2025-08-24 02:23:34The lights in the chamber dimmed.
Not because someone adjusted them—but because Facility 9 was designed to mimic circadian rhythm, as though sleep was possible in a place like this.
Shayne sat cross-legged in the center of the room, back straight, palms on his knees.
He had bled from one ear earlier. The ringing hadn’t stopped.
But that wasn’t what disturbed him.
It was the voice.
Not a hallucination. Not like before.
This had weight. Texture. Like someone had spoken directly into his soul.
And it said his name.
He kept still. Silent.
But the voice came again.
“Shayne…”
A whisper. Female. Familiar, somehow, though he couldn’t place it. Soft like wind through a chapel door.
“Who are you?” he whispered aloud.
No response.
Just silence.
And then, faintly:
“You were never alone.”
⸻
In a surveillance chamber four levels above, Elysia Vorn sat behind a curved glass wall, watching him.
The chamber labeled Sector 7 was live.
Feed from his cell flickered in front of her. Shayne hadn’t spoken in nearly four hours — except that brief whisper.
She had tried to amplify the audio, scrub the playback, isolate a second voice.
But there was nothing.
Just his voice. Just his silence.
“Either I’m losing my mind,” she muttered, “or he’s hearing something we can’t.”
A technician beside her glanced up. “Facility Nine has audio shielding,” he said. “Any sonic interference wouldn’t register here unless it was coming from our end.”
“But it’s not,” Elysia said, narrowing her eyes. “And he’s responding to it.”
Her datapad pinged.
NEW DIRECTIVE — Subject Transfer: Chamber 3 to Mind-Harvest Pod 1.
Supervising: Dr. Marin Hale.
Assistants: Riven. Vorn.
She blinked.
They were pulling her into the next phase.
She looked back at Shayne, then at the blackened glass surrounding her.
Something about this wasn’t protocol.
It felt…personal.
⸻
Back in Shayne’s cell, the air shifted. The white light brightened without source.
He stood, slow and steady.
His breath fogged, though the temperature hadn’t changed.
Then the voice came again — stronger now.
“You’re not in their hands, Shayne. Not entirely.”
He closed his eyes. His hands trembled, but he didn’t sit down.
“Tell me who you are,” he said again, aloud.
This time, the voice didn’t echo in his ears.
It echoed from within.
“I was taken too. Once. Long before you. But I was not forgotten.”
Shayne opened his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
A pause.
Then: “Look beneath.”
His gaze dropped to the floor.
At first, there was nothing but clean glass — flawless, clinical.
But then, beneath the corner where the console had zapped him earlier, something glinted.
He knelt, pressed his thumb to the glass.
A mark.
Carved faintly. So faint, it could’ve been mistaken for a scratch.
Three intersecting lines. A shape. A symbol he hadn’t seen since the night his father disappeared.
He whispered, “The Brand of the Watcher.”
Before he could think further, the wall slid open behind him.
Guards entered.
“Stand,” one barked.
Shayne didn’t resist.
They cuffed him and led him out — past sterile halls, silent tech, and reinforced doors.
Eventually, they entered a long white corridor ending in two vault-like doors marked:
MIND HARVESTING: SECTOR ONE
He was pushed inside.
⸻
Dr. Marin Hale stood waiting, hands clasped behind her back. Riven loomed to her right, armored and unreadable.
Elysia stood across the room. Her eyes flicked to Shayne’s — but her face remained stoic.
“You’ve shown remarkable resistance,” Dr. Hale began, circling Shayne like a curator examining a rare artifact. “But let’s see how much of that endurance holds up… under memory dissection.”
She tapped a console, and a suspended chair descended from the ceiling. A dozen neural nodes dangled from above like silk-covered needles.
Shayne didn’t move.
Hale nodded to Riven.
“Strap him in.”
As they moved him, Shayne glanced at Elysia again. Her jaw clenched, but she said nothing.
The chair hissed as the nodes latched onto Shayne’s temples, spine, wrists.
“You won’t break me,” he said.
Dr. Hale smiled. “I don’t need to break you. I just need to find the moment that did.”
Then, softly: “Begin harvest.”
⸻
The lights dimmed.
The nodes pulsed blue.
And Shayne’s mind… slipped.
He saw flashes — not from memory, but outside of it. Not dreams. Not nightmares.
A woman with silver eyes, walking through fire.
A child with his face, standing before a cathedral, singing in a language he’d never learned.
And a shadowed figure in black, whispering:
“You will choose the gate or the flame.”
He gasped.
Then screamed.
Then…
Darkness.
In the surveillance booth, Elysia stared at the neural scan.
Suddenly, the feed glitched.
A dark screen. Then static. Then—
A symbol burned into the display. Three intersecting lines.
Her heart stopped.
Because she had seen it once before.
In her brother’s journal.
Before he vanished.
Before they told her it was suicide.
And scrawled beneath the symbol, in Shayne’s voice, was a whisper through the static:
“You were never meant to forget.”
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