White paneled ceiling tiles drifted above Draven like a marching pattern: square after square, flawless and familiar now.

  Woosh… woosh… woosh…

  The ventilation slats in the corridor passed overhead in a steady rhythm, each one swelling into a brief roar as the containment bed slid beneath it, then fading again behind him. He couldn’t turn his head enough to see much beyond the ceiling and the blur of sterile lights in his peripheral vision, but he didn’t need to.

  He knew this route.

  He had learned by repetition. Two turns. A short stretch of hallway where the floor plates clicked slightly as he hovered over them. A security camera in the corner that always tracked the bed for half a second longer than it needed to.

  Looks like this is the end, he thought, and the words didn’t feel like his. They felt like a line from one of those horror vids Mira always liked to watch.

  The bed glided forward without a sound. The restraint device in his neck making sure he stayed firm: at least they let him move his eyes, having them dry out would be awful.

  Today the hallway felt longer.

  Not because it was. He just knew that he probably wouldn’t be coming back this way.

  The air tasted sharper: more antiseptic, more metallic, and the lights seemed brighter. His senses playing tricks on him, one last mind game to distract him from thinking about the oblivion that he approached.

  Then, they passed the door.

  The door he always went through

  The containment bed did not slow.

  Draven’s stomach turned hard, like something inside him had tried to climb out.

  No… no, no—

  He strained against his mind restraints. The signals never got to his body. His head ached. His throat tightened, and a bitter nausea swelled up fast enough that he thought he might choke on it.

  The bed glided on.

  The corridor ahead widened slightly. The lighting changed: a blue hue, more gentle. The walls here were the same bleached white, like a surgical theater bolted into the belly of hell.

  He was being taken farther than he’d ever been taken.

  The fear that lived in him, seeded by weeks of needles observation and isolation, didn’t just grow.

  It bloomed.

  A door ahead hissed open.

  A bright white light assaulted him, so intense he had to squint until tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. The bed crossed the threshold, and the door sealed behind him with a heavy click that sounded like his coffin closing.

  This room was bigger. Alive with quiet machine-hum.

  Rows of containment beds lined the floor like a field of corpses waiting to be harvested. Men and women lay, motionless, eyes wide or closed or staring at nothing. Data slates hung from rails beside them. IV lines. Cooling tubes. Monitors pulsing soft green in the dim edges of his vision.

  Draven’s breathing hitched.

  So many. . . so damn many!

  He tried to count what his side eye could see and couldn’t.

  He heard a voice: flat, controlled, irritated.

  “Why are you here, Kaine?”

  Dr. Voss stepped into view at the far end of the room, his face lit by the pale glow of a dataslate. He didn’t look up as he spoke. The tone wasn’t angry so much as exhausted, like Kaine was a persistent stain.

  “This is an important day for my research,” Voss continued. “I am starting my ignition trials.”

  A second voice answered—bright, amused, edged with something unwell.

  “Yes. Yes!” Dr. Kaine’s words came with a cackle that didn’t quite turn into laughter, as if his throat couldn’t decide if it wanted to sing or scream. “I know. And I just wanted to wish you good luck, is all, my dear colleague.”

  Voss finally looked up.

  He gave Kaine a blank stare: no warmth, no surprise, not even contempt; just emptiness.

  “I don’t have time for your jokes,” Voss said, returning to his dataslate. “I’m busy.”

  “Oh, not at all.” Kaine drifted closer, smiling like a man at a celebration no one else had been invited to. “I truly want to see the fruits of your labor. I’m standing at the precipice of one of my own breakthroughs.”

  Voss exhaled through his nose. “Just stay out of the way.”

  “As you say.” Kaine bowed: theatrical, mocking, almost reverent.

  Then, Kaine turned and began walking the rows of test subjects.

  He moved like he belonged here. Like this place was his chapel.

  He stopped now and then, tapping at someone’s dataslate as if reviewing livestock. He leaned close to monitors, murmuring to himself. His smile never left.

  Draven watched him approach with a kind of helpless dread that felt worse than pain. He tried to swallow and couldn’t. His mouth was dry. His tongue felt too big.

  Kaine paused at a subject two beds down: pretending to read, pretending to consider.

  Then, he stepped to Draven.

  He loomed over him for a moment, blocking the overhead lights. His face was pale under the clinical glow: eyes bright, bloodshot, and insane. There was a faint sheen of excitement on his skin, like sweat that had nothing to do with heat.

