I was supposed to be dead.

  Not in some serene, poetic way.

  More like, cracked-my-skull-open-on-the-wall-of-a-sensory-deprivation-chamber dead.

  Not dramatic, just... done. Instead, I'm here, in a pit. A grave, technically. Surrounded by the stench of rot and decay so thick it felt like a living thing, cwing at my nostrils and throat.

  I would have gagged at the smell if I'd had the energy. It was rank-sour and metallic, like a sughterhouse left baking in the sun for days. The kind of smell that clings to your lungs and makes your skin crawl with revulsion. I could hear the boring breaths of others around me, gurgling like the st gasps of drowning souls, desperate and distorted. Rattling, wet, guttural and final. Some of them still twitched, nerves firing like broken tech gone haywire. A hand belonging to someone nearby spasmed against my leg, and I flinched involuntarily, the movement costing me precious reserves. Fear drains energy, and I'm running on fumes. The dark felt thick and oppressive, heavy enough to drown in. The bodies beneath me felt soft and yielding in disturbing pces, warm in a grotesque parody of life, decay eating them from within. If I could care, I'd be disgusted. But I was too far gone for anything but numb survival.

  And that felt like a win. We were a pile of meat, dumped in a hole on some bcksite prison buried on a pnet no one bothered to name. Or maybe they did, and someone scrubbed it off every map. Either way, we were here. All of us. All of us, caught in the wrong pce at the wrong time. And no one was coming. Some of the people here probably deserved it. Monsters, killers, the worst kind of scum. And in this pile were people who saw too much, asked the wrong questions, touched the wrong data, fell in love with someone they shouldn't have-all of them had stories, dreams, and futures that had been clipped short. If I hadn't been so tired, so close to death, I would have mourned it all. Because we were all people who ended up on the wrong list.

  Not that I could say which was which. Hard to tell the difference between innocent and guilty when we're all just meat now. All our crimes-real or fabricated-yet here we are, rotting the same. The stench of decay hung heavy in the air, a putrid reminder of our shared mortality. I didn't even have a name anymore. They scrubbed it the second I got here. It's funny, in a bleak kind of way. My name once mattered, but here it was scrubbed clean the moment I became just another Terran. The identity I had clung to for so long, the very essence of who I was, stripped away with cruel efficiency. I had thought my name mattered. I found that my identity could be erased, and it was. Now I'm just another nameless body in the pile, referred to as a number and my species designation. Terran. A hollow bel, devoid of the richness and complexity that once defined me.

  When I first nded in this prison, I thought I would fight to get my name back, but that's no longer an option. Not in this grave. Still, I wondered. What kind of depravity gets you tossed in a hole like this? What did the girl twitching under my shoulder do? The guy gurgling to my left? Something unspeakable... or nothing at all? Didn't matter. I was dying. But there was no point in pying judge and jury now.

  My back pulsed-like someone had jammed hot wires straight into my spine. I stopped caring. I had failed. I failed hard. I was trying to save my people, but my actions only cost two innocent men their lives; their only crime was loving her. They were buried in a poisoned ground, and because of my actions, their families believed the lies that branded them as terrorists.

  But that was before, before the stank and the decay. In the now, I remember yelling - male voices, guttural and gross, too many sylbles slurred with spittle. "She offed herself!" "Get the sack!" Like I was a liability someone needed to disappear - fast. A high-value prisoner who managed to die before her scheduled execution? That's not just inconvenient; that's career-ending. Somebody was going to burn for this, unless they dumped the body quick and scrubbed the evidence faster.

  I remember the yank, being carried like garbage. Tossed. The fall sted forever, or maybe ten seconds. It didn't matter. As the darkness sank in, enveloping me, the warmth of nostalgia came - mom's radiant smile flickering behind my eyelids, her eyes crinkling at the corners, that soft ugh that always meant home. She used to be a combat pilot, flying through hell and back in orbital sieges during the war. Dad was a medic turned soldier to serve on the front lines, and then after it was all over, he went back to being a medic, patching up the broken bodies and minds left in the wake of the fighting. Heroes, both of them, once upon a time. They hadn't let the war bring them down, the weight or the memories. They made me a home, they loved me, and now they were dead.

