Voss woke to thunder that had forgotten the sky.
It rolled through metal first, a distant pressure in the bones of the transport, then broke apart into sharper things: bolter cracks, las-fire snapping hot through smoke, and the dull percussion of explosives landing close enough to make the deck beneath her cheek tremble. Voices followed, muffled by helm-speakers and pain, distorted into prayer, command, and static. Her first breath tasted of promethium residue, blood, heated rubber, and the sour chemical stink of ruptured suppression foam.
Her vision returned in fragments.
Black. Grey. Red lumen glare smeared across shattered plating. Black again. A strip of the underhive's idea of a sky appeared through a torn hatch above her: not open air, but a vault of smoke, gantry ribs, dangling cables, and furnace-light burning behind ash like a dying sun buried under steel. Shapes moved across it in slices, three at first, then two, then one helmeted figure bending over her with a white faceplate scored by impacts and devotional script half-blackened by soot.
Pain arrived late and in order.
Skull. Ribs. Mouth. Left shoulder. The shoulder did not report pain so much as absence, a heavy grey field where sensation should have been. Voss tried to move the arm and received nothing useful from it. Her right hand twitched against grit and spent casing brass. Her fingers closed on air, searching for a grip that was not there.
A thought cut through the thunder, broken into hard pieces.
Wrong.
Wake.
Not.
That.
Way.
Voss closed her eyes before the world could finish assembling itself. The words did not come through vox, prayer, or human throat. They pressed from behind the mark like cold fingers against wet ash, and the contact made the inside of her skull tighten. Numen, she filed it, because there was no cleaner category available. Cradle influence. Residual mark activity. Unreliable guidance from an unreliable source.
She began to reject it.
Then a round struck the transport's outer hull hard enough to throw sparks across the open hatch, and the argument became irrelevant. Danger had arrived before judgment. Trust, distrust, refusal, obedience — all of them required time. Voss had none.
A gauntleted hand seized the front of her coat and hauled her backward as something punched through the torn hull where her head had been. The Sororitas dragging her did not speak at first. Her helm turned toward the breach, bolter braced one-handed across the transport's warped interior, and she fired three measured shots into smoke beyond the hatch before looking down again.
"Inquisitor," the Sister said through a damaged vox-grille. The voice was hoarse, female, and compressed by armor systems pushed too long past tolerance. "Can you move?"
Voss forced her eyes open. "Status."
"That was not the question," the Sister answered, and fired again.
The words were not insolent. They were triage. Voss accepted the distinction and pushed her right palm beneath her, using the transport wall to lever herself halfway up. The movement drove a white spike through her shoulder and turned the world thin at the edges. She did not fall. That was the first useful datum.
"Mobile," Voss said. Her mouth filled with blood from a bitten cheek. "Limited."
"Superior," the Sister called over her shoulder, keeping her bolter trained on the torn hatch. "She is conscious."
Another Sororitas crouched in the lee of the shattered transport door, armor scraped raw across the breastplate and one pauldron cratered by impact. The black script on the parchment strip beneath her gorget was scorched but still legible: SABINE. Sister Superior, Voss placed, though the identification came slower than it should have. Sabine had lost the clean silhouette of command somewhere between the Cradle and this killing ground; purity seals hung in burned ribbons from her armor, her helm was marked by two shallow gouges across the brow, and blood had dried black where it had run from beneath her gorget. She still held her bolter as if the weapon and her spine had been forged from the same vow.
"Can she carry a weapon?" Sabine asked.
Voss reached instinctively for the plasma pistol at her hip and found nothing. Her other hand searched for the power sword. Nothing. The absence was immediate, exact, and professionally unacceptable.
"No pistol," Voss said. "No sword."
Sabine looked at her for half a second longer than the battlefield allowed. "Then no."
A body lay across the broken transport floor near Voss's boot, armor white beneath blood, one arm trapped under collapsed seating. The face was hidden by a cracked helm and a spill of cables torn from the transport wall. Another Sister lay half outside the rear hatch, one-handed grip still locked around a stolen lasgun whose barrel had been bent against the deck by the force that killed her. Two dead here, added to the dead Voss had not been present to honor. The surviving Sisters had not moved them. There had been no time.
Beyond the transport, the battlefield crossed itself in too many directions.
