The days after the doctor left blurred together into something that could only be described as painful.
Not violently so. Not all at once.
Just… steadily.
He'd been assigned a number—Twenty-One—and screened repeatedly since then. The same questions, over and over. Drug history. Family history. Psychological profiles phrased six different ways. They never told him what answers they were looking for, only noted them down and moved on.
The only real mercy was the food.
Actual meals. Warm. Balanced. Real enough that Aleph found himself eating slowly, suspicious of it. But even that came with a price. He never left the room unless instructed. The walls stayed the same shade of white no matter how long he stared at them.
Physical evaluations followed.
He performed poorly.
They didn't say it outright, but the implication was clear. Too small. Too light. Not enough endurance. For the past few days, he'd been "instructed" accordingly—forced conditioning sessions designed to build something he didn't have time to grow.
Four days wasn't enough to remake a body.
They trained him alone.
Always alone.
A drone handled most of it—voice synthesized, tone neutral. Aleph liked to imagine there was a real person on the other end, watching, adjusting the routines. It was easier that way. Easier than thinking the machine was the only thing willing to stay near him.
The sentries were worse.
They escorted him everywhere. Silent. Armored. Always a step too close. The way they watched him made his skin crawl—not like guards, but like handlers.
Like he might rupture if they looked away.
He was being escorted again now.
Another interview.
Another round of evaluations he already knew he wouldn't pass cleanly.
He tried to observe the facility as they walked—angles, doorways, anything—but the sentries noticed immediately. One of them shifted just enough to block his line of sight.
Message received.
They stopped in front of an automatic door.
The sentries stepped aside without a word, taking position on either side of the frame.
They didn't need to tell him what to do.
He already knew.
Aleph took a slow breath.
Then he walked in.
Aleph walked into the room expecting another masked face. Another faceless person in a white coat with a tab, asking the same tired questions, jotting down his answers with the same careful indifference.
What he didn't expect was smoke.
An obscured face — but not a visor this time.
He stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.
A person. An actual person.
And why the hell was she so damn pretty.
He noticed the eyes first. The way they were fixed downward, boring into a screen, almost piercing even from across the room. His expression soured almost immediately at the realisation of what he was doing. He clicked his tongue, reoriented himself, and took a seat in the composite chair across from her.
He hadn't been given permission to sit. He didn't particularly care.
The woman had short hair — to her shoulders, pale yellow, the colour of old paper. It wasn't often he saw someone like that. Most people in the Seventh Sector had dark hair, like he did. Sometimes white, though he tended to stay away from those.
He waited. She kept pulling drags from the cigarette, reading something on the tab, unhurried and entirely unbothered by his presence. He expected her to speak first. She didn't. After a while, he gave a slight cough — just enough to affirm that he existed.
She glanced up. A single second. Her eyes found his, and he flinched slightly from the weight of it — from the gaze itself, and from something else he couldn't quite place. It felt like being measured.
"Sorry, kid. Just going over your file."
She returned to the screen.
"You know, it really is something. I'm supposed to read everything here — you have any idea how much reading that is, interviewing all of you?"
Two things landed on Aleph at once.
First — there were others. Of course there were. He just hadn't let himself think about it.
Second — this woman was not a researcher. Not a sentry, either. The posture was wrong, the manner was wrong, the cigarette on the table was entirely wrong. He'd only ever seen a Saviour on government parade days or pressed flat on propaganda posters, stiff and formal and larger than life.
The presence of one, up close, in a small room — it was almost suffocating.
She finally set the tab down, crushed the cigarette against the table's edge without a second thought, and looked at him properly.
"So — Aleph." A pause. "Can I call you Aleph? There's no surname in this file, which is — whatever." She waved a hand. "How have they been treating you these past few days?"
Aleph considered it. He turned over a few options — the sarcastic route, something about feeling more like a test subject than a person, something cutting and perfectly observed. In the end, none of it came out.
"Fine," he said.
