The bruises and his limping arm from yesterday are now healed. Luka, in confusion, still has nothing to do except go with Darjan.
Now, as if never hurt, he feels like a new person. The effect of the pain he felt vanished into thin air. Like it never existed. Like he was never hurt from head to toe.
He still felt the pain before the bandages got unwrapped—his mind was playing tricks, or rather, it didn't adjust to his current state.
The pneumatic door hissed as it retracted into the sides of the walls, revealing a corridor that looked less like a hospital and more like the interior of a high-end watch.
They step out of the room and into the halls.
The Camera pulls back into a wide, symmetrical shot. The hallway is a long, tapering triangle of matte-black stone and brushed steel. There are no light bulbs; the edges where the walls meet the floor glow with a soft, pulsing violet hue.
Turning left, Luka is looking around in awe, not being able to believe what he's seeing, still checking down ever so often, still confused by what happened. It shouldn't be possible. Regardless, he moves forward.
"○This isn't a government hospital," Luka thinks, his eyes darting to the reflective floor. "○Not even the private ones have tech that looks like it was stolen from a sci-fi set."
The Camera follows them, tracking their movement as they walk. They pass heavy glass partitions—observation windows.
Inside on of the rooms, three men are standing over a table: one looks like a regular person dressed casually, the two others are in white coats. On the table lies a gun. One of the men in white coats picks the gun up, points it at the regularly dressed person, and opens fire.
Bum-bum—
Two shots are barely heard through the glass. Luka's eyes widen, confused—
"○What the... the fuck?"
The person on the table is bleeding and in pain. He just sits there. The other man in the white coat then comes closer and injects him with a liquid that looks like a mix between violet and green.
Luka, still confused, watches.
But bit by bit, something changes: the bleeding slows down, the wound becomes less visible, and the redness and anguished face he was making get calmer.
Until the wound simply vanishes.
The Camera zooms in tight on the wound, then cuts to Luka's wide, horrified eyes.
"They're experimenting?" Luka's voice is a dry rasp.
Darjan speaks up from in front—
"I told you to keep it moving."
"○Why was I given this task? I thought it would be something more fun." Darjan thinks to himself. "○What a drag."
Luka tears his gaze away and hurries to catch up. Walking further into the halls, the see-through glass rooms only get weirder and weirder.
The Camera cuts to a front-facing shot of the two of them. Luka looks down at his hands. They're still shaking, but the "static" is beginning to thrum again, responding to the high-energy atmosphere of the place.
They reach the end of the long corridor. A massive circular vault door stands before them, engraved with a symbol Luka doesn't recognize—a stylized eye encased in a heavy, geometric gear.
Darjan steps forward. A red laser lattice sweeps over his face.
| | ACCESS GRANTED: SPECIAL AGENT #018 — CLEARANCE LEVEL 1 | |
The heavy circular vault door retracted not in a rotation, but seamlessly into the wall structure, revealing a continued corridor. Wider, taller, and even more intimidating than the one they had just traveled.
The Camera pulls back to a wide, low angle, tracking them as they step through the threshold. The sound is swallowed by the sheer volume of the space. The halls are too wide, the geometric matte-white and gold-trimmed ceiling so high it seems to hold its own weather system.
As the door clears, the "Hospital" section is left behind. They step out onto the glowing floor, mixed with white, gold, and black, sparkling and pleasant to the eye.
"○This isn't a facility," Luka thinks, his eyes tracking the endless lines of the architecture. "○It's a top notch secret facility. A city, hidden from the public eye."
The Camera now follows them from a high altitude, a sweeping crane shot, only able to see the top of their heads, that emphasizes how small they look in the vastness.
They pass more massive glass partitions.
Through the first, a hangar-sized space. Hundreds of analysts are seated at curved workstations, monitoring data streams across monolithic LED screens. The room feels dedicated, complex, yet secondary compared to the journey.
The Camera is tracking them from behind as they walk through the gargantuan, white-and-gold hallway. The scale is immense, but Luka's world is suddenly shrinking. The anesthesia is wearing off, leaving a hollow, aching void in his chest. His pace slows. His eyes, which were darting around at the technology, now fixate on nothing.
Flashback Cut, quick 0.5s frames.
His mom laughing and saying dinner's ready. His dad grunting at the TV. Max, the dog, whining before the stairs.
Luka stops dead in the center of the hall. The camera overshoots him, then pans back quickly to capture his pale face.
"Wait," Luka whispers.
Darjan continues for two more steps before stopping. He doesn't turn around. "We're on a schedule, Luka."
"My parents," Luka's voice hitches. "They... they must be losing their minds. It's been—how long? Ten hours? A day? More? I need to go. I need to call them. I need to get out of here!"
Luka spins around, his sneakers squeaking sharply against the polished floor. He starts to bolt back toward the hospital wing, his movements frantic and uncoordinated.
"MOVE!" Luka yells at a passing technician.
Suddenly, a wall of black fabric blocks his path.
THUMP—
Luka hits Darjan's chest like he ran into a mountain. Before he can recoil, Darjan's massive hand clamps onto Luka's shoulder. It's not a violent grip; it's the grip of a man with a lead.
"Let go! They're probably calling the police! They think I'm kidnapped or -"
"Luka. Calm. Down," Darjan's voice is a low rumble that vibrates through Luka's bones.
