200 Piedmont looks wrong from the street and I'm through the entrance before I can name why.

  Then I can.

  The windows are broken outward. Glass scattered across the pavement in a radius that only makes sense if the force came from inside, which means whatever happened here didn't force entry. It left. Scorch marks climb the facade in lines too even for fire, a pattern you get from something that understood what it was doing. The fountain inside is cracked straight through the middle, water running across the concrete in directions that ignore the floor's gradient.

  I've seen three kinds of destruction since the System arrived. Monsters, which are messy. Survivors, which are messier. And whatever this is, which is neither.

  Damage without physics. Destruction without logic.

  Someone dressed this place to look like violence.

  Dark stains and footprints trail deeper into the building and I follow them because I don't have a choice and I've never had a choice, not really, not since the moment I decided that keeping her alive was the only position worth holding.

  Lily.

  Gone a few hours, tops. What the hell happened here?

  I move deeper in, eyes on the windows, the doorways. The Core pulses against my thigh. The rhythm has changed. To one of complete urgency.

  The trap announces itself a half-second before it springs.

  The air changes and the temperature drops. That prickle at the base of my skull returns, the one from the park and the sewers. Threat Hierarchy bathes my vision in orange that spreads in a circle around me.

  Blue light appears at the edge of the plaza, faint at first. A shimmer where the shadows pool between buildings. Then another and another. The light coalesces into shapes that are humanoid, translucent, and wrong in ways that take a moment to catalog.

  Too tall and too narrow. Proportions stretched like someone pulled a template without understanding anatomy. Fingers that extend past where fingers should stop. Faces that suggest features without committing to any. Eyes that are just light and hunger.

  One moment they shimmer. The next they are fully formed and oriented toward me.

  Six. Then eight. Then ten. Their blue glow spreads across the plaza and paints the fake destruction in colors that make it look even less real. They circle too, with restraint, moving like predators who have done this before and think they know how it ends.

  They're wrong, but I appreciate the confidence.

  A pair drifts into a line, one behind the other, sloppy... The kind of positioning that gets someone margin-called before lunch.

  Eight feet of weighted steel says hello.

  I charge the first and fake my commit, spear leveled at center mass. It reacts exactly how I need it to, arms wide, fingers extending to catch me.

  I drop.

  The slide takes me between legs that shouldn't exist, concrete scraping against my back. Its grasp closes on empty air above me. I'm already thrusting upward as I pass beneath, driving the spear point through the second one's torso before it can process that I was never aiming for its pack mate.

  It comes apart. Blue motes scatter like embers.

  I roll to my feet. The first one is turning, but turning takes time when your proportions don't obey anatomy. I plant my back foot and thrust. Steel punches through its chest. It looks down at the wound with something that might be confusion.

  Then it dissolves.

  Eight remaining.

  I activate [Analytical Strike] and let the count begin. The survivors seem hesitant, reading me, re calibrating.

  So they spread wider instead.

  I reset my grip and feel the electrical tape biting into my palms. Three seconds pass, then five. They're waiting for something.

  I don't give them the chance.

  The nearest one drifts a half-step too far from its neighbor. Isolation is death for pack hunters. I close the distance before the formation can adjust, feint high, then reverse into a low thrust that takes it through the midsection.

  Seven.

  Two come from my left at once. I give ground and let the fountain's wreckage funnel them single-file. The first reaches me and I bat its fingers aside with the shaft before driving the point through its face. It dissolves around the blade. The second lunges through the space its pack mate occupied. I sidestep, let momentum carry it past, then drive the spear through its back.

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  Five.

  Three more press the attack and I take them in sequence. Thrust, pivot, thrust. The spear's reach keeps their claws off me until one gets close enough to rake across my arm. Cold floods the contact point, seeping past my leathers like the armor isn't there. I wince, but I use the opening, and when the kill notification registers the cold vanishes. The remaining two easier to take down now.

  Suddenly, the survivors back up. Their glow pulses in unison, once and then twice. Some kind of signal I can't read. And then ten more shimmer into existence behind them.

  Twelve.

  This time they charge all at once. Because they've worked out that reach means nothing when they come from everywhere.

  I pivot and sprint, shouldering one aside even as cold rakes across my back. I push through it and get into a hallway between cubicle stacks, forcing them to funnel.

  I work through them on a planned route. Spin, thrust, absorb. They're landing hits now, cold spreading across my chest in patches, and my concern is growing in ways I'm not going to name.

  Eleven. Ten. Nine. Eight.

