The corridor stretched on, a grey throat swallowing him whole.
Beta-79 walked. The rhythm of his steps was the only clock he had left. Clack. Clack. Clack. The sound was hollow, swallowed by the dampening panels lining the walls, but inside his head, it was a thunderclap.
The blood on his thumb had begun to dry. It was tacky now, darkening from a vibrant crimson to a rust-brown smear against his pale skin. He rubbed it against the side of his index finger again, a microscopic rebellion. The friction generated heat. Heat was energy. Energy was proof of life.
"Move," the guard behind him grunted. A prod of the baton against the small of his back. Not a strike, just a reminder. "Schedule adherence is dropping."
Beta-79 didn't flinch. His body felt distant, wrapped in the Ovis-fleece numbness of the chemical suppressant Veres had pumped into his veins. But while the drug dulled the pain of the soul-drain, it did nothing to dull the senses. If anything, the emptiness inside him—the void where his mana used to be—acted as an echo chamber, amplifying the world around him.
The air changed first.
They were leaving the sterile, ozone-scrubbed vacuum of the Beta Sector. The blast doors ahead were marked with a different sigil: a stylized, twisting helix.
Gamma.
The doors parted with a heavy, wet hydraulic hiss, like a beast exhaling.
The smell hit him instantly. It was thick enough to taste—a cloying, humid soup of copper, cauterized meat, and the sharp, acidic tang of industrial solvent. It smelled like a slaughterhouse that had been scrubbed with ammonia but couldn't quite hide the rot beneath the floorboards.
Beta-79's stomach clenched. The nausea was a reflex, a phantom rejection of what lay ahead.
"Sector transfer authorized," a robotic voice announced from the ceiling. "Bio-hazard protocols in effect."
They stepped through.
The lighting here was different. Gone was the blinding, clinical white of the Syphon Wing. The Gamma Sector was bathed in a low, amber heavy-light, designed to reduce stress on the volatile Animatia grafts housed within the subjects. It gave everything a jaundiced, sickly cast. Shadows stretched long and distorted against the walls.
To his right, a row of observation windows looked into the "Forges"—the surgical bays where the Director's vision was carved into flesh.
Beta-79 kept his eyes forward, fixed on the grey plating of the guard's armor in front of him. Don't look, the Control voice whispered. Observation implies interest. Interest implies cognizance. Cognizance is a liability.
But then, a sound cut through the hum of the machinery.
It was a sound that had no place in a world of steel and logic. It was a wet, tearing noise, followed by a low, guttural whimper that vibrated with a frequency of pure agony.
Beta-79's head turned. He couldn't stop it. The reflex was faster than the discipline.
Through the thick, reinforced glass of Bay 4, he saw him.
Unit Gamma-79.
He was strapped to a table similar to the one Beta-79 had just vacated, but where the Syphon chair was clean and restrained, this table was a chaotic mess of restraints, articulated mechanical arms, and blood-gutters.
Gamma-79 was small. Younger than Beta. Maybe thirteen grand cycles. His frame was slight, the ribs visible beneath the thin, sweat-drenched infirmary gown. But it was his right arm that drew the eye and held it in a horrified trance.
The limb was no longer an arm. It was a warzone of biology.
The flesh from the elbow down had been stripped away or consumed. In its place was a roiling, unstable mass of muscle fiber and dark, chitinous plating that shifted and rippled like oil on water. The Metamorphoun sigil on his shoulder was glowing a violent, sickly orange—pulsing not with a steady rhythm, but in erratic, spasming bursts.
Three figures in white coats surrounded him. They weren't doctors. Doctors healed. These were sculptors working in a medium of bone and agony.
One of them held a device that looked like a soldering iron, the tip glowing with a containment rune.
"Graft rejection in the ulnar nerve," the scientist said. His voice was muffled by the glass but audible through the comms-grate. "The Kyn-form DNA is fighting the host's marrow. Cauterize it."
"No," Gamma-79 gasped. It wasn't a scream. He didn't have the breath for a scream. It was a plea whispered to a god that didn't exist in this subterranean hell.
The scientist pressed the iron into the shifting mass of the boy's arm.
Steam hissed up—white and thick. The smell of burning protein flooded the corridor, overpowering the ammonia.
Gamma-79 bucked against the straps. His back arched so violently that Beta-79 heard the crack of a vertebrae popping even through the glass. The unstable flesh on his arm writhed, shooting out jagged spurs of bone that grew and dissolved in seconds. A claw—long, black, and serrated, like that of a Sledeulv—erupted from where his fingers should have been, scratched frantically at the steel table, and then melted back into a slurry of red muscle.
