"How was the ceremony?"

  "You could've gone to find out for yourself." Annoyance barbed her every word. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. Sometimes, she questioned if he'd ever loved anything aside from his work.

  "I could've. And if I were there, you and I wouldn't have this conversation right now."

  They'd removed the remains of their meal from the table. Two steaming mugs waited. Dessert. They hadn't touched them. She looked into his eyes. There was sympathy there, but no apology. Was it so hard to set aside the duties of the Prime Beacon for a single day?

  "Your boys could've handled it. You don't accept incapable people into such important positions, right?"

  He gave the usual, infuriating chuckle and stretched. They listened to his joints popping. "Understanding my reasoning means nothing. They needed me on hand if a high-tier appeared."

  "And did one?" She'd already read through the follow-up reports. A transportation caravan dispatched to the eastern fort had run afoul of several Aud. Yes, a blue appeared during that ambush.

  And yes, it, and the rest, was dead now, thanks in no small part to the man sitting across from her. "One of your soldiers is nearly as capable as you."

  "If a job requires a hundred percent, ninety wouldn't cut it." He hadn't made a habit of saying vague, stupid things like that very often. Aunt Eight would make him regret it, calling him a "boring man" every chance she got.

  The moniker she used didn't differ much, though she was growing out of it. "Old man, you never make sense. Ever thought of taking breaks? One day, you'll run yourself so ragged there won't be enough of you to fit in that WAV you like living in."

  "That's uncalled for. I only spend as much time as I do in Co-6 to train."

  "You gave your suit a denomination. And you sleep in 'her'."

  "Is that jealousy I hear?"

  "Who'd be jealous of it? I'm just concerned that one day you won't come out of it, and humanity'll be down a Prime Beacon."

  "That day will come sooner than you think if you don't start being more respectful!"

  They shared a smile. The predominant pattern in their relationship usually went this way. He'd do something to upset her, she'd call him out, and he'd say something too ridiculous to stay mad. As he picked up his mug, his communicator buzzed. He'd left the thin cylinder at the edge of the table.

  He answered the call, and she waited, anticipating what'd happen after. It took a few minutes. He fingered his graying stubble when he ended the transmission. His eyes wouldn't meet hers. "I have to go."

  Just when they moved past his last absence. She sighed and tossed her hand at him. Good thing nobody else was here to see her make such a flippant gesture at the Prime Beacon.

  "Make sure you don't come back this time covered in lacerations. You come home so little as is; I'm getting tired of visiting you in a hospital."

  "It's a meeting. Nothing will try to kill me," he assured her, cleaning what little he could in the kitchenette before he had to go.

  "Not even the Fifth Headman?"

  "Does it make me a bad person if I say I'm kind of hoping he takes a swing at me someday?" He leaned against the countertop to pull on his boots. "Keep in mind this is a hypothetical admission."

  She smiled bitterly into her mug. For once, the syrup failed to cheer her up. "Got it. Won't recount that to myself near any online auditory sensors."

  "You should get going, too."

  She looked up, seeing his face peeking around the corner. "Where?"

  He pinned her with a hard stare. Something felt wrong the longer it continued. "Out of here. Hallucinations waste time. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience."

  She blinked, and he'd crossed the room. Their faces were close enough that she felt his hot breath on her cheek. His expression had morphed into something ugly. Hostility felt like it radiated from his pores. How did he do that?

  "Wake. Up."

  She did. A rush of agony permeating her body slammed into her first. She felt like an Aud was sitting on her. Was that what was happening? She tried to sit up, but her limbs refused to so much as twitch.

  They were stuck, incapable of anything but informing her overloaded brain of the pain. Groaning. Hers. She sucked in a couple of breaths. Expanding her chest felt like stabbing herself, but she had to.

  Coughing induced gagging when her throat caught on something that felt slimy. Chewy. Most of the suit's internal LEDs had cracked. The survivors flickered weakly, painting the insides red. Or was that the blood?

  She hacked up a glob, wishing she could wipe her mouth. The HUD came to the rescue. It sounded like it spoke from the distant end of a tunnel. "Notice: Resuscitation procedure successful. Addendum: Additional injections will include side effects. Proceed?"

  It hardly mattered at this point. She couldn't feel her legs. "Y-" The vibrations from speaking almost made her seize back up from the pain. Two more attempts. She switched to blinking in morse, hoping the internal visual sensors still worked.

  A needle pinched her arm, injecting copious amounts of painkillers and coagulants. All that internal bleeding had compounded. She'd gotten herself tossed, had to endure heavy impacts, almost blew herself up--twice.

