I nod ahead, catch a scatter of brass in the lamplight, and find a line of jagged scars where it etched the walls with hardshot. “It went down fighting.”

Salt picks out a long cut with his headlamps, smooth edges through layers of Sigurd’s mirror-plating. “Just like the shells outside.”

More dead machinery waits in the shadows, stark as our lamps find them. Three exo-hollows, if I had to count, taken apart in long, sweeping cuts. More casings, more impact-scars, a spread of wreckage.

Beyond them, another doorway. It’s shorter than the one we passed on the way in, both doors still attached to their hinges. They’re marked with one final image: a dying star, empty in the middle.

Two more exos lie on the floor. Further in is the thing that killed them.

The hollows brushed it aside, left it to curl in the corner and die. The floor runs with what could be blood, if it wasn’t so crystal clear. Even with our lamps, we can’t see much of the creature itself, but there are hints of it exposed. Midnight blue shows through where the strange helmet meets its collar, and again where long gauntlets meet an ornate shoulder-guard. A little more skin shows between the helmet and face-mask.

It looks like old leather, dark and gently wrinkled.

Everything else is hidden behind its armour, made from the same material that covers the shells outside, but much lighter, more delicate. Silvery glass billows like fine cloth caught in time, while harder plating covers its chest, shoulders, cheeks and forearms. Blisters mark where bullets bounced off, and long scars trace the paths of flechettes and shrapnel and smallrail. The silk-fine armour took the impacts head on.

Its weapon lies nearby, still completely perfect: a blade with a sabre-curve and silver basket around the grip, sharp enough that it took a slice out of the stone when it fell.

We watch the body from a distance first, with lamps and eyes, then IR and the weak ranging systems our suits carry. We look for a pulse, for warmth, for electrical impulses, then anything else we can think of. The body is as cold as the ground around it, as cold as the air and just about as still.

“What do you think it is?” whispers Hail.

I already know the answer, but there’s no way to say it that won’t sound like I’ve lost my mind.

Because I’ve met it once before, somewhere between death and waking. It leaned over me when I was tethered to the ground, still shackled with a black-iron chain. I saw the reflection of my face in those silvery plates—

Well, not my face.

I think I might even know its name.

Asha.

Salt saves me from saying anything out loud. He nods down the corridor, aims his lamps through the doorway at one last door, and the harsh lines of a prison cell.