I opened the notebook carefully.
The handwriting was neat. Soone who had been educated.
My na is Eric, Her na was Rue. If you are reading this, I am dead.
I don’t know how much of this will survive, so I’ll write what matters first.
A full section was lost to water damage. I turned past it carefully and found the next readable passage.
...I have had ti to think about why. The races of the two western countries had made a pact with sothing old. They wanted us gone, all of us, the hibrem. They had been working toward it for years while we shared tables with them and called them colleagues...
I read that line twice.
Hibrem.
A word that reminded of the cube I had and the voice in my dreams. Now it was here, in a dead man’s handwriting, on a page that had survived for quite a while.
I kept reading.
...this facility was built to serve our nation. This facility produced energy for three cities. Rue designed the water purification systems on the lower level. She was proud of that work. She had every right to be. We were happy here.
Another gap. Two pages fused.
...I was in the barrier room performing maintenance on the ward when it happened. The nuclear coupling below the table had co loose during the last tremor and I was reconnecting it. The work took longer than expected.
When I ca back up, there was a monster where she was supposed to be.
I knew what I was looking at. We were inside the bunker with no way in from the outside.
I said her na from inside the barrier, but she did not react.
The thing that had once been Rue stood in the center of the room, its shape shifting slowly like thick oil trying to rember how to hold a human form. Where her eyes should have been there were only hollow black pits.
They did not turn toward my voice.
They did not turn toward at all.
I said her na again.
Nothing.
For a mont it simply moved through the room without direction, touching the silver walls, the floor, the broken instrunts. Each ti it brushed against sothing solid its surface rippled, as if it were trying to understand the shape of the space around it.
Once it passed close to the barrier, close enough that I could have reached out and touched it.
It did not react.
It did not pause.
Whatever senses that creature used to perceive the world, they could not reach through the ward.
The woman I loved was standing less than a ter away, and there was nothing left of her in that thing.
I stopped reading for a mont.
Phinyx had drifted close and was reading over my shoulder without making a sound.
I turned the page.
...I have been inside the barrier for eleven days. The ward holds. She cannot reach . From here I can see her moving through the room, and she moves like sothing searching, never finding. I think she cannot feel at all through the barrier.
On the fourth day I made the mistake of stepping outside to check if I could maybe escape the bunker. She attacked without hesitation. No recognition. No pause.
I went back inside and I have not left since.
Several lines were unreadable here, the ink faded to nothing.
...she has the Acolyte rank. Even now that she beca a monster.
I cannot open the containnt door with her inside, she could escape and harm other people... if there were any left.
Also I’m not willing to end her life, I have tried to form that intention and I cannot. So here I am.
The nuclear coupling is now disconnected below the table. The ward will run on its remaining charge until it does not. That’s enough for .
I have decided I will die by my ability when I am ready. I would rather die this way than with corruption in my soul.
Whoever finds this... though I don’t expect anyone will, since most of us are gone and this bunker can only be opened from the inside, if you connect the nuclear coupling back, the ward and water system will start working again. It was ant to supply three cities, but by the ti you find this, the infrastructure might not work the sa.
The hatch is under the table.
I closed the notebook and did not say anything for a mont.
Coco had co close to read the last few pages. His usual lightness was gone. He just looked at the skeleton beside the table with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before.
"He stayed..." Coco said quietly.
Neither of us said anything after that.
I crouched and looked at the base of the runic table. The grooves I had noticed earlier ford a perfect rectangle in the floor, almost invisible.
A hatch.
Below it, according to Eric’s notes, was the nuclear coupling that he had disconnected the day Rue beca sothing he didn’t recognize.
I picked up the second notebook.
This one was different. No personal writing. Just dense, structured text with diagrams filling every margin. A manual. Page after page of coupling diagrams and connection sequences, with runic annotations marking each step.
The diagrams were universal. Numbered components. Arrows. Step by step sequences marked with symbols I could cross reference from the illustrations.
I could follow this... maybe.
I studied the diagrams in silence, turning pages slowly, building the sequence in my head.
The ward above the table was dark and inert, but if the coupling below was reconnected, it would power it again.
I looked and moved to the edge of the hatch, them started pressing my fingers into the groove.
It gave with a low, resonant click.
The hatch swung open, and from the darkness below ca a sll of old silver and dry stone, also the faint residual warmth of sothing that had been running for a very long ti before it finally stopped. Like opening an oven that hadn’t been used in years. A very large, very nuclear oven.
And beneath that, barely audible, the distant hum of sothing that hadn’t stopped entirely.
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