Voss saw it in narrow pieces through fire, smoke, and the fluttering edge of a torn devotional banner still held upright near the hatch. Gangers in patched armor fired from a cargo frame while Enforcers shot back from a barricade that had already been overrun twice. Blue-glass charms spun in smoke where figures in ragged robes drew angles with knives and flame. Farther left, something perfumed and laughing moved too quickly through a knot of bodies, trailing silk and blood. Mechanicus shapes advanced behind servo-skulls and hard red optic light, their weapons sweeping not for mercy but for asset denial. Ecclesiarchy militia screamed hymns through cracked vox-horns and burned anything that ran at the wrong angle.
And among them, men in Imperial greys moved without shouting.
Too calm. Too synchronized. Too quiet.
Voss watched three of them shift around a burst of incoming fire before it reached them, heads turning with a shared delay that was not human discipline. Their uniforms were local. Their posture was not. She did not have time to name the wrongness, but she marked it.
"They are not firing at us specifically," Voss said, her voice flattening as the picture arranged itself. "Crossfire."
Sabine's helm angled a fraction. "The transport was forced into it."
"By route denial," Voss said. A shell detonated somewhere behind the wreck, and the pressure wave drove hot air through the compartment. "Or chance. It no longer matters."
The Sister nearest Voss leaned out, fired twice, then pulled back as las-rounds snapped past her helm. Voss marked her by function first: bolter, steady hand, right-side cover. Another Sister knelt near the rear hatch with one leg braced against the wreckage and her weapon held across a gap in the torn plating. The banner bearer stood behind them with the simulacrum gripped in one hand and her sidearm in the other, the sacred standard scarred but upright, its icons blackened by soot and battlefield filth. Her armor was dented, the cloth around the pole burned in places, but she had not let it fall.
"This cover is failing," Voss said.
Sabine fired a burst through the hatch and withdrew before return fire chewed the metal edge. "We know."
"Where?"
The bolter Sister pointed with her weapon, not taking her gaze from the smoke. "Enforcer checkpoint. Forty metres. Barricades intact enough."
Voss looked through the gap and saw it: riot shields locked into a broken wall, ferrocrete blocks, a dead gun-servitor slumped in its cupola, and a checkpoint booth with its compliance sign still blinking through smoke. Bodies lay around it in layers. Enforcers. Gangers. A priest with half his robes burned away. Something in grey with a human face and hands too long for its sleeves. The position was ugly. It was also better than a transport hull being peeled open by every weapon in the district.
"Move in bounds," Sabine ordered, rising into a crouch as rounds hammered sparks from the outer hull. "Renata, cover. Thera, with me. Othilde, rear. Inquisitor stays between us."
"I can move," Voss said.
Sabine did not look at her. "Then prove it by not falling."
Renata stepped into the hatch and fired controlled bursts toward the left flank. Thera crossed first, armor low, bolter snapping at shapes in the smoke. Sabine followed, one hand catching Voss by the back of the coat when Voss's first step dragged wrong. The contact would have been intolerable under other circumstances. Under this one, it was an efficient correction.
Voss tried to find the rhythm of movement. Cover. Step. Angle. Breath. She had done this through manufactorum collapses, cult purges, voidship boarding corridors, cathedral riots, and interrogation cells gone suddenly loud. Her mind saw the path. Her body delivered it late.
Then the borrowed precision stirred.
For less than a second, the world narrowed to lines of force. The open ground became a diagram: incoming fire, safe intervals, body placement, the exact angle of Sabine's pauldron, the half-step that would carry Voss beneath a crossing line of las-fire. It was the Scythe Knight's gift, or residue, or wound. It came up through her nerves like an answer her body had not earned.
She reached for it because instinct was faster than caution.
The price arrived before the next step landed.
Her muscles locked around a stance she could not complete. Pain unfolded from the mark, down her spine, across her shoulder, through the ruined map of her left side. Her vision went white at the edges and black in the center. For one suspended instant she was neither falling nor standing, caught in the shape of a warrior her flesh could not become.
"Inquisitor!" Sabine's gauntlet hit her hard between the shoulders and drove her forward.
Thera turned to cover the stumble. A round struck the Sister high on the thigh joint, punching sparks and ceramite chips into the air. Thera's leg buckled. She caught herself against a broken barricade strut, snarled something that might have been a prayer, and fired anyway.
