The voice did not know he was listening.
That was the first thing Fenrik understood.
It spoke into the room with the same confidence it had always carried—measured, precise, unburdened by doubt. The words moved forward without hesitation, stacked neatly atop one another like tools placed on a clean table.
"—thermal thresholds remain inconsistent. Subject demonstrates adaptive response rather than degradation."
Fenrik stood motionless in the center of the data vault. The faint hum of emergency power crawled through the floor and up into his bones. Screens flickered weakly around him, pale light reflecting off black fur and scarred metal alike.
He did not move closer.
He did not pull away.
He listened.
The voice continued, unaware that the thing it described now stood upright, breathing, remembering.
"Recommendation: proceed with secondary stabilizer injection. Behavioral variance remains unacceptable."
Behavioral variance.
Fenrik tasted the phrase without understanding the symbols that accompanied it. The sound of the words mattered more than their meaning. The voice spoke as if the conclusion had been reached long before the sentence finished.
There was no curiosity in it.
Only correction.
A second voice joined the first.
Higher. Younger. Less certain.
"We should slow the cycle. The readings suggest—"
She did not finish.
The first voice interrupted smoothly, almost kindly.
"We've already exceeded projected cost. This isn't a preservation effort. It's validation."
Validation.
Fenrik's fire stirred faintly, a low, internal pressure, like a growl held just behind teeth.
The logs advanced automatically, one bleeding into the next without pause. Dates, times, identifiers—symbols Fenrik could not yet decipher, but patterns he began to recognize through repetition.
The same voices.
The same tones.
Always calm.
Fenrik moved closer.
The floor crunched softly under his weight as he approached one of the consoles. He crouched before it, lowering himself until his eyes were level with the screen. The glow painted faint lines along his muzzle and jaw, catching on scars he had not noticed forming.
The voice spoke again.
"Subject displays heightened response to non-hostile proximity. This may indicate emergent pack imprinting."
Pack.
The word struck him harder than fire ever had.
Not because he understood it fully—but because the voice did not.
The voice spoke it as a flaw.
As something to be corrected.
"Recommend isolation protocols moving forward."
Fenrik exhaled slowly through his nose.
The air left him hot.
He listened for hours.
Time lost shape inside the vault. The dead sun outside rose and fell without Fenrik noticing. Emergency power flickered, dipped, recovered. The voices continued.
Some logs were clinical—measurements, charts, assessments delivered with practiced detachment.
Others were… conversational.
"If this doesn't stabilize by the next cycle, we'll have to cut losses."
"It's a shame. The adaptive potential is unprecedented."
"Potential doesn't justify liability."
Fenrik learned the cadence of authority.
He learned which voice decided and which voices adapted around it.
He learned which voices hesitated—and how quickly those hesitations were buried.
One log played longer than the others.
The tone was different.
Tighter.
"—sedation administered. Vitals dropping faster than anticipated."
Fenrik felt his muscles tense before he realized why.
"Heart rate unstable. Flame response is—wait—"
Static cracked through the speakers briefly, then cleared.
"We've lost him."
The words landed softly.
Gently.
Like a door being closed with care.
Fenrik's claws dug into the floor, metal groaning faintly beneath the pressure. Fire surged up his arms instinctively, then stilled as he forced it down, deep into his core.
Listen.
He made himself listen.
"Confirm."
"No cardiac activity."
"Log it."
The calm efficiency of it pressed against Fenrik's chest until breathing felt like work.
"Subject expired during sedation. Cause: systemic instability."
A pause.
Paper shuffled.
"Prepare for disposal."
Disposal.
Fenrik's vision darkened at the edges, not from loss of control—but from clarity.
The logs continued.
No grief.
No hesitation.
No acknowledgment that anything of value had been lost.
They spoke of him the way one might speak of a machine that failed calibration. The same voices that had measured his heat and recorded his pain now moved on to other topics.
Budget reallocations.
Personnel transfers.
Next steps.
Fenrik straightened slowly.
The vault felt smaller now.
Not because the walls had moved—but because he understood what had filled them.
He understood that the substance that had healed him during the early cycles—the moments when his body had refused to collapse—had not been mercy.
It had been maintenance.
A way to keep the experiment running long enough to extract more data.
More validation.
Fenrik's gaze fell to the symbols etched repeatedly across the screens.
One sequence appeared again and again.
He traced it with a claw.
Slowly.
Carefully.
The symbols meant nothing to him.
But their repetition did.
They mattered.
They identified.
They labeled.
Fenrik pressed the pattern into memory, copying it onto the dust-coated floor beside the console with the tip of his claw. The motion felt deliberate, ritualistic, as if marking a boundary.
He did not know yet that he had just copied his designation.
Subject 100876.
The last log ended abruptly.
Power dipped.
The screens dimmed, then went dark.
Silence reclaimed the vault.
Fenrik stood alone among dead machines and colder truths, the echoes of voices lingering in the air long after sound had ceased.
He did not destroy the room.
He did not roar.
He turned and walked out slowly, carrying the voices with him—not as wounds, but as records.
