Archibald jolted awake in the dormitory.

  Everything ached. His vision swam, and the burn in his arm pulsed with a rhythmic sting—sharp, acidic, wrong. It traced the vein upwards from the last injection site on the nook of his left elbow, angry and inflamed. Already new scars adorned his pale figure.

  They are preparing us for something, changing us is some way. It feels wrong, twisted. I can’t even tell how much time has passed. It has to have been at least a week.

  Eyes squinting as he blinked the sleep out of them, he adjusted to the sterile light that hummed overhead, flickering slightly. His cot was one of dozens, arranged in ever-exposed lines across the concrete box of a room. There were no windows, no clocks, no defining or irregular features. Just gray concrete that was subtly cracked at the edges, and that nauseating smell—sweat, bleach, and a chemical sweetness that clung to the tongue.

  He lifted his arm. It was shockingly pale and the cut from the previous day's drill hadn’t closed. The edges were blackened, the tissue too soft and inflamed. Something was wrong with the serum. Wrong in a way that wasn’t purely accidental.

  No way these bastards would ever make anything fit for humans.

  A subtle sneer flashed across his face, before settling once again into quiet observance.

  …

  Across the room, someone vomited in their sleep. Wet, splattering. Soon after came the sound of choking, weak and desperate, echoing out in room.

  No one moved. No one flinched. No one looked over. No one but him.

  They never did, whatever that serum did left them glassy-eyed and vacant. Bound in a spell-like trance to the confines of their cots, regardless of bodily needs or comfort, as they dreamed terrible things.

  "At least I have the dignity of being able to piss in the corner."

  Then, routine took over.

  The sirens overhead droned to life. Shockingly loud. Yet not fast in cadence. Just a distant threat that said: get ready, or be gotten.

  Muffled chuffs and weak sputtering contrasted the quickness with which the initiates rose to their feet and stood at attention in front of their cots.

  The same man as yesterday and the day before that entered, dressed in the same flawless matte-black uniform. Clean, pressed, tailored to cut the image of precision. His boots clicked once against the tile before he spoke. He had never offered a name—just a face among the faceless. And yet, to them, he was the world now. Archibald noted how this man alone had decided the fate of more than ten of them since he first awoke in this living hell.

  “You’re going to make me proud today,” he said, voice clipped, cold. “Or you’ll make yourselves useful another way.”

  He turned, and they followed. Single file, in synchronized steps. Behind them, guards fell into pace—masked, black armored, silent. Rifles slung across their chests like casual reminders.

  The march to the Evaluation Chamber was silent. It always was.

  The chamber was cold—almost surgical in its sterility. Cold white tiles spread beneath harsh fluorescents, and the shuffle of their boots was absorbed by walls that seemed designed to swallow sound. No echo. No warmth. Just the steel table at the center, gleaming under the light like an altar.

  Doctor Callisee stood beside it, the sleeves of her pristine lab coat rolled precisely once, as though disorder itself would offend her. Two aides flanked her, masked and faceless behind dark visors. She didn’t look up when they entered—just kept writing, the pen’s scratch across her dataslate too loud, too piercing in the silence. Like a blade being drawn.

  Archibald remembered the first injection. She’d smiled then–a thin, clinical thing–as she drove a thick needle deep into his arm.

  Her voice echoed in his memory, flat and amused, “I suspect we’ll be seeing a great deal of each other. Call me Doctor Callisee.”

  Now, she said nothing at all.

  The instructor–same man, same uniform, same precision–stepped forward.

  “Same as last time. Step forward when called.”

  His tone was sandpaper and static, impersonal yet laced with implication.

  “Make me proud”

  The threat didn’t need to be said.

  Failure only had one outcome.

  “That was my first lesson here after all…”

  …

  In the next moments, initiates were called by their designation starting with A7-001 .

  One by one, they stepped forward. One by one, the needle went in.

  Gaze cast downward, but still subtly observing, he noted how the initiate's reactions varied. Some flinched. Some twitched. Some made no noise. Then, one cried out—a stuttering, sharp yelp—and was immediately dragged through a side door.

  The door, perfectly blended into the wall, clicked closed behind him sealing their fate, and the line kept moving.

  When they reached Archibald’s number, A7-31, Doctor Callisee looked up.

  Her dark eyes locked onto his. Not in curiosity. Not in recognition.

  Only in calculating and clinical analysis. Like a scientist looking at a rat ready for dissection.

  She turned to a locked case beside the table, input a short code, and removed a reinforced vial filled with a pearlescent fluid that shimmered faintly under the light. The syringe she loaded it into was thicker than the others. Its needle gleamed.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Now then, let’s see if you take to it,” she said—not to him. Just into the air as she flicked the tip of the needle.

  Laying on the cold steel table, the injection hit like molten glass. His spine arched, muscles locking. An involuntary cry nearly ripped from his throat despite his best efforts to restrain himself.

  He knew deeply what showing weakness got you here.

  Then something within him stirred, the same something that he knew intuitively had filled the gap within him.

  Eyes agape. The world flickered. His pupils dilated. The lights turned strange, too bright and yet distant. His vision warped, shifting colors and shapes as though his mind had slipped sideways.

  Eyes rolling back, he saw a creature—no, a monster of bone and sinew, its form never quite settling. Limbs bent the wrong way. Joints that didn’t end. It twitched, then fractured. Its essence—an invisible heat—bled into a crystalline black core that hovered nearby.