Voss tried to recover. Her right hand came up empty, then closed into a fist because there was no weapon to hold. She took two more steps under Sabine's force, saw the checkpoint looming through smoke, and then something hit her left shoulder with the flat, intimate brutality of a hammer swung by an unseen giant.
The world turned.
She did not remember the ground rising. She remembered Sabine's grip tightening, Renata firing over them, Othilde's simulacrum pole flashing past her vision, and the left side of her body becoming a locked door. She tasted copper and dust. Her knees struck ferrocrete near the Enforcer barricade, and someone dragged her the last metre behind a wall of riot shields crusted with old blood.
For several breaths, Voss was weak and numb.
The admission existed only as fact. Her body had lost command integrity across multiple points. Left arm useless. Shoulder compromised. Vision unstable. Breathing shallow but functional. Hearing distorted by blast pressure and blood. Her right hand still answered. Her mind still ordered information. That would have to suffice.
Bodies crowded the checkpoint.
An Enforcer lay seated against the inner barricade with his helmet missing and his eyes open to the burning transit lights above. Another hung over the gun-servitor mount, torso twisted, hands fused to the controls by heat. Three gangers were piled at the mouth of the checkpoint booth, one grinning through a jaw broken sideways, another with devotional hooks threaded through his cheeks and a purple stain around his lips. Near Voss's boot lay a grey-uniformed man with an autogun across his chest and a forehead wound too neat to explain the shape of his fingers. The fingers had one joint too many.
Voss saw a weapon beneath the dead Enforcer's thigh.
It was not her plasma pistol. It was not a power sword. It was a matte-black Enforcer-pattern autopistol with a chipped grip, a stamped serial plate, and dried blood across the trigger guard. A tool for riot corridors, checkpoint work, and the controlled application of local authority. Insufficient against most of what she had seen. Better than an empty hand.
Her eyes fixed on it.
Renata followed her gaze. The Sister stepped across the bodies, stooped, and lifted the pistol with the care of someone who expected the dead to have left traps behind. She checked the chamber, dropped the magazine halfway, inspected the load, snapped it back into place, and worked the slide. A single round clicked into battery.
"Functional," Renata said, holding it grip-first.
Voss took it in her right hand. The weight was wrong. Too light, too crude, too human. "Ammunition?"
"Partial magazine," Renata answered. A round struck the barricade above her, showering both of them with ferrocrete dust. "No spare observed."
Voss adjusted her grip and forced her back against the riot shield wall until she was upright enough to see. "Understood."
Sabine crouched beside Thera, inspecting the hit at her thigh. Blood had begun to seep through the cracked joint seal, dark against white armor. Thera pushed the Sister Superior's hand away and levered herself up against the barricade.
"Mobile," Thera said before Sabine could ask.
Sabine looked at the leg, then at her. "Reduced."
"Mobile," Thera repeated, and fired over the barricade without rising fully.
Othilde reached cover last. She came in backward, simulacrum braced against her shoulder, sidearm barking twice toward figures moving through smoke behind them. The banner's scorched cloth snapped in the pressure wake of rounds passing overhead. When she dropped behind the barricade, she did not set the standard down. She planted its base between two bodies and steadied it with one hand while reloading with the other.
Voss watched the street through a gap in the shields. Fire was shifting. Not randomly. Lines of engagement were bending toward the checkpoint as different groups noticed the new occupants, the exposed armor, the fallen transport, the surviving women in white. The barricade had bought seconds. It would not buy a minute.
"This position is compromised," Voss said.
Sabine's helm turned toward her. "Assessment."
"Three fire lanes converge on us. The servitor is dead. No rear fortification. Bodies indicate the checkpoint has already changed hands at least twice." Voss paused as a burst of autogun fire stitched the shield above her head. "We move."
"To where?" Renata asked, her bolter steady against the barricade lip.
Voss scanned through smoke, through the strobing emergency lumens and muzzle flashes, past the checkpoint booth and the dead signage. There was a transit access beyond the barricade, half-sealed by a blast door stuck at an angle, its warning strips blinking amber beneath grime. The opening was narrow. It was also downward.
"There," Voss said, lifting the autopistol toward the stairwell without raising her wounded side. "Transit stairwell."
Thera shifted her injured leg beneath her. "It may be blocked."
"It may be." Voss did not look away from the route. "This position is not."
