Page 5 of Red Demon

Mal looked beyond us to the stairwell. His fist clenched.

“What … what happened to you?” I said.

Mal shrank back, the fight shattering from him like one of those dropped coffee mugs. “You aren’t here to kill me?”

Iden and I shared a look, then looked back to Mal. “Why would we do that?” I said.

Mal rubbed his shoulder, shuddering.

“Mal, who else is down there?” Iden said. “Oren?”

Mal stopped breathing, his entire body frozen at that name. My mind raced as Mal sat there, staring at us with frantic eyes, offering neither answers nor questions of his own.

Only when Iden started moving toward the stairwell did he speak. “Don’t. Oren’s dead.”

I saw more than just grief on his face, but I wasn’t sure what. He rubbed his beard, dried blood on his hands.

“How’d he die?” I asked. My voice, quiet, echoed in my chest.

Mal stared at the ground as if his eyes could bore through the levels beneath. “I think that’s the Red Demon down there, killing people.” He looked at Iden.

“The Chaeten-sa? We saw her,” Iden said. “Did she kill Oren?”

Mal stared off into the dark.

“Mal?” I tried again.

I’d never seen Mal wear that look before. Distant, broken. “Most of them just died—dropped like hail. Not us. Oren was shaken up, but the Chaeten-sa didn’t get him.”

“So how’d he die?” Iden growled.

Mal shifted back on the desk, his eyes latched on Iden. “I killed him.” His whisper cut the air between us.

“No.” I refused to understand. I could see the guilt in Mal. Maybe he watched Oren die. Maybe Mal just felt guilty that he couldn’t save him. “No,” I repeated, uncertain, when nothing in Mal’s expression so much as flickered.

Iden shook his head, kept shaking it. “Keep it together, Mal.” He reached a hand to Mal, who just stared at it. “If he’s dead, we’ll get out of here, and we’ll figure the rest out.”

Mal hoisted himself to a stand. “I killed Oren with my knife.” He motioned to a stain on his thigh, a slash through the clothing. “He tried to kill me first. That’s all he got in on me.” He shuddered, collapsing back down into a chair.

“Why?” I whispered. All my memories of Oren had smile lines: the only dark-haired one among us. He’d be sitting across the table at dinner laughing, or letting me ride on his shoulders through the forest.

The metallic screech rent the air again, closer this time, shuddering through the floorboards and shaking the stone walls.

My heart beat wild as shelves clattered to the ground, mugs shattered and tables toppled. Raw panic spurred us into a run.

Iden’s lantern wove swaying shadows in the dust-thickened air. We reached the office door then scanned the hallway: clear. The glass in the front windows shattered on the floor.

“What is happening?” I yelled at Mal, but I’m not sure he heard. That rasp in my throat was nothing compared to the rhythmic clang that pained my ears, or the groan of twisted metal as it shredded the structural beams, collapsing the office floor behind us.

“The rigs!” Iden yelled over the noise.

We ran past the truck bay. The floor beneath us shuddered, but we kept our feet, dust raining down from the ceiling. It made little sense. The machines wouldn’t do this unless—unless someone programmed them to.

Fuck.

Fear pulled air from my lungs. Our drill rigs were tearing this place down beam by beam. The ceiling at the other end of the hall caved in, and the ground beneath me shuddered. I coughed through a cloud of dust.

The sounds of grinding metal echoed louder through the stone floor, but stone wouldn’t stop machines that could carve a meter a minute through solid granite and crack through imperfections much faster. We sprinted toward the fading light of the mine entrance. Iden stooped to grab my bag from the front; his was long gone in the collapsed office.