The chamber roils, vermillion and suffocating, wind untethered by gravity. You pull yourself free, muscles taut, rising above the pit. Dark strands cling to your skull, a fragile, flesh-bound form, long hair brushing your neck. A syrupy residue leaks from your body, re-entering the misery of penance. They imprison the others - devils, evildoers, the tortured. From number one to millions, corralled in eternity, never allowed to rot or rest. The City of Iron seethes with a dull, oppressive heat, rivers of molten rock and sin pulsing beneath. An insistent hum of atonement vibrates through every chamber. “You know us. We never meant you any harm.” Your shadow stretches behind you, rigid and sharp, forming a perfect “21.” Tattoos flame your arms and back, the numbers burn into your flesh, marking the lives you’ve taken. One number scorches hotter than the rest. You remember his face. Number 1,000,000,022 grows larger with every kill, every conquest, and every triumph. Fail, and your name, your self, will vanish into the vaults, absorbed by the relentless legion, forced to relive purgatory. Beacons of amber and ebony flicker across the walls; shadows undulate with each step. A blade drops, heavy and inevitable. You let the creature take it. Bloodshot eyes search yours. Iron and sulphur sear your senses, bile rises in your throat as the sword lifts. Your body betrays you, trembling with the fear in your chest. The hungry pit waits. You kneel in pray. Beneath your number, a fragment remains human, believing in the Divine.

They started gathering at the fence three nights after the power failed. At first, Mara thought they were survivors—burned, starving, desperate for water. Their silhouettes pressed against the chain link like mourners against a casket. She called to them from the guard tower, voice cracking through the loudspeaker, promising rations if they’d step back. None of them blinked. Now they were so many that the metal bowed inward, the posts whining like teeth under pressure. Gray faces pushed through the diamond gaps, skin peeled and lacquered with old blood. Their mouths hung open, not in hunger but in a soundless, endless scream, as if they’d been caught mid-breath when the world ended and never allowed to finish. One of them knew her name. “Mara,” it rasped, though its jaw unhinged too wide to shape the syllables. The voice slid through the speakers anyway, slick and wet, as if it had crawled up the wire and into the system. She killed the power to the tower. The voice continued from the dark. Hands forced through the fence—too many fingers, joints bending the wrong way, nails splitting and reforming like black thorns. They didn’t grab. They reached, palms open, pleading. That was the worst part. They didn’t try to climb. They waited. She watched through her rifle scope and saw her father’s face among them, lips gnawed down to bone, his empty eye socket leaking a slow thread of something that smoked in the cold air. He had died in her arms three weeks before the roads filled with the silent dead. She had buried him herself. She remembered the weight of the dirt. Now his hand pressed against the mesh, skin slipping through the metal like wax through a mold. Let us in, the speakers whispered. The fence began to dissolve—not breaking, not bending, but thinning where their fingers touched, turning to a gray paste that dripped upward instead of down. Behind her, the tower door creaked open. She turned. More of them stood inside, packed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow stairwell, their faces identical to the ones outside, except these were smiling. “Mara,” they said together, their voices perfectly human now. “You locked yourself out.” The last thing she saw was her own reflection in their eyes—standing at the fence, reaching in.

I had been standing in that line for five hours when the heat stopped feeling natural. The sun above the stadium burned white and merciless, the sea of necks in front of me glistening mixed with mullets, and ponytails, We were here for the final Power Up tour. AC/DC at their best. If we made it inside. The line barely moved. Every shuffle forward felt smaller than the last, as if the ground itself were resisting us. The air thickened. Breathing became something you had to remember to do. A child somewhere behind me began to cry. I tried to calculate how many people stood between me and the ticket booth, but the queue stretched unnaturally far, bending at angles that didn’t seem possible in the carpark. When I craned my neck, the front of the line dissolved into a shimmer. The bald man in front of me hadn’t moved in twenty minutes. Not shifted weight. Not wiped sweat. Not blinked. A fly crawled across his scalp. He didn’t react. “Mate?” I said. Nothing. The crying behind me grew louder. More voices joined it. Not crying now, whispering. Stay in line. Don’t lose your place. Almost there. The words slid over my skin like damp cloth. I reached into my pocket for distraction. A lighter. A pen. A hair tie. I didn’t remember bringing them, but they felt important. The crowd violently surged forward, as though something ahead had pulled us like puppets. I stumbled, colliding with the bald man. His skin was cold. Cold. In forty-degree heat. He turned then. His eyes were milked over, unfocused, reflecting something vast and red. He opened his mouth. No sound came out. The smell hit next, rotting flesh. Panic rippled through the line, but it moved strangely, too synchronized. People weren’t running away. They were pressing forward. Faces slack. Eyes unfocused. Drawn toward the booth like filings to a magnet. The booth. I could see it now. Except it wasn’t a booth anymore. The metal shutters had peeled back like lips. Darkness waited inside, thick and swallowing. The “Tickets Sold Here” sign flickered, letters rearranging themselves too quickly to read. Each time someone reached the front, they didn’t receive tickets. They stepped inside. And did not come back out. No staff. No music. Just the low, grinding hum of something feeding. The whispers grew clearer. Closer now. Worth it. Don’t lose your place. The bald man lurched forward again, dragging me with him. His hand clamped around my wrist. His dry brittle fingers, like dry twigs. I tried to pull free, bodies pressed closer from every direction. The heat intensified. Someone’s breath filled my ear. “Nearly there,” they murmured. The crying child stopped abruptly. I was three people away. Two. One. The man ahead stepped into the darkness. The sound was like paper tearing underwater. I wedged myself behind the metal barrier as the surge of bodies pressed forward. All this for a song.