The outside was loud.

  That was the first thing — the sheer volume of it, the way the air outside the shelter doors was a completely different thing from the air inside. Gunfire in the middle distance. The grinding, bellowing noise of something large and mechanical. The Steel Legion's las-fire cutting sharp lines through the smoke already drifting thick from somewhere nearby.

  And underneath all of it, irregular and wrong, the sound of Orks.

  Lilith had read about them. She had not been prepared for the sound.

  It was loud in a way that felt personal. Not the mechanical noise of weapons or vehicles but something coming from throats, from mass, from the particular chaos of creatures that were on some fundamental level enjoying this. It rolled through the grounds in waves and made the back of her neck prickle.

  "Let’s move," Eve said, close behind her seeing that Lilith is distracted.

  They moved.

  They stayed inside the orphanage grounds which is close to the building walls, away from the outer gates where the fighting was thickest. The smoke drifting in from outside gave them cover they hadn't asked for but were grateful for.

  The Steel Legion was already at the outer edges of the grounds, the disciplined crack of lasguns keeping the Orks from pushing through entirely. And among them, larger, moving differently which are the Salamanders. Green armor catching the light through the smoke. Lilith spotted Ha'ken's silhouette for half a second before the smoke swallowed him again.

  At least he's there, she thought.

  But they weren't going toward the fighting. They were moving through the orphanage itself through corridors and connecting rooms, the parts that hadn't been reached yet. The building felt wrong when it was empty like this. Too quiet on the inside while everything outside was too loud.

  The library was on the east side of the orphanage.

  Lilith moved fast, her left eye doing what it can’t before — seeing, filling in the side of the world that had always been blank before. Every corner clear. Nothing missed.

  Where is he? she kept thinking. He has to be in the library. He mentioned the book at breakfast. If the alarm went off while he was there—

  He'd go back for the book, she thought. He absolutely would.

  She was already moving faster.

  "Lilith—" Sister Marian started.

  "Library," Lilith said. "He went back for a book."

  Sister Marian made a sound that was both exasperated and completely unsurprised.

  They were halfway down the east corridor when the explosion hit.

  Not far. Close enough that the walls shook and dust fell from the ceiling and the sound of it went through Lilith's chest like something solid. She stumbled, caught the wall, kept moving.

  Her heart was going very fast now.

  Library. He's in the library. He has to be.

  She was at the front. Eve was right behind her, and Sister Marian behind Eve, the three of them moving single file through the corridor — and Lilith was not holding Eve's hand anymore, both arms free for speed and balance, and that was the moment the wall came apart.

  It didn't crumble. It was punched — a green arm the size of a support beam driving through stone and plaster like it was paper, and Lilith had already thrown herself forward on instinct and the arm passed through the space she'd just been in and hit the far wall instead with a sound like a cannon going off indoors.

  She spun around.

  Three Orks.

  They hadn't come through the wall neatly. They'd come through it the way Orks came through most things — sideways and loudly, and the corridor was now full of them in a way that corridors were not built to handle. Green bulk and rusted metal and small bright eyes that were interested in violence the way other creatures were interested in food.

  Between them and Lilith.

  Eve was on the wrong side. Sister Marian was on the wrong side. Lilith was standing alone in the corridor ahead with three Orks blocking everything behind her and the library still further down and Lysander still somewhere she couldn't reach.

  Hurry.

  The whisper. Same voice. Right there beside her ear.

  Lilith looked at Eve through the gap between two of the Orks — one second of eye contact across the chaos, Eve already dropping into a stance, reading the room with the cold focus she got when a fight had stopped being a possibility and become a fact.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  "Eve." Lilith's voice came out steadier than she felt. "Protect Sister Marian. Follow when you can." A beat. "I trust you."

  Something moved through Eve's expression — quick, there and gone. Then she nodded.

  Sister Marian started to say something.

  "Back away," Eve said to her, flat and without looking, already moving — not toward Sister Marian but toward the nearest Ork, and the Ork was large and armed and did not appear to take a small girl seriously right up until the moment it had reason to.

  Lilith turned and ran.

  She was fast now.

  That was something she'd stopped noticing because it had become normal — the way her feet found the ground cleanly, the way corners didn't catch her off guard anymore, the way she moved through space without the constant half-second miscalculation her blind left side had always forced on her. Both eyes open. The world complete on both sides.

  The library door was ahead.

  She hit it shoulder-first and it swung open and she was inside before it finished moving and she saw him immediately.

  Lysander.

  He was off the ground.

  An Ork had him by the head. One massive hand, fingers wrapped around his skull, holding him up the way a person held something they were about to throw or squeeze or simply break out of curiosity. Lysander's feet were dangling. His hands were at the Ork's fingers, small fingers pulling at green ones that didn't move, and his face—

  Blood. Running from somewhere in his hair, dark and too much of it, sliding down the side of his face and soaking into his collar.

