"What do you mean you don't know?"
Janus pushed himself upright on the gurney, bare feet finding the cold floor. He said it the way a person says something they already know the answer to and are hoping to be corrected on.
Mathen rose from the barrier cube, which dissolved into faint scattered light and was gone. He crossed the room with the measured pace of someone who had already decided how much of this conversation he was willing to have.
"The Table is a phenomenon associated with Heaven's Vessels and nothing else," he said. "There's no concrete record of what it actually is. You'll understand more once you meet the Captain."
"So I just wait until someone higher up decides to explain my own condition to me."
"Prepare yourself," Mathen said, ignoring the tone. "The Captain still considers you a potential aberrant. Don't do anything reckless." He gave a short wave and walked out without waiting for a response.
The door closed.
Leian was already at Janus' side before the latch caught, tugging his arm with the energy of someone who had been waiting for the room to clear.
"Come on. You have to meet the others."
"Hold on." He pulled back, feet planted. "I'm not done asking questions and that guy just bailed on me."
She reached into her coat pocket and produced a small candy bar, holding it out with an expression of complete sincerity.
"Sugar helps."
He stared at it. Then he took it.
"Fine." He tore the wrapper open — frosted cake inside, the kind sold from convenience store baskets — and took a bite. "Aberrants. What are they, exactly? The real answer, not the one they give civilians."
Leian opened the door and gestured him through. "Monsters," she said simply. "Two main types. One and Two."
The hallway was bright and clean, white metal panels lining the walls, overhead lights throwing everything into sharp relief. It felt institutional in the way that places built for serious purposes feel institutional — functional, deliberate, nothing wasted.
"How does someone become one?" he asked, falling into step beside her.
"Type 1 starts with someone doing something illegal." She tilted her head. "You know transplanting a Vessel's core is the highest taboo, right?"
"I did not know that."
"Well. Now you do." She clasped her hands behind her back as she walked. "Every Vessel has an organ — not an extra one, one of the existing ones transforms — that becomes their core. It's what stabilizes their power. Determines what kind of element or ability responds to them. Some Vessels survive things that should kill them because the core protects the body around it."
"So if you remove it—"
"It goes berserk. Separated from the host, with nothing anchoring it, it becomes something else entirely." They reached the elevator and she pressed the call button. "A Type 1 aberrant. Skilled medical-type Vessels are the only ones who can attempt a transplant, and even then the failure rate makes it not worth discussing. A single Type 1 can destroy a city."
The doors opened. They stepped in.
"And Type 2?" he asked, finishing the candy, cheeks slightly full.
Leian's tone shifted — not dramatically, but the lightness went out of it.
"Rarer. Maybe as rare as a Heaven's Vessel." She watched the floor numbers. "It happens when a Vessel pushes past what their core can handle. Normally they just die — the core burns out, it's over. But sometimes it doesn't burn out. It goes berserk instead and takes over the host completely."
"Takes over."
"The Vessel stops being the Vessel." She glanced at him. "Some records suggest a few retained fragments of intelligence afterward. But unstable. Unreasonable. The body becomes something it was never meant to be, running on power the mind can't contain."
The elevator hummed around them.
"A single Type 2 can cripple a nation," she continued. "That's another reason you're here. We can't risk you in the open, and neither can the international committee." She paused. "They're not wrong to be cautious. I want you to understand that. The caution isn't personal."
Janus stared at the rising floor numbers. His reflection looked back at him from the polished metal panel — dark circles, healing skin, the general appearance of someone who had recently died and found the experience inconvenient.
"Is there any way," he said, "to go back to my normal life?"
A beat.
"No," Leian said. Quietly, without cruelty. "Everyone here is legally nonexistent. The Empire buries us in classified protocols. On paper, this island barely exists. On paper, the people on it don't either."
He said nothing.
She watched his reflection in the panel, studying it with that same quality of attention she'd had since the lobby — not pity, not detachment. Something more careful than both.
"I know that's not what you wanted to hear," she said.
"It's fine," he said. "I figured."
He hadn't, actually. But saying so felt like handing something over that he wasn't ready to give.
* * *
The elevator opened at the third floor into a tall man with a clean crew cut and eyes the particular shade of blue that looks almost artificial in certain lighting. He filled the doorway with the ease of someone accustomed to taking up space, and his expression when he saw them carried the specific quality of someone who had recently lost an argument and was hoping the topic wouldn't come up.
"Guntman," Leian said. "I thought you were attached to Mathen."
"The Lieutenant told me to deli—" He stopped. Tried again. "I got into a fight with Yna."
He looked away from her immediately and with great conviction, as though the far wall had become extremely interesting.
Janus studied him quietly — the height, the build, the way he held himself like someone who broke things regularly and had learned to be slightly apologetic about it.
