CHAPTER 1

  THE BLEED ZONE

  The ash was the color of old bone.

  Elias Thorne walked through it anyway, each step sending up small plumes that clung to his boots and the hem of his coat. Fifty miles of this. Fifty miles of dead earth where Chicago used to breathe, where two million people had lived and laughed and complained about the winters. Now there was only silence and the distant shape of something that should not exist.

  The Tower.

  It rose from the horizon like a wound in the sky, fifteen thousand feet of organic obscenity, its surface glistening wet even from this distance. Elias had seen it a hundred times on news feeds, in grainy photographs taken from helicopters that got too close and fell from the sky with their pilots screaming about voices in their heads. But seeing it with his own eyes was different.

  It was breathing.

  He could feel it in his chest, a subsonic pulse that matched his heartbeat if he let it. He didn't let it. He kept walking.

  The Bleed Zone stretched in every direction, a perfect circle of devastation centered on the Tower. No vegetation grew here. No birds flew overhead. Even the clouds seemed to avoid the airspace, leaving the sky a pale, sickly gray that hurt to look at for too long. The skeletal remains of buildings jutted from the ash like broken teeth: a gas station with no roof, a school bus half-buried in gray drifts, the rusted frame of a highway overpass that led nowhere.

  Everything was the color of nothing.

  Elias flexed his fingers, an old habit from his surgery days, keeping the joints loose, and adjusted the strap of the scalpel-spear across his back. The weapon was his own design: a five-foot pole of reinforced aluminum with a surgical blade at the end, the edge honed to split molecules. It felt inadequate. Everything felt inadequate out here.

  His tongue tasted copper. The air itself seemed to leach color from the world, turning his olive drab coat gray, his skin gray, his thoughts gray. He'd been walking for six hours since the last quarantine checkpoint, where the soldiers had looked at him with pity and asked if he was sure.

  He was sure.

  The Tower whispered to him again, the same words it had been whispering for three months now, ever since the dreams started:

  Climb. Reach the apex. Save her.

  Elias didn't answer. He just walked.

  The bunker was where he'd left it, half-buried in a collapsed parking structure, the entrance hidden behind a fallen concrete slab that took all his weight to shift. Inside, the air was stale but clean, filtered through a system he'd jerry-rigged from hospital ventilators and automotive parts. Emergency lights cast a dim yellow glow over the cramped space.

  And there, in the center of it all, was Lira.

  She lay in the medical pod like a fairy tale princess waiting for a kiss that would never come. Seven years old when the world ended. Fourteen now, though her body hadn't aged past eleven, something about the soul-crack, the doctors had said, before the doctors stopped saying anything and started dying like everyone else who got too close.

  Elias knelt beside the pod. The monitoring equipment beeped its steady rhythm: heart rate, respiration, neural activity. All normal. All meaningless.

  Her soul was dying, and no machine could measure that.

  "Hey, sweetheart."

  His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, tried again.

  "I'm going now. You know that already, I think. You know everything that happens in this room, even if you can't tell me." He reached through the access port and took her hand, so small, so cold, so impossibly fragile. "The Tower... it says it can fix you. That there's something at the top, at Floor 100. The Origin Pump." He laughed, though nothing was funny. "Sounds like medical equipment, doesn't it? Like something I'd use in surgery."

  Her face didn't change. It never changed. The same peaceful expression she'd worn since the paramedics pulled her from the car, since Elena's blood had cooled on the asphalt and the Tower had erupted from the earth like God's own tumor.

  "I don't know if it's lying," Elias continued. "I don't know if anything that comes out of that thing can be trusted. But I know...." His voice broke. He pressed his forehead to the cool glass of the pod. "I know you're fading. I can feel it. Every day, a little less of you. And I can't—I won't—sit here and watch you disappear."

  He thought of Elena. The argument. The flash of light.

  It was your fault.

  He shoved the thought down where it belonged and stood up.

  "Once I go in, I can't come back out. Not until I reach the top. So this is..." He touched the glass one more time, leaving a handprint that would fade in seconds. "This is goodbye. For now. Just for now."

