Amber Eyes

The first shot came from above.

Katya heard the round before she registered the sound—a wet, coughing silence where air should have been, then the crack of displacement against the collapsed façade of what had been, sixty years ago, a Nordic banking headquarters. Concrete dust bloomed orange in the chemical light. She dropped flat, skis scraping over rubble, and the second round sparked off a steel beam two meters ahead.

Not a shooting stage. Not a target.

They were hunting her.

She rolled behind a crushed transit shelter, chest heaving, and fumbled the Kongsberg M-70 off her back. The weight was wrong. It had been wrong since the starting line—that impossible lightness that turned her stomach to acid. She cycled the bolt by feel. The action was smooth. Too smooth. Like someone had replaced the factory springs with glass.

A third shot. Closer. This one she felt—the displaced air against her neck, the way her braid whipped sideways.

"*Pust. Sikte. Skyte.*" The words left her lips before conscious thought. Breathe. Aim. Shoot. Magnus's voice, threaded through years of frozen mornings on the range.

She risked a glance. Through the iridescent haze of Zone Four, where radiation turned the air into something thick and sweet-smelling, she saw them.

Six figures, moving through the ruins of Old Oslo with a synchronicity that had nothing to do with training.

They wore different colors—two in Hemlock crimson, one in the slate gray of Kessler Group, three in unmarked black—but they moved like a single organism. Like fingers on the same hand. Their skis tracked parallel lines through the rubble, their bodies leaning into turns at identical angles, rifles sweeping in choreographed arcs. No communication. No hand signals. Just that terrible, silent coordination, as if they were all hearing the same music through ears she couldn't see.

One of them turned his head toward her hiding spot.

The eyes caught the light. Not the pale reflection of snow glare, but something else—a brief, amber flash behind the pupils. Like a cat's tapetum lucidum. Like circuitry completing a connection.

Then they all turned. All six. In perfect unison. Six faces orienting toward the transit shelter with mechanical precision.

Katya ran.

There was no thought in it. Just the explosive power of her legs, the desperate chop of pole plants against broken asphalt, the Kongsberg M-70 slapping against her spine with every stride. She threaded between two collapsed corporate towers—their glass long since blown out by the climate wars, their steel bones now wrapped in bioluminescent mold—and caught a thermal updraft that carried her thirty meters across a ruptured plaza before the draft died.

Behind her, the six moved through the same gap. They didn't catch the thermal. They didn't need to. Their legs simply worked harder, strides lengthening with an inhuman efficiency that ate the distance between them in steady, mechanical increments.

The radiation was thicker here. She could taste it—a metallic sweetness that coated her tongue and made her eyes water. Her embedded sponsor monitors would be screaming data back to Hemlock's medical team, but that was the least of her concerns. The countermeasure device pressed against her sternum, Jun's careful soldering holding firm, and she whispered a prayer of thanks for his frost-bitten fingers and sleepless nights.

The first shooting stage was ahead. She'd seen it on the course map in Devram's basement—a collapsed metro station where the overhead cover created a natural range. Four targets at seventy-five meters, standard biathlagic protocol. Drop them, move on.

Standard protocol assumed nobody was trying to kill you during the stage.

She descended into the metro station through a shattered skylight, skis clattering against the tilted escalator. The platform was surprisingly intact—cracked tiles, standing water that glowed faintly amber, old advertising displays still clinging to walls. The shooting position was marked with the standard Circuit hash marks. Four target silhouettes stood at the far end of the platform, half-hidden in the radioactive mist.

She dropped into prone. Fired.

The first target shattered. The second spun on its mechanism—hit. Two down. Two to go.

The Kongsberg M-70 performed flawlessly. That was the problem. A rifle this light, this smooth, was a rifle that had been tampered with. She cycled the bolt and the third target cracked. The fourth—

A boot crunched on tile. Close. Inside the station.

Katya rolled sideways as a shot tore through the space where her head had been. The round hit the platform floor and fragmented, sending chips of radioactive tile spinning into the mist. She came up on one knee, rifle snapping to her shoulder, and saw the shooter.

He was young. Maybe twenty-two. Hemlock crimson. Blonde hair cropped regulation-short. And his eyes—

Amber. Not flashing now. Burning. Steady and bright, like pilot lights behind glass.

He was already cycling for the next shot, moving with that terrible augmented fluidity. No hesitation. No wasted motion. Just the machine precision of a body that had been rebuilt to kill.

Katya's finger found the trigger. The mantras evaporated. There was no breathe-aim-shoot. There was only the space between heartbeats, the squeeze, and the crack.

Her round took him in the throat.

He made no sound. His hand went to his neck—not clutching the wound, but pressing against it, as if checking a sensor. He took one step backward. Then another. His rifle clattered to the tiles.

And his eyes began to flash.

Not the hunting amber. Something else. A rapid, desperate pulse—amber-amber-amber-white—repeating. A pattern. A signal. His mouth opened and closed, working around words that wouldn't come. The flashing accelerated. Amber-amber-white. Amber-white. White.

He fell.

Katya stood frozen, rifle still shouldered, staring at the body. The eyes had gone dark. But in those final seconds—the rapid pulse, the desperate working of his jaw, the hand pressed not to the wound but to something beneath his collar—

He hadn't been trying to kill her. He'd been trying to say something.

She took a step closer. His collar was open. Beneath it, embedded in the skin of his neck, was a small device—not sponsor monitoring tech, something else. Something that pulsed with the same amber frequency. She'd seen that technology before. In Jun's files. In the seven configurations that had turned athletes into experiments.

Configuration Six, maybe. Or Five. One of the ones whose files had ended abruptly.