  Then, she'd fallen. Almost too far to walk away from it still breathing. Or she might not walk away from it, but she'd take what crumbs the situation left for her.

  Painkillers reached the troublesome areas fastest. Their presence brought her enough clarity of mind to force her brain to work. The scattered thoughts had to come together. It wasn't the first time she'd forced her brain to work while drugged.

  The greater tunnels were kilometers high. She should've fallen long enough to approach her terminal velocity. And what was worse, the WAV packed her inside it. The design left little buffering space.

  Only one plausible explanation for her survival fit. Her fingers twitched, like they were expressing distaste. It had to be the frankly insane number of injections she'd subjected herself to.

  But even those hadn't done the job right. Her HUD's timely resuscitation--no, she could break down what'd caused her survival later. She'd have liked her legs to start working first.

  Instead, it was her neck. She turned the helmet on its side, staring into the dark. The night vision was missing; the blanket of blackness pressed down from all sides. If she was this messed up, it made sense the battery core hadn't escaped the worst of it either.

  She willed her hands to move and winced, even in her drugged state. When had she replaced her bones with thousands of shards? She pressed them against the ground, fighting against gravity. That wouldn't work. She felt faint, about ready to return to comfortable unconsciousness.

  Plans. They'd be better than pointless movement. She needed to conserve her energy. And she couldn't move on her own anymore; the fall compromised her locomotion. She half sighed, half coughed. While convenient, the WAV didn't need her body to move. Her head would do. And it was more or less in one piece.

  "Get me automated movement. Protocol YJ-3." The HUD took the reins. Dozens of minor intelligence programs activated to cover the functions of the suit still working. It stopped running diagnostics and instructed the suit to sit up.

  The servos had suffered enough that she could hear them creaking behind her back. Before they made it up, something forced them and her back down.

  The HUD crackled. There were Aud around her. She could surmise that much. Her fall would've been louder than a flash cylinder. One of them had spotted her. Or it had already been close.

  "Notice: Two green furs in immediate vicinity."

  She felt the fight leave her bones. One was already on top of her, preventing her from wriggling away. The light WAV wouldn't've had a chance at moving it had it been in its prime condition.

  She wanted them to be merciful and not the type to play with their food. When one of them moved, pressing down on her chest, she froze. The hoof slowly sank into the chest plate. It wouldn't crush her the old-fashioned way, would it?

  Her surviving auditory sensors heard its companion growling. The pressure relented. Her lungs regained the space to expand. She was so relieved that the stabbing pains felt inconsequential. But also suspicious. Why had the other called it off? Her earlier worries about their intelligence came back.

  'Not a good time, pessimistic brain. Leave me alone with the hundreds of kilos worth of biological killing machines. Thanks.'

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Knowing what she did--which still amounted to nothing--she expected a swift death, but also a long one. Aud were spontaneous when it came to their preferred method of slaughter. Sometimes they would be almost kind, ending the suffering with a single bite.

  Others could appear consciously vindictive and sadistic. They'd rip off the limbs of victims one by one, or slowly slit open their stomachs. The really lucky ones had a front row seat to a furred nightmare eating their insides. Further down, she heard something crunch, then tear. She got dragged forward.

  "Notice: Thigh plating breached. Addendum: Scent now transferred by air. Notice: Expect more visitors."

  The damage to the suit's internal modules was inevitable. The remaining LEDs projected a diagram of the damage in real-time. The Aud hadn't started with the leg storing the vial of Aud blood and the triangular talisman.

  It was only a small relief. More ripping and dragging pulled her further forward. She bit her lip in the darkness when nothing else happened. What were they going to do? Or what were they doing already?

  The cave winds rose with a fury, obscuring what little noise the sensors captured. One of the greens tugged her forward. Her arms rolled under her back at an uncomfortable angle. Was that a snap?

  She spent a few agonizing moments unable to catch other signs of what the Aud were up to. Pa-5 felt about ready to scream to hear something aside from the deafening winds. That was when they returned to their usual—more fitting for background ambience.

  Was that…chewing? The greater tunnel distorted the echoes. Wet. They sounded wet. She gagged as a nagging thought intruded. She couldn't feel her legs. And the greens tore open the leg armor first.

  She pushed her nausea down. The thought refused to let her silence it, pushing back with increased fervor. It made sense. The only reason to explain why she wasn't dead already.

  They were eating her alive.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. New moisture beaded beneath. No crying. She couldn't yet. Her breath came in flitty bursts. It couldn't be good for her, but she'd latched onto it. The sounds, they--she groaned when a vicious tug rolled her. Fixating on what anything else would be great right now. False optimism would taste like poison.

