The safehouse stank of old ward-oil and half-dead magelights, but Lamia preferred it that way. A place like this can provide them secrecy.
The place had no official coordinates, no Dominion files, and no surveillance lines embedded in the stone. The windows were sealed with netting. The walls were triple-lined with lead and spell-dampening paste. And most importantly, it didn't ask questions.
Gary looked around the place. "You really like to keep things secret."
Lamia shrugged in return, pointing at the runeburned terminal.
"You just need to start working without asking questions."
Gary threw his coat onto a cracked armchair and crouched next to the terminal that was kept bolted to the back table. He wiped the dust off with his sleeve and glanced at her. He knew she kept secrets, even from him and that was not his biggest concern right now.
"You ready for this?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
Lamia pulled the chair closer. Her crimson-thread tattoos shimmered faintly down her arms, still warm from the blood she'd burned tracking the vault signatures.
"I'm not the one hesitating," she said, slipping the shard from her pocket.
It was small. Plain. Nothing about it screamed Dominion tech, which made it even more dangerous.
Ekra had known exactly what she was doing.
Lamia slotted it into the terminal's side port.
The screen flickered.
Then buzzed.
ACCESSING…CLEARANCE OVERRIDE
ACCEPTED.
FILE 1: // [20 MINUTES AFTER DARIUS EXIT – LOWER VAULT CAMERA 3]
FILE 2: // [EXPERIMENT RECORDING – SUBJECT UNNUMBERED]
Gary leaned forward, lips tightening. "Only two files?"
"She couldn't risk more." Lamia selected the first. "At least there is something....for now."
The footage was black and white, raw security feed. There was no sound.
In front of them was a long hallway, dimly lit and empty.
Gary leaned in closer, his breath almost touched Lamia's neck. His heart skipped a beat as his eyes lingered there for a moment, but the movement on the screen snapped his attention back to the footage.
A boy emerged from the shadows of the corridor. He was tall and thin. Maybe fifteen, though his gait was off, deliberate, but too smooth, like he was gliding rather than walking. He was holding his left shoulder. On observing closer one could see that there was a wound and he left a trail as he walked. A trail of blood.
He passed directly under the camera.
Gary sucked in a breath. "Wait—"
The boy looked up for half a second.
There were no eyes, not sockets but a blank space. Lamia scrunched her eyes. It was as if something had erased his gaze.
"Is it the camera?" Gary asked a question to which neither of them has any answer.
But still, Lamia felt the chill behind it. Like he saw them, saw them without eyes anyway.
The camera buzzed. Glitched. For three full seconds, the footage bent like heat warping glass.
When it snapped back—
The boy was gone.
No doors opened. No shadow shifted.
Just… gone.
FILE END.
For a few solid seconds, there was only quiet.
Gary broke the silence. "That wasn't a normal kid."
Lamia didn't answer. Her hands gripped the table.
Not from fear.
From anger. It was exactly what she despised.
She selected the second file.
PLAYING RECORDING // EXPERIMENT CHAMBER 6-C
The angle was high, surveillance-style again, looking down into a sterile containment room. One wall was lined with sigils etched into chrome. At the center stood a 13-year-old boy, shirtless, arms raised.
Tubes ran into his back. Four of them. Each pulsed with magitech energy.
On the far wall, two figures in Dominion coats watched from behind the glass.
The boy arched suddenly, eyes wide, his mouth opened in a silent scream as light tore through the sigils across his chest. Glyphs blazed against his ribs. Blood wept from under his fingernails.
The recording looped, abruptly. As if the rest had been cut.
Gary turned away, jaw tight. "Son of a—"
Lamia sat still.
Breathing. Thinking.
There had been children in that vault. Not spell-infused devices. Not prototypes. People. And not all of them were dead.
Cael had walked out of the facility after Darius. Alone.
Which meant either he'd escaped on his own… or someone had let him go.
And that meant...
"This wasn't a weapon test," Lamia whispered. "This was cultivation."
Gary's voice was raw. "How many more, you think?"