Hatred did not burn in him yet.
It settled.
Quiet.
Dense.
Patient.
Fenrik returned to the vault the next day.
And the next.
He did not come with anger.
He came with attention.
The pack waited at the edge of the ruins the first time, uneasy in a place that still smelled of restraint and wrongness. Fenrik went alone, moving through the broken corridors with the steady patience of a hunter learning a new kind of trail.
Knowledge left tracks.
He followed them.
The data vault responded differently now.
Emergency power surged faintly when he entered, as if recognizing a pattern of use. Screens flickered alive more quickly. Audio logs resumed sooner, voices filling the chamber with the same calm certainty as before.
Fenrik sat.
Not crouched.
Not tense.
He sat, back straight, hands resting on his knees, eyes fixed on the screens even though he still could not read a single symbol scrolling across them.
He listened.
At first, the logs blurred together.
Voices overlapped. Dates meant nothing. Technical language passed over him like wind across stone.
But Fenrik was a predator.
And predators learned through pattern.
He noticed repetition.
Certain symbols always appeared before the same voice spoke. Certain tones always preceded moments of decision. Certain pauses—barely audible hesitations—occurred before phrases that ended something.
He began to connect sound to shape.
Not meaning.
Intent.
He scratched marks into the floor with a claw, slow and deliberate.
One symbol beside one voice.
Another beside another.
The vault became a map—not of language, but of behavior.
This voice decided.
This voice complied.
This voice hesitated—and was overruled.
Fenrik learned who mattered.
He learned who did not.
Some logs were personal.
Fenrik did not understand that at first. He only noticed that some voices changed when they thought they were alone.
"I don't like how it looks at us."
"It's just mirroring stress. Don't anthropomorphize it."
"That's easy for you to say."
The second voice always won.
Fenrik memorized that cadence.
One log repeated frequently—an automated diagnostic that played whenever the system rebooted.
"Subject 100876. Status: unstable. Observation ongoing."
Fenrik heard it so often that the rhythm of it began to echo in his chest.
He did not know what the number meant.
But he knew it was him.
The sound landed differently than the others. It carried weight, finality, possession.
He copied the symbols again—this time onto the wall, carving deeper, more carefully.
The act felt important.
Eventually, Fenrik brought the pack.
Not all at once.
One at a time.
He led the first—a quiet wolf who favored listening over action—into the vault and activated a short log. The voice filled the chamber, sharp and clinical.
The wolf's ears flattened.
Fenrik watched carefully.
The wolf did not understand the words either—but the tone translated perfectly. The same wrongness Fenrik had felt the first time surfaced in her posture, in the way her muscles tightened.
Fenrik stopped the log.
He placed a hand on the wall, over the carved symbols.
"Listen," he said.
Not command.
Invitation.
Over the next days, the pack gathered in the vault more often.
They listened to fragments. Never too long at once. Fenrik sensed that too much exposure overwhelmed them, stirred anger without direction.
He controlled the pace.
Discipline, again.
The pack learned which voices carried threat. Which meant pain. Which meant finality.
They did not need to understand why.
They understood what.
Fenrik began to notice something else.
Between the clinical logs were references—passing mentions of substances, procedures, contingencies. Words repeated across different voices.
"Stabilizer."
"Repair compound."
"Emergency bio-regeneration."
Fenrik followed those sounds like scent.
He replayed the logs that included them again and again, committing the cadence to memory. He mapped their appearances against the symbols on screen, searching for overlap.
One cluster stood out.
Always near the same shapes.
Always accompanied by urgency.
He followed that trail deeper into the facility.
Past collapsed labs and sealed doors, into a section the fire had spared only because it had been shielded too well. Here, the air smelled faintly different—cleaner, almost.
Fenrik forced a door open.
Inside lay storage.
Broken crates. Shattered containment units. And—intact.
A single sealed case.
Fenrik approached slowly.
His fire stirred—not with hunger, but recognition.
This place had once kept him alive.
He opened the case carefully.
Inside were vials—clouded, some cracked, others still sealed. The liquid within glowed faintly, shifting color with the light.
Magic Water.
Stabilizers.
Repair compounds.
Fenrik did not need the voices to tell him what these were.
His body answered first.
The fire inside him leaned toward the case, drawn not by desire—but by memory.
He took one vial.
Held it.
Did not drink it.
He understood now.
This was never mercy.
This was never healing.
This was a leash that failed.
Fenrik returned the vial to the case and sealed it again.
He did not destroy the storage.
Not yet.
Knowledge mattered.
He returned to the vault that night and listened again to the log where his death was recorded.
Again.
And again.
Each time, the hatred settled deeper—not loud, not explosive.
Focused.
When Fenrik left the vault that night, the pack followed silently.
Outside, Helios-77 stretched vast and layered beneath the dead sun—ice, forest, ocean, ash.
Fenrik stood at the threshold between ruin and world.
He spoke quietly.
"They made," he said slowly. "Then throw away."
The words were broken.
The meaning was not.
The pack listened.
And remembered.