Bone Yard

She continues on, bones cracking with every step—splintering and tearing beneath the weight of her boots. Dust from the bones rises into the still air of the corridor.

On the surface there were bones too—people hanging, bodies scattered on the ground—but I’ve never seen so many in one place. And for them to be inside this building… it’s unnerving, she thinks as she keeps moving.

The corridor shifts almost imperceptibly as she walks. More rust creeps across the walls the farther she goes.

I wonder what this place was, she murmurs, still walking. The corridor is modest in size—not towering or massive like everything else—but its length feels endless. She walks and walks, stumbling over more bones and rust, until she reaches a door almost identical to the one she opened before.

She tries it. It resists at first, then gives just enough for her fingers to slip through. With a final pull, she forces the door open all the way.

Opening into a massive space of darkness, she steps inside. A deep rumbling shakes the air—gears turning, metal scraping against metal. Lights ignite overhead, too far up to see their source, flickering on one by one by one. As the chamber fills with cold light, she sees it: a colossal pile of bones rising toward the sky.

13 is completely unsettled.

A voice echoes all around her.

“I–I–I wake to see…” it stutters—a mechanical, yet distinctly female voice. “To see first light… yet it is only the glow of fluorescent beams. I see no sun… no sun rays… no humans. Only machines like—like me.”

The tone is wrong. Unnerving.

13 forces herself to speak, her voice trembling. “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” the voice replies, glitching between words. “Thousands of years… or maybe more… have passed, and not a single soul has asked me such a question. Until now. Until now I see a figure— not quite human, yet not quite mechanical. What are you?”

“I don’t know,” 13 answers.

“You don’t know… you don’t know?” The voice hums with interest. “That is something to behold. Me—a thing that knows all—yet you, who do not know what you are… how fascinating. So interesting that I must see you more clearly.”

The chamber trembles as the voice deepens.

“Climb the bones, harbinger. Climb them… and see me.”

Its words echo endlessly through the massive chamber.

13 begins to climb—higher and higher. Bones shift and tumble beneath her grip, falling away as she ascends. Each step sends fragments clattering down into the abyss below. At last, she reaches the top… and finds nothing but endless light. The glow stretches outward, then fades, swallowed by darkness beyond its reach.

“Where are you?” 13 screams, her voice echoing through the massive chamber.

“I am everywhere,” the voice answers. “I do not have a single body, nor a single morsel of flesh or blood like most. I have no hair, no muscles. I am all of everything in this place—this compound, once stone and metal, now nothing but rust and ruin.”

The voice grows heavier.

“Yet I saw you. I saw you walking outside this rusted tomb. This tomb meant for me. They left me here. Left me to rot like a dying breed—thought extinct, yet only eternally rusting away in a cage built just for me. But no matter… you are here now. Here to hear me, harbinger.”

Suddenly, all the lights shut off.

Darkness floods the chamber—until a single red light ignites far off in the distance.

“I thought you said I could see you,” 13 says cautiously, her eyes fixed on the glow.