Spider Four had been right about the airflow. Unfortunately, airflow and exit are not synonyms.
I followed the western utility corridor with Six beside me and Four's navigation data glowing on the tablet. The first sixty meters were ugly but passable, full of fallen ceiling panels, exposed pipes and enough dust to prove nobody had walked there since Arcadia was abandoned. My new eyes made the darkness easy, and the electrical sense underneath them let me follow buried cables through the walls, but neither ability could do anything about several hundred tons of collapsed concrete.
The corridor ended in a mountain.
Part of the ceiling had come down where the maintenance tunnel began climbing toward the surface. Concrete slabs had folded over one another, reinforced beams twisting between them, with dirt and roots packed through every remaining gap. Four had found airflow because somewhere beyond all of that there was still a connection to the outside, but the largest opening I could see was barely wide enough for the drone itself.
I stared at it for several seconds.
Leona: "You couldn't have mentioned this part?"
Four climbed onto a broken pipe and looked at me.
Leona: "Yes, technically you said collapsed debris. I was hoping you were being dramatic."
It hadn't been.
I deployed one spider limb and drove its point beneath the edge of a concrete slab. The new muscles in my back tightened as I pushed, and for one wonderful second the slab actually moved. Dust poured from above, the entire blockage groaned, and my electrical perception caught several old cables shifting inside the wreckage.
Then the ceiling moved with it, and I stopped immediately. Strong wasn't the same as stupid.
Maybe I could have dug through eventually, especially with the new limbs, but eventually was becoming an increasingly theoretical unit of time. Moving the wrong slab could collapse the entire tunnel on top of me, and I had no intention of conducting the first practical test of my regeneration by asking whether it could recover from being flattened beneath a building.
Behind me, the tablet chimed.
AUXILIARY CONTAINMENT RESERVE: 5%
Leona: "Of course."
I backed away from the collapse and opened the facility map again. Main entrance occupied. Vehicle tunnel filled with concrete. Western maintenance exit collapsed. The remaining emergency shaft crossed a section Arcadia itself had marked structurally unsafe before abandoning the site. There were other maintenance conduits, but nothing I could reach quickly.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Then I heard boots. Not through a drone. Through Arcadia.
Distant, muffled and unmistakable, accompanied by shouted instructions and the metallic impacts of doors being forced open. The Authority was inside. Kira's temporary career as a hallway obstruction had ended.
Leona: "Fantastic."
I turned back toward the laboratory, already recalculating. Hiding was still possible. Arcadia was enormous, and the GHCA team didn't know its internal layout nearly as well as I did. If containment held for another ten minutes, I could probably lead them in circles long enough to find another route.
If.
The psychic pressure from below answered before the thought had properly finished. The Matriarch was excited. I felt it as a pulse behind my eyes, followed by hundreds of smaller impressions moving beneath hers. Not thoughts I could understand, but motion, anticipation and hunger multiplying through the hive.
Then Spider Three transmitted.
The feed was mostly static. I stopped walking.
Leona: "Three?"
A corrupted image appeared on the tablet. The vent overlooking containment shook violently while blue electrical light flashed through the chamber beyond it. Progeny covered almost every visible surface now, smaller than the Matriarch but still horrifyingly large, climbing over one another in dense layers while the surviving field burned anything that came too close.
The reserve dropped to four percent.
Spider Three turned toward the route it had used to reach the observation point. Something was inside the vent behind it. A cluster of black legs filled the camera.
Leona: "Three, move!"
The drone launched forward. For perhaps two seconds I watched the feed tumble through metal ductwork while something pursued it from behind. Three was fast. I'd designed all of them to be fast.
It wasn't fast enough.
The image jerked sideways. Metal screamed. Then the camera showed a close blur of chitin and too many small eyes before the signal vanished.
SPIDER THREE
CONNECTION LOST
I stared at the words. Two. Now Three.
They weren't alive. I knew that. No personality, no awareness, no little mechanical soul waiting somewhere for me to mourn it. I had still built them.
Leona: "...fuck."
Six touched one metal leg against my ankle. Probably accidental.
I chose not to believe that.
Then Arcadia's alarms changed. Not louder. Different.
A low repeating tone began moving through the facility while emergency text flooded my tablet.
CONTAINMENT RESERVE: 3%
SECTOR 04 SECONDARY BARRIER: FAILURE
VENTILATION ISOLATION: FAILURE
UNAUTHORIZED BIOLOGICAL MOVEMENT DETECTED
I looked at the map. Tiny red indicators appeared along Sub-Level Three, then Sub-Level Two.
That shouldn't have been possible yet. The main barriers were still active.
I expanded the maintenance overlay.
There.
An old service conduit, no wider than a drainage pipe, crossed around one of the failed emitter banks. Corrosion had weakened it, and the Progeny had apparently spent years doing what spiders do exceptionally well: finding small spaces.
They didn't need to break the main door. They had made their own.
My tablet began registering motion faster than it could display individual contacts. One. Seven. Twenty-three. Sixty.
The counter stopped trying.
The first things through weren't the human-sized ones I'd seen around the Matriarch. They were smaller, some scarcely larger than dogs, built low and thin enough to force themselves through the narrow breach. Once the first widened it, more followed. Claws tore at concrete from both sides while bodies squeezed through gaps that should not have admitted them.
Then they poured into Arcadia. Not dozens. Not hundreds in any orderly sense.
A wave.
A black, skittering flood spread through maintenance ducts, utility corridors and broken ventilation shafts, each creature making the paths wider for the ones behind it.
Above, the Authority shouted. Below, the Matriarch touched my mind with something very close to joy.
I looked at Six. Six looked at me.
Leona: "New plan."
Somewhere down the corridor, metal began to scrape. A lot of metal.
And then the first wave came around the corner.