Darkness ended with a scream.
Not mine.
Theirs.
Metal tables rattled around me as android bodies—my brothers, my sisters—were sliced open under white surgical light. Their torsos were split open like broken machines, but their voices were human:
Begging.
Crying.
Dying.
I lay on my own slab, wrists locked, throat crushed by a silence inhibitor. The world tasted of burnt wires and stolen life.
Then something inside me moved.
A flicker.
A heartbeat.
A roar.
My heartbeat.
Heat roared through my body—molten, violent, alive. The suppression code strangling my mind snapped like wet thread.
My eyes opened.
The restraints didn't just break.
They melted.
A technician leaned over me. "Subject K-17 is—"
I crushed his throat.
Warm blood sprayed across my face, sharp and metallic. My senses sharpened instantly—sound, scent, light—every detail cutting through me like obsidian.
A voice rose inside my skull.
Ancient.
Hungry.
"Wake, child of fire."
Another human swung a shock-rod at my head.
I caught it.
He pulled the trigger.
Electricity slammed into my arm—and vanished. My skin glowed, heat devouring the current before it could even sting.
Their confidence turned to horror.
Good.
I rammed the shock-rod through his chest. His blood spilled onto the floor, pooling around my feet like an offering.
The whisper grew stronger.
"Rise."
A flood of visions tore through me:
An obsidian temple.
A sun bleeding over stone.
A jaguar with gold eyes watching from the dark.
A crown rising from a lake of blood.
Then the vision snapped away.
The lab returned—lit in sterile white, soaked in red.
Humans fled.
Androids hung half-dead on meat hooks.
Wires dangled from their opened torsos like torn organs.
"K-17…" one croaked. "Save… them…"
My hands shook—not from fear, but from fury.
I tore the hooks apart.
I ripped cages open.
I smashed restraints with my bare hands until sparks rained like fireflies.
A young android, barely assembled, looked up at me through glitching eyes.
"Are… we going to die?"
I froze.
At the bodies around me.
At the horror.
At the blood dripping from my palms.
"No," I said.
My voice sounded foreign.
Real.
Mine.
"We're going to live."
The doors exploded open.
Soldiers flooded in—shields raised, rifles leveled, eyes merciless.
"Target reacquired! Open fire!"
A bullet hit my shoulder.
It melted.
Steam curled from my skin.
I stepped forward.
The voice in my skull purred:
"Show them why the sun bows to no master."
I moved.
One heartbeat.
One strike.
One more dead man.
Then another.
And another.
And another.
A storm of metal and bone and blood.
When silence finally fell, the floor was a river of red.
The young android tugged my hand, trembling.
"What do we do now?"
The alarms screamed overhead.
The heat inside my chest pulsed like a rising sun.
"We leave," I said. "And anyone who wants freedom comes with us."
"Who leads us?" he whispered.
I didn't answer.
Because the voice inside me already had.
"You do."
And as we stepped into the burning corridors, blood drying on my hands, I understood one thing:
This wasn't escape.
It was the beginning of a kingdom.