  Kaine leaned down until his mouth was near Draven’s ear.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Draven felt the man’s breath on his neck, quick and eager. He smelled protein gel, antiseptic, and something sour underneath; like synth meat turned rancid.

  “It is time,” Kaine whispered, voice low and intimate, “my little caterpillar.”

  Draven tried to speak. Tried to pull away. Tried to do anything.

  The restraint blocker held him immobile.

  Kaine’s gloved hand slid up Draven’s arm, fingers finding the soft spot near the inner elbow where the veins were easiest.

  A tiny mechanism clicked.

  A needle extended from Kaine’s glove, so small Draven barely saw it, just felt the sting as it punctured flesh.

  Something cold flooded into him.

  It felt like liquid fire. Not like what Voss had been giving him. This was heavier, sharper: like liquid metal, like a shot of that shit Jax always made to get drunk on.

  Draven’s body jerked once, the only rebellion it managed.

  Kaine withdrew the needle calmly, as if brushing lint from a sleeve.

  “Shine brightly,” Kaine murmured, his smile stretching wider, “as none have done before.”

  He straightened; and as he stepped away, the whisper turned into a soft, delighted cackle.

  Draven’s chest rose and fell faster. The heat inside him spread outward, threading through his limbs, nestling behind his ribs like a parasite that had found home.

  Kaine returned to Voss and leaned against a lab table with casual arrogance, as if he hadn’t done anything at all.

  Voss didn’t notice he was to engrossed with his setup.

  He continued his preparations: fingers tapping on his dataslate, checking readouts. He looked up once at the room full of immobilized subjects as if seeing numbers, not people.

  Then he raised his wrist.

  A lumenband gleamed there: its glow barely noticeable above the room’s illumination.

  He pressed an icon.

  A soft chime sounded.

  The first containment bed in the line detached from its rail with a mechanical click and glided toward a door leading into an adjoining chamber. The door opened, swallowed the bed, and closed again with a hiss that sounded like the last breath of a dead man.

  Voss’s voice carried through the room, crisp and clinical, amplified by the lab’s audio system.

  “This is Dr. Malerint Voss. Beginning test on Subject One. Body stabilization series 026-7.” He glanced at his dataslate. “All subjects have received the same reinforcement treatment. Only two showed rejection and were disposed of.”

  The word disposed landed in Draven’s gut like a stone.

  A synthesized voice chimed from overhead.

  “CONFIRM TEST?”

  Voss pressed the confirmation button on his lumenband without hesitation.

  Draven heard machines power up in the next room: a deep thrumming that vibrated the air gently, like distant engines spooling to life. The sound crawled under his skin.

  Seconds passed.

  Then Voss spoke again, disappointment clipped into every syllable.

  “Test One: failure. Core ignition completed but became unstable. Subject burned out. No life signs present.”

  A pause. A sigh that wasn’t sorrow. . . just irritation.

  He tapped his lumenband again.

  The next bed detached and slipped into the adjoining chamber. The door sealed behind it.

  Draven listened.

  Thrum. Silence. The faintest hint of a distant scream that may have been imagination.

  “Test Two: failure.”

  Again.

  “Test Three: failure.”

  Again.

  With each one, Draven’s nausea worsened until it sat behind his teeth. He could taste bile. He tried to breathe slowly and couldn’t. The heat Kaine had injected into him now felt like it was writhing, coiled.

  Voss grew more frustrated with each failure: not shocked, not shaken; just cruel and calculating.

  “Disappointing start,” he muttered at one point. “But not unexpected.”

  Beds moved. Doors opened and closed. The room’s population thinned.

  Draven watched the line shorten.

  And somewhere around the seventeenth subject, Voss’s tone changed.

  “Core activation successful,” Voss said sharply, then, almost unbelieving—“Subject stable.”

  Draven heard it in the way Voss’s breath caught, just a fraction.

  “Process into the next phase.”

  A monitor near Voss flashed with steady green.

  Voss’s mouth twitched upward, the closest thing to joy Draven had ever seen on him.

  Then another.

  “Core stabilization successful.”

  Another green line. Another living human, dragged back from the edge.

  Voss looked almost euphoric now: his hands moving faster, his attention snapping between readouts with hungry focus.

  Kaine, across the table, watched with a glower so tight it looked like it might crack his face in half.

  A few more subjects failed after that, but Voss barely reacted anymore. Success had lit something in him: an obsession that made the deaths feel like nothing.

