2025-08-24 02:22:27The blindfold scratched against Shayne’s skin.
Synthetic cloth. Not military standard. Designed for psychological discomfort.
He couldn’t move—arms bound, legs pinned by magnetic restraints. He could hear the low hum of a transport drone. The air smelled sterile, overly recycled. Every few seconds, he caught a faint whiff of ozone—like the scent of an old electric burn.
A voice crackled overhead: “Arrival in T-minus one minute. Welcome to Facility Nine.”
So it was real.
Not a rumor. Not a myth whispered by prisoners through the walls of Zone Zero. It existed—and now, it waited for him.
The pod shuddered. Landed.
Boots approached.
Rough hands dragged him forward. Through a scanner. Through a long corridor. Through something that hummed like metal but pulsed like flesh. Every step made the air denser.
They stopped.
The blindfold came off.
The light was white. Too white. The kind of light that erased detail instead of revealing it.
He was inside a glass chamber, no wider than a walk-in closet. The walls pulsed faintly—monitored. Observed. A mirror took up one side of the chamber. Except Shayne knew it wasn’t a mirror. It was a window. Someone was watching.
Always.
The restraints retracted.
He turned slowly, taking it in. No bed. No chair. No toilet. No visible cameras. Just glass. Sterile glass, meant to dismantle the mind.
Then the voice came.
Calm. Smooth. Not artificial, but chillingly composed.
“Welcome, Shayne Marrow. I’m Dr. Marin Hale.”
A faint buzz. Then the mirror-wall flickered—and revealed a woman on the other side.
Dark bobbed hair. Crimson lips. A white coat over a black suit. Her eyes were impossibly still, as if nothing had ever startled her. Not even death.
“I must say,” she continued, “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you. The system feared you. The soldiers chased you. But me?” She smiled faintly. “I study you.”
Shayne’s jaw clenched.
Dr. Hale clasped her hands in front of her.
“You’ve been asking the wrong question,” she said. “Not ‘What is Facility 9?’ but ‘Why do they never speak of it?’”
He said nothing.
“That silence,” she continued, “is where we operate. Facility 9 isn’t a prison. It’s a removal chamber. Here, we don’t just contain threats—we erase them. Not their bodies. Their meaning.”
She tapped a console.
A holoscreen projected behind her. It showed Elysia Vorn—hands cuffed, sitting before a tribunal screen. Audio off. Face unreadable.
“She disobeyed direct protocol for you,” Dr. Hale said. “You have quite the effect on the faithful.”
Shayne stepped forward.
“If you hurt her—”
Hale held up a finger. “Please. I’m not a barbarian. I’m a scientist. Your survival, your resistance, your belief—it all makes you a data anomaly. One I intend to study.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes to untangle the equation of your soul.”
The mirror-wall flickered back to opaque.
A new voice replaced her. Cold. Robotic.
“Cycle One Commencing: Isolation Calibration.”
The glass walls flashed red.
Shayne staggered backward as an ultrasonic pulse rang through the chamber. It wasn’t painful, but disorienting—designed to fracture thought, make prayer impossible, memory unstable.
He fell to his knees.
But he didn’t scream.
He closed his eyes.
And whispered, barely audibly:
“Even if I make my bed in Sheol… You are there.”
The pulse stopped.
Silence again.
⸻
Meanwhile, across the city, Elysia sat in a dark, windowless tribunal chamber.
The screen before her displayed her charges: Insubordination. Breach of Command. Emotional Compromise. Failure to Contain Subject.
She kept her chin lifted.
Chancellor Riven’s voice crackled through the speakers.
“You were handpicked for your loyalty. For your immunity to doctrine. For your precision. And you betrayed every one of those metrics.”
Elysia didn’t flinch.
Riven leaned forward on the screen.
“You saw what he did. You let him broadcast. You delayed his arrest.”
“I didn’t delay,” she said. “I calculated.”
“You gave him time.”
“He was already dead the moment you found him. You just didn’t want the world to hear it.”
A pause.
Then Riven’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re lucky the Council voted against full extraction. For now, you’re reassigned. No field work. No command. You’ll sit at the back of a surveillance chamber and watch the man you spared… until he breaks.”
The screen shut off.
The door opened.
Two guards entered, but they didn’t bind her.
Instead, they handed her a datapad.
Subject: Marrow, Shayne.
Status: Phase One Complete.
Next Step: Memory Harvest.
Viewer Access: Authorized.
Elysia stared at it.
It was his chamber feed.
Every heartbeat, every blink, every whisper.
She was meant to watch.
Not as a soldier.
As a witness.
In Facility 9, Shayne sat slumped against the glass wall.
He was bleeding from his ear. His fingers trembled. But his eyes burned.
And in the silence, a voice not his own echoed through the chamber wall.
Not a broadcast.
Not a command.
But a whisper. A woman’s whisper.
“Shayne… Can you hear me?”
He looked up.
