The river of debris swallowed them.

  Mara locked her arms around Trenn, her boots skidding uselessly against the steep stone chute. Trenn was a dead weight of metal and nerves, dragging them down into the dark until instinct took over.

  He twisted, pressing his wide tail under them like a brake.

  Metal scales shrieked against granite. Sparks sprayed in the choking dust. The friction vibrated violently up his spine. It threatened to rattle his teeth loose, but the drag slowed their lethal descent.

  The breath was hammered from Trenn’s lungs as they crashed into a mountain of compressed dirt and gravel.

  He reached out tentatively. His hand rested on Mara’s unmoving leg. She twitched. He let out a relieved sigh.

  Trenn’s boot nudged something smooth. He looked down. The God-Bone club lay half-buried in the slag. He reached down, his fingers closing around the ivory handle, and used it to steady himself against his tail.

  Trenn lay on his wounded, pustulent back. The air tasted of copper and ancient dust. The burn in his side radiated with the profound chill of rot.

  “Trenn?”

  Mara lay nearby. Black chitin was cracked. White fur was grey with soot. She pushed up, arms shaking. The Giant Pill burned in her veins, a chemical fire forcing her battered muscles to hold their enlarged form against the crushing fatigue.

  "You... Is it you?" Her hand hovered over the kris knife.

  "Yes."

  Mara relaxed her shoulders. "Good. Can't fight again."

  Trenn reached for his head. Skate? His hand met matted hair. Sound attuned mana pulsed into his skull and made his sonar flare. It mapped twisted metal, rails, carts... A mine.

  He found the Meteor Slime overhead. Skate was a violet puddle stretching precariously from the teeth of a rusted saw blade jutting from a pile of scrap.

  Trenn tried to stand. The world tilted. His tail slid through the filth until he reached the base of the debris pile and righted himself. He couldn't climb; he could barely lift his arms without tearing his wounds open.

  He raised his shaking hands, cupping them as high as he could reach.

  “Let go… Skate. Just… drop.” Each word was a strain on his endurance.

  The slime shuddered at his presence. It released its grip, sloughing off the metal and dropping through the dark to land in his palms with a splat.

  It was cold and yielding, stripped of its stone armor, but the core remained dense and cohesive. It quivered in his palms, a mass of translucent purple matter.

  He lifted the creature to the crown of his head. Skate settled, molding itself into a flat surface, clinging to the curve of his skull. A faint, stuttering vibration hummed against his temple—weak, but alive. It wasn't an armored ball anymore, but it was still holding on.

  "I can't… see," Mara hissed.

  "I thought you…” He winced, stepping towards Mara, “could see in the dark?"

  "Too dark," Mara whispered. "This place is like a closed box."

  “Okay. I’ll guide you… Just give me a second.”

  He closed his eyes and snapped his finger. The echo mapped an immense, cathedral-like chamber. Empty, with a gouge as high as the ceiling cutting through the far wall.

  The Path of the Red God.

  The floor was a graveyard of industry: shattered diamond-tipped saw blades, snapped high-tensile winch cables, and jagged, discarded shavings of Red Metal. Tracks and carts had been scattered by the giant animal’s escape.

  Trenn touched Mara’s arm and slid down her forearm to grab her hand. "We need to find our way out of here. The carts… their tracks. They disappear into an avalanche of stones… I can’t see the other side."

  He tried to sit. His side screamed. He touched the wound—charred meat and thick fluid. Heat from the infection warred with the thick gold ooze. He pressed his hand to the wall.

  “I don’t… I don’t see another exit… The only path is… the trench. The one the giant god dug to get out of this hole,” he said, ignoring the burning pain that covered his torso.

  "Can you walk?" Mara wheezed. With a grunt of effort, she pushed herself up. Her legs trembled, but they held. The Giant Pill was still working, a fire in her blood holding back the tide of her injuries.

  Trenn tried to follow, pushing himself from the wall and putting his weight on shaky legs. There was a painful flash. He collapsed back, shoulder to the wall, as the world swam in red static.

  "Don't move," Mara commanded. She was at his side in two unsteady steps. She braced herself. She jammed her shoulder under his armpit, her boots grinding into the dirt floor for purchase.

  "Push!" she spat.

  She heaved. Her armor shrieked, leather straps popping under the strain of her expanded muscles fighting the dragging weight of his tail.

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  She didn't lift him so much as lever him upward. Trenn moved his tail, trying different angles, but even his gold limb was causing the wounds on his back to tear.

  “Just… keep it behind you,” Mara said. “Stop you from falling.”

  Together, they ground their way to a standing position.

  She was the load-bearing wall holding the roof up, her breath coming in short, sharp hitches as she took the load.

  She shifted her grip, her fingers digging into what was left of the heavy leather belt to keep him from tipping. "Hold on.”

  The scale of the cavern was overwhelming, a vast hollow that swallowed his senses.

  Trenn listened for the heartbeat of the facility. A distant, rhythmic hiss of steam vibrated through the metal, and a strong, steady gale of moving air pulled at the dust.

  They began a slow, staggering walk. “Yes, just… forward. Watch your step… now! A rail. Feel that?” Trenn directed Mara, who supported Trenn. After what felt like an hour of feeling through the dark, Trenn’s fingers met a ragged edge.

  "Forward. Water," said Trenn.

  They moved along the gantry in a slow, agonizing shuffle. Every step made Mara wince and Trenn shudder.

  They stumbled into a service alcove with mining equipment and Rabbitling work clothes.

  “I need—”

  “This.” Mara pulled up a heavy tarp and wrapped it around his waist. “Hold this, I’ll…” She fastened the belt. “There. Enough for now.”

