Theron woke to his own heartbeat.
Not the steady, reliable rhythm of before. This was something else—a double-pulse, as if two hearts occupied his chest and only sometimes remembered to synchronise. He lay still, afraid that movement would shatter the fragile pattern, and tried to understand what had changed.
His skin felt thin. Transparent, almost. As if the barrier between inside and outside had worn translucent overnight. He could feel the air moving across his arms—not temperature, but presence. The way a hand might sense another hand in a dark room, close but not touching.
The hum had become something else too. Not a sound anymore. A frequency. A vibration that seemed to emanate from his bones rather than his chest. When he breathed, it shifted. When he held his breath, it steadied.
Day three.
He should feel different. He did feel different. But different wasn't the word. Hollowed was closer. Like something had been removed from inside him—not painfully, but thoroughly—and replaced with something the body didn't have names for.
He sat up slowly. The movement made him dizzy. The cell tilted sideways, righted itself, tilted again. His vision seemed to come and go in waves, as if his eyes were learning to see again from scratch.
The toilet still dripped. The walls still smelled of disinfectant. But he heard them differently now. The drip wasn't random—it had a rhythm, a pattern, an intention that made his teeth ache.
A knock on the door. Not aggressive. Just the standard rhythm the guards used.
"Prisoner," a voice called. "We're moving you. New intake needs this cell. Get up."
Theron stood. His legs held, though they didn't quite feel like his legs anymore. Everything felt borrowed. Rented.
The door hissed open. Two guards—Marcus and Elena—stood in the corridor. Elena looked uncomfortable. Marcus wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Come on," Marcus said, not unkindly.
Theron followed them down the corridor. He had memorised these paths in his mind, but walking them was different. The sounds were clearer now—he could hear conversations three cells over, the flutter of a guard's heartbeat when they passed, the low hum of electricity in the walls that nobody else seemed to notice.
They passed the medical wing's common area.
There was a mirror.
Not large. Mounted on the wall for prisoners to use, maybe, or for guards to check their appearance. Just a simple reflective surface that showed the corridor and, incidentally, anyone standing in front of it.
Theron caught his reflection and stopped.
Elena's hand went to his arm. "Keep moving," she said quietly.
But he couldn't.
The boy in the mirror wasn't him.
The face was his—same features, same greyish blue eyes. But the structure had changed. The skin had drawn tighter, like something underneath was pulling outward. His eyes looked too large. His cheekbones too sharp. As if the process of breaking down had consumed the soft parts of him and left only edges.
"We need to move," Marcus repeated, softer than before.
"There's a new prisoner coming in," Elena said, not quite looking at him. "Needs a cell with amenities. Better off moving you up a level anyway. Less traffic up there."
It was a lie. A kind one, but a lie. There were no amenities in a holding cell. No comfort that mattered. But she was telling him something else—that his presence was becoming dangerous. That the guards were uncomfortable around him now.
That something in him had shifted enough that even they could sense it.
Theron tore his gaze from the mirror and kept walking.
...
The cell on Level Two was identical to the one below.
Seven feet by six feet. Concrete floor. Steel bunk. Toilet with no seat. But the window faced different corridor, and the sounds were cleaner here—fewer voices, less overlap. Just the rhythm of routine without the urgency of the lower level.
They locked him in without ceremony.
"You need anything, press the button," Marcus said, pointing to a small red disc on the wall. "Meals at seven, one, and six."
They left.
The door sealed.
Theron lay on the bunk and let the new silence settle. Upstairs meant something. It meant the system had recalculated. Either he was safer now, or more dangerous. Either way, he'd been moved. Reclassified. Upgraded, maybe, though the word felt obscene.
He must have slept, because suddenly there was darkness and then a guard was sliding a meal tray through the slot in the door.
Grey paste. Grey water. The same as always.
He wasn't hungry. His body seemed to have forgotten that hunger was something it did.
But he ate anyway, because not eating would trigger questions, and questions meant more observation, and observation meant discovery.
Guards talking. Not casual. Urgent.
"—can't just leave them down there," a voice said. One he didn't recognise. "The cleansing facility is requesting more subjects. They're running out of—"
"Out of what?" another voice cut in. Solen. He recognized her tone now—clinical, almost bored. "Say it."
A pause.
"Out of test cases," the first voice finished quietly.
Theron's entire body went cold.
"How many were sent yesterday?" Solen asked.
"Seven. From the higher-grade screening. They're processing them now."
"Seven," Solen repeated, as if tasting the number.