"You were one step from detention," Leian said, walking past him. "And you still haven't fixed my garden."
"Yes, ma'am," Guntman said, to the wall.
He retrieved his mask from his coat, stepped into the elevator, and held the door for a brief, courteous moment before letting it close. Janus watched it go.
The hallway on the third floor was longer than he expected. Doors lined both sides, each with a nameplate. Some were clean and plain. Others bore small decorative touches — floral insignias etched into the frame, a pressed flower taped beside a name, small personal claims on institutional space. Others looked like they had survived something: dents in the doorframes, scorched edges, one door that had clearly been replaced entirely and still sat slightly wrong in its hinges.
Leian slowed and stopped.
"This one's mine." She gestured to her door, then to the one beside it. "That's yours."
Janus looked at it. Plain door. Clean nameplate, already bearing his name in small block letters. Someone had prepared this before he woke up.
"I expected more segregation," he said. "New potential aberrant, strange condition, international committee wanting him dead — I figured I'd be three floors underground with a guard outside."
"As the Overseer," Leian said, with the light tone of someone stating a fact they find quietly amusing, "I'm one of the strongest people in this facility. If you turn, I'll handle it." She pressed her palms together in exaggerated pleading, eyes wide. "So let's be kind to each other, yeah?"
He looked at her for a moment.
"Alright," he said. "Can I bathe? And after that — can I sleep the rest of the day? Honestly I just need to wash the last few weeks off. The homesickness isn't going anywhere but maybe the blood will."
Leian tilted her head. "You can bathe," she said. "But not sleep. The Captain's already here — you'll meet him after you're done." She pointed down the hallway. "Men's bath is at the other end of this floor. Come to the sixth floor when you're ready."
She turned and walked back toward the elevator without waiting for his response.
He stood in the hallway for a moment, then opened his door.
The room was small and clean. A single bed against the wall, made tightly. A large wooden cabinet to the left. A tinted window that looked out over the island — the slope of the hill, the dark line of jungle, and beyond it the sea, silver-black in the late afternoon light, completely still.
It was almost painfully normal.
For a moment, standing in the doorway with his hand on the frame, that normalcy felt like the most comforting thing he had encountered since waking up.
Then it felt like something else entirely.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
He closed the door.
* * *
Night had fully taken Bahaks by the time the city remembered how to move again.
Neon burned along the commercial strips, doubling in the wet streets below. Traffic surged through intersections. Late workers crossed bridges with their heads down and their collars up, the kind of motion that cities produce automatically, without instruction, because cities do not pause for their dead. Along the rebuilt blocks near ground zero, new structures had gone up with impressive speed — monuments to the victims of the aberrant incident, to the soldiers who responded, to the unnamed heroes who neutralized the threat. Plaques. Flowers. A few people standing in front of them at this hour, quietly, for reasons they probably couldn't have articulated.
One structure dominated everything else.
A tower of bluish glass rose from the center of the skyline, dwarfing the surrounding buildings not just in height but in the particular quality of its presence — the way it caught the city's light and returned it differently, colder, as though filtering out something warm. At this hour its upper floors were dark. The rooftop above them was darker still.
The man standing on it was barely visible against the sky.
He had black hair and green eyes sharp enough to catch light in the dark, and he stood at the rooftop's edge with his hands in his suit pockets, looking out across the city the way someone looks at something they own and are deciding what to do with. The wind at this height was cold and consistent, pressing against his jacket, and he seemed not to notice it.
His phone rang.
He let it ring twice before answering. Said nothing.
The voice on the other end started speaking. He listened for approximately four seconds before cutting in.
"I'm going to stop you there." His tone was pleasant in the specific way that pleasant becomes a warning. "Because what I'm hearing is that the chief is dead, the officer with him didn't have the pen, and you're calling me without it. Which means somewhere between 'simple retrieval' and 'don't fuck this up,' you managed to fail at both." A pause. "Tell me where the pen is. That's the only part of this conversation I'm interested in having."
The response on the other end was short.
Not short enough.
"Then what exactly," Jeyu said, the pleasantness gone now, replaced by something flat and very quiet, "am I paying you for?"
He ended the call. Turned the device once in his hand, then closed his fist around it. When he opened his palm the device was dust, and the wind took it before it could settle.
He rolled his shoulders, adjusted his jacket, and turned toward the stairwell.
Then he stopped.
A bead of sweat formed along his temple that had nothing to do with temperature. The air had changed — not the wind, something beneath the wind, a pressure without a physical source that was nonetheless completely unambiguous. The particular quality of being in a space that was no longer empty.
He removed his jacket and laid it over the railing. Unhurried. Deliberate.
"That's trespassing," he said, to the empty rooftop. "Just so you know."
