The silence inside the storage chamber wasn't empty. It was a presence—heavy, metallic, and waiting to be broken. Outside, the mountain was screaming.
It wasn't a human scream. It was steel grinding against stone—the growl of excavators chewing through the mountain above us.
I sat on the floor, the beam of my tactical flashlight aimed at the cracked ceiling, listening to the dust rain down in tiny, rhythmic showers. The net was closing.
Damien was a few feet away, his back against a rotting shipping crate. He was barely holding it together. The fever had receded, but the cost of the last twenty-four hours was written in the pallor of his skin and the way his hands shook whenever he thought I wasn't looking.
"We can't stay here," I whispered. My voice felt small, swallowed by the vast
