Chapter 1

The night outside pressed against the high, grime-streaked windows like black lacquer, swallowing every trace of the moon.

Yeonjung burst into the workshop breathless, slamming the heavy reinforced door so hard the glass cylinders on the drying rack rattled inside their wire cages.

“What do we do? They’re already on the first floor!” She had slipped into the stairwell less than five minutes earlier to scout the corridors, but now her small shoulders were rigid with terror, her face drained of all color as her fingers clamped around Jinseong’s forearm. “I heard them! Those bastards they warned us about—they’re inside. How the hell did they get past the gates? Taeho was screaming by the freight lift. Jinseong, are we going to die? They said they’d butcher the technicians first. That’s us!” Her hands shook uncontrollably, every trace of the teasing warmth she usually used to keep him anchored evaporated into raw panic.

Jinseong swallowed hard against a parched throat, forcing his gaze across the cluttered benches. Dizziness tilted the room, but he steadied his breathing. Waiting here was a death sentence.

A drunken boast the syndicate handlers had laughed over two months earlier resurfaced in his mind, sickening in its sudden relevance. “Yeah, we skimmed Nyx[1]’s precursors[2].” One of the handlers had sneered across the card table, slurring his words. “Bet those bastards are foaming at the mouth. Now that they know we’re cooking the finished stuff, you lab rats better watch your backs. Ah, don’t piss yourselves. It’ll take them six months to find this dump. We’ll squeeze every last won[3] out of it and be gone long before they get close.”

They had bragged that no one could ever find them. Yet barely sixty days later, Nyx had already torn through their perimeter. The price of crossing an organization like that had been made brutally clear from the start: a single envelope delivered to a shell office with no registered address, accompanied by a severed human hand. The rest of the courier was never found. The crooked, jagged handwriting had promised that within two months, the facility would be burned to the ground and every technician slaughtered where they stood. The Gold Class thugs had laughed it off, dismissing the letter as the ravings of a lunatic. None of them had truly believed this night would arrive.

Jinseong dragged both palms hard down his face, trying to still the tremor in his jaw. Yeonjung was trembling on the edge of tears. His eyes darted to his mother’s faded photograph propped on the shelf, then to the drawer where emergency cash and the small glass bottle of suppressants were stashed.

Urgency crystallized into an order. “Grab the rest of the supplies. Move.”

“Huh? Y-Yeah, okay.” Yeonjung turned toward the cabinets, but terror had hollowed out her strength. Her legs gave out on the very first stride, collapsing beneath her with a muffled thud.

Already stuffing the grubby wad of bills and the suppressant bottle into his trouser pockets, Jinseong dropped to his knees at her side. “Noona[4]. Look at me. Pull yourself together.” He caught her by the shoulders, quickly kneading her rigid calves and thighs to restore circulation to the shock-stiffened muscles.

Yeonjung stared back at him through brimming tears. Three years of forced labor and toxic fumes had never dulled the fine contours of her face. Five years older than Jinseong and from the same northern province, she had been trapped in this mountain hell beside him from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, between sharing stale rations and scrubbing acid burns, they had become sister and brother in everything except blood.

“Jinseong,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “If I die… you know what you gotta do, don’t ye?”

“…Stop talking nonsense.”

“You remember what Do-joon looks like, don’t ye?”

Her hometown dialect[5] had slipped back in. The handlers had beaten her half to death during their first year for letting slip the regional inflection that betrayed where she came from, yet it always surfaced the instant she spoke her young son’s name. Hearing that fragile resignation made Jinseong’s stomach heave with dread. In this godforsaken cage, she was the only human soul he had left in the world.

He rose abruptly, scowling down at her to keep his own composure from cracking. “I’m not doing that. Stop talking like you’re already dead. Get up.” Jinseong seized her hands, hauling her upright. When her fingers spasmed weakly against his grip, he clamped down harder until the pain grounded her.

Yeonjung pressed her trembling lips together, scrubbing the wetness from her cheeks with the back of a bruised wrist.

The guards normally stationed outside the tenth floor had already sprinted down the stairwell to reinforce the lower gates. From this point on, they were completely on their own, with no way of knowing how long they could survive out in the winter night.

Jinseong pulled on a canvas jacket and tossed Yeonjung a frayed woolen cardigan, then pried the backing from the cheap picture frame on the shelf. Travel light. He brushed his thumb once over his mother’s faded smile in a silent farewell, then slipped the photo into his inner breast pocket, flat against his ribs. Yeonjung clutched an empty canvas tote to her chest. He caught her wrist. “Let’s go.”

