The rain hadn't stopped in three days. Warren crouched beside the crumbled mouth of what used to be a subway maintenance tunnel, his jaw set tight against the cold sting of disappointment. Another entrance. Another promise ruined by time and erosion. The map's promise. A tunnel marked with precision, with confidence, and now? Just another dead lead swallowed by the ruin. Its entrance half swallowed by collapse and overgrowth. Concrete had buckled, the signage scorched into unreadable smears, and the air tasted like wet rust and disappointment.
It wasn't the right one. Not the entrance the map had promised.
Wren stood a few paces behind, her brow furrowed in concentration as she tapped through the map interface on her messenger band. The holographic projection flickered with degraded route markings, some dimmed entirely from damage. One of the encoded lens disks she'd pulled from the warlord's bunker had cracked during her flight to freedom, and its loss rendered the triangulation function unreliable.
It had been the key to unlocking the route.
Without it, the map was just theory. Lines and ghosts.
Warren rose slowly, brushing mud from his coat sleeve. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. Wren shook her head slightly.
"Another dead path," she said, voice quiet.
Styll paced the edge of the fractured platform, nose twitching, ears alert. She let out a low growl, nothing hostile. Just uneasy. Warren's companion, her fur matted by rain, moved with the same sharp awareness as her master, her loyalty as unyielding as the blacksteel in his hand.
"We're running out of marked routes," Warren said. "Three of them are gone completely. And the layouts we recovered, they're unstable. Even if we brute force scan, we'd be chasing noise."
Warren stared into the tunnel. Darkness ran deep in it. Not the kind of dark that waits, one that remembers. One that might whisper back.
"We don't need all the routes," he murmured. "Just the right one."
Wren dismissed the hologram with a flick of her wrist. "We just don't know which that is. Not anymore."
She didn't say it, but he could hear the weight behind her voice: this had been their advantage. The map. The key. The best lead they had. Now they were guessing.
Warren turned back to her. "We've lost an anchor, not the current."
Wren blinked, then gave him a look, half wary, half curious. "That's almost poetic," she said, the corner of her mouth twitching with the ghost of a smile, though her eyes held steady, searching his face with the quiet resolve that defined her.
He shrugged, but the edge of his mouth twitched. "Don't get used to it."
Wren gave him a sidelong look. "You've been thinking in riddles since we left the market."
He didn't argue. She wasn't wrong.
The Six Lines hadn't left him alone. Not in the tunnels. Not in sleep. They pressed at the back of his thoughts like pressure behind the eyes, not urgent, just constant, an unfinished pattern demanding closure. Mara had drilled them into him, her voice sharp and certain, a scavenger's creed to keep him alive. Each line carried weight, not as a key to any vault, but as a tether to who he was, a reminder of the ruin's cost. Here, where the map faltered and their path unraveled, they weren't just words. They were judgment. Warning. Reminder.
The lines circled his mind like hunting dogs, nipping at every corner of memory and thought: Do not hoard what you can teach. The machine will remember. Be worth remembering. Hold what breaks, even if it cuts you. A lie that saves is still a lie. Do not trade in it. Leave nothing behind you that poisons what comes next. If the Signal calls, answer it with silence, and flame.
They echoed now like breath against iron. Especially here.
He looked at the remaining paths on the hologram when Wren summoned it again, then back toward the collapsed tunnel.
"One of these routes has a lock. We just don't have the key."
Wren's eyes flicked over the hologram. "We could backtrack. Try Sector D. One of the vents might still be open."
"No," Warren said. "Too exposed. Too many flesh-eaters watching the south exits."
Wren sighed, dismissing the hologram. "Then we're walking blind."
"Maybe," he said. Then, quieter: "Maybe not."
Someone had mapped these ruins before. That was certain. The map they followed didn't make itself, and the one who etched its lines into memory and code was long dead, old world dead. What mattered wasn't who they were, or what they hoped. What mattered was what they left behind, and he refused to let it stay buried.
The map wasn't wrong, it was old. Time had shifted the world around it. Entrances had collapsed, direct routes blocked. What was once a straight shot was now a maze of dead ends. Not forgotten, just misaligned. Some collapsed. Some rerouted. Some swallowed by decay.