"They're not volunteers," she whispered.

The words hung in the radioactive air. Above her, through the shattered skylight, she heard the scrape of skis. The remaining five were coming. They'd heard the shots. They knew where she was.

She grabbed the dead athlete's magazine—a standard Hemlock load, nothing exotic—and stuffed it into her jacket. Then she moved.

The metro station had two exits. The main platform led deeper into the tunnel system, where radiation levels would spike and the darkness would be absolute. The emergency stairs climbed to street level through a stairwell choked with debris. Neither option was good. Both were better than staying.

She took the stairs. Her skis caught on rubble, and she abandoned them—ripping the bindings open with frozen fingers, leaving them wedged against a fire door. On foot now. The Kongsberg M-70 in her hands. Six rounds in the magazine. One in the chamber. Seven shots against five augmented hunters.

*Pust.* Breathe.

The stairwell opened onto a street she didn't recognize. The buildings here were older—pre-war residential blocks, their facades blackened by fire and chemical exposure. The radiation sheen was darker, almost purple, and her sponsor monitors buzzed against her ribs like angry insects. She was deep in Zone Five now. Maybe Zone Six.

The fog was thicker here. It rolled through the streets in slow, luminous waves, carrying the sweet metallic taste of contamination. Visibility dropped to fifteen meters. Then ten.

She heard them before she saw them. The synchronized scrape of skis on asphalt. The shallow, mechanical breathing. They were close. Too close.

Katya pressed herself into a doorway and raised the rifle. The fog swirled. A shape passed—two meters away, close enough to touch. Hemlock crimson. Moving with that liquid, augmented grace. The figure didn't see her. Or pretended not to.

Then another shape, and another. They were flanking the street, fanning out in a search pattern that would box her within minutes. Their amber eyes pierced the fog, casting faint light like biological searchlights.

She slipped out of the doorway and ran. The fog swallowed her. Her boots splashed through standing water that burned where it touched exposed skin. She could feel her heart slamming against the countermeasure device, feel the sweat freezing on her neck, feel the terrible weight of seven rounds against five hunters and whatever lay beyond.

A collapsed building ahead—a corporate tower, its lower floors compressed into a solid block of concrete and steel. She slid through a gap in the rubble and found herself in what had been a lobby. The ceiling was low, buckled. Water dripped from somewhere above. The air was thick with dust and radiation.

She could hide here. Catch her breath. Plan.

A scraping sound. Behind her.

She spun. Too slow.

An augmented athlete burst through the rubble gap—a woman, tall and angular, her eyes blazing solid amber. She moved without sound, without hesitation, her rifle raised and leveled at Katya's chest. No shooting stance. No breath control. Just the mechanical efficiency of a weapon in human form.

Katya fired from the hip. The round caught the woman in the shoulder, spinning her sideways. Her rifle discharged into the ceiling, bringing down a cascade of concrete dust. She recovered inhumanly fast—already turning, already raising the rifle again—and Katya closed the distance.

She hit the woman with the rifle stock. The blow caught her temple. The amber eyes flickered. The woman staggered, and Katya hit her again, driving the stock into the augmented shoulder wound. Something cracked—bone or hardware, impossible to tell. The woman dropped.

But she wasn't dead. Her eyes were flashing. Amber-amber-white. The same desperate signal. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened.

"Hjelp," she whispered. Help.

Then her eyes went white, and she stopped moving.

Katya backed away. Her hands were shaking. The countermeasure device hummed against her sternum. She could feel the radiation pressing against her skin like a physical weight, could taste the metallic sweetness on the back of her tongue.

Two down. Four remaining. And somewhere in this radioactive maze, the main field was still racing, still being broadcast to a city that didn't know—or didn't care—that athletes were being weaponized.

She checked the woman's pulse. Faint. Rapid. The amber light behind her eyes had faded to a dull ember, pulsing slowly. Not dead. Not alive. Something in between.

"I'm sorry," Katya said. The words were inadequate. They were always inadequate.

She took the woman's ammunition and moved deeper into the collapsed building. There had to be another exit. A window. A gap in the rubble. Something.

The building groaned. Above her, the compressed floors shifted. Radiation had weakened the structure, and the fighting had stressed what remained. She had minutes before the whole thing came down.

She found a window on the second floor—a narrow gap where the glass had blown out, overlooking a side street. The fog was thicker here, almost opaque. She couldn't see more than five meters in any direction.

Katya dropped through the window and landed in a crouch. The street was empty. The radioactive mist pressed in from all sides.

She stood. Checked the rifle. Five rounds remaining. The countermeasure device pulsed steadily against her chest.

Then the fog ahead of her shifted.

A figure materialized. Tall. Angular. Sleek black hair in a regulation bob. Designer athletic wear in Hemlock crimson, torn and stained with something that glowed faintly purple.

Liora Vance stepped out of the radioactive fog, rifle lowered.

Katya raised the Kongsberg M-70. Her arms trembled. The countermeasure device buzzed. Every nerve screamed to fire.

Liora's perfect, unsettling smile was gone. In its place: a raw, desperate terror. Her hands shook—not the subtle tremor of neural degradation, but the violent, whole-body shaking of someone fighting against something inside them. Sweat beaded on her forehead despite the cold. Her eyes flickered between amber and their natural dark brown, the two colors warring for dominance.

"I'm fighting it," Liora said through labored breaths. Her voice cracked. The corporate polish was gone. What remained was naked fear. "But you need to know—there's a seventh shooter you can't see. Hemlock didn't augment six of us." Her chest heaved. The amber flared, and she squeezed her eyes shut, grimacing. When she opened them, brown had won. Barely.

"They augmented eight."