The air in the chamber turned to ice as the intercom's static faded into that slow, deliberate applause.
The sound was wrong—too crisp, too sharp—like bones breaking one by one for the pleasure of the listener.
Lights flickered above, their erratic pulses timed to each clap, casting stuttering shadows that made the glass pods seem to shudder.
Between them, the hologram resolved into existence with a crackle of distorted energy, its edges bleeding static like an old transmission.
The man who materialized was gaunt, his white lab coat hanging off narrow shoulders as if he were a wire hanger given human form.
His face was all angles—a blade of a nose, cheekbones that could cut glass, lips thin enough to vanish when he smiled.
And he was smiling.
Dr. Havel Rhys.
The girl knew him instantly.
She'd seen him only once before, months ago, through the slats of an air vent as he tore into a cowering technician.
His voice then had been a scalpel, peeling flesh from bone with every word.
Now it was a serpent's hiss, amused and venomous.
"Ahhh," he sighed, the sound slithering through the chamber. "My little rat has finally reached the heart of the maze." His hands—pale, long-fingered, the nails perfectly manicured—came together again in another mocking clap. "And here I thought you'd gnaw through the walls forever."
The girl's breath came fast and shallow, her back pressed against the cold metal of the door frame.
She could feel the vibration of machinery through the floor, a steady thrum that matched the frantic beat of her pulse.
Dr. Rhys tilted his head, studying her with the cold fascination of a child about to pull the wings off a fly. "Did you truly believe we didn't know about your little excursions?"
He chuckled, the sound was as dry as dead leaves.
"The files you found. The vents you crawled through. Even the way you counted days on the underside of your bed." His smile widened. "We watched."
Behind him, the glass of Subject Zero's pod groaned.
The thing inside shifted, its too-long fingers dragging down the interior with a screech that set the girl's teeth on edge.
Dr. Rhys didn't turn.
Didn't flinch.
His hologram stepped closer, passing through a bank of dead monitors as if they weren't there.
"You're here because I allowed it," he murmured. "Every experiment needs fresh variables. New blood to stir the old." His gaze flicked to the second pod, where 4639-D's face was pressed against the glass, his mouth forming silent words. "And what better catalyst than... nostalgia?"
The girl's hands curled into fists. "You're lying."
"Am I?" Dr. Rhys's hologram leaned in until his face filled her vision, his eyes black pits in the static. "Then why," he whispered, "does your friend's file mention you by name?"
A metallic hiss split the air.
The seal on Subject Zero's pod ruptured with a sound like a dying scream.
The girl's fingers scrambled against the pod's control panel, her nails chipping against the unyielding surface.
The glass remained sealed, the boy inside pressing his palms against it as his mouth formed silent words she couldn't hear.
Behind her, the hiss of Subject Zero's pod opening sent a wave of freezing chemical air washing over her back.
"I know, I know—" she muttered to the boy, her voice cracking as she jammed her fingers into the emergency release slot.
The metal bit into her skin, drawing blood that smeared across the pod's pristine surface.
A wet, clicking sound echoed through the chamber.
She didn't turn.
Couldn't turn.
The panel sparked suddenly, the shock jolting up her arm as the seal finally broke with a pneumatic sigh.
The glass slid open, spilling blue-tinged preservative fluid across the floor in a wave that soaked through her boots.
The boy collapsed forward into her arms, his body shuddering as he gasped his first unfiltered breath in what might have been years.
His fingers dug into her shoulders—not in gratitude, but in warning.
Behind them, Subject Zero took its first step.
The sound was wrong.
Not the heavy tread of a human, but something precise, almost delicate—like a surgeon's scalpel tapping against a metal tray.
The girl turned slowly, the boy's weight pulling at her arms.
Subject Zero stood perfectly still, its elongated frame silhouetted against the emergency lights.
It wasn't breathing.
Didn't need to.
The Aether veins beneath its translucent skin pulsed in slow, rhythmic waves, illuminating the chamber with their sickly glow.
Its head tilted, studying them with eyes that held no pupil, no iris—just an endless, reflective black.
Then it smiled.
And spoke.
"You're late."
The voice wasn't the rasping growl of a Hollowed.
It was clear.
Human.
Familiar.
The boy in her arms went rigid.
Because he recognized it.
The moment Subject Zero spoke, the facility's alarms erupted in a chorus of shrieking alarm.
Crimson lights strobed across the chamber, painting the scene in jagged snapshots—the girl's bloodied hands, the boy's hollowed expression, Subject Zero's too-human smile.
Dr. Rhys' hologram flickered violently, his composure cracking as he stabbed a finger at the security feed. "Black Unit to Sub-Level 7—immediate containment! Subject Zero is lucid! How did this happen?! 4639-D will be compromised! The girl—" His voice hitched, eyes widening as the monitors reflected the first black veins threading through the girl's skin. "—dead or alive, I don't care, just stop this!"
The hologram dissolved into static.
Somewhere above, heavy boots pounded against metal stairs.
The Black Unit—Myriad's shadow army, the ones even the regular security forces whispered about—was coming.
Subject Zero didn't move.