A voice answered from somewhere in the dark behind him, flat and without inflection.
"You've got quite the body count for someone who keeps telling everyone he's one hell of a doctor."
He smiled at that — genuine, almost warm, the smile of a man receiving a compliment in an unusual form.
"A fan." He scanned the rooftop slowly, without urgency. "Why don't you come out? I'd love to meet you properly."
He pulled his shirt off over his head and dropped it beside the jacket, leaving only the cold air and the city light against his skin. The gesture had the quality of someone making themselves comfortable before something they expected to enjoy.
"Sorry," the voice replied, colder now. "I don't make a habit of introducing myself to narcissistic perverts, Jeyu."
The blade came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Genuinely fast — the kind of speed that makes the eye useless, that skips past tracking entirely and simply presents a result. Jeyu's right arm was on the rooftop before the pain registered, severed cleanly just below the shoulder. The blade was already gone, vanished back into whatever dark it had come from, leaving no trace in the air where it had passed.
Jeyu looked down at the arm. Then he crouched, picked it up, and pressed it against the stump.
The tissue moved. Not healing — reclaiming. The flesh at the wound's edge reached outward with a slow, deliberate intention, taking hold of the separated limb and drawing it back, layer by layer, until the seam had closed and the arm hung at his side as though the last thirty seconds had not happened. He rolled the shoulder. Flexed each finger in turn.
Perfect.
"Annoying," he muttered, stretching his neck. "But if staying hidden is all you've got, this is going to be a short night."
His arms began to change.
Not quickly — deliberately, each stage visible and intentional, as though he wanted whatever was watching to see exactly what was happening. The bones extended first, lengthening past natural proportion with a sound like timber under load, the skin pulling pale and tight over the new dimensions. Then the spikes came — pushing outward from beneath the surface along the full length of both arms, emerging in irregular rows. He raised them, each now nearly twice their natural length and dense with outward projections, and swept them in a single wide arc across the rooftop.
Metal scraped.
Resistance — brief, specific, in one location.
A line of blood appeared along the extended arm where something invisible had been standing.
The wound gave him up.
He stepped out of the air.
The man was dressed head to foot in black tactical gear, hood drawn close, and his mask was the first thing that held attention — black, smooth, fitted close to the face, with a vertical seam running from crown to chin that divided it precisely in two. On either side of that seam, set in pairs, four circular lenses glowed white in the dark. Not lit. Not reflective. Something between the two, a steady luminescence that had no obvious source and did not flicker. They were arranged like eyes that had been given extra opinions, and the effect in the dark of the rooftop was deeply, specifically wrong in a way that bypassed analysis and went straight to instinct.
He looked down at the cut along his left leg. Patted it once with two fingers. Shrugged.
"Not bad," he said.
"You're worse," Jeyu replied.
His arms retracted — the proportions collapsing back toward normal before his right hand reshaped entirely, fingers fusing, palm flattening and hardening into a blade of dense flesh with a serrated inner edge. He loaded his weight into his calves and the muscles swelled visibly, expanding well beyond natural proportion, the skin going taut and shiny over the augmented mass.
He launched.
The speed was wrong in the specific way his speed was always wrong — not trained fast but physically wrong, the rooftop cracking under the force of departure, the flesh blade coming in flat and horizontal, aimed to separate the masked man at the waist.
The masked man went up.
"Getting you cocky was the plan," he said, from above. "Hiding was just the setup."
The shot came from a different building entirely — crossing the gap between structures in a clean, unremarkable line that entered the back of Jeyu's skull and did not exit cleanly. Bone and matter dispersed forward. The impact snapped his head back hard enough that the rest of him followed, his body rotating once before hitting the rooftop and rolling to a stop against the railing.
The masked man landed. Approached carefully. One hand extended.
Jeyu's eyes opened.
He laughed — sharp and manic, the laughter of someone who has made a private arrangement with pain — and drove a fist into the masked man's torso. The knuckles had hardened into dense thorns before contact, each one driving inward on impact, and the force behind the strike sent the man across the full width of the rooftop and into a concrete service structure hard enough to collapse it.
Jeyu stood.
His skull was reforming. Bone reclaiming its architecture from the inside out, tissue threading back through the hollowed cavity with the same patient, purposeful intention as everything else his body did. Blood ran down his face in sheets and he didn't wipe it. He was already reading angles.
He reduced his mass.
Precisely, deliberately — compressing his frame inward by a fraction invisible to the eye but measurable in the geometry of his silhouette. The second shot arrived as he finished the adjustment and passed through the vacated space by four inches. He restored his density immediately, completing the skull's reconstruction as the bullet embedded in the rooftop behind him.
His eyes found the neighboring building. Upper floors. The faint residue of a muzzle flash still fading against dark glass.