  They gave all that up to raise me on some half-baked terraformed colony, working soil and healing coughs in a town barely established. But that's not what I saw. I saw my mother's hands-shaking. Her eyes, failing. My dad's mind, fading fast. He couldn't even remember my name the st time I saw when, trying so hard to say goodbye. I left them sick, dying, when they needed me most. I broke her heart, and I saw it in her face when they carted me away. And now here I was, another body in a hole, without them and dying alone.

  I clung to those memories as the stench of death filled my nostrils and the rodents began nibbling at my flesh. Their tiny cws scratched at my exposed skin, seeking purchase to tear away more meat. The pain was dull, distant-everything felt foggy, slipping away. This pit was my tomb, but at least I could die with the echoes of love and ughter ringing in my ears, a final defiance against the ugliness that consumed me. In those st moments, I tried to focus on Mom's smile. I held onto Dad's gentle baritone as he sang me old folk songs to sleep. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost feel the warmth of their embrace one st time before the end.

  I didn't want to think about my rotting in this pit, what lead up to it. I didn't want my st breaths to dwell on the rot, decay, or disappearing into the mass. If the universe had any shred of mercy left, it would let me think about them instead.

  My friends. My family. Their faces flickered in my mind's eye, warmth amidst the cold darkness closing in. I clung to those memories like a lifeline, terrified of letting them slip away into the void with me.

  Kerron. Gods, Kerron. Grinning like an idiot, badge pinned too high on his chest, doing that stupid sheriff walk that made me ugh until I cried. He was my brother-not by blood, but by every other measure that counted. We grew up raising hell together on these dusty streets. He believed in justice. He believed in me, believed with all his soul that I would save the town.

  And Tavrin. My heart. My gentle, brilliant Tavrin. Barely a man like Kerron, but he loved me with everything he had. And I never doubted it. Not once. I hoped to the stars he never doubted my love for him either. We were gonna commit-build a life there, have babies, make gadgets to ease the load for everyone in our dusty little town. We were gonna change things, make it better. His hands smelled of motor oil and herbs and I longed for that scent one st time.

  But instead, they were murdered. Ripped from me in fire and screams. The bridge colpse, their bodies in the air like dolls with cut strings. The screams still echoed endlessly in my mind. And then... him. The monster in the office with his sickening smile. The one I never trusted-not for a second. Everyone else bought his charm, his speeches, his promises to make the town richer, better, safer. But I saw the cracks. I knew he lied. And for one moment, one blissful second, I had proof of his deceptions. Truth, before everything shattered into chaos. He vioted me in that room. Made me feel less than human. Promised no one would believe me. Promised they would bme me. And they did. The townsfolk, my own parents - maybe they're right. Maybe if I hadn't been there, poking into things, Kerron and Tavrin would still be alive. And I wouldn't be bleeding out in this hole like an animal.

  My body was giving up. Finally. The pain dulled, everything softening at the edges. It was almost peaceful. Until it wasn't. A heat surged up from my core-searing, electric-like someone had lit a match inside my chest. My nerves fred, hands twitched, muscles spasmed involuntarily. I wanted to scream, but my lungs were on strike.

  "Why is this vessel so inefficiently constructed?" The voice wasn't mine.

  It echoed inside my skull-low, precise, male. Like an annoyed engineer talking to himself. I couldn't answer. Brain fog was thicker than concrete. Even if I could've formed words, I wouldn't have wasted the effort. I was dying. And I was so close to peace.

  "Muscle function is subpar. Neurological signals barely responsive. This will dey extraction." Great. Critique me on my deathbed.

  "Listen, carbon-based host: I require mobility. This facility is in a state of chaotic upheaval-your people are killing each other. If you do not move, we will be incinerated with the rest."

  Oh good. A riot. A bonus round of hell. The sounds of shouting and explosions filtered through the fog, reminding me of the chaos unfolding outside this tiny sanctuary. "Your fury is... potent. It sustained me. Your rage fueled the connection. But now, I need your body to move. Get. Up." I groaned, or at least I think I did. Maybe I just imagined the faint rasp escaping my lips.

  "It's still dying," he muttered to himself, annoyed.

  "Unacceptable. Wake up, meat-suit. Now." And just like that, I wasn't alone in my own head anymore. His voice sliced through the haze, sharp and insistent. He wouldn't shut up. Every word sharpened the edges of my awareness. I didn't want that. I wanted the fog back. The numbness. But his voice cut through it like a bde, refusing to let me slip away peacefully.