He knelt beside the edge of the reign had learned to listen.
Around them, the shadows seemed to still.
"We go in like they should fear us."
And the tunnel, as if hearing him, gave another distant groan, closer this time. Like something old shifting in its sleep.
The Red Vault wasn't a treasure hoard. It was something colder, more deliberate, a bank vault carved into the bones of the city, meant to stay sealed until someone strong enough broke it open.
Whatever defenses remained weren't relics of decay alone. They were signs of intent: traps laid not by history, but by someone who'd once found it and didn't want to share. Whoever they were, they'd claimed it as theirs. And if they were gone now, that claim meant nothing.
Warren would take it. Not out of greed, but because it was there. Because someone thought they could keep it from him.
It wasn't myth. It was a sealed place, untouched by time because someone wanted it that way. Whatever defended it wasn't just ancient ruin or mechanical decay. It was deliberate.
It had been sealed with purpose, guarded not by time but by intention. Someone had found the Vault once and made sure no one else could claim it until they could return. If that return never came, then the Vault would stay locked forever.
Unless someone was willing to take it by force.
They didn't make it far.
They made it fifty meters before the air changed. Not a breeze, not a shift in temperature, just a silence that didn't belong. Styll stiffened, her hackles high, her eyes glinting with the same unyielding focus as Warren's. She didn't flinch, didn't waver: his shadow, his blade, as much a part of him as the truncheon. Warren slowed first. Wren caught the signal and crouched low, her posture alert but composed, her hand resting lightly on her blade.
Twelve figures emerged from the shadows of a maintenance arch, boots careful against gravel, weapons close to the chest. At their center stood a tall woman with bone-blonde hair braided into loops, her leathers dyed with red ochre and stitched with symbols Warren remembered.
"You're far from the market, Zatha," he said. Calm. Cold.
He remembered her face too well. Smiling. Soft-spoken. The kind of beauty that curled into the cracks of hungry men and made them feel chosen. She used to bring extra rations to the ones she liked. Whisper sweet things in the dark. Pretended kindness with a surgeon's precision. Everyone drank it. Everyone but him.
Warren had watched her take the younger girls by the hand and lead them to Lucas. Said it was protection. Said it was opportunity. But Warren had seen the way she looked at them. Like picking cuts of meat.
She'd once told him which ones Lucas should pass to Reggie's appetites. One of them had been a girl so young she still asked if the city had ever been clean.
Warren had stepped in. Said no.
That was why they tried to feed him to Reggie next.
She smiled now like none of that mattered.
He saw her for what she was. Not a siren. A butcher in lace.
She smiled, slow and mean. "Still remember my name. Thought you'd forgotten the nights we bled together. Lucas hasn't. He said you took something. Payments due."
Warren didn't smile. "I never bled for him. Never touched anything that was his. Never owed him a thing."
Zatha tilted her head, mock-pity thick in her voice. "You lived in his shadow. That was enough. He fed you."
"I never ate your food," Warren said flatly. "Never slept with your filth. And I never danced when you pulled strings."
She flinched at that, just barely. But it was real.
She'd tried to wrap him around her finger, like the others. Played sweet while Lucas had his hand up her ass, figuratively and literally. Warren had seen the leash, even if she wore it like jewelry.
"He sent you to collect?"
"He sent twelve. Just to be sure."
"He should've sent thirteen."
Warren's hand dropped to the truncheon. No threats. No delay. Just motion.
The first came too fast, too eager. Warren pivoted, let the blade pass his ribs, and brought the truncheon down across the attacker's forearm. The crack of bone was sharp and final, the weapon clattering to the concrete. The man gasped, a wet, broken sound, but Warren wasn't done. He stepped in, reversed his grip mid-motion, and slammed the truncheon into the side of the man's skull with a thud that sent him crumpling like meat dropped on stone.
Warren didn't hesitate. He rolled his wrist and transitioned into the next strike before the first body even hit the ground, already reading the space ahead, counting footsteps, watching shadows fold and unfurl under flickering tunnel lights.