It watched the girl with something like pity. "They'll cage you," it said softly. "Like they caged me. Like they caged him."
A skeletal finger pointed at the boy, whose breath was coming too fast, his pupils dilating as his veins darkened beneath his skin.
The girl grabbed the boy's face, forcing him to look at her. "Fight it," she begged.
He choked, his fingers clawing at his chest. "I—I can't—"
A crash echoed from the hallway.
Armored figures in matte-black gear flooded the chamber, their visors reflecting the scene like insect eyes.
Rifles snapped up, trained on the trio.
The lead soldier barked. "Step away from Subject 4639-D."
The girl bared her teeth, her own veins burning as something shifted inside her. "Or what?"
The answer came in the whine of charging aether rifles.
Subject Zero sighed. "Ah. The predictable part."
"Final warning," the lead soldier intoned, his voice mechanically filtered through the helmet. "Step. Away. From Subject 4639-D."
The girl bared her teeth, her arms locking around the boy. "Go to hell."
The soldier didn't hesitate.
The rifle discharged with a sound like tearing metal.
Even with a body full of sedation, the boy draws his last ounce of power to move forward just to protect the girl.
The gunfire erupted like thunder in the enclosed space, each shot a punctuation mark in the boy's flesh.
The girl saw it happen in terrible, excruciating slow motion—the way his body jerked with each impact, how dark blood bloomed across his back in grotesque flowers before the Aether veins beneath his skin writhed to close the wounds.
He staggered but didn't fall.
"Stop!" she screamed, her voice raw. "You're killing him!"
The Black Unit didn't care.
Their rifles barked again, the muzzle flashes strobing in the crimson emergency lights.
The boy took another step forward, his arms spread wide, shielding her completely.
His breath came in wet, ragged gasps now, each inhalation bubbling through damaged lungs.
Somewhere above them, Dr. Rhys' voice shrieked through the intercom, distorted with static and fury. "Cease fire! CEASE FIRE! You're ruining my years of research!"
A bullet caught the boy in the throat.
The girl watched in horror as his head snapped back, the wound sealing almost instantly—but not fast enough.
Not completely.
Black blood poured down his chest, his healing struggling to keep pace with the damage.
He turned to look at her then, just for a second.
His lips moved, forming silent words she couldn't hear over the gunfire.
I'm sorry.
Then his knees hit the floor.
The girl scrambled forward, her hands pressing against the worst of the wounds.
His blood was everywhere—hot and slick between her fingers, soaking through her clothes, pooling on the cold metal beneath them.
"Stay with me," she begged, her voice breaking. "Just hold on, please—"
The boy's hand found hers, his grip surprisingly strong despite the tremors wracking his body.
With his last bit of strength, he guided her hand to the pocket of her jumpsuit—to the broken Conduit she'd carried all this time.
"I was supposed to give this to you when it worked," she whispered, tears cutting tracks through the blood and grime on her face.
The boy smiled then, a small, pained thing.
His lips parted, a bubble of blood forming at the corner. "It...always worked," he managed, each word a struggle. "Because...you built it."
His fingers closed around hers, pressing the Conduit between their palms.
Then he squeezed.
The silence after the boy's death was the loudest thing the girl had ever heard.
It pressed against her eardrums like a physical weight, drowning out even the facility's wailing alarms.
She knelt there, fingers splayed over his body had left behind, the body still warm beneath her palms.
His absence was a wound, raw and gaping, and for one terrible moment she wished the bullets had taken her too.
Then the cold touch came—long fingers settling on her shoulder with the weight of a tombstone.
"You knew."
Subject Zero's voice was different now.
Not the hollow rasp of a monster, but something almost gentle.
Almost human.
Its breath stirred the hair at her temple as it leaned down, the frayed edges of its tattered lab coat brushing her arm.
"From the moment they brought you here, you knew how this would end."
The girl didn't answer.
She didn't need to.
The truth sat between them, heavy as the blood drying on her jumpsuit.
Subject Zero's hand slid down her arm, its fingers—too long, too many joints—twining with hers.
Where their skin met, the black veins beneath her flesh pulsed hungrily, drawn to the Aether swirling beneath Subject Zero's translucent skin.
"He's gone," it murmured. "But you don't have to be."
Its free hand pressed against her chest, right over her stumbling heart.
"Let me show you how to make it stop hurting."
The pain came first.
White-hot and searing, it lanced through her bones like lightning, cracking them apart only to reshape them into something sharper, something hungrier.
She screamed, but the sound warped halfway up her throat, becoming a distorted shriek that shattered the remaining glass in the chamber.
Her spine arched violently, tendons snapping and reforming as her body rebelled against its own shape.
Across the room, a Black Unit soldier groaned, his armored fingers twitching toward his sidearm.
The girl—no, not a girl anymore, not really—turned her head.
The motion was wrong.
Too smooth.
Too fluid.
Like her neck had gained extra joints.
She saw the soldier through new eyes—eyes that didn't just observe, but dissected.
The rapid flutter of his pulse in his jugular.
The way his breath hitched when her shadow fell over him.
The faint blue glow of the Aether stabilizers in his bloodstream.