"The director wants to know if we're sending the lower-level cases once Screening is complete. The flareless ones. Apparently their resilience to pain makes them useful for—"
"I know what they're useful for," Solen said. "Tell the director I'll send the next batch once we finish the current series."
The voices faded. Theron remained absolutely still, not even breathing, until the silence returned and he was certain they were gone.
The cleansing facility.
Not a rehabilitation center. Not a medical facility. Something worse. Something that needed test cases. Something that ran out of subjects.
He thought of the man he'd glimpsed being moved, the shock collar around his neck, the canvas shirt with arms that led nowhere. He thought of seven more. He thought of himself, newly broken, newly useful, newly interesting in ways that made his skin crawl.
He was flareless. They'd said so.
But something in him was changing.
And the system didn't waste resources on what couldn't be weaponised.
...
The dream came around 4 AM.
Or not a dream. Theron was half awake—he could feel the thin mattress beneath him, hear the distant hum of the facility's machinery—but Kaelen was there anyway.
Not solid. Not real.
But present in the way that some truths are present, whether or not they exist.
Kaelen sat at the foot of the bunk, younger than he'd been in photographs, wearing clothes Theron didn't recognise. His hair was different. His expression was tired in a way that no amount of sleep would fix.
"You made it," Kaelen said.
Theron tried to answer, but his voice didn't work. He made a sound instead—something between a question and a whimper.
Kaelen pointed a finger at Theron's chest.
"Today's day four," Kaelen continued. "I can tell you're not flareless anymore. But you don't feel powerful, do you?"
Theron shook his head.
"Good," Kaelen said. "Power is the lie they tell you to make you useful. What you have now is something different. It's your ownfrequency. It's the ability to hear the system from the inside."
"The cleansing facility," Theron managed. His voice sounded wrong. Too low. Too resonant.
Kaelen's expression flickered. "So they told you."
"I heard the guards. They're sending flareless subjects there. For testing. Because we're useful for—"
"For finding out what breaks and how," Kaelen finished. "Yeah. That's what it is."
He stood. Even in the dream, even in the half-real space between sleeping and waking, his movements seemed choreographed, like he'd done this a thousand times.
"Listen to me," Kaelen said. "They're going to offer you a choice soon. Maybe not in words. But they'll offer it. You can fight, and they'll break you. Or you can play along, and they'll keep you. Both are ways of dying. But one keeps you alive long enough to become something they can't contain."
"What do I do?" Theron asked.
But Kaelen was already fading.
"Don't resist," he said, his voice distant now. "But don't surrender either. Survive like you survived the docks. Small. Invisible. Patient."
He was gone.
Theron lay in the darkness, unsure if he'd actually heard his brother's voice or if his own fractured mind had simply learned to imitate it.
Maybe there was no difference.
...
In her office, two floors above, Maren Voss sat at her desk and held Kaelen's notebook.
She wasn't reading it. She'd read it a hundred times. Instead, she was remembering.
Three years ago. Kaelen had been in Medical holding, same as Theron. Same facility, same progression. She'd watched the monitors then too. Watched his vitals spike and stabilise in the impossible way that signaled awakening.
She'd gone to see him once.
Not in an official capacity. Just... once.
He'd been sitting on the edge of the bunk, staring at his hands like they didn't belong to him. When she entered, he didn't look up.
"You're Voss," he'd said. Not a question.
"That's Director Voss for you" she'd corrected, though the correction felt wrong even as she made it.
"No," Kaelen had said, finally meeting her eyes. "You're just Maren right now. I can hear it. The frequency of your name. The part of you that isn't the job."
She hadn't understood then. She understood now.
She set the notebook down and looked at the live feed from Theron's new cell. He was asleep, or appeared to be. The monitors showed his heart rate still elevated, still that impossible double-rhythm, still other.
On her screen, a message notification blinked. From the cleansing facility coordinator.
Ready for next batch of test subjects. Confirm shipment timeline.
Voss stared at it for a long time.
She thought of Kaelen, three years dead in a way that official records would never acknowledge.
She thought of Theron, three days into becoming something the system wouldn't know how to contain.
She thought of the choice she'd made with Kaelen, and the choice she was about to make with Theron, and whether those choices were survival or complicity or something that had no name.
Her finger hovered over the keyboard.
She didn't type anything.
Instead, she closed the notebook and placed it in a drawer that nobody knew about.
Somewhere in the building, the machinery hummed.
Outside, the city went on, indifferent to the small, impossible things happening in its shadows.