He reached down, closed both hands around the base of a rooftop ventilation tower — steel, bolted, engineered for high wind loads — and tore it free from its housing.
The throw was not aimed. It didn't need to be.
The tower crossed the gap and hit the target floor like a controlled demolition. Concrete exploded outward in a wide radius. Glass descended the building's face in sheets. On the streets below, people ran from a sound whose source they couldn't locate, debris raining across three lanes of traffic.
"You'll never reach my core with that mediocre planning," Jeyu called across the gap. His right arm had transformed again — not a blade this time but a shield, layered slabs of dense flesh stacked in overlapping plates, the surface hardening visibly as he raised it. "Whatever you think you're dealing with, you're not dealing with it."
"Forgive me," the masked man said.
He stepped out of the debris cloud.
"I underestimated you."
He crossed the distance in a movement that did not resolve into individual steps and drove a kick directly into the flesh shield. The impact cracked through all three layers simultaneously — not sequentially, all at once — the force radiating inward fast enough that Jeyu's mouth filled with blood before the pain arrived. Surprise crossed his face for one unguarded second, the involuntary expression of someone whose model of a situation has just been revised.
The masked man grabbed the fractured shield before it could dissolve, wrenched it aside, and hit him in the face with a closed fist.
The blow didn't just break his concentration — it broke the specific quality of distributed focus that allowed him to maintain multiple augmentations simultaneously. The shield collapsed into ordinary flesh. His calves deflated. His enhanced mass dropped from his frame in an instant, and the rooftop seemed briefly to rise toward him as the weight left.
The hand closed around his throat.
The impact when he hit the rooftop ran structural cracks through the floor plate. The building shuddered. Lights on the upper floors flickered and died. And then they were through — not metaphorically through, but physically, the momentum carrying both of them into the building, through the rooftop access and into the floor below, where office furniture scattered and split and a conference table divided cleanly down the middle under the force of Jeyu's landing.
He lay in the wreckage and tried to remember how to breathe. His internals had been rearranged.
The sprinklers activated. Cold water came down in sheets, washing everything — blood, dust, the residue of a fight that had lasted longer than it should have — with equal, indifferent thoroughness.
He forced himself upright.
His muscles expanded with the automatic response of a body under terminal threat, mass loading onto his frame until he had become something barely recognizable as the man who had stood on the rooftop. The pain doubled and he absorbed it. He was on borrowed time and he knew exactly how much he had left, which meant the only remaining variable was how he used it.
The water.
He registered it a half-second too late. The sprinklers were washing the blood away continuously, resetting every surface every second. No trail. No tracking. No way to read where anything was in a room full of noise and movement and perfectly clean floors.
The masked man was gone.
The fear arrived without ceremony and settled into his chest with the weight of something that had been patient. He smashed through interior walls, moving by memory, until he found the broken windows at the building's face. He didn't slow down. With the remaining mass still loaded he crossed the last of the floor and went through the glass at full speed.
The night air hit him.
Then the beam hit him.
It came from below and to the left — yellow, almost luminous, the width of a doorframe — and it didn't wound him so much as subtract him. The portions of his body it passed through were simply gone, incinerated with a surgical completeness that left clean edges where there had been flesh. Half his torso ceased to exist. The remainder continued on the trajectory of the jump for a fraction of a second before gravity made its claim.
He was falling toward the street.
In the half-second remaining, he moved his core. Not a metaphor — a deliberate physical relocation, the transformed organ shifting deeper into what remained of his body with the precision of long practice. Then he restructured. The surviving mass extended and redistributed, pulling outward into wide angular surfaces, membranous and catching the air, the fall becoming a veer. Something enormous and asymmetrical curved hard away from the street and climbed, banking against the city's thermal columns, disappearing above the light line into the dark.
Gone.
* * *
The masked man stood at the shattered window.
Behind him, water still ran from the sprinklers across the wreckage of the office. Plaster dust moved through the wet air. Below, sirens had started — distant, converging, the sound of a city responding to something it had heard but not yet understood.
A woman stepped out of the shadows along the far wall. She moved without sound, a long rifle held at ease across her body, a thread of smoke still rising from the barrel. She crossed to the window and stood beside him, looking out at the sky where the shape had been. She didn't speak. She didn't need to. Her presence said everything her silence was designed to say: it was done, it had gone as intended, and whatever came next was already accounted for.
"Just as the Captain ordered," the masked man said. "He'll relay the message."
He turned back to the window. The woman stood beside him without a word, rifle at ease, smoke still thinning from the barrel. They watched the sky where the shape had been until there was nothing left to watch.
He had come here with a complete picture of what he was dealing with.
He was leaving with something considerably less comfortable than that.