Delicious.
Her body moved before she could think, crossing the distance in a blur of elongated limbs and snapping tendons.
The soldier barely had time to gasp before her claws pierced his chestplate like paper.
Then came the hunger.
For the flesh.
For the blood.
For the Aether in his veins.
She pulled, and it came willingly, a torrent of blue fire rushing up her arm and into the black veins now branching across her skin.
The soldier's memories came with it—fragmented and screaming—a childhood on some distant Spire, the sting of Myriad's needles, the weight of the gun they'd put in his hands.
She drank it all down, and when there was nothing left but a hollowed-out husk, she let the body drop.
Absorbing the carcasses after the killings.
The other soldiers were firing now, their bullets tearing through her new flesh with wet, meaty thuds.
The pain registered distantly, a minor inconvenience compared to the feast laid out before her.
One of the rounds took her through the throat, spraying black ichor across the ceiling.
She laughed—a sound like shattering glass—as the wound sealed itself before the bullet even hit the floor.
Behind her, Subject Zero watched, its too-human smile widening with each life she took.
"Yes," it whispered, as she tore through the last screaming technician. "This is what you were meant to be."
The girl—the abomination—paused, her claws buried in the chest of a twitching guard.
Something nagged at the back of her mind.
A name.
A face.
A promise made in another life.
I was supposed to give this to you when it worked.
The memory slipped away like smoke, replaced by a new, all-consuming need.
More.
She needed more.
The facility obliged.
Sub-Level 6 fell in minutes.
The researchers died at their terminals, their last moments flooding into her with every touch—secrets about Project Cradle, about Subject Zero, about the thing they kept locked beneath Sub-Level 7.
Their fear was intoxicating, their memories even more so.
Sub-Level 5 lasted longer.
The Myriad security teams had barricaded the doors, their voices tight with panic over the comms.
"What the fuck is that?"
"It's not stopping—"
"Fall back to the—"
The barricades didn't matter.
The doors didn't matter.
She flowed through the corridors like smoke, her body reshaping itself to fit the spaces, her new senses tracking the rapid-fire heartbeats of the men hiding behind reinforced steel.
When she finished with them, she took the elevator up.
The observation deck was empty when she arrived.
The abomination—no longer a girl, not really—slithered through the shattered door frame, her elongated limbs folding and unfolding like a spider testing new legs.
The room smelled of antiseptic and fear, the monitors still flickering with half-erased data streams.
Dr. Rhys' chair sat abandoned, spinning slowly from some hurried departure, the armrests still indented from where his fingers had dug in moments before.
A coffee cup steamed on the desk.
Fresh.
Close.
She tilted her head, the vertebrae in her neck popping audibly as she scanned the room.
His scent lingered—expensive cologne undercut with sour sweat—but the trail ended at a nearly invisible panel in the wall.
A hidden elevator.
The metal was still warm when she pressed her palm against it.
Behind her, Subject Zero chuckled, the sound wet and broken.
"He always runs," it rasped, dragging one clawed finger through the blood splattered across the monitors. "But the game isn't over yet."
The abomination didn't answer.
She was too busy peeling back the elevator panel with her new claws, the metal shrieking in protest.
The shaft beyond was dark, the cables still vibrating from recent use.
She could follow.
She would follow.
But first—
The monitors caught her attention.
One screen still glowed, displaying a live feed from Sub-Level 1.
A hangar bay.
And there, sprinting across the tarmac like a man possessed, was Dr. Rhys, his lab coat flapping behind him as he dove into a waiting VTOL craft.
The abomination watched, her too-many fingers curling into fists.
She'd find him.
Eventually.
But for now—
A new scent flooded her nostrils.
Fear.
Sweat.
Living, breathing prey.
The security team had arrived, their rifles raised, their hands shaking.
The abomination smiled.
Dinner first.
Then the hunt.
The last security officer's screams died as the abomination absorbed him, his memories flooding into her like a river of broken glass—training drills in the Spire's shadow, his daughter's laughter, the sickening crunch of bones beneath her claws.
She let the empty husk drop, her elongated fingers twitching as new power thrummed through her blackened veins.
Around her, the facility lay in ruins.
Blood painted the walls in abstract patterns, still dripping from the ceiling vents where she'd hunted the last fleeing technicians.
The air stank of copper and voided bowels and something sharper underneath—the tang of raw Aether leaking from shattered conduits.
Subject Zero watched from the shadows, its too-long limbs folded in apparent satisfaction. "You see now," it rasped. "This is what they made us for."
The abomination didn't answer.
Something nagged at the edges of her stolen memories—a face, a voice, the weight of a broken Conduit pressed into her palm.
She clutched her head, the claws scraping against her own temples as she tried to grasp the fading thought.
I was supposed to—
—give this to—
—when it worked—
A shudder ran through her mutated frame.
The hunger had been sated, the rage momentarily quieted, but now...
Now there was only the hollow.
A sound tore from her throat—not a roar, not a scream, but a wail so raw it cracked the remaining glass in the facility.
It echoed through the empty halls, up through the broken elevator shafts, out into the cold night air beyond.
The cry of something that remembered being human.