  What about real positives? The greens started with the one part of her that she could conclusively label dead weight. By this point, feeling in her legs still hadn't returned. Lower body paralysis? Relief came first, followed by terror. She couldn't feel their teeth tearing out chunks of her, but what did that matter? They were still doing it in the first place!

  "HUD?" She couldn't stay here. Her leg had to be half-gone, and they'd move to other parts of her body after. Her other leg, her stomach, her…

  She swallowed bile, grimly staring forward. Or was it to the side? Or up? She lost all sense of direction despite feeling solid stone against one of her sides. That she couldn't identify which one it was should've concerned her more than it did.

  Wait. Stone was fragile. She accessed the map and frantically reoriented it. Her prodding made it zoom out, abandoning the close-up view. It wasn't moving fast enough!

  She felt another pinch in her already numbing arm. Would she give out from the excessive doping or the Aud first? No, not her concern. Until she crossed the point of no return, the HUD would do everything in its power to keep her alive. She'd have to trust it.

  There! She traced the tunnels in a hurry. Above the greater tunnel was the lesser tunnel with the fragile ground she'd fallen from. They both stretched on, but they were no longer what interested her. What she needed, rather, was what was below.

  Another greater tunnel made a path cutting right underneath the one she suffered in. It could also be the same tunnel twisting back around. If them still dragging her wasn't enough to spike her feverish state, hearing more metal tearing open was.

  The scutumsteel had held admirably until now. Would this work? It would certainly surprise the Aud enjoying her legs. But she needed something better than that to survive.

  With stubbornness she didn't know she had left, her sluggish mind came out of its dying stupor. Ignoring her arms' pain signals, it sent its own. Instructions. Even numbed, moving was plenty capable of making her feel terrible.

  But her arm obeyed and rose. She bared her painted red teeth. The Light Institute had taught her that all animals had an instinct to offer one more iota of resistance before succumbing. Here was hers.

  It'd need to be now, though. Before the HUD could tell her the plan her drug-addled mind produced wasn't likely to work. Before the blood loss returned her to unconsciousness. Definitely before she could change her mind. Pa-5 aimed her surviving launcher at the ground.

  Here went nothing.

  Click. Click.

  She growled. Of all the things, why the launcher? One of the greens noticed the noises. It left her legs to move upward, drooling on the helmet.

  One of the hooves pressed onto her stomach. While the pressure increased, she fumbled with the launcher, one hand clenching helplessly.

  Unlike the flash cylinders, she couldn't brute-force a detonation without using the launcher. It peeled away the orbs' outer layers while firing, exposing the volatile contents to the oxygen needed for catalyzing. No explosions otherwise.

  They were just bouncy orbs on their own. A hard impact wouldn't do anything. Those flexible, hardy outer layers protected pilots from possible accidents.

  Click. Click. Click. What else could she do? She resolutely pulled the trigger on repeat. Each time, that click seemed to enrage the Aud further. She was grateful she couldn't see. No way to tell she could've kept going if they made eye contact.

  Click. Click. She pulled the trigger again. No click. It'd primed the orb. And just in time. She punched upward, catching the Aud off guard. It yowled.

  Before it could avenge itself by crushing her, she released the trigger.

  She heard the telltale whistle of the orb and the splatter. Anticipation came when she imagined the slick goop seeping into the green fur. At the height of this, she might've even felt glee.

  The explosion came, sending her tumbling. No, that it tossed her would be more apt. Each impact, regardless of intensity, drove the air out of her lungs. She skipped off rocks, ledges, and steps, and crashed through several boulders.

  The HUD did its best to protect her vitals. It controlled the arms and the less-damaged leg to take the brunt of the collisions whenever she crossed paths with another object. One or more of the visual sensors survived throughout.

  Her front feed hadn't, though she couldn't focus long enough to see anything. She kept going cross-eyed when jarred. Her entire world became a tumble in the dark, sending her crashing further away.

  The trail of destruction would attract even more Aud. Never mind the heat or light from the explosion. She struggled to sit up before she remembered her legs.

  Like a can of paste, her thigh plates had revealed their "tasty" innards. When the explosion went off right above her, she didn't doubt that what remained of her legs died in the combustion.

  She was free of the Aud, but the ground hadn't collapsed. Her goal wasn't met. Then again, she couldn't have survived another fall of that height. Pa-5 didn't want to hear the HUD's opinion of her continued survival. Could it tell her if the explosion cauterized her legs, though?

  She…needed to hide. The chemical scents of the concussion orb--her last--should've hidden her scent. So long as she hunkered down and tended to what wounds she could, she might eventually encounter another suicide runner.