She smiled. Not quite a real smile — it reached her eyes but skipped her mouth entirely, like something private and a little amused.
She tilted her head and looked at him with mock pity.
"Sure you are. They all say that."
She uncrossed her legs.
"Anyway. I'm not here to waste either of our time with theatrics. I'm here to orient you — about the next step. The one they've been running you into the ground for, for the past four days." She glanced at the tab again. "Hmm. Below average cardiovascular capability. Muscle mass is also... below average." A beat. "At least you're supposed to be smart."
She looked up.
"Care to tell me why your physical capability is this far below average? Or is that a sensitive subject? Or maybe you—"
She already knew. He could see it. She just wanted to hear it from him.
"I'm from the Seventh Sector," he said.
She almost managed surprise. Almost.
"Hm. Must've glossed over that part. I assumed you'd just dodged sports in school."
"Never went," he said.
"I assume the Seventh Sector isn't particularly known for its... educational infrastructure."
"Get to the point," he said.
She smiled again — a real one this time, though it didn't touch her eyes.
"The point is — they'll be giving you the real thing soon. Your mark's been degrading, hasn't it? The primer can only delay the advancement, it's not a cure." Her gaze drifted, briefly, toward the hand he had resting on the table.
Aleph moved it — slowly, almost imperceptibly.
"Is it the same as the primer?" he asked.
"Not quite. The primer is... forceful. Let's use that word. It's designed to make your body ready for what comes next. Strip you down, essentially. What follows is something different."
"What follows," he said. "Meaning."
"The survival rate for the actual procedure is significantly higher than the primer's. It's not a culling." She said it evenly. "It's also a considerably more intimate process, if you can believe that."
Intimate. He wasn't sure they were talking about the same thing.
"Tell me something," she said. "Has your life ever flashed before your eyes?"
Aleph blinked. The shift in register was jarring.
"No."
"That's unexpected, given where you're from." She leaned back slightly. "Some say it happens in moments near death — that the brain is searching for a reference. Some precedent. Looking for any prior experience it can pull from, any pattern that maps to survival."
"And?"
"The blood operates the same way. Or at least, that's the dominant theory. The fresh blood of one of those creatures has never experienced contact with something less than human. So we believe it runs a kind of search — through its own history, looking for instances where it has made contact with a human before. Some kind of previous communion."
She let him sit with it.
He mostly thought it was complete nonsense. Which meant it almost certainly wasn't.
"So what is it looking for?" he asked. "Some memory it can use?"
"We don't know," she said, and she sounded like she meant it. "But most subjects experience it."
"Experience what?"
"Whatever comes next. Most call it a trial." A pause. "The blood is looking for a memory. And you have to look for it — through the memory itself. Find the moment. The point where a human has communed with a dragon. Or something close enough."
"That's what the trial is," he said slowly. "Finding that."
"That's your purpose in it, yes."
"What does it feel like? The trial."
"You'll be under — mostly asleep. So it presents itself like a dream. A lucid one. Except it's said to feel entirely physical. Like you're genuinely there."
Aleph pressed two fingers to his temple and stared at the floor. He had no framework for any of this. He wasn't sure he wanted one.
"Is it dangerous?" he asked.
She gave him a look.
He already knew the answer. He'd asked it out of habit.
"Don't die, kid," she said finally. She stood, sliding a pad across the table toward him. "There's more detail in there. I don't have the time to cover all of it."
She moved to the chair where her coat was hanging. He watched her pull it on.
"How did you survive?" he said — almost without meaning to.
She looked back. And for the first time, she gave him a real smile. One that reached everything.
"Don't die," she said. "And don't hesitate. It's just a dream. Think of it as exactly that. Trust me — it'll make everything considerably easier."
She moved to the door. Her hand found the frame.
"I'll be looking forward to your results, kid."
A breath. Almost too quiet.
"We slum rats have to stick together."
She opened the door and walked out.
Aleph didn't move for a long time after that.