Sabine accepted that with a single nod. She checked her bolter's magazine by weight rather than sight. "On my mark. Renata forward. Othilde centre. Thera rear with me. Inquisitor between."
Gunfire hammered the barricade before she finished speaking. The compliance sign above the booth exploded in a burst of sparks and plastic, raining fragments across the dead. From beyond the smoke, something began laughing in a voice too bright for the amount of pain around it.
Sabine rose. "Move."
They left the barricade into worse light.
The stairwell was less than thirty metres away, but distance had become a predatory thing. Each step had to be purchased from noise, smoke, and crossing fire. Renata moved first, bolter tucked tight, firing short bursts into shapes that advanced too eagerly from the right. Othilde followed with the simulacrum angled low enough not to snag on overhead debris but high enough to keep its icons from dragging through blood. Voss came after, one-handed, pistol close to her chest, forcing her feet to obey before her balance could negotiate.
The assassin returned to her thoughts without invitation.
Not the face. There had been too little face. The question. The exactness. The attack in the facility had not belonged to this collapse. This was battlefield entropy, factional pressure, desperation, opportunism, contamination meeting fire. The assassin had been decision. A mind had aimed that blade and withdrawn it when conditions changed. Voss did not have the mind yet. She did not have the hand behind it. The absence remained an open wound in the case.
"Left," Renata warned, and the squad compressed against a line of cracked support columns.
Men came out of a side passage under strips of violet cloth and hanging wire.
At first they were only gangers, underhive carrion with stolen flak plates and blades polished to a surgical shine. Then one took a bolter round through the chest and laughed as the impact spun him against the wall. Another ran with both arms wide, skin threaded with piercings and devotional hooks, eyes bright with a pleasure that had no place in survival. Their weapons were knives, stubbers, chain-wrapped clubs, and one long hooked blade that screamed across a column as its owner dragged it through ferrocrete. Perfume cut through smoke for a second, sweet and rotten over blood.
"Slaanesh," Sabine said, and the word came out like a verdict.
The Sisters answered before the ambush fully opened. Renata's bolter took the laughing man apart at the sternum. Sabine stepped into the path of the hooked blade and broke the wielder's forearm with her pauldron before firing point-blank into his throat. Thera, wounded leg dragging, dropped to one knee and shot a charging ganger through both hips, then through the skull when he kept crawling with his hands.
One reached Voss.
He came from her left, where her body no longer reported the world properly, and that nearly killed her. She saw him late: wide smile, blood-slick teeth, a pistol in one hand and a thin blade in the other, his pupils blown black inside violet-painted sockets. The Scythe Knight's precision was absent. Her shoulder was dead. Her stance was poor.
Voss fired anyway.
The shot was not clean. The autopistol kicked harder than its frame suggested, and her weakened grip dragged the muzzle off line. The ganger's own charge corrected the failure. He came onto the round with his mouth open, the shot punching through the soft underside of his jaw and breaking out behind one painted eye. Momentum carried him into her, and she struck the wall hard enough to lose the stairwell, the Sisters, and the battlefield in a burst of black static.
A gauntlet caught the front of her coat before she slid down.
"Stand," Sabine ordered, dragging her upright.
Voss locked her knees. "Standing."
"Then move."
They reached the transit stairwell as the last ganger died behind them screaming hymns to sensation through a ruined throat. The blast door stood jammed half-open, one leaf caught against a collapsed track, amber hazard lumens blinking across old transit sigils and scratched Enforcer seals. Cold air rose from below, carrying oil, rust, old steam, and the mineral damp of infrastructure that had not seen honest maintenance in years.
Othilde slipped through first with the simulacrum turned sideways. Renata followed. Voss had to angle her wounded shoulder through the gap and nearly lost the pistol when her coat caught on torn metal. Sabine shoved her through with controlled force, then came after as Thera fired twice more into the passage behind them and limped into the stairwell last.
The door did not close. It could not. Sabine drove her boot against the bent mechanism anyway, forcing the damaged leaf inward until the gap narrowed by half. It was not a seal. It was a delay.
They descended.
The stairwell trembled under distant impacts. Old tile cracked beneath power-armored boots. Water ran down one wall in a thin black sheet, passing over warning glyphs, devotional scratches, and a handprint that had dried brown years before the current battle found this district. Voss kept her right hand on the rail when it existed and the pistol against her chest when it did not. Her left arm hung without use, pulling at her balance like a corpse attached to her shoulder.