Some of the faces were familiar. Not friends. Not comrades. Just boys who had once trained beside him for about a week, back when he'd tried to earn a place in Lucas's clan. Most hadn't spoken more than three words to him. A few had smirked when Zatha called him a rat. One had laughed when they told him to go with Reggie. Now that same boy was circling to flank him.
"He's the Yellow Jacket," one of them whispered, voice cracking with doubt.
"No way," another muttered. "Too small. Look at him, practically pissing himself."
"You really think this little shit's the Yellow Jacket?"
Warren didn't answer. The truncheon did.
He broke the doubter's femur with one upward swing and shattered his jaw on the way down. Another tried to tackle him from the side. Warren rolled with the momentum and slammed the steel head of the truncheon into the man's ribs. Three strikes. Each one to the same spot. Bone caved. Breath fled. The man dropped with a gasp that sounded like apology.
They rushed him. Three at once.
He didn't retreat. He stepped in. Crushed the first man's shin with the heel of his boot and turned the truncheon sideways into the second's throat. The third raised a machete. Warren snapped his wrist with a deflection, grabbed the weapon, and drove the handle into the man's temple.
Still more.
They came because they thought numbers would carry the day. Because they remembered Warren as he'd been: quiet, too thin, too strange, too sharp. They saw a boy who'd slipped through their world, unnoticed, unfeared. They feared Reggie's loud evil, his hunger. But they never saw Warren for what he was. The real monster. The killer who'd always been there, waiting in the seams of their blindness. Reggie was a beast they understood. Warren was the shadow they should have dreaded.
Another rushed. Warren sidestepped, swept the legs, and brought the truncheon down into the back of the neck with all his weight. There was a crunch. Then stillness.
He spun into a third, catching the attacker in the gut with the truncheon's steel tip. As the man doubled over, Warren brought his knee into his face. Blood burst. Teeth scattered.
Another tried to come from behind. Warren didn't look. He stepped back into the swing, caught the arm mid-arc, and used the truncheon like a lever to wrench the joint clean. Then a strike to the side of the head. Then again. And again. Until there was no more movement.
Another tried Warren's flank with a hook blade. Warren blocked with the truncheon's shaft, then twisted it into the man's throat. He didn't kill fast. He let the pressure build until the man collapsed. Then he stomped his chest in, once, to be sure.
Someone shouted a warning. It didn't matter.
The truncheon danced like it knew the rhythm. Elbow. Spine. Knee. Jaw. Each hit designed not just to hurt, but to dismantle. Warren was clinical, deliberate, like each body was a puzzle to solve in fewer moves.
One man tried to run. Warren caught him by the back of the collar and drove the truncheon up under his jaw. The body jerked. Dropped.
Zatha came at him again, panting, bleeding, knife in hand. She lunged. He didn't step back. He stepped in. Caught her wrist. Bent it until the knife dropped. Then brought the truncheon down into her shoulder, snapping bone.
She howled. Fell.
Still she crawled.
Still she spat.
"He'll come for you," she coughed.
Warren crouched.
"Good."
She tried to lift herself. Tried to beg. "Please. Don't. I can make it right. I'll follow you. I'll serve. I'll do anything. I'll make you forget her."
Warren stared.
Disgust didn't even cover it.
"I want nothing you can offer, you poisonous bitch."
She reached for him.
He kicked her hand away. Then stood.
She whimpered. Crawled. Something wet bubbled in her throat.
Warren raised his boot.
And brought it down on her face.
Once. She shrieked.
Twice. The scream turned into choking sobs.
Three times. Bone cracked.
Four. Blood sprayed.
Five. Teeth broke.
He didn't stop until she stopped screaming. Until she stopped twitching. Until there was nothing left but red and ruin.
The tunnel went still. The bodies bled in silence.
Warren didn't leave them in peace. He walked between the corpses with his truncheon still in hand, dripping, warm, part of him now. One by one, he bent low and gouged out their eyes. Not rage. Not cruelty. Just certainty. They wouldn't watch him. They wouldn't watch anything again.
He didn't close eyelids. He pried them open wider.
Then he stripped them.
