Celeste woke on the floor.
Not inside a pod.
Not trapped in gum.
On the floor.
Right in the middle of a corridor.
For one long, horrifying second, she simply stared at the ceiling above her—a ceiling made of hardened sugar-webs, pulsing amber veins, and strands of licorice-black cable that twitched like sleeping worms.
Then she realised she was not alone.
Zombies surrounded her.
Dozens of them.
Purebloods twisted into candy husks. Mythics with crystallised horns. Hybrids with warped limbs and glowing eyes. Sugar Rushers crouched between their legs, tails twitching. Cat-o-Wraps hung from the walls like striped ribbons waiting to drop.
Every single one of them was bowing.
Celeste did the only sensible thing.
She screamed.
The zombies did not move.
Celeste scrambled backwards on her hands, heels slipping against the gummy floor.
“Oh stars, oh stars, oh stars—why are you doing that? Please don’t do that. Actually, please continue not eating me, but maybe with less worship? Less kneeling? Less… ominous formation?”
Still nothing.
Their heads stayed lowered.
Their hands remained flat against the floor.
A pressure brushed the inside of her skull.
Celeste froze.
It was not a voice.
Not exactly.
It was more like hearing someone think in a language made of hunger and music.
Follow the song.
Sleep.
Guard.
Carry.
Feed.
Follow the song.
Follow the song.
Follow the song.
Celeste clapped both paws over her ears.
It did nothing.
The thoughts were not coming through her ears.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh, I do not like internal zombies.”
The hive hummed around her, and the thoughts hummed with it. Not individuals, not really. More like fragments caught in syrup. Fear. Pain. Obedience. Hunger. A constant pull toward the lullaby threaded through the walls.
Celeste swallowed hard.
“Um…”
The nearest zombie lifted its head slightly.
It had once been a dog, maybe. Pureblood, judging by the absence of a rune, though half its face had swollen into glossy caramel. One eye glowed bright yellow. The other was sealed beneath sugar crust.
Celeste stared at it.
It stared back.
Waiting.
Very politely, somehow.
Celeste’s ears flattened.
“Hello,” she said weakly. “I’m very sorry if this is rude, but… where is my friend?”
The zombie tilted its head.
Celeste licked her lips.
“Arcade. Hedgehog. Quills. Very sarcastic. Looks like he hasn’t slept since birth.”
The zombie’s thoughts brushed hers again.
Quills.
Spark.
Subject.
Table.
Study.
Pain.
Celeste’s stomach dropped.
“Where?”
The zombie raised one stiff, sugar-glazed arm and pointed down the corridor.
All the other zombies turned their heads in the same direction.
In perfect unison.
Celeste made a tiny distressed noise.
“Thank you,” she said, because apparently manners survived even when surrounded by bowing candy corpses. “That’s… very helpful and deeply upsetting.”
The zombie kept pointing.
Celeste looked at the others.
They waited.
Still bowed.
Still silent.
Still inside her head.
Follow the song.
Guard.
Carry.
Serve.
Follow—
“Right,” Celeste said quickly. “You can all… go back to what you were doing?”
The zombies rose.
All at once.
Celeste squeaked and pressed herself flat against the wall.
The nearest Cat-o-Wrap dropped from the ceiling, landed beside her, bowed once more, then padded away. The Sugar Rushers scattered in twitchy lines. Larger zombies turned and drifted back down their corridors, resuming their tasks as if nothing had happened.
Within seconds, the corridor was almost empty.
Celeste remained plastered against the wall.
Her breathing came fast.
“Nope,” she whispered. “Nope, nope, nope. I am not in charge of zombies. I am not a zombie manager. I did not apply for this position.”
The hive pulsed.
Somewhere far away, something screamed.
Arcade.
Celeste’s panic sharpened into motion.
“Right,” she said, forcing herself upright. “Friend first. Existential zombie-command crisis later.”
She glanced down the corridor the zombie had indicated.
Amber light flickered over the walls, revealing branching passages, sealed pods, hanging web-lines, and distant machines working with horrible patience.
Celeste took one step.
Then stopped and looked back at the empty corridor.
“Also,” she whispered to herself, “where am I?”
The hive gave no answer.
Only the song.
Only the hum.
Only the lingering ghost of bowed heads in her mind.
Celeste clutched her katanas tighter and hurried toward the direction Arcade had been taken, trying very hard not to think about the fact that somewhere inside her chest, something ancient had just told the monsters to kneel.
And they had.
Celeste kept walking.
Every corridor seemed to open into a different kind of hell.
One room was filled with Council weapons stripped apart and rebuilt wrong—sparkshot barrels fused with candy-tubes, ward plates grown over with sugar veins, ration scanners repurposed into humming core-readers. Another held broken arcbracers suspended in amber resin, their screens flickering through stolen signals. A third was lined with uniforms, collars, identity discs, torn cloaks, school bags, children’s shoes.
Evidence.
Trophies.
Supplies.
She wasn’t sure which answer was worse.
The hive was not stupid.
That was what scared her most.
It was learning.
Studying.
Taking everything Clawdiff had built to control people, protect people, categorise people—and chewing it into something new.
Celeste paused before a wall covered in maps.
