How the hell had these workers gone from being strong enough to haul the artifact onto the train, to lying there in a gurgling mess? Instantly, the memory of that enormous metal cylinder comes back to me, its unnatural silver surface glinting under the moonlight. The strange weight of it. A chill builds inside me and seeps down my limbs.

The hurried voice of another soldier comes to us as she rushes past. “They were still out in the square during the blessing of the new sculptures from Mara. Already saw some blisters on their faces then, but this…”

“That’s impossible,” says a lab worker who meets them at the gate to usher them inside. Then he glances at the crowd gathered around and seems to temper the rest of his words. He raises his voice. “Hey—get back, back! State business. Back!” He waves a hand impatiently at the rest of the patrol, and guards begin to physically nudge the crowd in either direction.

“We should go,” Jeran whispers beside me. His eyes linger on the two men on the stretchers, then flick up to me. “Something tells me it’d be best if we aren’t too near them.”

I nod, and in one motion, the two of us turn away from the scene. But the last image of the victims disappearing inside the complex stays seared in my mind. The chill in my body lingers.

“Do we know where they’re keeping that artifact from the train?” I reply as we go.

“Didn’t they unload it from the train with those enormous platforms?” Jeran says. “Where would they bring equipment like that in the city?”

I frown as I think through Cardinia’s locations. “There’s a military district near the central palace,” I finally murmur. Around us, people blur past, oblivious to what had happened near the lab gate and excited about the upcoming game. “Those platforms are typically for transporting larger weapons like catapults and cannons. Maybe that artifact had been moved with them to that district.”

Jeran nods once. He looks pale too, even under the evening light. “We don’t have much time,” he says quietly. And he doesn’t even have to explain his words for me to know what he means.

The Federation has sunk its teeth into the land of Mara, churning up its earth in an attempt to find something of value left over from the Early Ones. But the cylinder we’d seen them pull out … it can’t just be a relic. I’d seen with my own eyes how those workers looked before they loaded the object and after, bleeding everywhere. There is something happening here that I don’t understand, but I can feel the darkness of it hanging in the air, a foreboding of things to come.

It has come before, after all. The Early Ones were once mighty, and now they are gone.

If Karensa figures out how to weaponize what they found in Mara, whatever it is that has hurt those men, then soon it may no longer be just the Federation that we need to stop. Soon, all of us may become like the Early Ones—annihilated by something we couldn’t control.