin. Blood seeped from the wound, seeped like oil from a machine.

  Her friends hadn’t been torn to shreds. They had been... weathered was the word that came to mind. It wasn’t enough to kill them, not nearly enough. But it had almost brought them down. Tyver was favoring a leg where the skin had worn almost completely away, muscle filigreed with bionic threads glistening in the dark. Reinforced bone gleamed in a patchwork across Wynn’s back as they rocked over Gael’s unconscious body, clutching him close and whispering to themselves. Naomi and Gael, bruising around their neck and ribs where the things had evidently suffocated their catch before dragging them off, were constellations of tiny bites in eerie mimicry of the studs that dotted their skin. With a start, Kaya realized she was somehow in the best shape of all of them.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Naomi said, eyes wide with mingled fear and pride. Her knife was still in hand, drifting from point to point across the sea of hissing raug like a compass seeking north.

  “We did,” Kaya said.

  “We’re going to die here. Look what they did to you. It took seconds.”

  “We might,” Kaya allowed listlessly, then shook herself. “We might,” she said again, more forcefully. “But we’re not dead yet. Not yet.”

  “They are,” Naomi said, cocking her head toward a spot on the floor. Next to her was a martyr, years dead, nothing but dirty bone and withered bionics worked among them like layers of unspooled thread, a knife broken beneath one outstretched hand.

  “They were alone,” Kaya said. “You’re not.” It felt like a small miracle as she smiled, the torn edges of her face grinding under the weight of her injuries. “Not yet.”

  Behind them, the queen let out a grunt, throaty and oddly musical, and the raugs began to close in as she stalked around the martyrs, putting them between herself and the pack.

  Naomi started to shake her head, but something passed between the girls. She nodded instead. “‘Not yet.”

  Kaya turned to the closing wall of beasts, working her way back. One of the raugs darted forward, snapping teeth inches from her face before she dashed it from the air, her stone crushing the thing’s jaw to powder. The rest closed in more patiently, taking their time. Behind her, Kaya heard Naomi say something and grunt, pulling Gael into her arms as the others stepped forward.

  “Not yet,” Tyver said.

  “Not yet,” Wynn said, Gael’s knife in hand.

  “We keep to the side of the room this time," Kaya said. "Hug the wall.”

  “Don't blame I, just followed the topper.” Tyver said, wearing a shadow of his usual smile. “Main street wasn’t great, fair.”

  Somehow, they all laughed. Kaya’s weight shifted, ready to push for the wall and begin fighting their way free, when there was a sudden screech. Her eyes swept to the burrow’s entrance as a familiar figure, ghost-pale in the dark, clawed wings tucked in close around it as the birdlike shape shouldered into the room, oriented on the martyrs, and shimmered. The APE resolved into an almost comically hulking shape, reminding her of the heavy construction suits her colony had used. Hunched down on all fours and covered in plates of hooked bone, the hologram was built as though it could either walk through a concrete wall or bring it down with a simple tap of its heavy, three-fingered fist.

  Then, in a perfect echo of Wynn’s own kickoff to the party, the APE let out a thundering roar and ripped a desk from its mounting. It flung the furniture down the room like aged lightning, spinning toward the martyrs faster than the eye could follow.

  The human eye, anyway.

  Kaya dove, heedless of the scattered bones and rubble beneath her as the desk passed with a hair’s breadth to spare. She heard a squelching crunch of impact and felt a moment of panic as she turned, convinced one her friends hadn’t been fast enough.

  The desk had hit the queen. The impact had been fatal. Viciously so. The mess and sudden stench were both indescribable.

  “Well, fu-” she heard Tyver swear just before all hell broke loose.