The weakness was becoming familiar.
Voss disliked familiar unacceptable conditions.
A part of her reached for the Scythe Knight's precision again, not as prayer, not as loyalty, but as a body remembering what competence had felt like. The memory was intolerably clean: motion without delay, angle without uncertainty, force without waste. She denied the reach before the mark could answer. The denial cost effort. That was new information, and she did not care for it.
They came out of the stairwell into a Mechanicus maintenance conduit large enough to swallow a chapel nave.
Massive pipe trunks ran along both walls in bundled layers, some thick as armored transports, others narrow and wet with condensation. Catwalks crossed above in rusted grids. Suspended cable looms sagged between pylons like black veins, and red maintenance lumens pulsed in slow intervals through steam that breathed from cracked valves. The air was warmer here, sterile under the filth, carrying machine oil, coolant, heated copper, and the old dry incense of Mechanicus rites burned into metal long after the priests had gone elsewhere.
For the first time since waking, Voss heard the battle become distant.
Not gone. Distant. A muffled storm above and behind them, filtered through ferrocrete, service layers, and the endless machine-body of the hive. The conduit turned gunfire into dull taps and explosions into pressure shifts against the ribs. It was better cover. It was not safety.
Sabine signaled a halt behind a pipe junction where three enormous conduits met around a maintenance shrine stripped of most of its brass. The Sisters formed by instinct. Renata watched the stairwell. Thera lowered herself against a valve housing and checked the seal at her thigh. Othilde planted the simulacrum beside the shrine, its scorched icons catching the red lumen pulse in brief, blood-colored flashes.
Voss leaned against the pipework and almost failed to remain upright.
The autopistol hung in her right hand. Her left fingers twitched once and then stopped. The numbness had spread from shoulder to elbow, deep and cold beneath the heat of the conduit. She listened to her own breathing and found it too shallow. She corrected it by will until pain forced the correction smaller.
"How many rounds?" Sabine asked without turning from the stairwell.
Renata checked her bolter. "Low."
"Number."
"Eight."
Thera looked at her own magazine, then at the blood on her thigh seal. "Six."
Othilde inspected her sidearm and the pouches at her belt. "Four. Simulacrum intact."
Sabine removed her magazine, counted by sight, and seated it again. "Nine."
Voss checked the Enforcer pistol. The magazine resisted extraction, sticky with old blood, but she forced it free one-handed and counted with her thumb. "Five."
No one commented. That, too, was discipline.
The shadow in the far conduit corner moved.
Voss raised the pistol before she registered the motion. There was nothing there except a pipe cluster, a hanging hook, and a length of loose cable swaying in the steam. The shapes arranged themselves into armor for half a blink: a tall figure with a long weapon angled beside it, helm bowed not in prayer but in observation. The red lumen pulsed again, and the knight was gone.
Her finger tightened against the trigger guard.
Why?
The question did not arrive as sound. It formed in the space a voice would have used. Voss felt the gaze more than the word: patient, severe, unblinking. Not malicious. Worse than malicious. Interested.
"Inquisitor," Othilde said.
Voss did not look at her. "Report."
The banner bearer's helm remained fixed on Voss rather than the conduit. "You were addressing someone."
"No."
Sabine turned then. The motion was small, but the squad felt it. Renata's bolter lowered by a fraction from the stairwell. Thera's hand shifted near her weapon despite the wound in her leg. Othilde tightened her grip on the simulacrum pole.
Voss understood the change immediately. Marked Inquisitor. Unknown contact. Cradle exposure. Hallucinated interlocutor. The Sororitas were exhausted, bereaved, low on ammunition, and loyal enough to kill what they believed necessary. She did not blame them. Blame required a cleaner battlefield.
Sabine's voice came through the vox, quiet and hard. "Who were you addressing?"
"No confirmed entity," Voss said. She kept the pistol angled down, not because she trusted them, but because unnecessary escalation would be waste. "Concussion, blood loss, and mark activity remain possible causes."
"Possible," Sabine repeated.
"Confirmed cause unavailable."
Thera's helm tilted toward the mark beneath Voss's torn collar, though cloth and blood hid most of it. "If you are compromised—"
"You will act," Voss said, looking at her now. "I know."