Boots. Coats. Belts. Armor. Anything that made them look like people. He took it all and threw it in the mud. Let the rain wash it. Let it rot. He left them naked, faceless, eyeless. Not human. Not mourned.
He went further.
Warren rifled through pockets, pulled out scraps, necklaces, faded notes, charms, anything that marked memory. Anything that hinted they'd once been more than enforcers and cowards. He gathered it into a pile in the center of the corpses and burned it. Smoke curled up like erasure.
It was deliberate. Sacrilege by choice. A break from the Code.
He had carved his mark before. He knew the rites. He knew the weight of what he was breaking.
The Code said the dead had rights.
Said violence was a tool, sharp, clean, final. Not art. Not message.
Said scars were earned. Said names didn't matter.
But this wasn't about scars. It wasn't about names.
This was about what you do when someone betrays the right to be remembered.
And that's what they'd done, every one of them. Laughed while girls were fed to Reggie. Took orders from Zatha like she was kin. Followed Lucas with eyes wide open.
They weren't scavengers. They weren't even raiders.
They were the kind of rot the Code warned you to leave buried.
So Warren didn't bury them.
The Scav Code said to leave the dead whole, to let the earth take back what it owned. Said to close the eyes of enemies, even the ones who tried to kill you. To bury their names in silence, not ash. But that was for the fallen, for those who'd played the game and lost with blood still in their hands. These weren't the fallen. These were filth. The Code didn't cover them. The Code warned about them.
These weren't enemies. Not anymore. They were rot given flesh. Traitors to their own. And this wasn't disrespect, it was declaration. A line in the ruin.
He didn't just destroy what made them men. He made sure nothing of them would outlive the smoke.
They wouldn't be remembered. Not for who they were. Not even for who they followed.
Lucas would hear about this, if anyone was left to tell him. And if he came looking, he'd find twelve bodies laid in a line, not buried, not blessed, not remembered. Just reminders. Just message.
Warren spat beside Zatha's remains. He didn't speak. He just turned.
None walked away.
It wasn't a fight.
It was contempt made manifest.
Wren stood at the tunnel's edge, her posture steady, her eyes fixed on the carnage with a calm that matched the rain's rhythm. She wasn't a killer, but she wasn't fragile either. Her gaze traced the bodies, the smoke, the blood pooling in cracks, and she didn't flinch. She didn't judge. She was Wren: resilient, grounded, herself. Styll sat beside her, unperturbed, her fur slick with rain, her eyes glinting with the same unflinching loyalty she'd always shown Warren. The creature's tail flicked once, a silent acknowledgment of the violence, but she didn't stir, didn't shy away. She was his, through blood and ruin.
Warren stood still for a long time after the fire caught. The smoke curled like a signal no one would answer, rising through the wet air in lazy spirals, too thick to vanish cleanly. He didn't look at the pile again. He didn't need to. What was left wasn't warning, wasn't justice. It was erasure.
He moved a few paces away and crouched beside a broken length of piping near the tunnel wall. Rain leaked through a hairline crack in the concrete above, pooling in his palms when he held them out. He rubbed them together. Not to clean them. Not to warm them. Just to feel them again. Flesh on flesh. Not blood. Not bone.
Wren approached slowly. Not cautious. Just aware. She didn't flinch. She didn't hover. She crouched across from him, arms resting on her knees, her coat soaked through, eyes steady.
"Was that justice?" she asked, quiet.
He didn't look up right away. When he did, it wasn't with anger. Just certainty. The kind that no longer needed defense.
"No," he said. "That was a message."
Wren nodded, once. Not agreement. Just understanding.
"You broke the Code," she said.
"No," Warren replied. "I followed it. They broke it. What they did puts them outside its shelter. The Code protects the innocent. Not the filth. Not the ones who betray its core. Anyone who actually believes in it would've done worse. Even you know that."
A pause. The rain found rhythm again. Somewhere deeper in the tunnel, water dripped in long, even beats.
She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. She knew the Code better than anyone, knew exactly what it demanded, and what it condemned. There was no conflict in her gaze. No doubt. Only clarity.
He looked at her once, then away. "It does matter. That's why I won't let them hide behind it. It was never meant to protect people like that."