Before touching the metal handle, Jinseong cast one final glance across the room. Whether they would make it down the mountain or merely be dragged to some other ditch to bleed out, he could not guess. Heating mantles[6], condensers[7], and glass retorts[8] of every shape cluttered the slate benches; though the rawest chemical stench had dissipated, the bitter vinegar bite of narcotics had long since baked into the pores of the concrete walls. None of it had ever belonged to him. Everything he had possessed in his former life, save his mother’s portrait, had been burned in the incinerator the day he arrived.

Then, as his eyes swept the dust beneath the central bench, something caught the overhead fluorescent light—a small crimson ampoule[9], nestled against the skirting board. A leftover from yesterday’s yield, dropped by one of the couriers who normally weighed and confiscated every milligram. Jinseong crouched, his fingers closing around the cold glass cylinder. I’m taking it. It has value.

He slipped the ampoule into his pocket and turned the heavy latch. The first door gave onto an inner airlock vestibule[10]; the laboratory had been constructed like a series of nested vaults, watched around the clock by half a dozen armed sentries. Tonight, the corridor was a tomb. Even Taeho, who had kept them locked behind steel plate until an hour ago, had abandoned his post.

Cowardly bastard. The man had kept them under lock and key for three years, only to bolt the second his own throat was on the line.

Jinseong reached the outer exit door. Unlike the lower processing floors, the tenth floor was never deadbolted from the exterior due to the lethal risk of nitrogen gas buildup[11], though it remained the most heavily monitored level in the entire facility. Sometimes weeks passed between his rare trips into the corridor; at other times, months went by with nothing to look at but steel and tile. Now, his bare palm hovered over the panic bar.

“Try calling Taeho,” he muttered. Years of submission had driven hesitation deep into his marrow; even cracking this threshold felt dizzyingly illicit.

Yeonjung fumbled a cheap flip phone from her pocket, but the moment she pressed dial, a tinny electronic jingle echoed from the grease-stained break table ten paces behind them. Taeho had left it on the table. Jinseong’s brow creased.

“Dong-soo isn’t picking up either,” Yeonjung murmured, her voice paper-thin. “What do we do…?”

Sweat slicked the palms of Jinseong’s hands. Their window was closing fast. Whatever retribution Nyx had brought up the mountain, a swift bullet in the dark was likely the gentlest mercy waiting for them. He laced his fingers tightly through Yeonjung’s, anchoring himself to a single, stubborn objective: Keep her alive. Get down the stairs.

“We’re going down.”

Jinseong shoved the heavy fire door open and took the first step onto the landing. The cold concrete of the stairwell bit sharply into their feet. Neither of them wore shoes—a calculated indignity enforced by Gold Class to ensure captive technicians could never run far. Yeonjung at least wore frayed cotton socks; Jinseong was entirely barefoot.

Though the complex was an unlicensed drug kitchen, an emergency evacuation route existed on paper. If they could descend to the fourth floor, a reinforced utility door opened onto an exterior metal fire escape reserved for the syndicate bosses. If they reached that door, they had a chance.

They raced past the ninth-floor landing. The unnatural silence confirmed the upper sentries had all deserted their posts, and Jinseong lengthened his stride, glancing back over his shoulder to ensure Yeonjung remained on his heels. Please let someone from our crew still be alive down there. Someone who can hide us.

The lower they descended, however, the louder the slaughter grew. Raw screams tore up through the vertical shaft, punctuated by the dull, wet crack of iron rebar[12] striking flesh and bone—the sound of bodies being beaten to pulp. That the violence echoed this far up proved the defense had collapsed entirely. Gold Class was being exterminated.

Reaching the fourth-floor landing, Jinseong pressed Yeonjung flat against the concrete behind him and nudged the steel door open an inch.

His pupils shrank. Before he could process the heaps of bodies strewn across the processing bay, two deafening gunshots shattered the stairwell, punching jagged holes through the upper panel inches from his forehead. Jinseong threw his weight against the door, slamming it shut as hot lead whistled through the gap. Whether the shooter had seen him or was merely clearing the thresholds didn’t matter; the fourth-floor escape was crawling with executioners. Dammit. He spun back toward the steps. Yeonjung read the disaster in his eyes, her mouth dropping open in wordless horror.

Then, hovering in the empty air beside her right ear, pastel-tinted lettering flickered into existence:

[Rooftop. Death.]

“…”

No. God, no.

A choked gasp caught in Jinseong’s throat, cold dread crawling like insects across the nape of his neck. Scrambling to the roof had been his sole alternative if the lower exits were blocked, but that path had just been severed before his eyes. Down was a slaughterhouse. Up was an execution. He caught Yeonjung’s shaking wrist and dragged her back toward the stairs. “Back up. Run!”

Climbing the stairs was twice as brutal. Three years of breathing toxic solvent vapors had scarred Jinseong’s lungs, and every ragged inhale tasted like battery acid. Yeonjung was in worse condition. Each time her knees buckled, he hauled her upward by the elbow, supporting most of her weight.