The conduit answered before the Sisters could.
A wire sparked somewhere beyond the maintenance shrine.
The flash revealed a shape in the next service bay. Huge. Hunched. Too broad for a man, too still for machinery, one arm hanging longer than the other. Its head was turned toward them. The spark died, and the bay became pipes, steam, and darkness again.
Renata fired once.
The bolter round struck metal with a hard shriek and vanished into the conduit wall. No body fell. No blood sprayed. Somewhere deeper in the pipework, something breathed.
Sabine raised a fist. The Sisters froze.
The sound came again, low beneath machine-hum: metal dragged across ferrocrete, then lifted. A footstep followed. Heavy. Patient. Then silence, as if whatever moved had learned that sound had betrayed it.
Othilde whispered a prayer under her breath and tightened both hands around the simulacrum.
The next spark came from behind them.
Voss turned too slowly. Across the conduit, thirty metres away where a side access tunnel opened between coolant pipes, the shape stood again. Red lumen caught a swollen shoulder, a thick neck, and one pale eye set beneath a brow of ridged bone. It withdrew before Renata could bring her bolter fully around.
"Xenos strain," Voss said.
Sabine's voice sharpened. "Identification."
"Genestealer cult. Large morph. Abominant probable."
The word changed the air. Even through sealed helms and exhausted posture, the Sisters understood. Not a ganger. Not a common mutant. Not a thing to be dismissed with one burst and faith. A mining brute remade by alien inheritance and cult devotion, all muscle, bone, and brood-purpose, stalking them through the one place they had thought defensible.
A pipe coupling burst above the far tunnel with a scream of steam.
The Abominant came through it.
It did not charge like an animal. It crossed the first metres with a loping, distorted power, one oversized fist dragging across the floor, the other clutching a chunk of torn metal that might once have been part of a service hatch. Bolter fire hammered into it. Renata hit shoulder, chest, and face. Sabine put two rounds into its knee. Thera fired from the ground, each shot braced through pain. The creature staggered, lost skin and blood in dark ropes, then hurled the hatch fragment.
The metal struck the pipe junction above them and tore the maintenance shrine in half.
"Move!" Sabine ordered.
The conduit became pursuit.
They fell back along the service channel, not running cleanly because Voss could not run cleanly and Thera's wounded leg dragged with each third step. The Sisters made a moving wall around weakness and paid for it in ammunition. Renata fired, withdrew, fired again. Sabine shot pipe valves when she had no clean target, flooding the space behind them with steam. Othilde kept the simulacrum close and used the haft to shove aside hanging cables before they caught on armor. Thera limped rearward, bolter up, breathing harsh enough that her vox clicked with each exhale.
The Abominant vanished whenever steam swallowed it.
Then it returned closer.
It appeared in the wrong places: a reflection in oil underfoot, a silhouette beyond a grating, a pale eye between cable curtains, a massive hand closing around a catwalk rail above them before the rail tore loose in sparks. It was too large to hide and still hid. It was too wounded to continue and still continued. Every time the Sisters slowed it, the conduit gave it another route.
Voss fired once at a movement near the floor and killed a smaller thing crawling out of a drainage gap, its skull too smooth and its mouth too full of needle teeth. The recoil sent pain through her shoulder so violently that her knees loosened. Sabine caught her by the collar and dragged her another two steps before releasing her.
"Keep moving," Sabine said.
"I am," Voss answered, though the words came through clenched teeth and insufficient breath.
The knight watched from the steam.
It stood at the end of a side passage as they passed, scythe-shape resting against one shoulder, armor suggested by shadow and red light. It was not there when Voss looked directly. It was there when she needed the corridor clear. It was there in the dark between lumen pulses, in the curve of hanging cable, in the silhouette of a valve wheel behind Sabine's helm.
Why?
"Not now," Voss said.
Renata heard her. Her bolter shifted toward Voss for half a second before discipline pulled it back toward the stalker. "Superior."
"I heard," Sabine said. She did not look away from the path ahead. "Inquisitor, control yourself."
Voss almost answered that she was attempting to control multiple failures at once. She did not. The sentence would not have improved the tactical picture.
They reached a maintenance gate half-lowered across the conduit. Its teeth had jammed a metre above the floor, leaving a gap too low for power armor to pass without effort. Sabine and Renata grabbed the edge and hauled. Servos in their armor whined. The gate rose another half metre, shaking rust and metal flakes down around them.
