Shadowhunter in the Apocalypse

His stomach did a small drop. "How far?" he whispered.

"Two doors deeper," she answered. "Either they moved her or they masked it. Give me tilt. Broadcasting now." Her fingers moved a blur, and his HUD filled with a heatmap. The green dot had gone dim, flickering like a candle about to die. The coordinates glitched a hair toward an interior chamber that should have been locked to even the internal priests.

"You sure?" Reed said.

"Positive. Someone's pregnant with a clever trick." Jasmine's voice had a pinch of anger. "We didn't account for a decoy pull. It's a trap vector. Could be bait. Could be test. Either way, we pivot."

They had planned for some variables, but the tracker moving was a live complication that could cascade. Reed's mind clicked into a different rhythm: options, contingencies, costs. They'd banked the ritual delay to give them a clean calm window; if Ava had been moved in response to the call — to test whether the Apostles still controlled their inner sanctum — then someone in the compound had eyes and skin Reed hadn't counted on.

"New plan," he said. "We split. You stay on comms and hold feeds. I go deep."

"Alone?" Jasmine's voice was a low, disbelieving rasp.

"You know I hate asking for backup," Reed said. "You know why."

"Because you like feeling like the only blade in the dark?" she shot back.

He didn't answer that. Instead he felt the ring warm as if on a signal. Raven's charm pulsed faintly, a vibration in the metal that told him the world had shifted. He hated that the relief came with another liability; any use of Lilith-blood artifacts was a scream in Reed's own life, a flare others could read. But it vibrated, and he knew its presence could be a last-ditch advantage.

"Do not use it unless Ash-Burn calls," Jasmine warned. "If you light that ring you burn a bridge with a demon line. Last resort."

He smiled without humor. "Noted."

Jasmine fed him a three-point slice of the map — a maintenance shaft that bypassed the second sarcophagus, a ventilation crawl that led to vault B, and an old priests' access corridor that was nominally ceremonial but had been used for secret deliveries since the founders. "You go vault B," she said. "If it's a decoy, you'll be walking into a baited cell. If it's not, you get to Ava. Either way, we adapt. You take the vault; I give you twelve minutes of blind spots. After that, the system reroutes."

Reed took the map, rolling it into his palm like a practice dart. He felt the catechism of his training: speed, silence, surgical choices. He pushed off from the altar's shadow and moved like a word being whispered. The air grew colder as he descended the maintenance stair, the hum of the runes increasing as if somewhere deeper, the lattice remembered its duty and chewed the air with a sound like a distant bell.

Every step down was a step into a place where a saint's authority was more physical than metaphysical, where carved angels looked down from the lintels with eyes of stone. Reed's breath was the only sound he let himself have. His shadow clung to the stone like wet cloth.

At the maintenance hatch he paused, listening. There was movement far below — feet, low voices. The trackers fluttered like moths on the HUD. He counted the voices, the cadence of each step. He could hear the pattern of guard rotations in the tremble of the openings. He breathed and folded the world into another small shape — an axiom: don't take a fight you can't finish.

He eased the hatch open and slipped into the crawlspace. The duct was narrow, but he liked narrow places: they forced focus. Dust scraped across his knees. The tracker pinged; he could see the green dot on his HUD leap forward, then halt. Whoever moved the dot wanted him hunting in the wrong place. That told him two things: someone inside had been expecting a rescue, and someone more than a volunteer curated this place's inner theater.

Reed made the crawl as silently as a rottering thing. Ten minutes. Nine. He could feel the count like a metronome. The ritual clock in the sanctum was a pounding drum in his face, echoing up through stone and bones and candle wax. He slid out of the shaft into a narrow service corridor that opened onto vault B's rear door. A faint warmth beat against the heavy metal — the vault was near; the atmosphere thickened like lungs before dive.

He paused at the rear latch, fingers splayed on cold metal. There was a rune pad here, an archaic set: fingertip authorization with an angelic attunement that should have been impossible to mimic. Jasmine's voice came soft and precise: "You can trip the latch if you elicit the chamber's thermal memory. Use a pyric breath and imprint on the pad; it'll cycle its memory and open for a cycle. Short window. Don't overheat it."

He drew a breath, let a small flare of shadow curl around his palm and added a micro-spark — nothing like fire, more like a controlled ember of night. He exhaled, warming the pad with a breath that felt ritual in reverse. The pad hummed, accepted, and the latch clicked. He slid the door and moved through.

The vault smelled of old iron and perfume, like priests in a trunk. Shelves of relics lined the walls: reliquaries, jars of scent, boxes with the names of saints stamped in faded ink. In the center, a low chamber held a sealed clamshell partition that held whatever the Apostles kept from the world. Reed's HUD pinged in a dozen tiny ways. He moved forward, every sense a blade.

And then the tracker flipped to red.

That small change, that punctuation on his vision, was like a shot. The green dot turned angry and alive; it was no longer a location but a scream. Reed's hand tightened on the bow at his back. Somewhere, inside the deepest veins of the compound, someone had pulled a wire and yanked the theater closed.

He had minutes — maybe ten, maybe less. Forty-seven had become forty, then thirty-seven. The ritual clock was a cruel metronome, and the angels' net would not be patient with those who dared its seam.

He moved like a man who had already reconciled the cost. If the Apostles had moved Ava deeper, he would burn through walls until she was found or the world came down around him. The ring at his thumb hummed like a second heart, reminding him that promises were made and debts would be collected. He stepped into the vault's central space and the air around him felt like a held breath, waiting for someone to speak.

The operation was no longer only chess and knives. It was now a negotiation with fate, and Reed liked the taste of the gamble.

Reed lowered himself into a crouch, fingertips grazing the cold flagstones. The vault wasn't just a room; it was a throat, swallowing him into silence. The reliquaries stacked along the walls glowed faintly, their runic seals whispering like insects in the dark. Some of them were hot to his shadow-sense, thrumming with angelic charge. Others felt hollow, as if whatever had been locked away inside had already been consumed.

The red dot blinked again, stuttering erratically. Sometimes it appeared closer, sometimes deeper, like a heartbeat that refused to settle. Reed narrowed his eyes. Decoy or distress beacon?

"Talk to me, Jazz," he murmured, pressing two fingers to his comm.

Static. Then Jasmine's voice cut through, sharp and low. "Feeds are distorting. They know someone's in the lattice. I've got overlapping shadows where there shouldn't be. You're inside the vault perimeter, right?"

"Yeah. Dot just went red."

"I see it," she said, her voice thinner now, like she was forcing the signal through static. "That's not a tracker anymore. That's an alarm tether. They converted it—"

The door behind him thudded.

Reed froze, shadows prickling across his skin. That wasn't the normal slow grind of a ceremonial lock. That was the sound of bolts snapping into place. The Apostles weren't trying to keep intruders out. They were locking someone in.

"Jasmine," he said, barely a whisper, "they sealed me."

Her breath caught on the comm. "Shit.

They flipped the script. Reed, that vault's not just storage—it's a holding cell. They've turned the entire room into a crucible."

He scanned again. The glow from the relics brightened, runes crawling faintly like veins of light across the shelves. Every seal was waking, responding to the alarm tether. He felt the air change—thicker, denser, like the room itself had lungs.

Angelic suppression field, he realized. They're going to choke me out.

For a split second he considered Raven's ring, felt the hungry thrum of it against his thumb. But no—too soon. Too loud. The Apostles would taste Lilith's blood in a second if he played that card.