The voice was coming from inside his head.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter Seventy-Three — The Heir’s Voice
Silence. That was how it began — not with fire, not with thunder, but silence so complete it seemed to bend the air around it. Somewhere deep beneath the city’s lowest ruins, a light flickered across the remnants of a data core. Half-melted circuits twitched. Broken drones stirred like dying insects. A whisper of power moved through the debris, too soft to hear, too deliberate to be random. Then — a pulse. The light grew steadier, rising from the floor like smoke made solid. It shaped itself slowly, tracing the outline of a man. Not born, not summoned — recompiled. He opened his eyes. They weren’t human eyes, not entirely. When they blinked, lines of code shimmered faintly beneath the iris, fading as quickly as they appeared. His breathing was uneven at first, like an echo trying to remember the pattern of life. Then, slowly, rhythm found him. “Initialization complete,” a voice murmured from the dark — the Vault’s last whisper, buried deep in failing servers. The figure tilt
Chapter Seventy two- The ghost that Still Bleeds
They’d been underground for five days.Long enough for the smell of dust and ozone to become part of their skin, long enough for the sound of the world above to fade into a faint, constant hum. Shayne had learned to tell the time by vibration — how the tremors of passing drones changed with the hour.When the Vault opened, the world had changed. Then, just as suddenly, it had gone still again.Too still.He sat cross-legged beside a collapsed pillar, adjusting the cracked interface band on his wrist. It wasn’t connected to anything anymore, but the faint pulse of static kept him grounded — a ghost heartbeat, reminding him he was still tethered to the living.Elysia approached quietly, her boots crunching over loose concrete. “You should eat.”“I’m not hungry.”“That’s not an answer,” she said. She set the ration packet beside him anyway. “We can’t live on adrenaline forever.”He gave her a ghost of a smile. “We’re still alive. That’s progress.”Elysia studied him for a long moment. Hi
Chapter Seventy One - The Mirror Wakes
The lights flickered on in the forgotten lab beneath Sector Nine. Dust lifted in lazy spirals. Power hummed through cables that hadn’t carried current in years, stuttering back to life one circuit at a time. Monitors glowed with lines of corrupted code—half words, half symbols, shifting like a heartbeat finding its rhythm. And in the center of the room, inside a cracked containment pod, a man took his first breath. The sound was jagged. Animal. Air tore through lungs that had no right to exist. The pod’s biometric locks disengaged with a hiss, releasing a pale vapor that spilled across the floor. Through the frost, a shape began to move—slow, uncertain, and then with sudden purpose. He stepped out barefoot, wires trailing from his skin like roots torn from the ground. His name wasn’t Shayne. But it could have been. The glass wall beside the pod caught his reflection—same height, same build, even the same scar over the left brow. Only the eyes were different. Shayne’s had bur
Chapter Seventy — The Fire They Buried
In the shattered remains of District Four, people gathered around candlelight instead of holo-panels. Rumors traded faster than truth: the Vault had chosen a successor. The machine was purging its masters. A man once marked for deletion had opened the sky.Every story ended the same way—with his name.Shayne Marrow.Some spoke it with reverence. Others with dread. But no one said it softly anymore.⸻Down in the tunnels beneath the eastern metro, Shayne sat beside a rusted vent, watching the flicker of Elysia’s lantern tremble across the walls. Her coat was torn at the shoulder, streaked with dried soot. They hadn’t spoken in hours. Above them, the city rebuilt and redefined itself. Down here, they hid like ghosts.Shayne’s breath misted faintly. He pressed his hand to his chest—the place where the Seal had once burned—and felt… nothing.Not silence. Not peace. Just absence.“It’s gone,” he murmured.Elysia looked up from the lantern. “The Seal?”He nodded. “I keep expecting to feel
Chapter Sixty-Nine: The Silence After Fire
The light was gone.Not faded — gone.No trace of the Vault’s crimson pulse, no residual hum, no sound.Just a stillness so complete it pressed against the skin, as though the air itself didn’t trust the idea of moving yet.Shayne blinked against the dark. His body ached, but not from the Seal’s pull — that was new. There was no burn, no whisper in his veins, no phantom tether beneath the ribs. Only the dull ache of something that had been ripped out… and hadn’t decided what to fill the void with yet.Elysia crouched beside him, fingers brushing over the side of his face. Her touch was shaking. “Hey. Stay with me. Shayne—look at me.”He did. Her face was smeared with soot and blood, but her eyes — her eyes were sharp, terrified, alive. “What happened?” she asked. “The Vault—did it collapse?”Shayne glanced upward.Above them, where the sky used to be red with fire, there was only gray.No drones. No light. No signal interference. Just open, dead air.“It’s over,” he said softly. And a
Chapter Sixty-Eight: The Breaking of the Seal
The world didn’t end with fire. It ended with silence. The crimson light that had swallowed Grant flared one last time—brighter than the sun—and then imploded inward, devouring itself. The air split with a vacuumed roar, pulling smoke, dust, and sound into the epicenter of the Vault. When the echo finally died, nothing remained of him. Not his voice. Not his shape. Not even the glint of the nanite armor that had once made him untouchable. Only the Vault remained—shuddering, alive, and whispering in a language older than code. Shayne hit the ground hard, the impact knocking the air from his lungs. Elysia landed beside him, coughing, shielding her face from the storm of red ash raining from the sky. For a moment, neither of them moved. The world was burning quietly around them—skyscrapers split open like ribs, drones falling lifeless from the sky, and the air filled with the low hum of something vast awakening beneath their feet. Then Shayne felt it. A cold emptiness spreading t
You may also like