  I'd fought hard. Right up until the moment they threw me into that sensory deprivation chamber. The warden and his ckeys. They broke me, then tossed me in like a piece of trash they were done pying with. I just wanted to lie down, just rest for one damn second-but the chamber wouldn't let me. The walls were snted, jagged, designed to keep you from leaning, from sleeping, from finding even a scrap of comfort. I know they ughed. I know they watched. The pain in that room-it was all I could hear. The wounds on my back were still bleeding, each drop hitting the floor like a metronome of agony. The pulse of it thudded in my ears like a war drum. So I showed them. Smmed my head into that sharp-patterned wall. Again. And again. Until something inside me cracked.

  Now this voice wouldn't stop. Was it even real? Or was this just one st cruel trick from a brain that hated me as much as the world did? Maybe it was just me. Another twisted piece of myself refusing to let go. Another reason to rage. I lost. SVC won. That was the truth. They got everything they wanted. I could just die now. That was the deal.

  But then something fred in my chest. Anger. Hate. Fury. And the thing inside me... it purred. Or maybe it was more of a hum, a pleased static that filled my head. "Yes. Again." It urged me on, taunting me with its eerie calmness.

  Then it struck-blinding pain, sharp and cold and wrong. A tingling surge lit up the base of my skull and crawled up like fire under my skin. It consumed me. I would've screamed, but my mouth wouldn't open. My jaw locked like it had forgotten how to move.

  He was still talking. "More input. More repair. I require limb function." I tried. I grunted. That was all I could manage. Just one tiny, pathetic sound in a grave full of silence. He didn't care. He needed more. And I... I wasn't sure if I hated him more than I hated myself. But I moved. Slowly. A twitch of fingers, the jerk of a leg. Limbs waking up like they'd been dug out of ice. Each movement felt impossible. Each one hurt. The dead shifted under me, soft and broken and wet. The air thickened with the squelch of rot and heat. I could smell the decay all around me, a sickening reminder of where I was, suffocating me with its foul stench.

  "Finally," he hissed, as if I was the problem. "You will rise. I am no common parasite-I am a prince, and I will not be thwarted by an obsolete meatsack with a death wish." I wanted to snap back, tell him to crawl out and walk himself, but I didn't have the breath. My lungs felt like they were filled with shards of gss, each gasp a struggle against the putrid air that burned my throat.

  Limb by limb, I moved. Pushing through the bodies, their lifeless forms offering little resistance. I slipped-lost my bance, and rolled. Down. Into the lowest part of the pit where the fluids had pooled. Mucus. Muck. Viscera. It coated my skin like slime, seeping into every pore and crevice. And beneath it-bodies. Not just Terrans, but others too. Limbs that ended in cws or tentacles. Faces half-caved in or split down the middle. Skin shades I'd never seen before, some with bioluminescent patches dulled by death. One had gzed-over eyes that stared straight through me as I slid past, mouth sck and ringed with blood. Another oozed worms from its nose and lips, pale things writhing like they were still hungry, seeking sustenance. Bones poked through where they shouldn't. Some of the corpses were so bloated it was hard to tell what species they'd once been. It was hell. A stew of species and secrets dumped in a pit to rot together, their twisted forms blending into an indistinguishable mass. I could feel them breaking beneath my weight. Could feel them shift. Colpse. Squelch. Disgust hit me like a jolt of electricity, threatening to overwhelm me. I wanted to die-sure-but not in this putrid grave, not surrounded by the decaying remains of the forgotten.

  The rage fred. My fingers dug into the mess, and I pushed myself up. That was enough for him. "Yes. That. More of that." The static behind his voice rose into a hum of satisfaction. Power trickled through me, fire on my nerves, reconnecting lines that had gone dark. I stumbled, upright now.

  Legs shaky, body slick with horror. "You will move. Now. Listen to my voice. I will get us out of here." He guided me through the dark. The tunnel curved-angled hallways slick with condensation and something worse, something that clung to my skin like a second yer of filth. I stumbled, hard-tripped on something, viscera or rock, I couldn't tell. Pain shot through my legs, fresh and sharp. I hit the wall with my shoulder, hard, hands skidding through the wet slime that coated the surface like the walls themselves were sweating. I braced against the curve of the tunnel, sucking in air that tasted like metal and mold, burning my lungs with each desperate breath.