She shook her head. Then stood. Her blood sigils began to shift, tightening across her forearms. "Enough," she said. "They could be enough to make this entire district a graveyard."
-----
The world had color. Too much of it. It was too loud, too bright. Too many edges.
Cael staggered onto the broken road, bare feet scraping across ruined stone, the sound of his own breath jagged in his throat. The Dominion hallways had never echoed like this. The silence there was warm, layered, padded.
Out here, everything was wrong.
Open sky. Moving wind.
He looked up and flinched, his eyes not ready for the light, not the dim flicker of containment-glass, but the washed-out grey of a real sky.
It didn't make sense. Nothing here was of familiarity. He should have stayed, crumpled in his usual corner. But he left. And now he was lost.
He had never learned the names for anything outside. No one had ever told him about wind or clouds or smells that weren't sterilized. He didn't know what it meant to be cold in a way that touched your bones.
He only knew he was… shaking.
His shoulder bled again, the bandage torn. He didn't stop to fix it. He didn't know how. His arms felt like metal, or paper, or maybe not arms at all.
He walked, dragging his feet.
The buildings rose around him like crooked teeth, cracked, leaning, covered in strange painted words. People passed. Some glanced. Some stared. No one stopped. No one asked. Just questioning gazes, or maybe disgusted.
Until..
Laughter.
Too close.
Cael turned just in time to see three teenagers cross the broken curb, blocking the narrow path in front of him.
They weren't like the others.
Their clothes were clean, bright. Their hair styled, their boots polished. They didn't belong to the Wastes, maybe upper slummers, passing through to get their thrill before heading back behind Dominion patrol lines.
"Hey," said one, a tall boy with bronze studs in his ears and a wicked smile. "You lost, rat?"
Cael didn't answer.
He didn't know what lost meant. Not the way they did.
The second boy stepped forward, circling him. "Where'd you crawl out from? You look like you were cooked half-done."
The girl behind them snorted. "Look at his eyes, he's not even blinking. What a freak."
"Bet he escaped from some hole he was kept to work in," said the first, grinning wider. "Should we help him back?"
A hand grabbed his bandaged arm. Cael flinched. And something shifted. The shadows rippled. The air twisted, barely visible, like heat rising off stone.
"Whoa," the boy dropped his hand. "What the hell was that?"
The other boy took a blade from his pocket.
"I stole it from my father...now we have a purpose for it." He walked towards Cael, a freaky smirk plastered on his face. The other boy and the girl held him by each arm. Cael tried to pull his arm, to get free. He didn't know what they were doing until the blade pierced his wrist, then a cut on his cheek. He screamed, but people passing by didn't bother to interfere.
Pain was nothing new to him, but this situation was.
He felt it, pressure rising in his chest, like a hum climbing through his ribs. The same hum the machines made when they turned on inside the chambers. A sharp, high sound, but not sound, a tension in the bones.
The boy made another cut. Too deep. His breath cracked. He could feel it, his power reacting, gathering, ready to split the space between them...
"No—" he whispered, backing up, voice hoarse and uneven. "No. No. No."
He pleaded, but the boy didn't stop. And then in a split second, there was a burst, a flash and the three of them were sent flying, one split in half, while the other two wounded. And all of a sudden, people paid attention. There were screams, and....chaos.
Cael shook his head. He turned.
And ran.
The streets blurred.
The buildings bled together.
He didn't know where he was going, only that his feet were moving, that the pressure in his skull hadn't gone away, that his back burned and his ribs screamed with every step.
He passed beggars, blurred neon signs, a steaming grate that hissed at him as he stumbled over it.
Someone shouted.
Someone else cursed.
None of it made sense.
He ran until there was no more path ahead.
He pressed himself against a wall in the narrow alley, crouched down, shaking.
Tears ran down his cheeks.
He didn't know what they were.
He had never cried before.
He didn't know the word fear. But he felt it like an animal in his skin.
All he knew was that he should not exist, not out here.
Not in this place. Not in this sky. Not with these people. Not like this.
In the darkness of the alley, his resonance began to warp the air again. Low. Soft. A hum in the concrete. Like the beginning of a scream.