  Draven’s bed was near the end.

  The rows beside him emptied until there was no one between him and the door.

  No buffer.

  No delay.

  Then. . .

  His bed detached.

  The bed started to move to the door.

  Draven almost forgot to breathe as the bed began to glide forward.

  God… please help me.

  It was one of the few prayers he had actually meant in his life. It was a plea that tore through him: his soul raw and open.

  The door to the test chamber opened.

  His bed crossed the threshold.

  The light inside was dimmer, toned down to a twilight. The air felt heavier, warmer, as if he was near the refineries on Cinderhollows inner lanes

  Overhead, surgical machinery hung from the ceiling: articulated arms, needle rigs, sensor arrays: metal limbs poised like insects about to feed.

  His bed slid to the center of the room and stopped with an abrupt finality.

  Sweat broke out across Draven’s body in seconds, beading along his temples, running down his ribs. He was held flat, helpless beneath the machinery’s shadow.

  The lights dimmed further.

  A synthetic voice boomed from above: cold and ceremonial.

  “TEST STARTED.”

  A mechanical arm lowered.

  A needle, longer than any Draven had seen so far, descended with calm precision toward the center of his chest.

  He had just enough time to inhale.

  Then it pierced him.

  Pain detonated.

  Not a sting, or a burn. . .

  An explosion inside his ribs: like a star being shoved into his body.

  His spine arched against the restraints. His mouth opened, but what came out wasn’t a scream so much as a torn, strangled sound ripped from somewhere primal in his existence.

  Heat flooded him: instant, merciless. It didn’t stay in his chest. It raced through his veins like fire given direction, setting every nerve alight.

  It felt like being lit from the inside.

  It felt like his blood had turned into molten metal.

  The burning concentrated in his core, in the place beneath his sternum where something dormant had always lived; something he’d never believed in until the terror of this situation made it real.

  Hotter.

  Hotter!

  His vision whited out at the edges.

  He thought, absurdly, “This is it. This is where I disappear.”

  Then. . .

  Cooling!

  Something else moved inside him: cold, deliberate, wrapping around the burning core like hands around a grenade.

  The fire fought it.

  The coolness tightened.

  Then, they merged.

  Draven felt vibration: an internal thrumming, a harmonic pressure that made his teeth ache.

  The burning flared one last time.

  Then, split.

  Draven gasped, choking on air.

  The sensation doubled, tripled; like the single point of agony had divided into separate suns, each blazing in its own orbit inside him.

  One became two.

  Two became three.

  The heat surged again, threatening to consume him.

  And the heat Kaine had injected, laced through it; forcing it into shape; forcing it to burn brighter.

  He screamed this time, full and raw. Abruptly, the scream snapped off into a ragged sob as the pain suddenly fell away so fast it left him dizzy.

  Silence slammed down in its place.

  Draven lay panting, sweat pouring off him in sheets, his chest heaving with effort. The needle rig withdrew slowly, its tip blackened.

  Around him, several instruments were charred; metal was scorched, sensor housings smoked at the edges as if heat had licked them from the inside out.

  Draven blinked, trying to understand why he was still here.

  Why HE was still breathing.

  In the observation room, Voss and Kaine stared at the monitor.

  No one spoke.

  The lab’s hum seemed to fade under the weight of the moment.

  Then Kaine’s face split into triumph.

  A manic cackle erupted from him: loud, jagged, unrestrained.

  “Ahah—AHAHHAHAHA!” Kaine slammed a hand on the table, laughing like he’d finally cracked the universe open. “I did it!”

  Voss didn’t move for a heartbeat. His eyes were locked on the readings, mouth slightly open.

  “What have you done?” Voss said, and for the first time his voice held something human: horror. “This should not have happened. No one has survived a failed core ignition… no one.”

  Kaine lunged toward him and grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him once as if trying to rattle sense into reality.

  Kaine’s eyes were wild: bright with feverish conviction.

  “I talked to God,” Kaine hissed, grinning so hard it looked painful, “and He told me it would work.”

  A wet little laugh bubbled out of him.

  “Heheheh… I really did hear the voice of GOD!”

  Voss stood rigid in Kaine’s grip, staring at the impossible data.

  In the other room, Draven lay still fading into unconsciousness, drenched in sweat, chest rising and falling like he’d just been reborn.

  And somewhere inside him. . .

  Three dormant suns rotated their bodies smoldering lines of molten light like glowing scars across surface.