Chương 2: A Sudden Change

A cold that had no patience moved through his skin in quick waves, each one dragging a sharp gasp from his exhausted lungs. His eyelids were dark and weighted, fighting to open under the backlog of pain. The voice from the fog echoed somewhere below conscious thought, too faint to parse but too present to ignore.

"He's been out for two days. I'm concerned. An awakening like that will place abnormal stress on the body." A metallic sound, perhaps the activation of some mechanism, finally pulled Lance clear of the dream.

"I know it's my responsibility! You're as useful as ever, Maliard!" The voice grew sharper and more familiar as Lance managed, slowly, to claw away the weight of sleep. His eyes made an enormous effort to stay open. His vision was blurred. The grey walls around him, riveted iron, reinforced with heavy bolts, suggested immediately that he had been taken somewhere. His heart rate climbed when he saw the drip attached to his arm, feeding a purplish fluid into his vein.

Lance reached for it with his free hand, but he realized to be cuffed to the cot. His eyes started to dart around faster and faster. Footsteps moved outside the door. Mechanisms buzzed and clicked inside the frame. The door slid open. A woman entered in a tight black jumpsuit and a pale white coat, the suit tracing purple veins symmetrically through its material. She didn't look at him immediately.

Monica was storing a device that resembled a medical headset, with the practiced disinterest of someone doing something routine. Then she turned. His vision had recovered enough to see blonde hair swaying at her shoulders and the precise, unhurried quality of her movements. He recognized her. He pushed himself upright, enduring everything his body had accumulated, and swung his legs toward the floor. Fortunately, the chain was long enough.

Monica spotted him and crossed the room in three steps, crying out for him to stay in the bed with a tone that was simultaneously commanding and completely undone. She pressed him back, checked him over, and her expression shifted from alarm to transparent relief when she confirmed that his wounds had closed without a trace. Lance felt the heat rise in his face and took her forearm gently. She looked down at her own hand, then up at him, and seemed to process her current attire belatedly.

"Could you..." He murmured, pulling the blanket closer. That landed. She stepped back quickly, buttoning her coat while muttering apologies under her breath. That she was sorry, and that she hadn't thought, and several other things that didn't quite form sentences. The color slowly left both their faces. Lance moved to sit properly now that he was uncuffed. Monica settled beside him and offered coffee. He shook his head gently. She cleared her throat and looked for the right starting point.

"I know you have questions. Your head is probably in shambles right now. Let me tell you where you stand." He listened carefully, working hard not to fall asleep mid-sentence.

"You're currently aboard the third vessel of the N. O. I. R. Association." She opened her arms with a gesture that was approximately one part professional and three parts theatrical." The Pietas!" She turned to the panel behind them. A snap of her fingers, and the porthole opened. Clear light poured in, reflected off an expanse of cloud. Lance stared at the blue sky, crossing the shadow of the hull below them.

"A ship?" He said.

"NOIR? Weren't you a researcher?" He tried to stop the vortex of thoughts.

"And those things in the clearing." He looked at his hands.

"I don't understand any of this."

"I'm sorry." She bit her lip. She looked at him steadily. His eyes were full of something she didn't want to name.

"Lance Klint died in that clearing. You are something different now. As are all members of NOIR." He looked at his hands for a long time. Then he smiled. Monica recoiled as though a small animal had leapt at her.

"What happened in the clearing..." He said, keeping his eyes on his hands, his smile unchanged, "wasn't something any ordinary person could do. Was it?" Monica's expression closed. She turned to the desk, knocked a pen and two folders to the floor without caring, and produced a thin black card from her coat pocket. She set it on the desk. It unfolded into a matte-black screen with purple trim and expanded to the size of a standard display under his very confused gaze.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Her voice carried the smile, but not her face.

"It's still in the works, but this is one of our finest inventions!" The screen lit. A file header appeared.

"REPORT: SUBJECT 8 — CODE NAME: ALPHA""Don't get angry at us, but we have been following you since we found this." She smiled a bit while working with the strange object.

"You are our only clue to understand the importance of this file, or so our head researcher says." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The cold was immediate and total. Not the cold from his spine. Something worse, the cold of recognizing something you have no memory of knowing. Lance stared at the document. The first lines came to him before he read them. He had never seen this file. He knew the opening sentences by heart.