Not paper maps.
Living ones.
A huge sheet of translucent gum stretched from floor to ceiling, glowing with moving lines, pulsing nodes, and strange symbols she did not recognise. The language crawled like sugar-ants across the surface, too technical for her to follow and too deliberate to be random.
She leaned closer, ears flattening.
“Um… no thank you.”
The map showed Clawdiff.
Not as streets and districts, but as systems.
Supply routes.
Shelters.
Council wards.
Hybrid concentrations.
Mana currents.
The Egg Tree.
Celeste’s stomach turned.
There were markings around the city dome, pressure points she didn’t understand, and red lines branching toward places where people were still hiding.
This was not hunger.
Not just hunger.
This was intelligence.
A will.
Something inside the hive wanted to break Clawdiff so completely that it was willing to learn every bone in the city’s body before deciding where to bite.
Celeste backed away, almost tripping over a coil of sticky cable.
“Nope,” she whispered. “Nope, don’t like the clever gumball.”
The hum deepened as she moved on.
Not machinery.
Alive.
Eventually, the corridor widened into a chamber so vast her little arcbracer light barely reached the ceiling.
Celeste stopped.
For a moment, her mind refused to understand what she was seeing.
Hybrids.
Thousands of them.
Pods covered the walls in towering rows, stacked from floor to ceiling and threaded into the hive by thick cables of gum, sugar-glass, and stolen Council wire. Each pod held a Hybrid—rabbit, fox, cat, dog, goat, bat, hedgehog, reptile, bird. Common clothes. Work aprons. Delivery jackets. School uniforms. Torn scarves. Cheap boots.
Ordinary people.
Rough people.
Forgotten people.
The kind Council reports called unstable population pressure and then stopped thinking about.
Their cores glowed weakly through their chests.
Every pulse travelled out of them.
Into the walls.
Into the floor.
Into the great humming belly of the hive.
Celeste’s throat closed.
“No…”
Her thoughts staggered backward, trying to refuse the shape of it.
Purebloods and Mythics were being turned.
She had seen that.
She had seen the cocoons, the candy veins, the sugar eyes, the bodies changed into monsters that obeyed the song.
But the Hybrids—
The Hybrids were still themselves.
Sleeping.
Drained.
Used.
Because Hybrids could not be turned.
Not by the candy.
Not like the others.
But they could kill the candy undead when they were linked to Celeste.
So the hive had found another use for them.
It had taken them out of the fight.
Hooked them into the walls.
Made them batteries.
Just like the power plant.
Celeste pressed one paw over her mouth.
Her eyes burned.
She could hear them faintly now, not as clearly as the zombies, but enough.
Weak threads.
Dreaming minds.
Fear.
Cold.
Pain.
Names repeated in the dark.
Someone calling for their mum.
Someone counting backwards from ten again and again.
Someone praying.
Someone begging not to be useful anymore.
Celeste’s knees almost gave.
We’re useful, Bartleby.
But not everything has to be.
The words came back so sharply they hurt.
She forced herself forward, because standing still felt like letting it happen.
Most of the trapped Hybrids looked like commoners. People from the Warrens. Dock workers. Shop clerks. Factory hands. Bracer scouts. Street kids. Folk who would disappear and leave only a little space behind in the world, easy for the Council to misplace.
Then one pod stood out.
Not because it was larger.
Because it was guarded.
Set back from the others in a chamber hidden between layers of crystallised sugar and licorice mesh, the pod rested behind deeper sugarlocks, its surface rimmed with frost instead of syrup. Dozens of pods lined the walls around it—some shattered and empty, their contents long gone.
Others still glowed softly.
Sleeping figures inside.
But this one—
Before Celeste even saw the occupant, she saw the mark.
At the base of the pod, smeared faintly into the sugarfilm, was a golden handprint.
Not painted.
Not carved.
Smudged.
Like someone had touched the surface while the world was still soft.
Her breath caught.
She knew that mark.
She didn’t know how.
Her fingers trembled as she stepped closer.
Inside the pod—
A man.
Tall.
Unconscious.
Hair swept back, features sharp and composed even in sleep, like someone carved from glass and secrets.
Familiar.
Dangerously so.
Celeste’s heart stumbled.
“I’ve seen you before…” she whispered.
She didn’t know when.
Not clearly.
A flicker at the edge of memory.
Maybe back in Clawdiff.
Maybe before.
His pod was marked differently.
High security.
Deeper sugarlocks than the others.
Important.
And then she saw it.
Bolted into the spine of the pod was a battery—thick cables sunk deep into the sugarframe, pulsing faintly with captured light.
Not feeding into the pod.
Feeding out of it.
Power was being drawn directly from him.
Far more than the others.
The chamber around him hummed with stolen strength.
Celeste’s stomach twisted.
They weren’t just storing him.
They were using him.
Her blade hovered inches from the seal.
Help… or hinder?
Was he a prisoner like her?
Or a weapon?
A tool the hive kept in reserve—plugged in, drained, waiting to be deployed?
She hesitated.
She was running on instinct, exhaustion, and grief—but something about this pod made her pause.
And for the first time since she woke up—
She wasn’t sure what to do.
