Heartbeat thumps like clock hands ticking, eighty-nine seconds counting down until only one of us remains; there is no other way it could have ended. We were orphans in the crawlspace, with barely six inches of space to breathe in the wet rocks of the mountain. Fuel had been dwindling for years. That damned furnace piled high with the burning bodies and melting eldritch metal from their flesh. We should have known to stop it. Crystals of quartz cut away at the skin of our palms, Mercury behind me, Wolfram behind him. The pinhole of light piercing my skull evaded me. The only light we knew was incandescent, from flame, magnesium or tungsten. The light was dwindling. The forge was dying. The heat of a dying world beckoned us from behind, throbbing. The cold of the unknown ahead crackled. Breaths crystallizing into blue hues of phantasmagoria. We kept crawling. We had no choice. Mercury would have been cold, alone in the dark of his workshop.
Tripped on a wire--Thud!-- head-first into a half-pieced part of a machine built for the never-war outside, sold back to him as an achievement of forever-war. The only munition to ever see blood. The scrap metal saw more crimson than the chrome ever did. Twisting, growing, contorting from the walls, plucked by the ones we cast away, slowly warping and rending their malnourished bodies. Wolfram would have been consumed into the serpentine steel, another body in the tapestry of gore lining the mountain walls. The metal in his body will kill him one day. It lives in him and writhes like tapeworms. I swear when I reach the light, I will find him a cure.
The escape is narrow. The chasm was selected haphazardly. We had no time to choose. Now, it crushes us. If we must die, we die alone. Martyrs, not slaves. Squeezing. Blood rushing to open wounds. New iron on rock. It hurts to breathe with ribs against the stone. Compression. Who made this happen? My father, his father, his father before him. Hallogen, my family name. The moun-
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