**SFX: A soft, harmonic HUMMM, like a machine singing itself to sleep.**
White. Then color. Then world.
Aeron opened his eyes to sunlight. *Real* sunlight, warm and golden, filtering through the leaves of a birch tree. The air smelled of damp earth and wildflowers. He was lying in grass, the blades cool and soft against his skin. For a moment, the memory of grey ash and the smell of ozone was just a fading nightmare.
"You spaced out again."
He turned his head. Maya sat beside him, weaving a crown of clover flowers. Her hands were clean, unmarked by scars. She wore a simple blue dress, her hair loose. She looked peaceful. She looked like the sister from old photographs, not the girl from the ventilation shaft.
"Just… thinking," Aeron said, sitting up. His body felt light. Unburdened. No armor. No constant, low-grade pain in his joints from years of combat. He was wearing soft, grey trousers and a linen shirt. He was fifteen. They'd been with the Kindred for five years.
The Kindred. Their saviors.
The story was simple, beautiful, and they had awoken into it five years ago in a soft, white recovery room. The Kindred—a benevolent, humanoid species with silver skin and luminous eyes—had pulled them from the wreckage of the Dominion's attack on London. They were the *other* aliens, the ones who opposed the Dominion's cruel harvest. They had healed the siblings, given them sanctuary on this hidden orbital haven called *Elysium*, and were teaching them to fight back. To be weapons of justice.
"Kaelon says our focus training is this afternoon," Maya said, finishing the crown and placing it gently on her own head. The flowers didn't wilt. Nothing ever wilted here unless it was meant to be beautiful. "He says we're almost ready for another surface mission. To hurt them where it matters."
Aeron felt the familiar, cold fire ignite in his gut. *Them.* The Dominion. The butchers. The monsters who had taken everything. The memory of Vance's crystalline statue was a sharp, sacred pain he carried everywhere. The Kindred had validated that pain. Had given it purpose.
"Good," Aeron said, his voice hardening. "I'm ready."
***
**SFX: The muffled, rhythmic THUMP of a dropship's atmospheric entry.**
*Three Days Later. Mission Log: Salvage and Sabotage. Berlin Exclusion Zone.*
Reality in the field was different. Sharper. Colder. It had to be.
Aeron crouched behind the melted hull of a pre-Collapse tank, his breath fogging in the frigid air. He wasn't in linen anymore. He was clad in the Kindred's gift: a suit of sleek, adaptive combat armor the color of storm clouds. It fitted him like a second skin, amplifying his strength, feeding him data. A holographic display projected inside his visor showed heat signatures, structural integrity of the ruin ahead, and the mission objective—a Dominion data-core in a fortified outpost.
In his hands, he held a *Kin-Spiker*, a Kindred rifle that fired shards of crystallized sound. It felt right. It felt like justice.
"Thermal scans show two Brutes on patrol pattern Delta," Maya's voice came through the neural comm, calm and focused. She was half a click away, perched in a broken clock tower, her role as spotter and biomedic. In her suit, she could sense life signatures, trace biochemical trails, and, if needed, project a stabilizing field to seal a wound. "The core is in the central spire. I'm detecting… high neural activity around it. Like it's thinking."
"It's a brain," Aeron muttered, shifting his grip. "For their local network. We fry it, this whole sector goes dark." That's what Kaelon, their Kindred mentor, had said. Every mission was a strategic blow against the Dominion's oppressive grid.
"On your mark," Maya said.
Aeron took a breath. He didn't feel fear. He felt the clean, pure clarity of purpose. This was for Vance. For Griff. For all of them.
**SFX: The high-pitched WHINE of the Kin-Spiker charging.**
He moved.
The next twenty minutes were a symphony of violence, choreographed by five years of relentless Kindred training. Aeron moved through the ruins like a ghost, the Kin-Spiker singing its lethal song. Crystal shards tore through chitin. He used the environment—collapsing a weakened wall on one Brute, luring another into a nest of still-live power cables. He was efficient. Brilliant. A prodigy, Kaelon called him.
He reached the central spire, a grotesque fusion of gothic stone and pulsating biotech. The data-core hovered in the center, a tumor-like mass of glowing tissue and crystalline circuitry.
"It's protected by a neural shield," Maya warned. "A direct attack will trigger a feedback loop."
Aeron didn't hesitate. He'd been trained for this. He closed his eyes for a second, reaching out with the new sense the Kindred had nurtured in him—**Technopathic Resonance**. He could hear the machine. Not with his ears, but with his mind. It had a song. A discordant, oppressive drone. He listened past the drone, found the harmonic frequency of the shield generator, and with a thought wrapped in vengeance, he *pushed*.
