Hollowing at a Hologram: The Last Organic Lycan Alive

The Rust King

Chapter 9

The silence in the alley was thicker than the smog.

I stared at the massive, scarred wolf. His rusted iron eye-plate caught the sickly neon bleed from a flickering streetlamp above. He was bowed so low his snout nearly touched the toxic sludge pooling around my bare feet. Behind him, a dozen other wolves mirrored the gesture. Broken cyborgs. Discarded junk.

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.

"Get up," I whispered. My voice cracked.

The grey wolf didn’t move.

I looked down at Kaelen. His skin was turning a terrifying shade of gray. The glowing blue tether connecting our wrists was sputtering. It pulsed weakly, the light dimming with every shallow, agonizing breath he dragged into his failing lungs.

"I said get up!" I screamed it this time. My throat burned. "Help me!"

The grey wolf lifted his head. The rusted gears in his shoulder whined as he shifted. There was no clean flash of light, no high-tech realignment. It was a messy, painful sound of tearing muscle and grinding metal.

A man knelt in the mud where the wolf had been. He looked to be in his fifties, his face weathered like old leather, half of it covered by crude metal plating bolted directly into his cheekbone. He wore a ragged trench coat smelling of sulfur and wet dog.

He looked from me to the dying billionaire bleeding out in the trash.

"You smell like the old world," the man said. His voice was gravel. "Like pine and rain. We haven't smelled that down here since the Spire went up."

"I don't care what I smell like," I choked out. I fell to my knees beside Kaelen, gripping his broad shoulders. I shook him, but his head just lolled to the side. "He's dying. His implants are rejecting."

The man stepped closer. He didn't look at Kaelen with pity. He looked at him with pure, unadulterated hatred.

"That is Alpha-Prime Kaelen," the man spat. "He ordered the purges in Sector Four. He built the very machines hunting us. If the sky-god is choking on his own chrome, we should let him rot."

"He jumped down a disposal chute to save my life!" I shot back. My fingers curled into Kaelen's silk sheets, staining them with the oil and blood covering my hands. "If he dies, I die."

The man frowned, his organic eye darting to the flickering tether between us. He realized what it was. What it meant.

A harsh cough ripped from Kaelen's chest. Blood bubbled past his lips. The silver port at his temple let out a sharp hiss, venting a plume of foul-smelling black smoke. His body convulsed.

"Please," I begged. I wasn't proud. I was just terrified. "I'm a Fleshy. I don't know how to fix this."

The man stared at me for a long, agonizing second. Then he whistled sharply.

Two men shifted from the shadows, grabbing Kaelen by his arms and legs. They hoisted his massive frame up like a slab of dead meat.

"My name is Silas," the scarred man said, turning toward a rusted grate in the wall. "Welcome to the Under-City, little pureblood. Let’s hope you have a strong stomach."

We ran.

Silas led us through a maze of collapsed subway tunnels and flooded maintenance shafts. The air grew colder, smelling of ancient damp earth instead of ozone. The Rust Pack flanked us, silent sentinels watching the dark.

They dropped Kaelen on a slab of cracked concrete inside what used to be a train station. Water dripped from the ceiling. A few dim halogen bulbs swung from frayed wires.

"Put him down flat," Silas barked to his men. He turned to a small, wiry woman missing an arm. "Fetch the pry-bars and the blowtorch."

My stomach bottomed out. "Pry-bars? What are you doing?"

Silas ripped Kaelen’s ruined silk shirt open, exposing the heavy titanium plating grafted into his chest cavity.

"His organic tissue is rotting because the metal is poisoning it," Silas said flatly. "Your mate bond is trying to restart his real heart, but the synthetic pacemaker is fighting it. It's a feedback loop."

"So how do we stop it?" I asked, crawling closer to the slab.

Silas grabbed a rusted crowbar. He looked at me with dead eyes. "We rip the machine out."

Before I could process the words, the blue tether between Kaelen's wrist and mine flashed bright red.

Then, it shattered into a million sparks and vanished.

Kaelen’s chest stopped moving. His remaining organic eye rolled back. A flat, continuous tone droned from his chest implant.

His heart had stopped.