Hit by Stroya's full weight, Gull slammed down onto the elevator's floor, but the lycan didn't finish her attack with tearing fangs. She launched herself back into the carpark above, havoc breaking out in the den—lycans running, barking, and yelling.

For a moment, Gull just breathed.

He'd been a millisecond from losing everything. His mind. His soul. Fuck.

He scraped together his wits, gaze lifting to the elevator's half-blocked exit.

No guard. No one watching. Going by the reaction to the warning calls higher up in the building, the den had other priorities. An attack from a rival pack possibly.

This was his chance—to escape or die trying, his only two choices. Turning into a bloodthirsty nightmare would be worse than death, but there were even greater horrors that would come with it. Zera had said she'd direct her questions to the creature he'd become, and her expectation had been clear.

He'd answer.

Gull felt himself pale. If he was bitten, all she and her pack would need to do was wait until the Change; after which, he'd betray his friends, the colony, everyone's secrets—his mother's and her work. The pack would kill everyone, anyone who might know anything about the research into a cure.

With quivering bound hands, he sat up and reached forward to find the head of the large nail he'd jammed into the side of one boot heel.

Being a lycan prisoner wasn't something he'd been prepared for, the wolves preferring to kill, not capture, but nihilistic street gangs frequently abducted people for ransom or entertainment. He'd learned to conceal a few tools that might survive a mugging.

The nail slid free gleaming, its length anything but rounded.

The edge he'd put on it was more than enough to cut through the nylon rope binding his wrists and ankles.

In under a minute, he was free.

Ears tuned beyond his hard heartbeat, he slipped the makeshift blade back into its sheath and moved to the slab half blocking the elevator's door. Keeping low, he peered into the car park above. Barks and shouts rang out on higher floors, echoing down vehicle ramps and stairwells. But directly in front of him, firelight flickered quietly over butchered cars, half-eaten carcasses, and rubbish. Nothing moved in the darkness beyond.

He retrieved his belongings, hooking carabiners, a headlamp, and the rope of his bindings to his belt. Then, with the stealth he'd perfected over years of city scrounging, he vaulted up into the wolves' den. Eyes sweeping the shadows, he moved to find what he needed: a rusting pickup truck, a toolbox—a crowbar.

He double-timed it back to the elevator. Gingerly, trying not to clank metal against metal, he slid the iron bar on top of the car, amongst exposed pulleys and electrics. The gap above the sunken elevator was narrow, too small for most lycans. The mutts prided themselves on brawn.

As a scavenger, he was all for wiry and flexible.

With a few pulls and a deft twist of his body, he was through and up inside a well of darkness.

Black, musty air. Many metres of it, rising above him, encased in unforgiving concrete. His breaths rung harshly, every hard surface reflecting sound.

He'd have to move carefully.

He jammed the crowbar into the back of his belt, out of the way. Steadying his respiration, he slipped on his headlamp; looked up and around; assessed what he was working with.

Support girders, cables, and narrow ledges. Piping and electrical boxes—all in reasonable condition. Just a little rust.

A regular jungle gym for someone like him.

He started climbing, not hurrying, prioritising silence. Shouts and the thuds of running feet echoed down around him, hinting at an opening somewhere on a higher level. But it couldn't be a large one. The elevator car below him lay clear of detritus. If there'd been a large opening, there'd have been litter at the bottom of the shaft, maybe a body.

He'd seen the latter too often, the result of accident, violence, or despair.

Five floors up, he found the opening. The doors to the casino's ground floor lobby had failed to close, jamming on rags and bone.

The forearm of a decomposed corpse.

Gull checked the darkness overhead; confirmed the parking garage elevator went no further than the casino's reception. Fighting to keep his breathing quiet, he switched off his headlamp and peered through the gap in the doors.

Moonlight slipped in through large windows along the casino's façade, sketching out the surfaces of reception desks, furniture, and ornate pillars. Howls and shouts rang out: lycans racing through nearby corridors and old gaming rooms. Shadows streaked past the lobby's glass out in the night.

But nothing disturbed the cluttered gloom just beyond the elevator.

Gull tested the wedged doors, failed to get them to budge. Using a carabiner and the rope salvaged from his bindings, he secured himself so he could safely try and lever the doors open.

Safely.

He winced at the word as the sounds of agitated lycans echoed around him. He might escape the elevator shaft, but getting out of the building was a whole other matter.

A bandana wrapped around the crowbar deadened the sound of iron grating against metal doors.

