A horn blared across the shattered mountain, thin as a blade. The audience—wherever they were—watched in silence now. This was the ascent’s final tier.
Her last chance.
His last chance.
Vibrant green runoff bled from the reactor’s cracked crown, carving a scar through the valley below, hissing like serpents. Under its toxic spray, Tessa pressed her forehead to the jagged stone—heart pounding in time with the Cascade’s thunder—and clung to the promise she’d made him.
The electric crackle under her skin as the radioactive mist blistered her face didn’t slow her. Nothing did. Seventeen had fallen already—some shoved screaming from the stone, most swallowed by the torrent, the rest mutated beyond anything that could live.
The Cascade pulsed. From the mist above, something howled. It didn’t faze her. She’d sworn she would never climb for them, never let strangers pay to watch her body come apart.
But some promises broke under the weight of others.
Her fingers had split, growing nail-thorns that bit into stone, and her veins throbbed like reactor coils. Her left eye saw time stagger.
Mutations.
Everyone transformed here. Flesh couldn’t survive this climb unless it evolved. Some welcomed it. Tessa hadn’t when her bones first shifted, and fighting it had nearly killed her.
Now, she let the change take what it needed. She had entered the show for her son.
Her grin split wider than it should, teeth wet from the artery she’d torn open moments ago. She spat blood and climbed.
Above her, a man-shaped thing lurched from the mist, sinew exposed, foam leaking from its split mouth.
It lunged.
Tessa opened her left eye fully and let the staggered seconds align. She caught the beast mid-air with a climbing axe to the jaw.
Bone cracked. It shrieked, tumbled past her, its blood unspooling red through the green mist.
Something shifted beneath her ribs. Bone ground against bone. Her skeleton kept working, widening, bracing, making something that could reach the summit even if the woman inside didn’t.
Two climbers remained above her. One had mutated past reason, hooked claws jutting where his feet should have been, his grin stretched too wide. The other clung beneath him, young and human enough to beg.
Tessa saw the angle. Saw his hands locked around the monster’s leg—one cut would drop them both.
Her hand tightened on the axe.
For one breath, she saw her son beneath plastic tubes.
Then she saw the young man below the monster, his mouth shaping a plea the Cascade tore away.
Tessa cut the monster loose.
Two bodies vanished into the green thunder below.
She didn’t watch them land. Her hand found the final ledge. Beneath her, the reactor thrummed through the rock.
A drone hovered, its mirrored plating shimmering as it sloughed off the toxic mist.
“Tessa Monroe, winner of the Cascade,” it announced. “Funds transferred.”
Tessa collapsed. Splintered bones pressed beneath her skin, still trying to become something that could survive.
They didn’t need to.
As her vision faded, she heard the warped echo of the lullaby she used to sing beside her son’s hospital bed, beneath the soft rhythm of machines that could keep breathing as long as someone paid.
Her most important promise had been kept.
He was safe.
Far below, the Cascade carried her blood down with the rest.
Steven Corbin 