  He didn't give me a second. "Move," he barked, "We are losing precious time." His stupid alien superiority wrapped around every word like he expected the universe to obey, as if the ws of nature would bend to his command.

  I blinked. There was light up ahead. Just a sliver, or maybe my eyes were adjusting to the gloom. We were still in a pit, still buried deep, but it wasn't polished hallways and prison-grade metal anymore. This was raw, barely carved out from the rock, like the structure had been built on top of something older, forgotten, a relic from a bygone era. The riot raged above us. Metal groaned. Screams echoed. The entire compound a symphony of chaos. We were beneath it all. In the guts of the pce. The waste tunnels, where the unwanted and the discarded were left to rot.

  "Security will not follow here. They do not track the dead." Of course they didn't. Why would they? Who chases corpses? Who bothers with the forgotten?

  Who the fuck are you? I thought, not sure if I even said it out loud or just threw it into the void of my brain. He answered anyway, his voice cutting through the darkness. "I am not a parasite, nor a worm, and certainly not your hallucination," he snapped. "I am a Symbiote-Second Prince of the Sovereign Line. I was captured, experimented on, and thrown in this pit to rot... with people like you."

  If I wasn't half-dead and coated in human sludge, I would've ughed. Hard. People like me. Like there was anything worse than what I was right now. I didn't catch most of what he said-something about sovereigns, princes, lines. My brain was still running on fumes. If I was being honest with myself, he was doing most of the work. I was just along for the ride, dead weight being puppeted forward. But the disdain in his voice was clear. So was the fire under it.

  He wasn't going to let me quit. And apparently, neither was I. We may have been deep underground, but we weren't that far from an exit. That much I could tell now. Probably didn't want the stench of the decay anywhere near the actual prison floors. Made sense, in the kind of disgusting way this pce did. And then it hit me-like a lightning bolt to my already fried psyche. I was naked. Those fucking lizards didn't even let me keep the rags I came in with. Barely cloth. Threads really. And they stripped them from me. Why? What the hell was the point? There was nothing left to take. Nothing worth the effort.

  The thought sent a new wave of rage crashing through me, hot and bitter. I could feel the anger coursing through my veins, fueling me with a burst of energy. I could feel him humming again-pleased, feeding off the fre of emotion. "That's it," he said, almost purring now. "That should be enough to get us to the shuttle bay." His voice dripped with satisfaction, as if he had orchestrated this whole situation to rile me up.

  We stumbled out of the tunnel and into a corridor-one clearly shaped by Terran hands. Smooth walls, lighting strips half-burned out, clean metal smeared in grime and time. It looked like the prison again, or at least some forgotten artery of it. The air was colder here. I hadn't felt it before, not in the pit, not through the numb fog. But now it hit me, crawling up my bare skin like a thousand icy needles. It made me shiver violently. It made me angry, the fury burning even hotter as a defense against the chill.

  He purred again, the sound grating on my nerves. "Excellent." He was trying to get me to lift my head, to keep moving forward. Said there might be a shuttle bay nearby. I tried, but it felt like my skull was filled with sand, weighing me down. "Why must your head rotate so far just to see anything? What a waste of evolutionary engineering. These optics are horribly positioned. Entire species-doomed by design." If I could've rolled my eyes, I would've. But then-there it was. A shuttle. Docked. Door open. "There."

  He sounded serious now, like a bomb trying to tiptoe. His voice took on a hushed urgency. "One guard. Focused on the riot. We move carefully. Quietly." I could sense the tension radiating from him, the anticipation of our next move. We were so close, yet the slightest misstep could mean the end.

  Carefully? Quietly? I was a corpse dragging itself around by sheer rage and someone else was at the controls. I didn't do sneaky. I stepped forward. Hit a crate. It didn't fall. Thank whatever stars still cared. Another step. I tripped. Caught myself before I smmed into the floor, and that poor bastard still didn't look back. He was glued to the chaos above-probably waiting for someone to come escort him out. Maybe the warden. Maybe someone worse. He thought he was holding the only ride off this rock. but he was wrong. Because we were going to steal it. Ever the gentleman, this thing in my head, he didn't bother to check if I was on board with the idea. He just grabbed the reins and sent my body lurching forward.