  From his pocket, he pulled the locket, tarnished silver, the chain broken and re-tied three times over the years. Inside was a photograph of Lira at five, gap-toothed and grinning, holding a crayon drawing of their family: stick-figure Mommy, stick-figure Daddy, stick-figure Lira in the middle, and a yellow sun that took up half the page.

  He didn't open it. He didn't need to. He'd memorized every pixel, every scratch on the casing.

  "I'll save you," he said. "Or I'll die trying. And if I die, at least I won't have to live with myself anymore."

  The machines beeped. Lira didn't move.

  Elias left the bunker and didn't look back.

  The Tower grew as he walked.

  Not metaphorically, it actually grew, swelling in his vision like a balloon inflating in slow motion. Two miles away, it had been a shape on the horizon. One mile away, it blotted out a quarter of the sky. Half a mile, and Elias had to crane his neck to see the top, which vanished into clouds that writhed and pulsed with dim red light.

  Up close, it was worse than he'd imagined.

  The surface wasn't stone or metal or anything built. It was skin. Pale, almost translucent, stretched over something massive and alive. He could see veins beneath it, blue and red, pulsing in slow, rhythmic waves. Pores the size of manholes dotted the exterior, exhaling warm, wet air that smelled of iron and something sweeter underneath. Something organic.

  It smelled like the inside of a body.

  Elias stopped at the base and stared up. The Tower's diameter was at least two thousand feet, a pillar of living tissue that dwarfed every skyscraper humanity had ever built. Its shadow fell across him like a physical weight, and he felt suddenly, absurdly small. An ant approaching a god. A cell approaching a tumor.

  Climb.

  The whisper came from inside his skull, not his ears. It wasn't a voice, exactly—more like a memory of a voice, an imprint left on neurons that had never fired this way before.

  Climb. Reach the apex. Save her.

  "I heard you the first time," Elias muttered.

  The Threshold was ahead: an opening in the skin about twenty feet wide, ringed with something that looked disturbingly like lips. Climbers who had made it out—there had been a few, in the early months, before the Tower stopped letting anyone leave, described it as a mouth. They weren't wrong.

  Elias approached slowly. The warm air from inside washed over him, carrying the smell of blood and meat and something almost pleasant, like the inside of a womb. The walls of the opening glistened with moisture. When he got within ten feet, he heard it: a heartbeat, deep and slow, resonating through the ground and into his bones.

  Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Roughly every four seconds. About fifteen beats per minute. A resting heart rate for something very, very large.

  He thought about the soldiers at the checkpoint. He thought about the doctors who had given up. He thought about Elena, her hand in his as the light engulfed them, her voice saying words he couldn't remember anymore.

  He thought about Lira's smile.

  Then he stepped forward.

  The moment Elias crossed into the Tower, several things happened at once.

  First: the air changed. Outside, it had tasted like copper and ash. Inside, it was thick, warm and humid, almost tropical, with an undertone of iron that coated his tongue. The temperature jumped twenty degrees in the space of a single step.

  Second: the light changed. The gray sky vanished, replaced by a dim red glow that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. Bioluminescent organs, he realized, clusters of tissue embedded in the flesh that pulsed with soft, arterial light. Like walking inside a body lit by its own blood.

  Third: the sound changed. The silence of the Bleed Zone gave way to something else. A low, constant thrumming that he felt more than heard. The heartbeat, yes, but also other sounds, gurgles and shifts and wet, sliding noises that came from everywhere and nowhere.

  And fourth: the exit closed behind him.

  Elias spun around just in time to see the Threshold contract, the lip-like opening puckering shut like a wound healing in fast-forward. In three seconds, there was no sign it had ever existed. Just smooth, pale skin stretching in every direction.

  He was inside.

  He was trapped.

  WELCOME, CLIMBER.

  The words appeared in his vision, not in front of him, but somehow overlaid on his sight, like a heads-up display in a cockpit. White text against the red gloom, sharp and clinical.

  INITIALIZATION SEQUENCE COMMENCING.

  Pain.