**SFX: A glassy SHATTER, followed by a wet, gurgling SCREECH from the core.**
The shield flickered and died. The core spasmed. Aeron raised the Kin-Spiker and fired a sustained burst into its heart. Light exploded, then died. The ambient hum of the outpost ceased. Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of dying energy.
"Target neutralized," Aeron reported, his voice flat. "Proceeding to extraction."
"Clean work, Aeron." Kaelon's voice was a warm, proud presence in his comm. "The Liberation Council will be pleased. Another step toward taking your world back."
Aeron looked at the smoldering core. He felt nothing but a cold satisfaction. This was his purpose. This was his penance for being alive.
He didn't see what the mission *really* was. He didn't see that the "Dominion outpost" was, in reality, a **Nexus of Human Resistance** in the Parisian catacombs. The "data-core" was the central comms hub for a network of free survivors. The "Brutes" were human defenders in scavenged power-armor. The Kin-Spiker's crystals didn't just kill; they **liquefied neural tissue and extracted psychic imprints**, adding more raw data to the Dominion's harvest.
The screams he heard as dissonant machine noise were human. The satisfaction he felt was a planted trigger, reinforcing his loyalty to the lie.
***
**SFX: A liquid, bubbling DRIP, syncopated and wrong.**
*Between Missions. The Simulacrum Spire. Observation Deck.*
The truth of their existence was not in the sunlit fields of Elysium or the violent theaters of their missions. It was here, in the sterile, silent heart of the Dominion's research facility.
They floated.
Aeron and Maya, now sixteen and fifteen, hung suspended in a vat of viscous, oxygenated amniotic gel, their bodies pierced by dozens of fine, neural filament wires that fed into the ceiling like inverted roots. Their eyes moved rapidly behind closed lids, living the dream. Their physical bodies were lean, pale, maintained at peak condition by the gel and nutrient drips.
Around their vats, the air hummed with silent activity. And in the center of the room, observing, was the scientist.
Its designation was **Overseer Vexil**, Sub-Architect of the 7th Branch's Potential Cultivation Program. To call it disgusting was to miss the point; it was a masterpiece of dedicated, amoral form.
It stood on three reverse-jointed legs that ended not in feet, but in complex, root-like clumps of sensitive cilia that tapped constantly on the floor, reading vibrations. Its torso was a vertical tube of translucent, greyish hide, through which pulsed slow, bioluminescent organs of different colors—a blue one for analysis, a yellow for memory retrieval, a slow-throbbing red for active conditioning. It had four arms: two slender, multi-jointed manipulators with too many fingers; one heavy, piston-like appendage with a massive syringe; and one that was simply a cluster of whipping neural filaments.
Its head was the worst. It had no neck. The torso simply narrowed into a bulbous, eyeless head covered in a mosaic of different sensory patches—heat, light, psychic resonance, pheromonal. A vertical slit of a mouth, lined with needle-teeth, opened only to emit clicks or to taste the air with a long, black, worm-like tongue.
It was studying a holographic feed—the feed from Aeron's Berlin mission. With a twitch of a manipulator, it zoomed in on the face of a human defender just before a crystal shard took out his eye. It isolated the micro-expression of terror, saved it to a file labeled *Human Stress Response - Terminal Recognition*.
A soft chime sounded. Vexil's head-patches shimmered. It turned and scuttled to Maya's vat. Her biometrics were spiking. In the dream, she was using her **Biomantic Splicing** to save a "wounded Kindred ally."
In reality, her powers were being channeled differently. The filaments in her spine were humming, and in a separate lab across the spire, a batch of harvested human stem cells was being violently restructured according to her will, creating a new, unstable type of bio-drone for the Dominion.
Vexil watched the data streams with palpable delight. It made a sound like stones grinding in oil. To it, the siblings were not children. They were **Dual-Core Anomaly #7A/B**. They were the most successful experiment in trauma-bonded potential amplification it had ever overseen. Their hatred for the Dominion (directed, of course, at the wrong targets) was the furnace. Their bond was the catalyst. The simulated kindness of the "Kindred" was the crucible.
It tapped a command. In the dream, Kaelon would soon praise Maya's healing, strengthening her emotional connection to the lie.
***
**SFX: The gentle, artificial chirp of a songbird in a perfect garden.**
*Elysium. The Calm Before.*
A year passed in the dream. They were sixteen and seventeen now. Veteran operatives. Aeron's technopathy had grown so advanced he could "quiet" entire grids of Dominion tech. Maya could "heal" catastrophic injuries in minutes. They were the Kindred's sharpest knives.
But cracks, like hairline fractures in perfect glass, had begun to form.