  No one was around to help, so she dragged herself. Her plated fingers scraped over the rocks and dug for cracks to find purchase. Her body dragged behind. She couldn't be sure if she was moving toward the tunnel's center or its walls, but she needed distance. Any distance, no matter how small, would help.

  The edges of her vision were darkening. At first, it'd been hard to notice due to the blood loss and that everything was also dark. Her HUD clued her in by warbling in her ear.

  "Notice: Low blood pressure and rising beats per minute detected. Onset tachycardia detected. Anemia from blood loss detected."

  She gurgled, feeling more blood dribble past her lips. If she wasn't careful, she could drown in the stuff. How ironic. There wasn't a body of water large enough to drown in anywhere in the Gaiss Hollow except the Last Light, yet here she was. She angled her head to the side and continued.

  The trail she was leaving behind her must've looked nasty. The best-case scenario was that her legs were the only missing parts. And that the explosion cauterized them. She shivered when the chills began. Her head was going all over the place. How bad would the agony be without the suit's injections?

  As an afterthought, one of her hands pawed weakly at the suit's compartment. The one holding the vials and the talisman. She wondered if either survived.

  The compartment was set into the suit's hips more so than the legs. While it wasn't as impossible as she first thought to escape the worst of it, she found herself shocked. Enough so to push back the hungry black a little longer.

  She had a mission. She couldn't die until she'd delivered the news of Fort Io's fall. The things she'd collected could reach them, too. She was an engineer, but also a serviceman of humanity. A soldier, when duty called for it. Without knowing how the other eight fared, she couldn't rest until she knew she'd made it.

  The other runners. She hadn't thought about them in a while. More gurgles. Supposed to be chuckles, those. Had any of them reached their tertiary checkpoints? Were most of them still alive, and was she the worst one off? The thought didn't hurt as much as she thought it would.

  The Western Greater Tunnel System would claim her. Other Aud would finish what those two greens had started, and leave behind another skeleton. Maybe some human would find her one day, decades down the line. Maybe she never would be. Or was her eventual fate to become one with the walls, her bones fossilized?

  She watched the screen displaying her vitals reset more slowly, tracking meticulously even now. What an odd thing, watching the proof of her body failing grow worse before her eyes. Her eyes didn't work perfectly in the first place, but they conveyed enough.

  She pulled up the suit's diagnostics. Scraps of scutumsteel and the last dregs from a power core were all that held it together. The legs were goaslike she'd suspected. The mount on her surviving arm disappeared, too.

  Not that there was any more ammunition for it. The chest had caved a little--okay, more than a little--and the stomach plates were close to detaching on their own. Her WAV's condition might be almost as bad as hers.

  The darkness was more oppressive now, clawing not only at her eyes but through her head. Her sluggish thoughts somehow got slower. If she didn't know better, it almost felt like somebody was pressing down on her shoulders. Like they felt an obligation to make each agonizing meter a greater struggle than the last.

  Had the Aud caught up? Or found her? She didn't think so. She was still free. Or was she? She shook her head, wishing she could scratch it through the helmet. Was there a concussion somewhere inside?

  "Notice: Vital signs bottoming. Warning: Impossible to preserve signs of life with current measures. Addendum: Remaining chemical contents include liquid sun. Proceed with injection?"

  She wouldn't live long enough to survive the consequences anyway, so who cared? She blinked out the pattern for yes.

  She gasped when the amassed injections hit all at once. They slid all over her body, creeping into every nerve. She was hot, no, burning up. But it was a good kind of burn! The kind that told her her body was still fighting to keep going, even now.

  The First Ray doled liquid sun out to its soldiers, and the Eighth Ray's liberally. The two branches of the One-Light Directory used it as an emergency recovery method. It did its job well, or else they would've found a replacement.

  But like everything, too much of it harmed more than helped. After a threshold, excessive liquid sun entering the body orally or via the bloodstream would burn it up from the inside. Like a sun had taken root in her chest.

  She could draw strength from its heat to keep going. Her exhaustion would fade. Her mind would keep greater clarity. Her wounds would even begin to heal.

  But that heat grew until it ruined the temperature equilibrium of the human body. Then it continued. Overdose victims never had bodies to autopsy if they died. The process ended with natural cremation when the body got so hot it went ablaze.

  She'd started a clock with a time limit she couldn't gauge. Everyone resisted the temperature imbalance differently. She needed to find another suicide runner before then and hand over her microchip and physical findings. Failing that, find a place to hide that would be hard for Aud to find, yet easy for a human, if they ever came looking.

  She'd soon be too dead for any other option to matter.