The ground beneath her pink boots was not smooth snow, but a treacherous, jagged landscape of black glass-ice and frost-bitten basalt. Every step across Citrace's airless floor was a battle against the terrain. The ground was cracked into sharp, razor-edged fissures that threatened to slice through her suit's reinforced seals, coated in a fine, powdery frost of frozen carbon that swirled in soundless eddies whenever her heavy soles struck the rock.
And Nea was utterly, agonizingly exhausted.
Her lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. Inside her pink EVA suit, sweat pooled along her spine and soaked through her thermal undergarments, chilling her to the bone every time she paused. Her thighs burned with a sickening, lactic acid fire, and her trembling arms felt like lead weights attached to her shoulders. The pink suits armor plates, once a pristine symbol of Amadeus's love, were now battered, scuffed, and smeared with black grease and frozen blood. Small crystals of frost were even beginning to form along the inside edges of her golden visor, fed by her frantic, heavy breathing.
I am a goddess,
she lied to herself, forcing her shaking knees to lock as she dragged her body forward.
I am his queen. A mortal body feels pain, but I am divine. I was made for him, and he was made for me.
She clung to the madness like a shield against her collapsing body. Amadeus was her golden god, her champion, her sun—and a sun could not shine without its goddess to behold it. He was drifting in the dark, helpless, calling out for her to bestow life back upon him. How could she yield to simple fatigue when her champion was waiting?
Yet, thirty steps from the dark, open mouth of Chute 37, her legs simply gave out.
Nea collapsed backward, hitting the base of Zenith's outer wall with a dull, heavy thud that rattled her teeth inside her helmet. She couldn't stand. She didn't have the strength to lift a foot. Slumping against the five-mile-high cliff of matte-black star-steel, she let her head fall back against the wall, staring up at the pale, weeping eye of the sun frozen in the black sky.
The wall vibrated against her suit, humming with the terrifying power of a city that cared nothing for her.
Panic, dark and cold, slithered into her mind through the cracks in her fanaticism. She looked toward the dark iron hatch of Chute 37—the final tube along the wall.
What if he isn't here either?
the thought whispered in her head, terrifying and raw.
What if I drag out every corpse, scan every face, and find nothing? What will I do?
If the last chute was empty, her journey on the surface ended in total failure. There were no more tubes. There was only the endless, airless desert of glass-ice stretching out into the dark horizon. She couldn't survive out here alone. Her oxygen reserves were ticking down. If Amadeus was truly gone, if there was no vessel left on this frozen rock, then she would be forced to lie down in the frost and let the cold turn her pink hair and glowing eyes into just another frozen artifact of Citrace.
"No," she wheezed into her microphone, her voice a ragged, pitiful scrap of sound inside her helmet. "No. My champion needs me. He cannot stay in the dark."
Gritting her teeth until her gums bled, Nea clawed at the sharp basalt ground, using the wall behind her for leverage to haul her trembling body back onto her feet. Her limbs shook violently. Her vision swam in pink and gold spots, but she forced one pink boot in front of the other until she reached the iron lip of Chute 37.
With an agonizing scream that died in her throat, she threw her failing weight against the chute's outer hatch. The hatch was stock in place barrel move inch
Then, something inside her snapped.
"Move!" she screamed, her voice breaking into a ragged, desperate shriek inside the tight confines of her helmet. "Move, you piece of shit,
move!
"
She slammed her heavy pink gauntlets into the iron door with all the frantic strength left in her dying muscles.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The vibrations rattled up her arms, shivering into her teeth. She beat against the metal like a wild, trapped animal, kicking her boots against the corpses beneath her, cursing the hatch, cursing Zenith, cursing the ice that dared to stand between her and her love.
Tears, hot and bitter, spilled from her glowing pink eyes. They welled over her eyelashes and streamed down her soot-stained cheeks, pooling at the base of her chin inside her suit. In the freezing chill of the shaft, her hot breath and moisture instantly fogged the inside of her gold-tinted visor, painting the glass in thick, milky streaks of condensation.
The dark went completely blurry. She couldn't see the hatch. She couldn't see her hands. Crying only made it worse, blinding her entirely, but she couldn't stop the sob tearing through her chest. She was a goddess without a throne, bruised and bleeding, trapped in a hole full of discarded meat.
"Amadeus..." she sobbed, blindly throwing her full body weight upward against the wheel one last time, screaming through her teeth until her throat tore. "Amadeus!"
CREEEAAAK—CLACK!
With a violent, shuddering pop, the rusted locking pins finally sheared away. The heavy iron hatch swung upward, breaking its icy seal and revealing a sickening pile of naked, butchered bodies onto the glass-ice ground .
The sight was horrific, but Nea's frantic mind barely registered the grotesque, monster-chewed wounds, the melted ribs, or the acid-burned flesh. She dropped to her hands and knees in the razor-frost, her trembling hands grabbing corpse after corpse, dragging them out into the dim starlight. She pressed the twin prongs of the
Sta-Checker
against their mutilated chests, her heart pounding like a trapped bird against her ribs.
BEEP. RED.
BEEP. RED.
BEEP. RED.
Every rejection was a physical blow to her chest. She searched every face, her gloves slick with frozen indigo bile and blood, until the pile was empty.
Nea sat back on her heels in the black frost, gasping for air, her suit's oxygen warning chiming a faint, terrifying yellow in the corner of her HUD. Her despair crested, threatening to break her—and then, out of the dark fog of her exhaustion .
I have to go to the city,
she thought, her obsession igniting into a fresh, manic fever that burned away her fatigue.
Driven by a terrifying, unholy strength, Nea dragged her exhausted body toward the slick, dark interior of the chute. She grabbed the naked leg of a monster-torn corpse and shoved it into the pipe. She hauled a second, then a third, her muscles screaming in agony as she stacked the frozen dead into a crude, gruesome staircase inside the steel shaft.
Step by agonizing step, her pink boots crunched against stiffened flesh as she pulled herself up into the wall. Suspended high inside the dark pipe, her body shaking from pure exhaustion, she reached back down with her gloved hand. She grabbed the heavy iron handle of the outer hatch, pressed her boots into the dead beneath her, and pulled with the absolute last shred of her strength.
The giant steel door slammed shut with a deafening, metallic
CLANG
.
The weeping sun vanished. The airless void was locked out. Surrounded by total, suffocating darkness inside the razor-wall of Zenith, Nea leaned her helmet against the icy metal pipe, listened to her own ragged breath, and began to crawl upward looking to the city to see nothing but Chaos.