"Subject responds well to Lambda radiation exposure and demonstrates high cooperation when Subject 9 is referenced as a point of discussion or used as conditional leverage." That was all he remembered of the document. But remembering it at all was enough to detonate something in his chest.

"Why... Do I remember it?" Lance convulsed. Disconnected images ripped through him without order or mercy: white floors, screaming, the smell of burning flesh, vomiting, a face behind glass. His brain was processing them at a speed that felt like he was slowly driving a needle into his forehead. He gasped. Monica was already on her feet, watching him with undisguised fear. He tried to stand. His knees buckled, and she caught him before he reached the floor.

His eyes flickered between brown and a burning, unnatural gold." Rejection? Impossible. Is he reacting to the document itself?" She thought, already reaching for the syringe in her pocket. She pressed it to the side of his neck. He went still in her arms. A few tears caught on the lapel of her coat. She got him back to the cot and cuffed him again, reluctantly, but without hesitation. She sat in the chair and looked at the screen for a long moment.

"How did you know that document by heart?" She asked, more to herself than to him.

"It was lost ten years ago during a Singularity. We sent dozens of agents to recover it from a black box in the ruins, and Lucas himself was interested in it." She began to scroll. The subject profile matched Lance in the broad strokes: black hair, above-average height, brown eyes. The name had been redacted everywhere it appeared. The file was a fragment of the original: a summary with a set of notes appended at the end. That technology was special, top-notch, one would say.

The technique to engrave documents on thin strips of mineral was so advanced that only the military and the Institute knew how to do it. Her eyes reached the notes. She read the passage Lance had recalled and then continued past it. Experiments on humans, laid out in the flat clinical language that made them worse somehow than if someone had simply described them with feeling. She scrolled further. One entry made her stomach turn."

Subject Alpha was exposed to a series of images depicting Subject 9 (a combination of fabricated and authentic materials, as recommended by Superintendent —REDACTED—). Alpha, initially agitated and combative, began requesting that the researchers cease the stimulus. This dissolved rapidly into acute nausea and loss of consciousness for a period of approximately four minutes." She kept reading. Excerpt from appended incident report." Upon regaining consciousness, Subject Alpha's complexion was entirely pallid.

Ocular pigmentation had shifted to a highly saturated yellow. Electromagnetic interference was recorded on all devices in the room (attributed to Lambda radiation emission). The containment walls sustained severe structural damage. All screens failed simultaneously. Researchers in action exhibited acute panic responses.

"Twenty-five low-classification Helspawn were introduced into the facility corridor as a standard containment measure. Subject Alpha neutralized all twenty-five in three minutes and twenty-five seconds. Alpha then turned on the research staff, wounding three and incapacitating two. His exit route proceeded through the facility's automated defense network: twenty-eight automata destroyed, six damaged; thirty-three security personnel wounded, five incapacitated.

Alpha's advance was halted at the containment area for Subject 9 through the intervention of the duty defense agent —REDACTED—, currently comatose due to injuries sustained. Experimentation on Subject Alpha is to be suspended immediately. Custody is to be transferred to Researcher Nyx Monoghan. Classification revised from Green to Red. Subject Alpha is to be considered unstable and dangerous.

He has demonstrated the capacity to shape Lambda radiation into physical constructs—masks, tools, or weapons—making him a lethal risk to all facility personnel." Monica closed the file. She looked at Lance, still weeping in his sleep on the cot. Pity washed over her gaze, softening her eyes.

"What did they do to you?" Monica pressed a hand over her mouth.

"It's disgusting." She sat back." Dissociative Amnesia makes sense now. His brain built a wall to protect him." She drummed her fingers on the armrest.

"... But even without any of this, even if he were simply who he appears to be, and our analysis is wrong, what he did in that clearing. No, Zwei couldn't manage that on their first manifestation without a frame of reference for what they were doing." A robotic voice cut through the hull.

"Arrival at destination expected in twenty-three minutes. Destination: Dielmon, Port I-A." Monica let out a long breath.

"Finally!" She said as she stretched.

"Time to meet the team and get you acquainted with this new world."She looked at Lance's sleeping face.

"Try not to burn anything down."