  Something went very hot inside Lilith's chest.

  It wasn't fear. It was something else that came up fast and total and swallowed every logic she would normally think first. She didn't think. She didn't plan. She just looked at the Ork and the thing in her chest that had gone hot went hotter and her left eye started to burn.

  The warmth built fast. Too fast. Pressing behind her gold eye like pressure looking for somewhere to go.

  The Ork hadn't noticed her yet.

  It was looking at Lysander with that small-eyed consideration — turning the problem of him over, deciding.

  Lilith looked at it.

  "Die," she said.

  It came out low and it came out certain and it came out with something behind it that wasn't just a word — something that moved through the air the way lightning moved, not visible but felt, and the Ork made a sound Orks were not supposed to make and its body—

  She'd seen it before. Once. On the Magos's ship. The same thing happened now — the body folding inward, twisting in a direction bodies were not supposed to go, warping in on itself in the quiet grotesque way of something being unmade from the inside out.

  It dropped Lysander.

  Lilith was already moving — across the room, sliding to her knees beside him, her hands finding his face, his shoulders, steadying him before he could crumple all the way to the floor.

  "Lysander." Her voice had stripped down to just the immediate thing. "Lysander. Look at me."

  He was blinking. Dazed. His eyes wandered and then found her face and something in them cleared — the way eyes cleared when they found something familiar in the middle of something terrible.

  "Lilith," he said. Small voice. A bit wet.

  "I've got you." She pressed her hand carefully to the side of his head where the blood was coming from, felt him wince, kept the pressure steady. "I've got you. Can you move?"

  "My head hurts."

  "I know. Sister Marian is coming. You just have to hold on for me." She looked at his face — checking his eyes, the way Sister Marian had shown her, looking for the things that mattered. "Just hold on."

  Lysander looked at her with the unfocused, earnest trust of someone who wasn't entirely sure what was happening but had decided the person in front of them was enough.

  "You came," he said.

  "Of course I came," Lilith said.

  Meanwhile, in the east corridor—

  The first Ork swung.

  Eve wasn't there when it arrived. She'd moved under it — not dodging, just not being where it expected her to be anymore — and found the knee joint on the way back up and pushed in the direction knees were not designed to go. The Ork went down sideways and the corridor was not big enough for something that size to fall without consequence.

  The second one watched this and adjusted. It came in lower.

  Eve stepped into it instead of back from it.

  The Ork had not planned for that.

  The third was watching both of them with the small-eyed recalculation of something that was no longer as confident as it had been thirty seconds ago.

  And then Eve felt it.

  The emptiness.

  It arrived the way cold arrived — from everywhere at once, her Blank field expanding outward the way it had before Lilith existed, back when the whole world had been hollow and wrong and quiet in a way she'd had no words for because she'd had nothing to compare it to. She felt it push outward through the corridor, through the walls, into the air around her.

  The Orks felt it first.

  The third one, which had been moving to flank her, stopped. Not tactically — it stopped the way things stopped when something went wrong in a way they couldn't name. Its eyes went small and confused and it made a sound that wasn't aggression, just noise, the sound of something whose certainty had suddenly left it.

  The second one, still grappling with Eve, lurched. Its movements became sloppy. The confidence went out of it like air going out of something punctured.

  The emptiness was working on them faster, harder, more completely than anything else in the corridor.

  Behind them, Sister Marian had pressed herself back against the wall.

  She could feel it — the wrongness pressing in from all sides, the prickling wrongness she'd learned to breathe through in the orphanage when Eve was nearby. She knew what it was. She'd known for months. She'd built a tolerance for the edge of it.

  This was not the edge of it.

  This was the full weight of it, and it made her stomach turn and her legs feel uncertain and every instinct she had say wrong, wrong, something is completely wrong with this corridor right now. She pressed harder against the wall and kept her feet and kept her eyes open.

  But the Orks were worse.

  She could see it clearly — the way the aggression drained out of them, replaced by something closer to confusion, the way their movements became uncertain and uncoordinated, the way they seemed to lose the simple animal confidence that Orks ran on like fuel. Whatever Eve's Blank field was doing to Sister Marian, it was doing something considerably more complete to them.

  They were big. They were armed. They were losing.

  Eve was still smiling, which was not an expression Sister Marian had ever seen on her in any ordinary moment and which was, under the circumstances, one of the more unsettling things in an already unsettling corridor.

  Through all of it — the expanding wrongness, the disoriented Orks, the shaking walls — there was a thread. Sister Marian couldn't see it or name it, but she could almost feel it in the way you felt weather changing before it arrived. Something that ran from Eve outward and didn't break, some connection that the wrongness pushed against but couldn't swallow.

  Eve pushed the second Ork into the wall hard enough to crack the stone and turned to the third one, and her smile didn't move.

  Sister Marian gripped her medicae bag, steadied her legs, and stayed on her feet.

  Someone was going to need her shortly. Or is it?