"Othilde," Sabine said.
The banner bearer ducked through first, dragging the simulacrum sideways. Thera followed with a pained grunt. Voss dropped to one knee and forced herself under the gate, scraping her wounded shoulder against the lower teeth. For one instant, the pain made the world vanish.
A massive impact struck the gate as Sabine came through.
The Abominant had reached it.
Renata turned and fired the last of her magazine through the bars. The creature's face erupted in blood and bone chips, one eye disappearing under bolter impact. It did not fall. Its hand closed around the gate and began to bend it upward.
Sabine grabbed Renata by the backpack frame and pulled her back. "Out."
Behind them, the gate screamed as metal lost the argument.
They ran again.
The service channel narrowed, then opened into a long arterial passage where coolant pipes crossed overhead in bundled ribs. A sign stenciled in flaking red indicated transit exhaust access, though half the letters had burned away. Air moved there, faint but real, carrying smoke from beyond the conduit and the distant sound of battle returning in sharper edges. Exit. Not safety. Exit.
The knight stood in the passage ahead.
Voss stopped for less than a heartbeat, but in a chase that was too long. Sabine slammed into her from behind and nearly drove them both down. The echo did not raise its weapon. It did not block the path. Its helm faced her, and this time the question changed shape.
The voice came without sound, older than her and exactly hers.
Use the weapon if you must. But know why your hand closes. Be more than the office. Be human enough to choose, and cruel enough to pay for it.
Voss inhaled once.
The echo vanished.
Behind them, the Abominant hit the passage wall hard enough to burst a lumen strip. Darkness strobed red, black, red, black. Voss moved before Sabine shoved her. Not with borrowed precision. Not cleanly. She moved as a wounded woman with a pistol, a dead arm, and authority that had lost every comfortable shape. It was slower than the Scythe Knight. It was hers.
They reached the service hatch together.
Renata and Sabine forced the wheel while Thera fired down the passage. Othilde stood beside her, simulacrum planted, sidearm snapping at the Abominant's silhouette each time red light found it. The creature came through bolter fire and pistol rounds with half its face ruined, shoulder meat hanging, one leg dragging from Sabine's earlier shots. It was dying by increments. It had not yet accepted the verdict.
The hatch opened into light, noise, and a concourse already at war.
They spilled out onto cracked transit flooring beneath a collapsed interchange where several routes met under a broken ceiling. The chamber had once been an Enforcer-controlled transit annex, judging by the ruined booth, restraint rails, and faded warning signage. Now it was an open wound under the hive: overhead gantries torn wide, smoke climbing into the false sky, bodies scattered across tiled platforms and track wells, muzzle flashes blooming from kiosks, stair mouths, and overturned transit carts. For one breath, the space seemed too large after the conduit's metal throat.
Then the Abominant followed them out.
It tore through the service hatch frame with both hands and emerged behind Othilde in a rain of sparks and broken metal. The battlefield saw it. For a rare second, hatred aligned. Autoguns turned. Las-lines converged. A heavy stubber from somewhere above opened with a grinding roar. Bolter fire from an unseen Ecclesiarchy position struck its back. Someone fired a mining charge that detonated against its hip in a white flash and a wet thunderclap.
The Abominant did not die cleanly.
It tried to move through the storm. Ammunition peeled it apart in layers, stripping skin, punching meat, breaking one leg sideways. It swung once at empty air, as if the brood-purpose inside it could still reach the prey it had chosen. A final barrage caught it in the head and chest together, and the huge body collapsed forward onto the concourse floor hard enough to crack tile beneath it.
The victory lasted less than a second.
An explosion struck the concourse from Voss's right.
The blast lifted her from the ground and removed all order from the world. Sound became a white ring. Light turned to wet smears. Her pistol left her hand. Her body struck something, rolled, struck again, and stopped on her back amid grit, glass, and hot metal fragments. She could not breathe at first. When air returned, it came shallow and useless, too thin for the amount of pain waiting behind it.
She tried to move.
Her right fingers twitched.
She tried to lift her head. For a moment she managed it, enough to see smoke dragged sideways by pressure and the blurred forms of Sisters scattered across the concourse. Then control failed. Her skull hit the floor again with a dull impact that sent black spots swimming across the broken vault above.