It was the little things. The **loops**. A songbird in the Elysium gardens that sang the same eight-note sequence every day, at exactly 3:47 PM. The way the clouds repeated their formations in the sky every eleven days. The taste of their nutrient paste, which was always, inexplicably, the faint taste of copper and ozone underneath the fruit flavoring.
It was the **glitches**. Sometimes, in the heat of a mission, Aeron's vision would stutter for a nanosecond, and he'd see the grimy, blood-streaked visor of a human scavenger instead of the chitinous face of a "Dominion Stalker." Once, when Maya was deep in a healing trance, she heard not the grateful thoughts of a Kindred soldier, but the screaming, panicked prayer of a mother in a language that hadn't been spoken on Earth since before the Collapse.
They never spoke of these things. The dream was too beautiful, the purpose too vital. To question it was to betray Vance's memory, to spit on the gift of their salvation.
But the subconscious remembers what the conscious mind buries.
***
**SFX: A sustained, digital SCREECH—the sound of a system rejecting incompatible data.**
*The Breaking Point. Mission Log: Extermination. "Hive Gamma."*
The mission was critical. Intel said the Dominion was cultivating a new bio-weapon in an underground hive in the Scottish highlands. Total sterilization was required.
They descended into the dark. The hive was humid, warm, walls slick with organic growth. The enemy here were "Weavers," spider-like Dominion creatures that spun psychic webs to trap prey.
Aeron moved point, his technopathy sensing the low thrum of the hive's central ganglion. Maya covered the rear, her bio-sense alert for ambush.
They found the central chamber. In the dream, it was a cavern dominated by a huge, pulsing sac of bioweapon embryos.
But Maya's bio-sense, her true power that worked on *real biology* even through the dream's filter, screamed at her.
This wasn't a bioweapon.
The sac was translucent. Inside weren't embryos. They were **people**. Dozens of them, suspended, alive, connected by umbilical cords to the sac. Their faces were peaceful, sleeping. They were being *sustained*. Farmed for neural activity. A living battery. A larder.
"Aeron… the scan is wrong," Maya whispered, her voice trembling. "Those aren't weapons. They're… people. Civilians."
"It's a trick," Aeron growled, raising his Kin-Spiker, his mind buzzing with implanted conviction. "A Dominion illusion to protect the hive-mind. Kaelon warned us about this. We have to purge it."
"No, wait—" Maya reached out.
But the command was in his head, bright and urgent. *STERILIZE THE HIVE. PROTECT HUMANITY.*
He fired.
**SFX: A wet, colossal BURST, followed by a chorus of short, muffled CRIES that were cut off almost instantly.**
The sac exploded. The fluid that rained down was warm and salty. Like amniotic fluid. Like tears.
Maya stood frozen, drenched. Her biomantic senses were overwhelmed not with death, but with a sudden, vacuum-like silence. The cessation of dozens of sleeping, innocent neural signatures. Her power, her healing, nurturing power, recoiled in horror. It felt like she had just murdered a hospital ward.
In that moment of visceral, soul-deep wrongness, the dream flickered.
Not for a nanosecond. For a full, terrifying second.
Aeron saw it. The beautiful, organic walls of the hive melted into grim, industrial Dominion biometal. The Kin-Spiker in his hands morphed into a brutal, boxy Dominion psi-cannon, its barrel smoking. The fluid on his face wasn't just fluid; it was blood and liquefied fat.
And Maya… he saw her. Not in Kindred armor, but floating in a vat of gel, her real body twitching, her face contorted in a silent scream, wires sprouting from her spine.
Then it snapped back. The hive was a hive. The weapon was a weapon. Maya was beside him, in armor, shaking.
"Report," Kaelon's voice was in his ear, tight.
"Hive… sterilized," Aeron heard himself say, his voice robotic.
"Good. Extract immediately. You've done a great service."
On the flight back to Elysium, neither spoke. The copper-ozone taste in Aeron's mouth was overwhelming. He looked at his hands. In the dream, they were clean.
***
**SFX: The low, constant TONE of a sustained, perfectly calibrated note.**
*Elysium. The Night It Fell Apart.*
That night, Aeron couldn't sleep. The eight-note songbird call played in a loop in his head. 3:47 PM. Every day.
He got up and walked to the observation deck, a dome that showed a perfect simulation of Earth, whole and blue, below them. Maya was already there, staring at the planet.
"The clouds," she said, not looking at him. "Over the Atlantic. The same spiral pattern. I've been logging it. It repeats."
Aeron joined her. He didn't look at the clouds. He looked at the interface panel beside the dome. A simple touch panel to adjust the view. On a whim, driven by a technopath's itch, he placed his palm on it. Not to adjust. To *listen*.
