The corridor didn't grow quieter after she lost the crowd.It became even more violent.
For a few heartbeats Mara could still hear the thunder of the main surge—boots hammering metal, panicked shouts swallowed by the calm, inhuman announcements looping overhead like a bored god. Then she rounded the corner and walked straight into a secondary enforcement lane, one corridor already locked down by compliance while another was still trying to empty itself of civilians.
The world narrowed into something far worse.
Less movement.More meat.
The passage was a choked artery of rusted shutters and weeping wiring, condensation sliding down the walls like cold sweat. Half the lights had died; the rest flickered between clinical white and a diseased orange strobe. For one treacherous second she thought the shadows might hide her.
Then the first flat THUNK split the air.
Ten meters ahead, a man's legs simply betrayed him. No blood, no drama—just neural shutdown. He pitched forward like a dropped puppet, forehead cracking against the deck with a wet crunch that sprayed teeth across the grating. His body twitched once, then lay still in its own leaking fluids.
Mara froze against the wall, breath locked in her throat.
Two white-armored compliance officers emerged from the flickering dark as if they'd been born there. No warnings. No raised voices. Just clinical efficiency.
"Biometric mismatch," one said, voice flat as machined steel, glancing at the hovering display at his wrist.
The second officer raised his compact rifle. THUNK.
The fallen man's skull jerked as the neural disruptor round finished the job. A brief, obscene seizure rippled through his limbs, then nothing. Just a sack of cooling meat.
Mara's stomach lurched.
This wasn't enforcement.
This was extermination.
The officers stepped over the corpse without breaking stride. One sprayed a quick mist from a canister; it hardened into a dull grey seal over the man's implant port like a scab forming in seconds.
"Tag and purge," the first said.
"Confirmed."
They moved on, boots squelching faintly in the spreading blood.
Further down the corridor, a woman screamed—a raw, animal sound that went on too long. She bolted past Mara clutching a bag of contraband injectors, eyes wide with terror. Her foot hit a slick of coolant and she went down hard. The wet pop of her knee bending backward was sickeningly loud. She tried to crawl, nails scrabbling at the deck, leg dragging uselessly behind her like a broken wing.
A sleek drone dropped from the ceiling, silent as death.
"Unauthorized modification detected."
The woman's scream climbed into something inhuman.
"I didn't steal it—I just—"
The drone's beam lanced across her spine. Her back arched violently, every muscle locking in agony. A second burst followed. Her body convulsed, urine and blood spilling across the floor as her nervous system collapsed. She flopped once, twice, then lay still, eyes wide and staring at nothing.
Mara staggered backward, ribs already aching from earlier impacts. Her pulse hammered so loudly she was certain it would paint a target on her chest.
"MOVE!" someone roared behind her.
A body slammed into her like a freight sled. She crashed forward into a stack of sealed crates. Something inside her torso tore—a bright, wet ripping that stole her breath. Her hands slipped in someone else's blood, warm and sticky, as she tried to rise. Pain exploded through her side like broken glass grinding between her ribs.
She forced herself onto one elbow, trying to stand.
A compliance officer fired past her at a fleeing runner.
The neural round struck the bulkhead beside her skull instead.
The impact detonated the composite panel into a storm of razor fragments. One jagged shard sliced across her upper arm, laying the flesh open in a clean burning line. Blood sheeted down instantly, hot and shocking. She gasped as the delayed fire of it hit her nerves.
Another body crashed into her.
This time she went down completely, skull bouncing off the deck. Copper flooded her mouth. A fleeing man trampled straight over her, boot heel grinding into her hip with brutal force. Something shifted wrong there—not a full break, but close enough that movement became a gamble.
"Don't stop!" voices screamed somewhere in the slaughter.
THUNK. THUNK. THUNK.
The flat reports came faster now. Bodies dropped around her like butchered livestock—limbs jerking, skulls splitting, blood and brain matter painting the walls in abstract horror.
A drone shadow slid over her prone form.
It was sweeping for movement, not bodies already down.
She stopped breathing entirely, forcing herself still among the dying.
The scan beam lingered on her coat.
Her keepsong chimed once, faint and apologetic beneath the fabric.
The beam flickered, hesitated—reading conflicting biometric signals—then moved on.
Mara dragged in a ragged breath that tasted of blood and coolant and fear.
Pain arrived in full then—arm burning, ribs grinding, side throbbing like a second heartbeat. She clawed her way behind a shattered vendor partition with one trembling, blood-slick arm, leaving a dark red smear across the floor.
Every inch was agony. Her vision tunneled. Shallow, animal gasps were all she could manage.
Now the corridor was a slaughterhouse, and the systems weren't angry, weren't cruel—they were simply correcting errors by removing the defective.
She curled tighter into the shadows, shaking, bleeding, listening to the wet sounds of bodies being erased around her.
"N-n-nobody warned me about this. They said the shadow lane w-was tolerated. They d-didn't tell it would be like this..Is this what the city is like outside the civilian zones.."
Mara spoke to herself barely managing to stay conscious. The pain was ripping her apart. Her body wasn't trained for this. She had never experienced savagery to this extent.
She had always believed that the real power of the directorate was psychological control and order through regulations. What she had just witnessed was violence to an extent she had never imagined. This is how easy it was for the directorate to take control and decide what was not going to be ignored anymore. This was how deviant variables were extinguished. The official reports hid this brutality behind technical terminologies.
"Did they do this to you too Sene..?" She did not want to imagine that sight even in her worst nightmares.
Mara broke down crying. The tears tainted with blood and dust flowed down her cheeks. There was nobody to comfort her.