  They're learning, or the survivors are sharing information across whatever passes for a nervous system between them.

  Four rush together. I catch the first on the spear point, use its dissolving form as interference, clip the second with a wide slash. It staggers but holds its self up forcing me to kick the third in the jaw as it dives for my leg. The fourth gets inside my reach anyway.

  Fingers close around my forearm. Cold drives straight through muscle into bone. My grip loosens, reflex not choice. I headbutt where its face should be and it recoils enough for me to reverse the spear and drive the butt into its midsection.

  It comes apart. My arm is slow now. Heavy.

  I've lost count of how many are left. They're not giving me sequences anymore. Everything is simultaneous, pressure from all angles, all the time.

  I thrust at one and two more hit my flank. Cold across my ribs, the inside of my elbows, my thigh. Each touch taking something. Heat, maybe. Speed. The margin I've been trading on.

  I kill another, then two more. The spear finds centers of mass by geometry now, punching through forms that shouldn't be solid but are solid enough to die.

  Three left, then somehow ten. My lungs are burning, vision blurring. I can feel their breath, or the substance within it. My chest constricting like drowning in ice water.

  They're not letting up. If anything they circle tighter. One shoves me into another's strike. They can see what's happening. They know which way the momentum is running.

  One feints and I react too fast. Another shoves me from behind while a third drags fingers across my spine until my knees almost buckle. Too much, too fast, and yet I manage to stay upright long enough to take the one in front.

  Small victory but their numbers keep climbing.

  My next thrust goes wide. Fatigue or cold or both. The miss costs me another rake across my shoulder. I can barely keep the spear level.

  Then the Core pulses against my thigh. In a blazing kind of heat. An inferno pressing back against the cold spreading through my limbs.

  Then light.

  Or maybe more then light. Pressure expands outward from my hip in a sphere that passes through me without resistance. The creatures are not so lucky. The wave hits and they come apart, shattering into blue fragments that scatter across the cubicle floor like marbles caught in a shock wave.

  I stumble, catching myself on the spear which I plant in the ground like a flag. The cold is still in my bones but the heat running through my body is pushing it all back, warming me from the outside in.

  No more fake destruction around me. Only motes of fading blue.

  Then the shimmer starts again, at the edges. In the shadows between buildings, dozens of them. The wave bought time, not victory.

  The Core pulses, directional now. A compass needle finding north.

  Toward the staircase. Toward Lily.

  A thought arrives without anything to support it.

  Bring it to her.

  The certainty feels foreign, inserted. I don't trust it, but I don't have a better option and the new shapes are already coalescing at the edges of my vision.

  I run.

  My legs are heavy and cold-touched but fear is a resource like any other and I'm glad to spend it on anything other then dying here.

  The stairway is thirty feet away. Running it becomes twenty then ten.

  I take the stairs two at a time, then three, pausing only on the fourth floor to check the Core. Still pointing up.

  I reach our base's floor and start working the locks. My hands are clumsy, cold-touched and yet the sequence comes back to me and I move through it. Behind me I can hear them, some entering the building below, others smashing through cubicles, more flooding the stairs.

  I shoulder the door open as they hit the floor beneath me.

  Inside, I swing it shut and wedge the a 2x4 plank across the frame in a draw bar position I'd already set up.

  I move to Lily's room.

  She's in her bed. Sofia is close by. Lily's limbs are restrained, all four of them, and her throat is a deep ocean blue. Sofia's face tells me nothing useful because for what I see before me is the most terrible of all things.

  "She's having a psychotic episode!"

  Lily's body arches against the restraints. Not fighting them, moving in ways that have nothing to do with voluntary muscle control. Her eyes are open but tracking something I can't see, pupils dilated so wide the color is gone. Her mouth thrashes soundlessly. Her hands claw at the sheets with a rhythm that matches nothing in the room.

  Except it does.

  The Core pulses in my pocket and her fingers twitch in sync. Pulse, twitch. Pulse, twitch. Like she's receiving a signal I'm carrying.

  The blue in her throat is new. Not bruising. Not cyanosis. A color that sits under the skin and shifts when she jerks, the same impossible blue as the creatures I dissolved downstairs. The same blue as the things currently climbing toward us.

  "It started about ten minutes ago." Sofia's voice is clinical in the way doctors get when they're scared. "I thought it was the fever spiking. But her temperature is normal. Heart rate elevated but not dangerous. She just." She gestures at Lily, a small helpless open-handed thing. "Started."

  Ten minutes. Around when I got here with the Core.