She didn't press. She didn't need to. The silence that followed wasn't empty. It held something heavier: consequence, choice, weight.
"If Mara saw that," she said eventually, "what would she have said?"
He exhaled, slow. "She wouldn't have said a word. She'd have done it herself. She believed in the Code more than anyone. Those pieces of shit, she wouldn't have blinked at wiping their names from the world."
That earned a faint sound from Wren. Not quite a laugh. Just breath with shape.
Warren rose. The moment didn't vanish. But it folded.
"We move," he said.
Wren stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder. She didn't look back.
Neither did he.
Warren's coat dripped, heavy with water and ruin. He wiped the truncheon on his sleeve, methodical, like cleaning a tool after use. The spike retracted with a faint click, and he slid the weapon into its loop at his belt.
"This is just the beginning," he said, voice low, final.
Wren nodded, her expression unreadable but firm. "They were Lucas's. He'll know."
"Let him," Warren said. "Let him come."
Styll rose, her claws clicking faintly as she moved to Warren's side, her presence a quiet affirmation of his path. Wren stepped forward, her hand brushing the messenger band. "The Vault's still out there," she said. "And we're not stopping."
Warren met her gaze, a flicker of respect passing between them. She wasn't like him, didn't carry his rage or his coat's weight, but she carried her own strength, and that was enough.
The air trembled again, a vibration without echo, like the city itself was listening. Warren's Scavenger's Eye flickered, catching irregularities in the tunnel walls: scratches too precise, panels too clean. Someone had been here, not centuries ago, but recently. "This wasn't random," he murmured. "Someone's been guarding this path."
Wren summoned the hologram, its faint routes pulsing in the air. "The route's still active. Barely. Maybe a kilometer deeper."
"Then we move fast," Warren said. "And quiet."
They descended, the tunnel sloping, walls tightening, air thick with decay and metal. Styll's claws clicked, her ears swiveling, her focus as sharp as Warren's. Wren kept pace, her steps deliberate, her eyes scanning for traps. The Six Lines echoed in Warren's mind, louder now, as if the tunnel amplified them. Hold what breaks, even if it cuts you. He thought of Mara, her coat, her lessons carved into his bones. If the Signal calls, answer it with silence, and flame.
A faint click broke his thoughts. Styll froze, her growl low, alert. Warren raised a hand, halting Wren. He crouched, tracing a pressure plate blended into the concrete. Chemical, maybe explosive. He drew his pocket knife and slid it along the plate's edge, holding the mechanism in place while he placed rubble to transfer the weight. The plate held. No hiss. No explosion.
"We're not alone down here," he said.
Wren's eyes narrowed, steady. "Still guarding it?"
"Never stopped."
The tunnel widened into a chamber, plasteel beams reinforcing the walls, the floor littered with debris and bones. Recent, human, arranged like a ritual, skulls facing a massive steel door, its surface unmarred, its lock fried but intact. Blast marks scarred the ground, signs of failed attempts to breach it.
"Someone tried," Wren said, her voice calm, observant. "And failed."
Warren ran his fingers along the door's edge. "Not scavs. Something organized. Older."
Wren summoned the hologram again, its faded infrastructure schematic hovering in the air. The route ended here, marking the chamber as a terminus. No codes, no signals, just the cold certainty of a path's end. "This is it," she said, dismissing the hologram. "The map got us here. Now what?"
Warren's Scavenger's Eye flickered, catching a faint irregularity in the wall beside the door. Not a panel, not a switch, but a seam, too precise to be decay. He pressed his palm against it, feeling for resistance. A click, subtle but deliberate. He drew his knife and pried at the seam, revealing a concealed lever, rusted but functional, wired to a manual override.
"It's not about the map," he murmured, his breath steady. "It's about what they hid."
Wren stepped closer, her eyes sharp. "Can you open it?"
He gripped the lever, testing its weight. "Only one way to find out."
He pulled, slow and deliberate, muscles straining against the rusted mechanism. A low hum rose from the chamber, the ground trembling as gears groaned beneath the floor. Dust fell. And the door began to move.