The hood smelled of old sweat and chemical dust.Miko’s world shrank to the rough fabric against his face, the heat of the bodies carrying him, and the steady jolt of boots descending the slope. The Bond was completely suppressed under the resonance crystal’s field. The absence felt worse than the earlier hunger — a hollow silence where the colorless threads should have been. His ankle dragged uselessly. No one adjusted for it.They reached level ground. The sound around him changed from open wind to the enclosed roar of the works: machinery, pressure vents, the occasional shout distorted by heat and distance. A heavy door opened. Closed. The air grew thicker, hotter, layered with the sharp stink of hot metal and something organic that had been burned too many times.The hood came off.Miko blinked against harsh white-blue light from mana strips set into a low ceiling. He was in a rectangular processing room of black brick and iron plating. Two other children sat on a metal bench alon

Six crystals kept their steady pressure through the night.Miko stopped trying to measure time by the pulses. His world had narrowed to the metal chair, the twisted angle of his ankle, the dry burn in his throat, and the complete absence of the Bond. The suppression field was thorough. Even the memory of the colorless threads felt distant, like something that belonged to a different body.Workers came and went at irregular intervals. They checked readings, made notes, and left without speaking to him. Once a different supervisor entered, studied the slate for a long time, and said to someone outside the door, “Director Hale will want him transferred before the next intake cycle. Keep the field stable. If the take capacity degrades, the value drops.”The door sealed again.Miko kept his eyes open.Somewhere in the same complex the evening intake was already underway. He did not know what the intake looked like. He only knew Kitty had been walked into it, and the deal they had made offe

The lattice above the central table brightened in measured steps. Each increment pressed the suppression field tighter around Miko’s stretcher. The Bond no longer felt simply silent; it felt pinned, forced into a smaller and smaller space inside his chest while the resonance with the girl in the side room pulled in the opposite direction. Blood continued to run from his nose in thin, steady lines. It tracked down his cheeks and pooled in the hollow of his throat. No one wiped it away. In the side room the girl who exhaled smoke arched again as the matching lattice intensified. The glowing lines on her arms spread in branching patterns, bright against scarred skin. The smoke thickening above her face was no longer pale. It carried a faint white edge, as if something inside her was still trying to burn clean and failing. Her eyes had opened. They were fixed on the ceiling of her own room, but every few breaths they flicked sideways toward the observation panel — toward the new boy on

Portable array outside the panel never changed its pulse.Miko sat in the same corner, bad ankle stretched out, dried blood itching along his neck. The suppression field held steady. The Bond stayed buried so deep he could barely feel the shape of it anymore. Thirst had moved past pain into a dry, constant scrape every time he swallowed.He kept his eyes on the cell across the corridor.The girl was gone for a long stretch. When they finally brought her back, she looked worse. Fresh red lines crossed the older burn scars on her arms. The smoke that left her mouth came in shorter, thicker bursts. She curled into the same position as before and stopped moving.Miko watched her for a while, then looked away.Six hours, the director had said.He had no way to measure six hours under the crystals. The mana strips in the ceiling stayed the same cold blue. The only markers were the soft magnetic sounds of panels opening farther down the wing and the occasional scrape of a stretcher.His mind

Mapping sequence lasted longer than the previous tests.Miko kept his eyes closed through most of it. The crystal array pressed the suppression field down in slow, measured waves. Each wave scraped against the Bond and left a thin new line of blood sliding from his nose toward his ear. He stopped trying to wipe it with his shoulder. There was no point.Director Hale spoke at intervals, her voice calm and distant.“Residual structure remains unusually coherent for a maternal-transfer subject.”“Take function is still attempting to reach outward even under full suppression.”“Log the frequency match with Subject 07’s last cycle. There may be usable overlap.”Miko let the words pass over him.The only image he held onto was the small hand that had slipped out from under the sheet. The slightly curled fingers. The dark smudge where a bandage had been.When the array finally dimmed, the sudden drop in pressure left him light-headed. The workers unstrapped him, moved him back to the stretch