  "If I must do everything myself, then so be it," he muttered, clearly offended. "This shell is slow, clunky, inefficient beyond comprehension. You are the lowest functioning construct of a species I have ever had the displeasure of animating."

  Behind the ugly lizard's back, my legs moved. Not mine-his. My legs, under his control. It was weird. Watching them move without me telling them to. Was this what those old-world movies meant with zombies? Shambling corpses brought back with no soul behind the eyes? Gods, I used to love those as a kid-terrible graphics, overdramatic screams, the one girl always tripping in the woods. But none of them ever talked about how gross it would feel. Or how humiliating. Or how it would make you want to punch something just to remind yourself you could. I didn't want to be a zombie. The thought made me mad. Which, of course, made him hum in satisfaction.

  We tumbled into the shuttle like two bags of malfunctioning limbs-him focused, me seething. I hit the bay door retract button on instinct. Because I could. Because it was there. Because maybe, just maybe, I wanted to prove I wasn't completely useless. It's nobody's business that in the scramble up the ramp, I slipped again and ended up sliding against the interior wall-cheek pressed right up against it like I was trying to cuddle with cold metal. Smooth move, corpse girl. Smooth move.

  Of course, the prince couldn't let me have that one small moment of satisfaction. "Congratutions," he sneered, "you pressed a button. Possibly the only remotely useful act your species has ever contributed to a shared endeavor. Though, that remains to be seen." I tried to picture stabbing him with something sharp. A stick. A fork. Anything. But my brain refused to supply the image. I couldn't even mentally murder my own parasite. It made me mad, and it made it hard to enjoy my anger when I could he liked me being angry.

  But then he went quiet. Too quiet. An uneasy silence fell over the shuttle bay as we both sensed the shift in the air outside. The guards were mobilizing, realizing their captives were no longer captive. I could hear the shouting, the pounding of boots. This wasn't going to be a clean escape.

  "This... I do not recognize this interface." I blinked up, sluggishly dragging my gaze over the shuttle's console. "These controls are Terran." The way he said it, it might as well have been a slur. "Inferior. Crude. None of this is beled with standard functions. Why would you design navigation like this? This panel yout is an abomination." Panic tickled the back of my mind. He didn't know how to fly it?

  Stuck in a stolen shuttle with a body I didn't control and a prince who just realized he couldn't drive. But I wasn't going to panic. He didn't know how to fly. I didn't have control of my body. That meant he had to listen to me. And that would have to do since I couldn't stab him. Not even in my imagination.

  Looking around, this was indeed a Terran ship. One I was intimately familiar with from my all my time at my mother's side. I tried to speak out loud, but all that came out was the tiny dying bray of some unfortunate rodent - thin, weezy, pathetic. Well, fine. I talked to myself all the time before everything went to shit, so I tried thinking it instead. Yelled it into the voice of my head like I was throwing a rock at a window. "I can do it."

  He jolted so hard we both jerked backwards. Good - he heard me. There was a loud ctter as we smmed into the console and then- the ugly lizard guard turned. This lizard guard was a wall of muscle and bad attitude, all squat lizard head and heavy boots. His scales caught the dim light like cheap metal, dull and gritty. Every movement was deliberate, thick limbs shifting like he was carved from punishment itself. His gaze was the kind that said he'd love an excuse to break something. He didn't just fit the pce-he liked it.

  Through the shuttle's preview dispy-a ft screen curved across the front like a false window-I saw him whip around. Eyes locking onto us, and he knew we were here, he knew his ride was being hijacked. If my Symbiote prince could panic, he was doing it now. He might have been a prince, but calm under pressure was not one of his features, apparently.

  But I wasn't lying, I could fly one of these in my sleep. Muscle memory from a life that seemed like eons ago stirred within me. Lower right-yellow panel with the dual glyphs, I thought. That's your ignition. His hesitation only sted a breath. I felt my hand lift up and smmed the very control I told him to.

  The shuttle's undercarriage fred. Not with heat - these things didn't burn to unch-but with pressure. Pure force. The guard, poor bastard, had run straight for us. Proving to me, what I suspected all along. These guards were a dumb bunch of reptiles. As the shuttle unched, the guard foolishly stood beneath it, only to be fttened like a pancake. I felt a grim sense of satisfaction as we bsted off, leaving his mangled body behind. One less obstacle in our way.