Beta-79 stopped walking.
The guard behind him shoved him, hard. "Eyes front, Unit."
Beta-79 planted his feet. He felt the vibration of Gamma-79's scream in the floor grating. It traveled up his legs, bypassing the dampener in his blood, and struck the empathy center of his brain like a hammer.
He is destabilizing, Beta-79 analyzed. The data flooded his mind, unbidden. The dual sigil resonance is off-key. The Tenebrae aspect is feeding the shadow of the pain, but the Metamorphoun is trying to rewrite the nervous system to accommodate the trauma. He can't hold the shape. He's going to break.
Inside the bay, Gamma-79 turned his head. His face was a mask of sweat and tears, the veins in his neck standing out like cords.
For a second, their eyes met.
Gamma-79's eyes were wide, the pupils blown so large they swallowed the iris. There was no recognition in them at first. Just the blind, Animatia panic of a creature caught in a trap. But as he saw Beta-79 standing there—standing safe, whole, and watching—the panic shifted.
It became a question.
Why?
The silence between them was louder than the machinery. It was a heavy, accusing weight.
Beta-79 felt a phantom sensation in his left hand—the Infusus sigil. Even drained, even hollowed out by Veres, the instinct flared. He could feel the toxicity radiating off Gamma-79. The chaotic, burning mana that was tearing the boy's body apart. If Beta touched the glass... if he just focused... he could pull it. He could siphon the instability. He could take the pain into himself, ground it, and let the boy breathe.
It would hurt. It would burn him like acid. But it would stop the screaming.
His hand twitched at his side. The fingers uncurled.
Do it, a voice whispered. Not the Control voice. The other one. The one that liked the smile of the cleaning girl.
"I said move!" The guard's baton cracked against Beta-79's shoulder blade. A jolt of electricity zapped through his trapezius, locking the muscle.
Beta-79 gasped, the breath hissing through his teeth. The physical pain snapped the connection. The world narrowed back down to the corridor, the guard, and the order.
He looked at Gamma-79 one last time.
The boy in the glass box slumped back, the cauterization complete for the moment. The arm lay steaming on the table, a grotesque lump of blackened meat and glistening scales. Gamma-79 stared at it. He looked at the limb attached to his own body as if it were a parasite that had burrowed into him while he slept. A look of profound, devastating betrayal.
Beta-79 closed his hand into a fist, hiding the Infusus mark.
Inefficiency, he told himself. The word tasted like ash. To intervene is to disrupt the test. Disruption leads to punishment. Punishment leads to damage. Damage lowers utility.
He turned his head forward.
"Moving," Beta-79 said. His voice was a dry croak.
He forced his legs to lift. Clack. Clack. Clack.
He walked away. He left Gamma-79 in the amber light, strapped to the altar of evolution. He walked away because he was Number 79, and Number 79 was a survivor, not a savior.
But as he crossed the threshold from Gamma sector toward the Alpha containment zones, the image of that melting, shifting arm burned behind his eyelids. He could still feel the phantom weight of the other boy's pain pressing against his skin, sticky and hot.
He rubbed his bloody thumb against his finger again. Harder this time. Rubbing until the dried blood flaked off and the skin underneath turned raw.
I am the Control, he thought, the mantra feeling flimsy and rotten. I am the wall.
But walls cracked. And as the smell of burning flesh faded behind him, replaced by the smell of ozone and kinetic discharge from the Alpha sector, Beta-79 realized with a terrifying clarity that he wasn't the wall.
He was just another brick in the oven.
The guard shoved him toward a lift at the end of the hall. "Mess hall. Fifteen minutes. Nutrients only. No socializing."
Beta-79 stepped into the lift. The doors slid shut, cutting off the view of the hallway, cutting off the screams that had started up again.
He stood in the silence of the ascending car. He was alone.
He looked at his reflection in the polished steel of the door. The hollow eyes. The grey tunic. The number stenciled on his chest.
You let him scream, the reflection seemed to say.
Beta-79 didn't answer. He just watched the floor numbers tick upward, waiting for the bell that would tell him it was time to eat, time to regenerate, time to prepare to be drained again.
One cycle at a time.
The lift chimed.
Ding.
Sector 4. The Mess Hall.
The doors opened, and the smell of boiled grains and synthetic protein washed over him, masking the lingering scent of the Flesh Forge. But it couldn't mask the memory. The memory was etched now, scarred into his mind just as surely as the runes were carved into the blast doors.
He stepped out, deeper into the dark.