Chapter 8 · The Ash Marshal

The breathing came again.

It rolled through the hidden archive like thunder trapped beneath the floor—slow, wet, impossibly deep. Dust sifted from the ceiling. Every dead console flickered awake in sequence, their screens blooming with amber symbols that Kellan could not read and somehow understood.

Behind him, Brom raised a cutting torch.

"Tell me that's machinery," the mechanic said.

The torch shook in his hand. Brom had faced burning transit rings, collapsing gantries, and a Crown purge cannon at arm's length. This fear was different. It had found a place behind his ribs and settled there.

Sable stood beneath the broken archway, one palm pressed against the side of her head. Blood ran from her nose. Her eyes remained fixed on the black door at the back of the chamber.

"It isn't machinery," she whispered.

Kellan's folded armor crawled beneath his skin.

The sensation began at his spine, a cold pressure threading upward through vertebrae that no longer felt entirely his. Plates unfolded over his shoulders, then withdrew again, as if the armor were breathing with the thing below them.