Then, slowly, he leaned back in the chair and stared up at the rectangular fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling. He covered both his cheeks with his hands.
"Fucking hell."
They finished with him a few hours later. Another round of assessments — blood pressure, reflex response, something with electrodes he didn't ask about. A sentry walked him back to his room without a word.
The room was the same as it had been every night. White walls. A cot. The particular silence of a building that was trying to sound empty.
He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow.
The word sat on his chest like something physical. He turned it over, examined it, put it back. There was nothing useful to do with it. No preparation that mattered, no variable he could shift. The woman had said as much without quite saying it. The blood would decide. He was just the thing it was deciding about.
He thought about the others. However many there were. Whether they were lying in identical rooms right now, staring at identical ceilings, running the same useless calculations.
He thought about the mark on his hand. The way it had been spreading, slowly, for the past few weeks. The primer had slowed it, bought time, but the progression was there if you knew where to look — a faint tracery working its way toward his wrist.
Non-viable, they'd call it. If the trial didn't select him.
He hadn't known that word an hour ago.
Sleep didn't come. He'd known it wouldn't.
Eventually he sat up, reached for the pad on the floor beside the cot, and activated it.
Forty pages. Dense text, no diagrams, no images. Theories. Notes. Secondhand observations from researchers who wrote in the passive voice, as if distance from the subject made them more credible.
He almost threw it across the room five minutes in.
What the hell is all this.
He went back to the beginning and forced himself to read slowly.
The first thing that stopped him was buried in the third paragraph, almost casual in its placement, as if they'd expected him to miss it. If the trial failed to produce a selection — if the blood rejected the subject — the mark would flare. Rapid advancement. The document used the phrase non-viable with the same affect it used for everything else.
Aleph stared at the line for a long moment.
She hadn't mentioned that.
He set the pad down on the cot. Picked it up again.
Further in, the document's description of the trial itself was considerably less reassuring than lucid dream. Subjects reported complete sensory immersion — not the soft impression of dreaming but something with weight and temperature and pain. A handful of researchers speculated the subjects weren't dreaming at all, that they were somehow physically present in whatever the blood surfaced. They admitted they had no proof. They included the theory anyway.
He flipped ahead, looking for something useful. Instructions. Parameters. Any indication of what he was actually supposed to do in there.
Nothing.
Forty pages and not one sentence that told him how to survive the thing. Just descriptions of what it was like. Accounts of what others had experienced. No map, no criteria, no definition of success.
So you just throw me in and hope I figure it out.
He rubbed his face and kept reading.
The phenomena section was supposed to be the reassuring part. He skimmed ahead to page twenty-one, looking for it. The blood, according to the dominant theory, wanted its host to survive — the trial wasn't a culling, the document insisted, but a selection process, and whatever phenomena the subject was granted would be sufficient to navigate whatever memory the blood surfaced.
The blood seeks the survival of its host.
He read the line twice.
"And how do you know that," he said quietly, to no one.
He scrolled back, found the section he'd skipped, and made himself read it.
Voices. Hallucinations. Reported by a significant portion of subjects following exposure, persisting in some cases for weeks afterward. The document gave it half a page — less than half — and spent most of that space on categorisation rather than explanation. Auditory. Occasionally visual. No confirmed mechanism. No identified source.
The recommendation, in its entirety, was four words.
Subjects are advised to disregard.
Aleph stared at it.
Then he snorted.
"Convenient."
He reached page twenty-one.
Phenomena. The word was larger than the surrounding text, formatted as a heading. He'd been half-expecting something technical. A classification system. A list of documented abilities, categories of power with documented precedent — something that would let him understand what he might become, what shape the thing would take.
What he saw instead made him go still.
The word sat there, and directly beneath it, close enough that for a moment he thought it was a subheading:
Order.
The room was white. So white it erased depth — no shadows, no gradients, just flat cold light from every direction at once.
