**Location:** Site-09, Medical Wing → Psychic Evaluation Room
**Time:** 04:23 AM
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The med-tech's nitrile gloves snapped like overstretched rubber bands as she peeled them away. "No cerebral contusions. No neural degradation." She tilted the vial of my blood between her fingers, the thick, oil-slick liquid inside clinging to the glass in languid swirls that moved just slightly too slow to be natural. "But this..." She tapped the glass, making the dark substance shiver. "This isn't standard hemorraging."
I dug my nails into the exam table's padded edges, the cold vinyl biting through my fatigues. The nosebleed had stopped, but my skull throbbed with the aftermath—a deep, insistent ache like someone had taken a scalpel to the sutures of my parietal bone and pried them apart.
Across the room, Director Cale watched from the shadows near the doorframe, his tailored suit absorbing the fluorescent light. "Explain the feedback event," he said, his voice smooth as the glass observation panels in N-01's chamber.
I opened my mouth—
*—a scream that wasn't mine tore through my frontal lobe—*
*—the scent of burning copper and wet cement filled my sinuses—*
*—somewhere beyond the walls of the world, something that wore a boy's face turned its head—*
I choked, doubling over as black-tinged saliva dripped from my lips. The droplets hit the steel floor with tiny, resonant pings, each one leaving behind a perfect circle of frosted glass where the metal had transmuted under their touch.
"That," I gasped, wiping my mouth with the back of a trembling hand, "is what happens when you try to read something that only remembers how to look human."
---
Interrogation Room 4 smelled of stale coffee grounds and the acrid tang of fear-sweat trapped in synthetic fibers. The two-way mirror showed me a hollowed-out version of myself—pale skin stretched too tight over sharp cheekbones, dark circles like bruises beneath bloodshot eyes.
Lieutenant Veyra's combat boots tapped a staccato rhythm against the reinforced flooring. "Subject exhibited immediate biometric response to Virelle's psychic signature within 0.3 seconds of contact." She slapped a holofile onto the steel table, the projection shimmering to life with footage of N-01's chamber. "First ocular movement in 287 hours of observation."
*Unauthorized probe.* My fingers twitched against my thighs. Like I'd willingly stuck my hand into a woodchipper just to see if it would hurt.
Dr. Renis adjusted his wire-frame glasses, the lenses flashing opaque under the harsh lights. "The containment chamber's quantum stabilization field fluctuated by exactly 12.7% during the incident." His bony finger tapped the holofile, zooming in on the warped glass. "Most concerning is the residual effect—the null-steel isn't just bent. It remembers being bent."
Cale's polished nails drummed a funeral march against the tabletop. "Here's what we've ascertained, Virelle. N-01 appears human. His skin thermoregulates. His chest rises and falls in perfect mimicry of respiration. When cut, he bleeds red." The director leaned forward, his cologne—expensive sandalwood and something faintly antiseptic—washing over me. "But peel back that pretty biological mask, and there's... nothing. No soul signature. No psychic resonance. Just an event horizon wearing a teenager's face."
The lights flickered. The hologram distorted. For one terrible instant, all our shadows stretched toward the door like plants reaching for sunlight.
No one reacted.
---
The psychic evaluation chamber hummed with the subsonic whine of dampeners kicking in. The walls were lined with hexagonal panels of obsidian alloy, each one etched with containment sigils that made my molars vibrate.
"Full-spectrum resistance test," the technician droned, securing the neural monitors to my temples. The conductive gel beneath the electrodes burned like dry ice against my skin. "We need to establish your new baseline after exposure."
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper. *Exposure.* Such a clinical term for having your mind's foundation pried open by something that wore humanity like a cheap suit two sizes too small.
The machine awakened with a chorus of chirps and whirrs.
*—a whisper in the white noise between heartbeats—*
My head snapped up violently enough to tear a monitor pad free. The tech frowned at his scrolling diagnostics.
"Readings show abnormal theta wave activity. Are you experiencing—"
*—the scent of ozone and forgotten graves—*
*—the pressure of a thousand eyes opening in the dark—*
Then the lights died.
In the perfect black, something cold and infinite brushed against the edges of my consciousness—
*"You look exhausted, little oracle."*
N-01's voice. Not in my ears. In the marrow of my bones. In the spaces between my cells. In a tone so perfectly, horrifyingly human it made my stomach clench.
The emergency lights stuttered on with a sound like breaking glass.
The room was empty.
The technician lay sprawled on the floor, his monitors screaming. From his nose and ears, thin tendrils of black smoke curled upward, forming shapes that hurt to look at before dissipating.
---
Cale intercepted me outside the decontamination airlock, his cufflinks gleaming like surgical tools under the flickering fluorescents.
"Effective immediately," he said, his voice carefully neutral, "you're being reassigned."
I stared at the security team flanking him—their pulse rifles modified with silvered barrels and strange, pulsing runes carved into the stocks.
"To what?" My voice sounded alien to my own ears, distorted as if coming from deep underwater.
His smile was a scalpel's edge. "N-01's primary observer."
The corridor tilted. The realization struck with the force of a head-on collision: *They'd never been studying him.* The containment protocols, the observation logs, the entire damned facility—
*They were conducting an experiment.*
And I was both lab rat and sacrificial lamb.
Somewhere deep in Site-09's substructure, the infrastructure groaned like a living thing. The vibration traveled up through the floor, into my bones, settling in my teeth like the aftershock of distant artillery.
For one terrible moment, I could have sworn I heard laughter echoing through the ventilation shafts—laughter in a voice that knew exactly how to sound human.
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