The speaking tube hissed with venting steam, followed by the clanking slide of ceiling vents. Heavy, lilac-tinted soot tumbled down like curdled milk. Pure, unrefined nightmare-smog, harvested directly from condemned sleep-cells, pooled across the iron floorplates until it reached their knees. "Breathe it in, Valdas," Voss's brass-amplified voice drifted down from the reinforced observation gallery above. "Experience the harvest you protected for six years. It will dissolve your faculties in moments." Valdas did not step back. His vision flared violet, the edges of his sight dissolving into shifting ash, yet his spine remained straight. He pulled off his leather coat, dropping it into the churning haze. "Doctor," he said, his voice flat, devoid of its usual gravelly reserve. "Step behind the accumulator housing." "Valdas, don't play the hero," Ovidia snapped, her boots scraping over the grating as she backed away. "Smog at this saturation will liquify your cerebral cortex in three breaths." He opened his mouth and drew a long, deliberate breath. His ribcage expanded. He dragged the violet venom into his lungs, his throat convulsing once before settling. The dark corruption in his veins did not destroy him; it met the festering rot already entrenched in his chest and ignited. The gray veins crawling up his neck swelled into pitch-black ropes. A sharp, trench-born cadence tore from his lips, ancient mud-magic warping the room's temperature until frost formed on the brass rivets. He wasn't fighting the infection. He was feeding it. "He has lost his senses," Voss murmured through the tube, the calm veneer cracking into irritation. "Release the pneumatic lancets. Bleed the male before the venom spoils the distillation!" A steel aperture beneath the gallery ground open. A volley of copper somna-darts, designed to pierce plate-armor and drain spine fluid, spat downward with sharp pneumatic cracks. Valdas raised a hand, gathering the smog into a solid barrier of crystallized panic, but his focus lagged by half a second. A whistling dart tore through the smog screen, aimed straight for his exposed collarbone. She shoved him aside, shoulder taking the brunt of the collision. Ovidia's shoulder took the projectile. The barbed head tore through wool and linen, burying itself into muscle with a wet crunch. She sucked in a harsh, rattling gasp and stumbled into the iron wall. Her palm, pressed against her wound, came away soaked in silver-laced blood. The alchemical cord joining their wrists thinned to a pale, smoking thread. Valdas dropped to one knee beside her, catching her arm before she slid into the caustic fog. "You fool. What did you do?" "I kept alive the man who still owes me an explanation," she rasped through bared teeth. The sedative-laced dart was already leaching her vitality, dragging her toward unconsciousness. "The link... is slipping. If the thread snaps... your mind goes with it." "It will not snap," he growled. Valdas rose. The discipline drilled into him since the front-line trenches splintered. He did not care about Morbray's laws. He did not care about the Night-Watch. He looked up at the reinforced glass of the observation box, his eyes pitch-black voids ringed by burning amethyst. He extended his arm toward the observation window. "You want the harvest, Voss?" Valdas's voice didn't echo; it drilled through the iron walls, carrying the thunder of heavy artillery and the screams of men rotting in flooded trenches. "Take all of it." He channeled every splintered, bloody hour of the Great Mud campaign—the gangrene, the terror-gas, the comrades whose faces dissolved into mud while they still screamed—and shoved it across the psychic ether, using the smog as a conducting wire. The reinforced glass held, but Voss buckled behind it. Inside the box, the old man dropped his cane. He dropped to his palms against the parquet, digging fingernails into his ears as Valdas's war memories invaded his skull. Voss shrieked, a high, pathetic squeal of an aristocrat experiencing true frontline horror for the first time. Blood dripped from his nostrils; he began striking his forehead against the iron floor, begging for a cease-fire that had ended ten years ago. Yet the central Somna-reactor did not stop. Deep below the floor, the primary alembic groaned. The brass dials spun wildly past their safety pins, needle tips snapping off against the glass faces. The machine was drawing from their linked blood, but without Voss at the controls, the pressure valve had locked. The glowing core pulsed against its housing, ready to vaporize the entire sub-level in a blast of pressurized delirium. "Valdas!" Ovidia pulled herself up against the accumulator, her wounded arm hanging limp, fingers dripping scarlet onto the corroded floorplates. Her chest hitched in shallow, ragged spurts. "The safety bypass... is inside the primary chamber!" He rushed to her, catching her waist as her knees buckled. "Tell me how to vent it." "Orderly commands and brute force will shatter the housing," she said, blinking against the spreading sedative. "It's tuned to our blood-link. The only way to short-circuit the core is to feed it a pure, untamed psychic overload. You have to drop your mental walls entirely." Valdas went rigid. "If I drop my walls, the madness takes the throne. I won't come back." "I know," she whispered, pressing her bloodied hand against his cheek. Her skin was burning, the tether between them fraying into brittle cinders. "Drop every ward. Let the blight chew through your marrow, and funnel the seizure straight into the core." "And then?" "And then pray to whatever gods remain that I am strong enough to drag your soul back to the surface before your brain burns to ash." The iron chamber groaned around them as the reactor began its final, lethal cycle.

Shattered Control