Aleph became aware of it slowly. Ceiling first. Then the restraints — wrists, ankles, chest, something across his forehead he hadn't expected. He tried to move and nothing moved and he was too far under to feel afraid about that.
A figure in a white hazmat suit moved at the edge of his vision. Head down. Tablet in hand. The suit was sealed completely — gloves, visor, the works — the kind of protection you wore when you weren't sure what you were dealing with.
Robotic arms shifted above the bed, adjusting. One near his chest. One near his left arm. A third he couldn't track.
He turned his head as far as the restraint allowed.
There was a machine beside the bed. Low, wide, humming at a frequency he felt more than heard. Tubes ran from it — into his right arm, he realized, following the line of them — and inside the tubes something moved. Slow. Deliberate.
He stared at it.
It was almost the right color.
Almost. But under the white light it caught differently than it should have — too dark at the center, too slow around the edges, clinging to the walls of the tube in a way that blood didn't cling. Like it had more weight than it was supposed to. Like it was thinking about where it was going.
He watched it move for a long moment.
Then he looked back at the ceiling, because there was nothing else he could do about it.
The hazmat doctor set the tablet down and began.
"Subject is conscious. Heart rate elevated but within acceptable parameters. Neural activity stabilizing." He moved around the bed with practiced efficiency, checking connections, adjusting the machine's settings without looking at the readout. "Mark response ongoing. Blood pressure above baseline."
One of the robotic arms retracted. Another extended.
"We are proceeding with administration." He tapped something on the console. "You will experience visions once the blood enters your system at full volume. There will be no pain — not as you currently understand it. You will be unconscious for the duration."
He snapped his fingers. Sharp. Close to Aleph's ear.
"Focus, Twenty-One. Blink once if you understand."
Aleph blinked.
"The trial will present itself as a dream. It is not a dream. Do not treat it as one." A pause. "Blink once if you understand."
Aleph blinked.
The doctor moved to the machine. Adjusted something. The substance in the tube shifted — a faint change in flow, almost imperceptible — and Aleph felt it almost immediately. Not pain. Just presence. A warmth that didn't belong to him, moving up his arm from the inside.
The doctor's hands were on the console.
They were shaking.
Not much. Just at the edges — a faint tremor in the fingers as they moved across the settings, there and then controlled, there and then controlled. The kind of shaking that came from doing something difficult for long enough that your body had started keeping score without telling you.
Aleph watched it.
The doctor finished the adjustment and stepped back.
He stood for a moment with his hands at his sides. Then he looked up — not at Aleph, not at the tablet. At the corner of the room. High up, where the wall met the ceiling.
Aleph followed the look.
A camera mount. Small. Matte black. The kind designed not to be noticed.
The red light on it was off.
The doctor looked at it for three full seconds. Then he looked back down at Aleph, and something in his posture had shifted — something small, some professional arrangement he'd been holding in place that he'd quietly set down.
He pulled the stool from under the console and sat.
"Your name is Aleph."
He said it differently from everything before it. Not a procedure step. Not a calibration check. Just a fact he was choosing to acknowledge.
"Remember it."
A beat of silence. The machine hummed. The substance moved in the tube.
"Don't hesitate in there. Whatever it shows you — move. "If the theory is right, the blood prefers living hosts." He paused. "And don't die too fast. The Saviors are occupied. If you rupture before anyone gets to you it becomes a containment event, and I am not equipped for that today."
He glanced at the machine. Back at Aleph.
"I'd also like to see my family tonight. So."
He stood, replaced the stool, picked up the tablet.
"For the love of everything," he said, back in the clinical register, smooth and practiced, "don't die."
The warmth in Aleph's arm spread to his shoulder.
Then his chest.
Then his thoughts started coming apart at the seams, slow and painless, like something untying a knot it had been working on for a while.
The last thing he saw was the tube.
The substance inside it — darker than blood, slower than blood, moving like it knew where it was going — almost empty now.
Almost all of him.
Then the white room was gone.