  Archibald knew, without knowing, what it would do to a part of him, a part that he never had felt prior to this moment.

  It didn’t promise power. Nor strength.

  It promised control.

  Visions fading, he opened his eyes and saw the initiates—each a silhouette, something within them a core of strange light. They appeared as different shapes. Different frequencies.

  His own reflection flickered in the reflective masks of the doctor’s aides.

  Blank.

  He appeared a canvas yet to be painted. Empty, but intuitively he felt it, he was more whole than he had ever been.

  Even then though, he knew the real purpose wasn’t the injection. It was what came after.

  The tests that followed were cruel in the way only institutions could be: efficient, methodical, dehumanizing.

  Archibald knew the purpose of these tests. These were no reasons hidden, the instructors made sure that everyone knew what would happen to them, if not through words, then with actions etched into their mind and flesh.

  Once they were led away from the evaluation chamber, they were brought to a room Archibald had started calling the trial room—low ceilings, copper-drained floors, and dark black walls that smelled faintly of ozone and disinfectant. Everything here was sharp. Deliberate.

  Obedience drills always came first—stand, kneel, crawl, stand, kneel, crawl, again, again, again. The commands were barked in bursts of static through a wall-mounted speaker and through the mouth of the same instructor, deliberately asynchronous, just long enough to short-circuit thought. Even a half-second delay meant a brutal punch to the spine by one of the gaurds. No yelling, no insults. Just error and consequence.

  After what seemed like hours, came the next round of testing and training. One he particularly dreaded.

  Pain tolerance.

  They held heated weights until their skin blistered, held strange poses until their limbs trembled and locked, endured needlework into muscle while strapped down and told not to scream in the few steel tables in the back of the room. Blood was left to dry on their skin, only to be cleaned without ceremony after the trials under a cold pressure wash that left him and his fellow initiates shaking. In these moments, Archibald watched the drains, the precision of the rooms sick design as if he was entranced.

  Then came the psychological strain—commands. Humiliating, degrading, performative. Bow to the one next to you. Thank the one who struck you. Apologize to the wall. Strike your closest initiate in the groin. Again. Again. Again. Archibald noted how one initiate, having reached some sort of breaking point, began laughing mid-task and was beaten half to death into silence. No one reacted.

  Humiliation was next. They were marched with collars and told to perform naked in front of one another, thrusts, punching and tearing themselves, forcing out yells and cries—no purpose, no context, just shame for shame’s sake. A few wept. Some trembled. Archibald during this always remembered how on his first day, one had broke down sobbing and was dragged away, beaten into foaming red at the mouth.

  No one asked what happened to her and Archibald learned a valuable lesson.

  Isolation was perhaps the most torturous test. Hours in pitch-dark coffins, no sound but their own breathing, no room to stretch their limbs. Archibald measured time by the beat of his heart so as to not hear the same voice he had on the first day. Today, one came out covered in blood, nails ripped down to the quick. Another whispered nonsense under their breath for a short while before they were noticed and made silent forcefully. None of them came out of this unscathed, not even him. It made hours feel like days, and days feel like months.

  One test was simple: who cried out first when shocked. They were lined up, bare feet on steel, wires attached to their temples. The current was weak at first. Then it wasn’t. They all cried, eventually. Archibald did not.

  Like a mantra he repeated, “I want to live, I want to live, I want to live…”

  To maintain an appearance of relative normalcy, he let himself falter during a balance test, he allowed himself to be subsequently beaten. He took a lash during a rhythm drill. He made mistakes, calculated mistakes. All on purpose.

  The instructor watched. They noted. They said nothing.

  Archibald, meanwhile, cataloged everything he could lay his eyes on. His focus honed even through gritted teeth and bleeding gums.

  Slowly, torturously slowly, details were falling in place.

  The way Callisee tapped her pen when intrigued as she monitored them post isolation. The flicker of the instructors left eyelid when annoyed at a failure. The initiate always in front of him who smiled subtly when others suffered. The one who never blinked despite being beat.

  And so Archibald studied his surroundings.

  And in doing so the system he found himself at the whims of.

  After the day’s training was finished and as they were marched back out, Archibald felt it—eyes on him.

  It was an alien feeling. A feeling akin to a hot laser pointed at his head for a second too long. Like the gaze was attempting piercing the side of his skull to prod around in his brain.

  Making a natural movement, his eyes scanned the source briefly.

  A mirrored panel along the chamber wall caught his attention. He saw his reflection, then a flicker of movement behind the glass.

  A female voice crackled in a comms line he could not hear:

  “Subject A7-31 showed some resonance today.”

  A deep imposing male voice intoned “Continue monitoring. He may be viable for the next stage of evolution. Make sure he will serve Helix and our cause.”

  Behind the two way glass, a man stood—arms folded, sharp gaze unblinking. No mask. Just a long black coat and a stare that cut deeper than the needles ever had.

  “There’s something buried in that one,” He said. “Let’s see who finds it first.”

  Back in his cot, Archibald lay staring at the ceiling. The lights dimmed, but never truly off.

  His body burned. His mind spun. He felt both more like himself than ever and also like a complete stranger in this new body.

  He remembered the monster in his vision. The crystal. The feeling of completeness. The way that something within him had responded to it all.

  He didn’t know what it was yet

  But he would.

  He could feel what it promised.

  Power.

  And power meant control.

  And as such, he’d play their game. For now.

  He was certain now that he wasn’t the only thing that woke up in this new body.

  He fell asleep with a slight smile today.