  It hit without warning, a burning sensation that started at the base of his skull and spread outward like fire through his nervous system. Elias dropped to his knees, scalpel-spear clattering on the fleshy ground. His vision flickered. His ears rang. Every nerve ending in his body screamed as something rewrote them, carving new pathways through tissue that had never been designed to carry this kind of information.

  It lasted ten seconds. It lasted ten years.

  When it stopped, Elias was on his hands and knees, gasping, sweat dripping from his face onto the warm, yielding floor.

  And something had changed.

  The display was still there, burned into his vision, a constant presence in the upper right corner of his sight. No matter where he looked, it followed.

  He blinked. It didn't go away.

  He closed his eyes. He could still see it, a ghostly afterimage against the darkness of his lids.

  SANGUINE INTERFACE ACTIVE

  CALIBRATING TO HOST BIOLOGY...

  CALIBRATION COMPLETE.

  The text shifted, rearranging itself into a format that looked uncomfortably like a medical chart:

  SANGUINE INTERFACE

  Vitality: 100/100

  Harvested Blood: 0.0 L

  Soul Integrity: 98.7%

  Circuits: None

  Floor: 1

  Elias stared at the numbers. Vitality, he understood—some combination of health and stamina, probably. Harvested Blood was self-explanatory, if horrifying. Circuits he didn't recognize.

  But Soul Integrity.

  98.7%.

  That number meant Lira. That number meant she was here, somehow, connected to this system. And that number was already dropping—he could see it, if he focused: 98.7, then 98.6999, then 98.6998, ticking down with terrible precision.

  SOUL LINK DETECTED.

  FOUNDLING CLASSIFICATION: COMPATIBLE.

  MANIFESTING...

  "Manifesting?" Elias pushed himself to his feet. "What does that....."

  The air in front of him began to glow.

  It started as a pinprick of light, no bigger than a firefly, hovering at chest height. Then it expanded, stretching and twisting into a shape that made his heart stop.

  A shape he knew.

  A shape he loved.

  A shape that had been lying motionless in a medical pod for seven years.

  "...Daddy?"

  She was translucent.

  That was the first thing Elias noticed, he could see the red-lit walls through her body, the veins in the floor beneath her feet. She glowed with a soft, pale light, like moonlight filtered through water. Her edges flickered occasionally, pixels of her form dissolving and reforming in tiny cascades.

  But her face.

  Her face was Lira.

  Dark hair, shoulder-length, just like she'd worn it at seven. Green eyes—Elena's eyes—wide with confusion and something that looked terrifyingly like hope. White sundress, the one she'd been wearing in the car, pristine and unstained by the blood Elias still saw in his nightmares.

  She looked at her hands. Looked through them.

  "Daddy? What...." Her voice was wrong. Not wrong exactly, but doubled, like two versions of the same word layered slightly out of sync. "What's happening? Where am I? I was dreaming and then—" She looked up at him. "Why are you crying?"

  Elias didn't realize he was.

  He wiped his face with a shaking hand and took a step toward her. She flinched back, flickering, and he stopped.

  "Lira. Sweetheart. It's okay. You're...." What was she? A ghost? A spirit? The System had called her a Foundling. Soul Link Detected. "You're safe. You're with me now."

  "But I don't understand." Her lower lip trembled. She looked around at the fleshy walls, the pulsing bioluminescence, the organic nightmare they stood inside. "This isn't home. This isn't—" Her eyes went wide. "Where's Mommy?"

  Elias's heart cracked along an old fault line.

  "Mommy's... not here, sweetheart. It's just us. But that's okay. I'm here. I've got you."

  "But I want Mommy." Tears that weren't quite real gathered in Lira's eyes, glowing faintly. "I was in the car, and there was a light, and Mommy was screaming, and then—" She pressed her hands to her head. "I can't remember. Why can't I remember?"

  "Shh. Shh. It's okay." Elias knelt, bringing himself to her eye level, desperately wanting to hold her but not knowing if he could. "You've been asleep for a long time. A very long time. But I'm going to fix you. I'm going to make everything better."