The underhive sky looked down at her.
Gantries crossed it like ribs. Smoke moved between them in slow, bruised sheets. Furnace-light burned through gaps in the structure, red and orange behind the ash, while sparks fell from damaged cables in brief, dying trails. The image blinked in and out with her vision. Each blink changed the world.
Blink.
Sabine on one knee, bolter raised, armor streaked with dust.
Blink.
Renata dragging Thera behind a cracked transit barrier, both of them firing toward shapes Voss could not resolve.
Blink.
Othilde rising last.
The banner bearer had been thrown farther than the others. The simulacrum lay half across her, its pole caught under one arm, the scorched icons scraping the floor as she forced herself upright. No cover protected her. No full magazine waited in her weapon. She rose anyway, sidearm in hand, standard braced against her body as if the act of holding it upright was the last remaining architecture in the concourse.
Enemies became visible through smoke.
Gangers. Grey-uniformed shapes. A figure with a blue-glass charm swinging from his weapon. More behind them, too many for Voss's damaged vision to count. They fired into the scattered Sisters because the Sisters were visible, because they were hated, because they were alive.
Othilde fired first.
Her shot took a man in the throat. Another struck her from behind at the knee, punching into the joint with enough force to drive her down into a hard crouch. The simulacrum tilted. Othilde caught it before it fell, one gauntlet locked around the pole, her body folding around the standard instead of away from it.
She raised her pistol again.
A round struck her shooting arm. Another hit her left pauldron and spun her half-sideways. Ceramite held. Flesh beneath it did not escape the impact. She staggered, corrected, and fired back. Her second shot dropped the shooter who had wounded her arm.
The red light came from above and left.
It pierced her helm in a line so clean Voss did not understand it at first. One instant Othilde was aiming. The next, a red lance cut through the faceplate, and the back of the helm flashed dark with exit spray. Her head turned, either from nerve, instinct, or the force of the shot. Her pistol came with it.
Othilde fired once more.
The man who had killed her fell backward from the gantry edge, weapon tumbling from his hands before his body vanished into smoke below.
Then Othilde fell.
The simulacrum slipped from her grip.
Voss watched it descend in broken frames, the scorched cloth twisting, the icons catching furnace-light, the pole striking the floor with a flat metallic crack that cut through the ringing in her ears more clearly than any gunshot. The standard bounced once, rolled against Othilde's dead hand, and stilled.
The remaining Sisters tried to reach her.
Sabine rose into fire and was driven back by impacts across her breastplate. Renata emptied her bolter and used it like a club when a ganger reached the barrier. Thera, half-dragging her injured leg, put a round into a grey-uniformed attacker at close range, then took a hit that spun her to the floor without stilling her weapon. They did not break. They were beyond ammunition, beyond position, beyond reasonable survival. Faith and stubbornness carried them where bodies had already failed.
Voss could not reach the pistol.
She could not reach the fallen standard.
She could not reach the women dying around her.
A shadow stepped into the edge of her vision.
It was human enough to be worse than a monster. A face behind a cracked visor. A gun in both hands. The figure moved with no ceremony, no hatred Voss could use, no shouted creed to categorize. Only intent. Ordinary, careful, final.
The barrel lowered toward her face.
Voss tried to move.
One finger answered.
The knight stood beyond the gunman.
Not between them. Not as shield. Not as salvation. It had no place in the geometry of the moment except the corner of her failing sight, where smoke, light, and concussion arranged themselves into armor one last time. The scythe-shape rested at its side, thinner now, almost gone, its edges unmaking themselves in the furnace-glow leaking through the broken vault above.
For the first time, the helm tilted.
There might have been a smile beneath it. Voss could not see one. Armor allowed no such mercy. Yet the shape of the motion carried something close to recognition, not sorrow, not pity, not judgment. Understanding.
The future had arrived too late to become useful.
Voss drew one more breath and tasted dust, copper, and the bitter chemical smoke of the underhive. Sabine was still firing somewhere to her right. Renata was shouting, or praying, or both. Thera's bolter cracked once, then again, the rhythm uneven but unbroken. The fallen simulacrum lay where Othilde had left it, its scorched icons catching red furnace-light in brief, dying flashes.
The gunman fired.
Light filled her vision.
Not holy.
Not Imperial.
Not enough.