It did nothing to silence the creaks of mechanisms seized by grime and neglect.

A dull, metallic pop. The doors released a few more precious centimetres.

Growling.

Quick footsteps—approaching.

Gull swung away from the gap, held his breath—prayed the draft swirling about the elevator shaft wouldn't deliver his scent to mutt noses.

"Fucking false alarm." A gruff complaint.

"Sentries are twitchy." A second lycan. "Only a matter of time 'til the dock pack throws another batch of new-borns at us."

The first snorted. "More meat for our fangs. Their kill–death ratio is humiliating."

"Their alpha don't care. They've halved our number, and there's plenty more cattle to Change. They'll keep coming."

"So, we need more pups. Strong ones. Destroyer's find looks anaemic. More bones than meat."

"Does it matter?" Bleak amusement crawled through the second mutt's words. "Her pups never see a second moon."

"Cannibalistic bitch."

"Yeah, wouldn't mind those fangs in me. Pity she prefers fresher—"

A howl far below—from the elevator car lost in the darkness. A mournful cry that rapidly turned into one anticipating battle.

Stroya.

With tense growls, the lycans outside rushed to answer their packmate's call. Others from nearby corridors followed: a clatter of feet and claws.

Gull's pulse pounded. He had little time. The mutts would soon figure out he wasn't on any of the parking levels below.

As the lycans' calls became distant, he checked the lobby outside; found it still and dark.

It wouldn't stay that way.

Fighting panic, he worked to widen the gap in the elevator doors until he could get a boot into it. Bracing himself, he checked the lobby again—then pushed.

Grating metal groaned into the night. Fuck. But the gap widened.

Heart a drum, he snapped himself free of his safety rope—

Another howl—still well below him, but closer.

With his fist clenched bloodless on the crowbar, he slipped out into dull moonlight, staying low. He fought the urge to rush, tensing with every sound his boots and clothing made as he wove through dead potted plants and armchairs.

His journey to a fire exit just beyond a bank of elevators felt like a lifetime. Lycans—he could hear them rising through the nearest stairwell, hunting his scent.

His gut jolted at finding the fire exit chained shut, but the door wasn't what had drawn him to its shadowy corner. A square of moonlight glowed high on the wall next to it: a gap in the concrete where an air-conditioning vent had once been.

With shouts and clattering feet echoing about corridors and stairs—closing in—he placed the crowbar on the floor and boosted himself up to the void, using the fire exit's handle. Fingers gripping the edge, he checked the night beyond the hole, then lifted himself to worm through.

An alleyway thick with weeds awaited, its closest end blocked off from the street by an overgrown truck. Voices sounded some distance away, beyond the abandoned vehicle. But in the alley, only the night's breeze rippled through grass seedheads.

Gull bellied his way out to his waist, then twisted over. Gripping the outer edge of the hole, he worked his legs free until they hung below him.

A short drop into wet grass. Relief surged through him when there was no clatter of hidden street junk beneath his boots.

Back on familiar ground—a trashed city crisscrossed with high and low roads—he didn't waste time. A fire escape, dumpster, and window ledges gave him a convoluted but safer path than any street.

A person didn't outrun a lycan; they outclimbed it.

When excited or aggravated, mutts had trouble holding onto their human forms. Paws might run well, but they scaled walls like total dog shit.

He was on a laundromat's rooftop, five streets clear of the pack's lair, when he realised he'd not escaped.

A shadow on the roof behind him—two-legged. Moving fast. Too fast to be completely human.

Gull gave up stealth, put his overlong legs to use.

Sprinting for the roof's edge, he judged the gap to the next—leapt.

He rolled to break his fall; used his momentum to fly back to his feet. His next jump had him sailing over an alley and through a broken office window.

He hit mouldering carpet—tumbled under a boardroom table.

He was out of the meeting room's busted door and running full sprint through a black maze of cubicles when a crash sounded—his pursuer colliding with meeting room table and chairs.

Seconds. His lead had shortened to mere seconds.

He was fucked.

The Colony, his mother—there was only one thing he could do for them now.

He pivoted; gave up the sprint for the balcony door that would've got him to the next roof. He aimed for another of the office's glassless windows, a pale rectangle of moonlight.

No roof or fire escape beyond.

Just hard, unforgiving, rain-blackened asphalt—four floors down.

He leapt—

—slammed sideways as something hammered into his side, ramming him into a cubicle's wall full force.