  Lira looked at him with those green eyes, so much like Elena's it hurt.

  "Promise?"

  The word was a knife in his chest.

  "I promise," he said, and meant it more than he'd ever meant anything.

  SOUL INTEGRITY: 98.7%

  The number hovered in his vision, a constant reminder of how little time he had.

  Lira seemed to stabilize, her flickering slowing. She looked around again, more curious than frightened now. "This place is gross," she said with the blunt honesty of a seven-year-old. "It smells like the hospital. I don't like hospitals."

  Elias laughed, a broken, desperate sound. "I know, sweetheart. I know. But we have to go through it. We have to climb."

  "Climb where?"

  He pointed up. "To the top. A hundred floors."

  Lira tilted her head. "That's a lot."

  "Yes. It is."

  "Will you carry me if I get tired?"

  The question hit harder than it should have. He couldn't carry her. He couldn't even touch her. She wasn't real—not physically, not anymore. She was a ghost made of light and fading soul-matter, a daughter he could see but never hold.

  "I'll do everything I can," he said, because it was true.

  Lira smiled—gap-toothed, innocent, heartbreakingly familiar.

  "Okay, Daddy. Let's climb."

  They had been walking for less than ten minutes when Elias heard it.

  A skittering sound, like claws on meat.

  He stopped, hand going to the scalpel-spear at his back. The corridor ahead stretched into red-tinged darkness, the bioluminescent organs spaced too far apart to provide real visibility. The floor squelched under his boots, warm, yielding, alive.

  Lira drifted beside him, her glow casting strange shadows on the walls.

  "Daddy? What's that noise?"

  "Stay behind me." He drew the spear, the surgical blade catching the dim light. Ahead, something moved—a flicker of motion at the edge of visibility. Then another. Then a third.

  Eyes.

  He counted six of them, glowing faintly in the darkness. No...twelve. Pairs. Small bodies, low to the ground, moving with a jerky, insectile rhythm.

  THREAT DETECTED: DERMLINGS (x3)

  CLASSIFICATION: PARASITE — BESTIAL

  THREAT LEVEL: LOW

  The System display flickered, and Elias felt a strange pressure behind his eyes, like knowledge being downloaded directly into his brain. Dermlings. Skinless rat-creatures with needle teeth. Hunt in packs. Target wounded prey. Circulatory system weak at the neck.

  He didn't know how he knew that last part, but he knew it.

  The creatures emerged from the darkness, and Elias's stomach turned.

  They were wrong. Skinless, yes, raw muscle and exposed tissue glistening in the red light. About two feet long, each of them, with elongated bodies and too many joints in their legs. Their heads were eyeless, smooth as eggs, but their mouths, their mouths were circles of needle-thin teeth, spiraling inward like the bore of a drill.

  They smelled him. He could tell by the way they stopped, heads twitching, nostrils (if they had nostrils) flaring.

  Then they charged.

  "Daddy!"

  "Stay back!" Elias set his feet, spear raised. The first Dermling leaped, and he stepped left, letting it pass, driving the blade into the soft tissue behind its skull—

  Severed the brainstem.

  It dropped, twitching, dead before it hit the ground.

  But there were more. The darkness beyond was moving, the skittering growing louder, and Elias realized with cold clarity that three was just the beginning.

  He looked at Lira, glowing and terrified behind him.

  He looked at the Dermlings, multiplying in the shadows.

  He tightened his grip on the spear.

  SOUL INTEGRITY: 98.7%

  HARVESTED BLOOD: 0.0 L

  FLOOR: 1

  Seventy-five floors above him, the Origin Pump waited.

  Around him, the Tower's children gathered.

  Climb, the Tower whispered.

  Or die.

  Welcome to the story!

  I’ve already released 10 chapters for you to enjoy now, but I’m releasing 1 chapter every day at 6:00 AM PKT (US times: 8 PM EST / 7 PM CST / 6 PM MST / 5 PM PST, previous day) until Chapter 17 (Feb 2). After that, the remaining chapters will be uploaded, and the story may be removed from Royal Road and become available on Kindle Unlimited.