He dropped his mental guards, the ones the Kindred had taught him to use to "focus his gift." He opened himself to the machine's song.
What came back wasn't the clean, efficient melody of Kindred tech. It was a cacophony. A screaming, layered mess of millions of voices, human voices, crying, praying, begging, reminiscing—all woven into a horrific, psychic tapestry. It was the sound of the Dominion's harvested consciousness network. The very thing he was supposedly fighting.
And underneath it all, he heard another song. The true, signature frequency of the technology holding him. Cold, intricate, and utterly, unmistakeably **Dominion**.
**SFX: A mental SHRIEK of feedback, like two worlds colliding inside a skull.**
Aeron staggered back, clutching his head.
"Aeron?" Maya grabbed him.
"It's a lie," he gasped, the words tearing themselves free. "All of it. The Kindred… the tech… it's *them*. It's the Dominion!"
The world around them didn't shatter dramatically. It **unraveled**.
The observation deck flickered. The beautiful blue Earth pixelated, revealing for a second a gruesome holographic map of Earth with Dominion sectors highlighted. The clean, organic walls of Elysium bled away into the sterile, fleshy walls of the Simulacrum Spire's observation deck. The smell of flowers was replaced by the antiseptic stink of amniotic gel and ozone.
Maya's hand on his arm was real. But her form flickered. He saw her in the blue dress, then in her armor, then for a terrifying, sustained moment, he saw her as she truly was: floating, pale, pierced by wires, her eyes wide open and staring in horror at nothing.
Her own breaking point came from within. Her biomantic sense, the truth-sense of life itself, finally broke through the dream's firewall. She felt the *artificiality* of her own body in the simulation. She felt the distant, thin, struggling pulse of her real body in the gel. She felt the vast, hungry, parasitic presence of Overseer Vexil somewhere nearby, monitoring their distress with clinical interest.
"We're in a tank," Maya whispered, her dream-face crumbling into an expression of utter devastation. "We're not saviors. We're… we're their weapons. The missions… the people we killed…"
The full, monstrous weight of it crashed down. Every "Dominion" monster they'd slain. Every "strategic target" they'd destroyed. They had been killing their own. They had been the harvesters.
The dream fought back. Kaelon's voice boomed from everywhere, warm, concerned, fatherly. "Aeron! Maya! You're experiencing a psychic feedback loop! A Dominion trap! Calm your minds! Remember your training! Remember Vance!"
The name was the final trigger.
They remembered Vance. Not the martyr of the Kindred's stories, but the real man. His last act. The shake of his head. *Don't run. Survive. Remember.*
He hadn't meant remember a lie.
He'd meant remember *them*.
Aeron looked at Maya, and in her eyes, he saw the same, iron-cold realization. The grief was a tsunami, but rising above it was something harder. Something infinitely more dangerous.
**Rage.**
Not the hot, directed rage the dream had given them. This was cold. Absolute. It was the rage of a tool realizing it has been used to murder its maker.
"No," Aeron said, to the fading image of Kaelon, to the dream, to the Dominion. His voice, in both the dream and the gel-vat, was a dry, rasping thing. It was the first true sound he'd made in seven years. "No more."
Together, in the disintegrating dreamscape, they didn't scream. They didn't cry.
They **reached**.
Aeron reached with his technopathy, not for the dream's systems, but down the neural filaments, into the cold, alien system of the Simulacrum Spire itself. He didn't try to control it. He poured every ounce of his hatred, his grief, his stolen humanity into a single, discordant psychic scream and *shoved it* into the main processing core.
Maya reached with her biomancy. She found the feed of her own life-signs, the signals that told the spire her body was docile, compliant. She gathered the phantom pain of every wound she'd healed in the dream, every death she'd caused, and she *reversed the polarity*. She sent a surge of bio-electric terror, of rejection, of pure, cellular-level revolt back up the wires.
**SFX: A soundless, psychic IMPLOSION, followed by the blaring SCREECH of a hundred system alarms.**
In the real world, in the spire, Overseer Vexil stumbled back as its console exploded in a shower of sparks. The holographic feeds of Elysium dissolved into static. The vats holding Aeron and Maya began to churn violently, warning glyphs flashing red.
In the last fragment of the dream, standing in the grey void of a deleted simulation, Aeron and Maya faced each other. They were children again, and adults, and weapons, and victims.
"They took everything," Aeron said, his dream-voice finally his own.
Maya took his hand. Her grip was fierce. Real. "Now," she said, the word a vow that would bridge the gap between dream and waking, "we take it back."
The world went white.
Then it went dark.
Then, for the first time in seven years, they opened their real eyes