Luka struggles for a second, then slumps, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "Are they... are they okay?"
Darjan sighs, finally letting go of the shoulder but staying close. "They're fine. They're safe in their home. They have no idea about anything that happened, and they never will. We've handled the narrative."
Luka wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead, a small sigh of relief escaping him. "Okay... okay. So they think I'm just staying at a friend's house? Or I'm in the hospital for a 'fainting spell'?"
Darjan looks at him with a completely deadpan expression.
"No. We told them you died."
The Camera stays perfectly still in a Wide Shot.
Silence.
One second...
Two seconds...
Three seconds...
Luka's head tilts slightly. "Huh...?"
"It was the cleanest way to sever the connection," Darjan adds, as if he's talking about the weather.
Luka's eyes go wide, his jaw literally dropping.
"HUUUUHHHHHHH!?" Luka's voice cracks, echoing through the 50-foot ceilings. "ARE YOU FOR REAL!? YOU KILLED ME!? I'M STANDING RIGHT HERE!"
Luka starts waving his arms around like a madman. "You can't just—you can't just DEATH me! That's permanent! My mom is going to have a heart attack! My dad is—oh my god, Max is going to think I'm gone forever!"
"It was for the best," Darjan says, his tone suddenly snapping back to a sharp, icy professional.
Luka, not listening, continues to flare his hands and panic, trying to get past Darjan.
He grabs Luka by the collar—not to hurt him, but to force him to calm down.
"Look at this place, kid. Remember what happened out there. Think for a second. You think you can just go back to high school? You think you can sit at the dinner table with that uncontrollable unknown you've awakened? Listen, I know how you feel; I've been there, even when I was younger than you."
Luka freezes. The image of the creature's splitting, jagged mouth appears in his mind, positioned right in his own living room. Images of the side of his bed crushed and the bathroom sink running rampant flash through his mind. The anger drains out of him, replaced by a cold, heavy realization.
"I... I.. I can't go back," Luka whispers.
"Not yet," Darjan's voice softens just a fraction. He lets go of the collar. "Until you have a grip on what you are—until you can mask that scent—staying 'dead' is the only thing keeping things stable. It's temporary. But for now, Luka, you belong to the shadows. It's a small price to pay for salvation."
"...Fine. You make sense. But I'm not gonna sleep on the fact and take it for granted."
Darjan actually lets out a short, dry chuckle. "Fair enough. Now, move. Time's wasting."
As both continue to walk through the vast space of this mysterious place, they reach the end of the monumental hall, a high-speed elevator bank waiting. Darjan steps forward, another iris scan.
| | ACCESS GRANTED: SPECIAL AGENT #018 | |
The elevator doors split. They step inside. The vertical journey is near-silent, marked only by the blur of the matte-gray layers flashing past the reinforced glass.
Up. Up. Up. Up.
The de-compression pressure is physical, a constant popping in Luka's ears.
The doors slide open.
The scale of the room is staggering. It's a subterranean hollow, the size of a small village, carved directly into the bedrock.
Thousands of monitors line the far walls, flickering with satellite feeds, thermal maps, and scrolling strings of data. People in dark uniforms move with purpose, navigating rows of high-tech consoles.
In the center of the room, suspended by massive carbon-fiber cables, is a colossal holographic globe of the Earth. It's covered in hundreds of small, pulsing red dots.
They are in a secure tactical command room—high-tech consoles, analysts in dark uniforms, the central holographic globe pulsing with the blue Earth and its red dots.
They approach the globe. The Camera is positioned at a close 3/4 angle, following them as they stop by the central monitor.
Luka leans against a console for support, staring at the map.
The Camera pulls in tight on his wide, dazed expression, then to the pulsing red dots on the blue sphere.
"Those dots..." Luka whispers. "Those are... them. The Darkins."
"Not quite. It's activity," Darjan says, his voice heavy. "The dots aren't the Darkins themselves but rather the places known where they appear. They appear everywhere; the dots mark where they're most active."
"I see... so Europe. That's where I see most of the dots." Luka asks.
"Correct. Out of the whole planet, they are mostly on this continent." Darjan answers.
"Listen..." Darjan's voice lowers and gets a little serious, cutting the chit-chat. "You are about to be pulled into something you need to be ready for."
He steps back, allowing the central tactical command room and the Globe to fill Luka's vision.
"Welcome..."
He pauses, the weight of the moment hanging in the air. As the word is uttered.
VVZZZZTTT—
The tactical room environment begins to flicker. The high-tech consoles, the matte-white walls, even the analysts begin to dissolve into digital static.
"...to The Organization."
On the final word, the holographic transition completes. The secure computer room and all its details vanish.
Luka and Darjan are standing on a massive, curved, open half-ball shape observation deck—a hemisphere platform integrated into the highest point of a monumental monolithic structure.
The transformation leaves them standing on a high-altitude catwalk, a dizzying drop on all sides. The Command Room they were in is now revealed as just a single, internal chamber of this giant open observation deck.
The air is cold, sharp. Luka clutches the railing, looking out into the sudden vastness.
Darjan doesn't look back, framing his back against the open vista revealed by the holograph. He spreads his arms slightly.