Consciousness was a bleach-white slap.
Leo woke first, a snarl already forming in his throat. He was on his back on a cold, seamless floor. The air was sterile, odorless, and hummed with a familiar, hated frequency. He pushed himself up, his head pounding. He was in a cube. Ten feet by ten feet. Every surface—walls, ceiling, floor—was a flawless, luminous white. No seams, no vents, no door.
His fists clenched, the memory of the biopolymer lightning a phantom sensation in his arms. He was wearing simple, loose white trousers and a tunic. No weapons. No armor.
"No," he growled. "No, no, NO!"
He lunged at the nearest wall, throwing his shoulder into it with a force that would have shattered concrete. The white surface absorbed the impact with a soft, pneumatic thud, yielding slightly before rebounding, pushing him back onto the floor without a mark. He roared, hammering his fists against it. THUD. THUD. THUD. The sound was muffled, swallowed by the room. The white material was unbreakable, engineered to dissipate energy.
His rage echoed uselessly in the perfect cube.
Across the facility, in an identical white cube, Derek came to with a gasp. His mercury-sheened eyes darted around, taking in the impossible sameness. His enhanced senses screamed—there was nothing to sense. No texture variations, no temperature gradients, no scent. It was sensory deprivation made physical. He stumbled to a wall, running his hands over it. Seamless. He slammed his hardened fist against it. A dull, unsatisfying thump was his only reward.
In a third cube, Jordan's eyes opened. He was already sitting up, his analytical mind immediately cataloging the parameters. Containment cell. Probable purpose: psychological and physiological assessment post-capture. No observable exits. Material: unknown polymer with high-energy dispersion properties. He stood, walked to the center of the room, and closed his eyes. He began a series of slow, controlled movements, testing his body's limits in the confined space, a calm amid the brewing storm.
In a fourth cube, Eva stirred. Agony was her first sensation—a fire in her left side where ribs were still knitting, organs repairing themselves. She pushed herself up, wincing. The white room was an abomination of memory. The Chrysalis Directive. The endless tests. They were back. Her Prime biology had healed her enough to live, but not enough to fight. She placed her hands on the wall, feeling the hum. It was a different hum than before. More focused. More… anticipatory. They weren't just storing her. They had plans.
And in a fifth, much smaller cube—a cell no larger than a walk-in closet—Maya awoke.
She was curled on the floor, also clad in white. Her hair was its natural faded pink-blue, her eyes their original, confused blue. The monster was gone, receded, leaving only the trembling, violated girl. She hugged herself, rocking slightly, the memory of the forest, the chase, the terrible power, a jumbled nightmare.
Then she saw it.
On one wall, at floor level, was a small, rectangular outline, like the faint drawing of a box. It was the only feature in the entire room. A seam.
Hesitantly, drawn by a desperate, childlike need to find a way out, to find anything that wasn't blank, she crawled towards it. She reached out a shaking hand. Her fingers traced the lines. Nothing happened.
Tentatively, she pushed her fingertips against the center of the rectangle.
With a soft click, the outlined section depressurized and slid inward an inch, revealing a dark, shallow recess. It was an opening, just big enough to fit a hand and forearm.
Hope, terrible and naive, flared in Maya's chest. An air duct? A service panel? She didn't think. She acted on instinct. She pushed her hand into the darkness, feeling around, seeking a latch, a wire, anything.
Her fingertips brushed against something smooth and cold at the back of the recess.
There was a sharp, hydraulic HISSS.
The rectangular panel shot back into place with the force and speed of a industrial guillotine.
It happened too fast for pain, at first. There was a clean, pressureless snick.
Maya stared, uncomprehending, as her arm was now severed at the mid-forearm. Her hand and the lower part of her arm lay inside the dark recess, now sealed behind the flawless white wall. A perfect, geometric amputation.
A full second of silence hung in the white room.
Then, the nerves caught up.
A scream tore from Maya's throat, raw and human and filled with a suffering that dwarfed all the silent horrors she had endured. Blood, shockingly red against the sterile white, fountained from the clean stump, spraying the floor, the walls, her face. She fell backwards, clutching the gushing wound to her chest, her screams echoing in the small, unforgiving cube. It was a test. A simple, brutal question: Does physical trauma trigger the transformation?
---
In an observation room overlooking a special containment chamber, two lower-ranking Architects watched a screen displaying Maya's cell. They observed the scream, the blood, the frantic, human agony. They watched her bio-signs spike with pain and terror.
The entity did not emerge. The scales did not form. The silence did not descend.
One Architect turned to the other, its voice modulated and calm through the silver helmet. "Report to Superior. Subject Maya-07. Stimulus: acute traumatic amputation. Result: negative. The entropic transformation is not triggered by physical pain or mortal fear. Hypothesis: transformation is linked to perceived ontological threat or systemic psychological overload. The trigger is conceptual, not corporeal."
They made a note in the data-stream and moved to the next observation window.
This window looked into a chamber that was the opposite of the white cubes. It was a cavern of dark, frozen metal. The temperature was calibrated to near absolute zero, a cold so profound it stilled molecular motion. In the center of this cryo-chamber, suspended in a stasis field, was Wolfen Welfric.
He hung, unmoving, clad only in the simple white clothes, his eyes closed. Frost coated his skin and hair. He looked dead, frozen in time.
The two Architects observed. This was the deepest containment they had for an anomaly of his class. The cold was to suppress any potential energy emission, to keep the fire smothered before it could even spark.
On their monitor, his vital signs were flatlined. No thermal signature. No brain activity. He was a statue.
Then, on the screen, Wolfen's lips moved.
It was just a twitch, a tiny crack in the frost. Then, they curled upwards.
He was smiling in his sleep.
In the observation room, the two Architects flinched back from the window as one. A cold deeper than the chamber seeped into their bones. The monitors still showed nothing. No life signs. No energy spike. Yet the subject was smiling. It was impossible. It was an error in reality itself.
The smile on the frozen face widened, just a fraction.
One of the Architects fumbled for a comms unit, its modulated voice for the first time holding a tremor. "S-Superior. Anomaly Welfric containment chamber. We have a… a facial expression. No corresponding physiological change. Requesting… requesting guidance."
In his cryo-prison, unseen by them, Wolfen Welfric's mind was not still. It was burning, planning, and profoundly, deeply amused. They had put him on ice. But even ice could burn, if you knew how to look at it.