  A steam pipe jutted from a wall nearby. Air vent?

  A shallow pool of grey water had collected in a rust-caked bucket beneath the pipe’s slow drip. Trenn pressed the wall with his shield arm and painfully dropped to his knees.

  “Water,” he groaned as he plunged his mutilated hands into the bucket.

  The water smelled of sulfur. He didn't care. He lowered his mouth to his hands. like licking a battery, and the floor, at the same time. He swallowed and guided Mara’s hand to the puddle.

  She lapped and coughed up the dirty water, her muzzle wrinkling.

  He looked out at the vast, empty void of the cavern. The gantries and platforms surrounding them weren't built to mine the rock; they were built to reach the sleeping god’s Red Metal fins.

  "We're standing in its bed. The Rabbitlings weren't mining a vein. They were peeling the armor straight off the giant animal."

  He dipped a rabbitling outfit into the metal bucket, letting it soak a moment.

  “No more,” Mara said, running her sleeve across her wet nose.

  The wound shrieked when he pressed the wet garment against the gangrenous burns in his side. He washed the area as best he could while Mara coughed and sat up.

  “The pill won’t last long… We should cover as much distance as possible… while I can.”

  Trenn’s ichor was already scabbing, isolating the necrotic plague in his wounds from the rest of his body.

  "Gold clots... fast," Trenn breathed, staring at the hard, amber scab on his side.

  Mara wrinkled her nose at the sweet, electric scent. “Good. Means we don’t both die in this hole.”

  “Listen… Mara… about that—”

  “Trenn. If this is about you crushing half of my body… with your god-tail… You can stop. At least until the four tracks of necrosis I clawed in your back heal.”

  "Fair," he whispered with a chuckle that made him flinch.

  Mara braced her back against a support beam to stand. She pushed her large frame into Trenn and hauled him in tight, pressing his uninjured side to herself. She wedged her shoulder under his armpit to keep him upright.

  "I lost control again," Trenn said, his weight heavy against her. "We almost lost. Because of me."

  "It was the One-Eye, not you. Besides, we're alive."

  “You fought it. You—”

  “It wasn’t my first time,” she snapped. “You know… for someone who forgot who he is… You sure sound like your old self.” She jerked him forward, making Trenn groan. “Stop your guilt spiral, we’ve got trouble ahead, soldier.”

  The cavern wall ended, severed at a sharp angle. It opened into the wound left by the Red God—a colossal scar gouged through the mountain's root. They stepped through the breach onto a ledge of sheared granite, the floor of the titan’s tunnel.

  Tracks the size of freight cars scarred the ceiling where the titan’s fins had sheared the rock.

  “There’s a bit of light,” Mara whispered, taking in the cathedral-like corridor in front of them. “Way out, up there," she finished, tilting her muzzle upwards and smelling the air.

  Trenn touched the wall beside them. It wasn't the cold, pitted iron of the hopper. It was stone, but polished to a mirror sheen and curved in a vast, unnatural arc that stretched up into the static of his echo location.

  The rocks were still warm from the passage of the digging Red God.

  “What… what do you think it is?”

  “It’s a mole. A mole with three fins. There are songs about it. They never end well.” She nudged his arm back up on her shoulder. “We unleashed something bad, Trenn.”

  Trenn grimaced. “I’d argue… It’s the One-Eye’s fault…”

  Mara laughed and coughed. “Maybe you’ve changed after all,” she said, smiling for the first time in weeks.

  She leaned her head heavily on his shoulder to keep them both steady. Her breath was a hot, erratic whistle.

  "And your memories?” she scanned Trenn’s face. “Annie—your mother. Tell me... anything. Just... one thing."

  Trenn reached back into the fog. He looked for the sound of her laugh or the scent of a kitchen, but his mind hit a wall of smooth, silent gold.

  "I can't." His voice trembled. "I have a name. But the face... nothing. Just grey static."

  He slumped further into her support, his ribs grating. "When I said that word... 'DIE'... it felt good. But… I think it makes me forget things. People. Places… Promises—"

  A pain groan and a griseled pop cut him off.

  Mara convulsed. Her vision blurred. A violent tremor slammed her against him.

  Steam hissed from her white fur. Her spine buckled. Vertebrae ground together like millstones. Her jaw snapped back into alignment with a loud click.

  The black chitin armor, stretched taut only a second ago, suddenly hung loose. She was dissolving inside the shell, biology rebelling against the magic pill.

  She collapsed.

  Trenn’s support was gone. He pitched forward with her, hitting the ground hard.

  He gritted his teeth against the pain and reached for her. His hand found a black Husk plate. It was cold and loose. Her body had shrunk away from the chitin, leaving her a small, unconscious weight rattling inside a suit meant for someone twice her weight

  Zeen’s design had held; the sliding rivets and overlapping Husk plates had expanded with her growth rather than bursting, but now they hung around her like a broken carapace.

  A tremor ran through his shoulders. “Discard her,” the beast in his marrow whispered. “Hollow shell. Dead weight.”

  Trenn ignored the impulse. He grabbed the slack leather straps hanging from her side. With his good hand, he loosened them, one by one. The armor groaned, the chitin plates sliding over each other with a series of clicks until they sagged down off her frame.

  He removed the greaves, the gauntlets, the pauldrons, and the breastplate. It was slow, painful work.

  He slumped near Mara and dragged her unarmored form against his chest. Her inert weight settled in his arms. The golden tail coiled around them, a heavy, metallic barrier that pressed them together.

  "I’ve got you," he whispered.

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