Mantas gripped the rubberized shaft of the livestock stun prod until his knuckles turned white. Freezing nitrogen billowed around his shins, spilling across the scarred concrete threshold. The climate in the hall bit his cheeks like wire teeth. He stepped through, leaving the sanctuary of his living wing behind, hearing the heavy hydraulic latch reset behind him with a deafening thud. He had crafted every angle of this trench-cut bunker to withstand centuries of geological collapse, yet the ceiling pipes groaned overhead like stressed tendons. Ice crusted the lower conduits while blistering drafts whistled through the high intake vents. The balance was coming unstitched. "Mantas?" Ruta’s voice crackled from a wall speaker ten feet ahead, ragged and distorted by acoustic feedback. "He’s past the second divider. He killed the auxiliary feed to Bay Four." "Shut up, Ruta," Mantas muttered under his breath, raising the prod. The twin conductive prongs hummed, sparks jumping across the three-inch gap with a flat crackle. He kept his back pressed against the riveted zinc paneling. Every junction smelled of scorched wire and frostbitten iron. Five yards down, the passage branched toward the holding cells. A trail of smeared frost on the floor marked where Oskars had dragged his boots. Ahead, a junction valve shrieked. A vent flap snapped shut with a brutal clack, then reopened, releasing a plume of boiling vapor that clouded the sightline. [NEURAL FLUX DETECTED: WARD 2] [METRIC: SHAME (INDUCED)] [VENTILATION CYCLE: +14% AIRFLOW RESTRICTION] The Kardiak Engine’s chime struck once—an iron hammer on an iron bell. The brassy echo shook the rust off the overhead joists. The air around Mantas dropped six degrees in an instant, frosting his eyelashes, only to boil back upward as the chime ceased. "Oskars!" Mantas called out. The word hung white in the air. "Step into the light of the bay. You drop the iron rod, or I dump the halon tanks into the floor grates. We both bake together." A laugh drifted from the shadows near the storage cage. It was dry, rattling, full of phlegm. "You won't dump shit, Mantas. You spent eight years calculating how to live through the ash. A man who calculates his own skin down to the calorie doesn't open the vents on himself." A wrench clanged against steel piping. A low yelp followed—the sharp, muffled cry of a cornered dog. Oskars had found the service terrier Mantas kept in the crawlways for vermin control. Another sickening thud echoed, followed by a sharp, whimpering silence. [NEURAL FLUX CONFIRMED: WARD 2] [METRIC: CONTRITION (REFLEXIVE)] [LOCAL CRYOGENIC RECOVERY: 1.8%] The blast of frigid air struck Mantas’s neck like an ice pack. The criminal was farming his own petty cruelties, deliberately stepping on small lives just to harvest the immediate, sickly remorse that followed. It was calculated, transactional, and disgustingly functional. "See that?" Oskars’s voice echoed from behind a stack of corrugated partition shields. "The needle jumped. I felt the chill in my teeth. I don't need your master keys, engineer. I just need something living within reach." "You're burning through the margin," Mantas snarled, creeping past the shattered doorway of Bay Three. Broken cable ties littered the deck. The neural cap Oskars had torn from his skull lay in pieces, its copper needles bent and bloody. "The micro-climates can't handle split cycling. You're fracturing the coils." "Let them fracture," Oskars called back. "Cold is cold." The overhead intercom speaker popped again, loud enough to make Mantas flinch. Ruta’s breathing was shallow, labored by the suffocating pockets forming in her sector. "Mantas, listen to me!" she rasped, the microphone picking up the screech of grinding turbines from deep in the geothermal sump. "The central manifold is starving. Those little drops he's pulling... they’re noise. Static. The primary capacitor is failing! The core needs a massive drop—something catastrophic—or the seals on the exterior intake will warp. Once the external air hits the shafts, the Scald burns us out in two minutes!" "I am handling him!" Mantas shouted toward the ceiling grid. "You aren't handling anything!" she screamed back. "He doesn't feel real guilt for kicking an animal, and neither do you for watching him do it! It needs an unbearable transgression! It needs an actual ruin!" A floorplate rattled ten paces ahead. Mantas leveled the stun prod. A shadow darted past the entrance to the latrines—heading straight for the small alcove where Tadas had barricaded himself with Laima. Mantas broke into a sprint. His boots slipped on patches of rime coating the steel decking. He swung around the reinforced support pillar just as Oskars kicked the plywood barricade down. The makeshift barrier splintered into matchwood. Tadas sat curled on the cold floor, his back jammed into the corner beneath an unshielded heat pipe, his arms locked around the seven-year-old girl. Blood seeped from Tadas's broken nose, dripping into his beard, drying brown in the arid draft. His gaze was hollow, fixed on the rebar chisel. Laima had her face buried in her father's wool sweater, her shoulders shaking without a sound. "Get away from them!" Mantas roared, lunging forward. Oskars turned, teeth bared under the red emergency bulb. He held a length of rebar ground to a chisel point. He didn't even raise it toward Mantas. He looked straight down at the child. "Think of the drop, Mantas," Oskars whispered, his chest heaving, veins corded along his thick neck. "Think of how much frost a little throat will buy us. I'll feel awful about it. I swear on my mother’s grave, I’ll weep like a widow. The needles will plunge all the way to absolute zero. We’ll have ice for a decade." "Don't!" Mantas thrust the stun prod forward, aiming for the crook of Oskars’s neck. Oskars was faster. He slapped the baton’s shaft aside with an iron pipe held in his left hand, the shock jarring through Mantas's forearm to numb his fingers. The baton clattered against the wall, sparking wildly against the bare metal skirting. Oskars pivoted, his entire body weight leaning into the downstroke of the rebar chisel, aiming the point straight down toward Laima’s skull. Mantas reached out, but his boots had no traction on the slick floor. He was two inches too far. A fraction of a second too slow. His engineer's mind measured the trajectory, the speed, the inevitable pierce of bone—and the horrific, unforgivable truth that he had opened the door that let the monster in. Before the steel point could strike the child, Tadas surged upward. With a ragged, wordless bellow, Tadas threw his torso over his daughter, arching his back and shielding her crown with both arms. The rusted rebar did not glance off. It punched through Tadas’s threadbare jacket, grating against his collarbone before driving deep into his upper chest with a wet, heavy crunch. Tadas’s body jerked violently. His breath left him in a ragged, bubbling hiss, hot crimson splattering across the girl's small hands and the cold concrete floor beneath them.

Breach of Isolation