Elian.
I woke up drowning.
Not in water. Not in blood.
Light.
Raw. Bright. Violent. Blinding would be the right word. It pressed behind my eyes like needles. Every blink hurt.
Not just my eyes. Everything hurt.
A deep, terrible kind of pain. Like someone tore me apart and stitched me back together wrong. Every muscle. Every bone. Even the ones that hadn't broken. Hurt.
But I was alive.
That didn't make sense.
I tried to move. Couldn't.
Straps dug into my skin - thin, tight. Cold metal against my spine. My arms pinned. Ankles too. Something sharp rested at the base of my skull. A needle? A wire?
I didn't know. I didn't want to know.
Panic came slow. Then memory returned.
The blood.
The breach.
Kalen.
The demon.
The voice that called me "brother."
I remember every little detail. Everything.
I should be dead.
So why the hell was I here? Alive. Tied up.
I shifted, only to feel the straps bite deeper. Something shuffled to my right. A cough. Shaky. Dry.
I turned my head slowly. It ached.
I wasn't alone.
A body. Another slab. Another person.
Kalen.
Strapped like me. But still. His chest rose in shallow intervals. His face - bloodless. The cigar was gone.
I glanced further down. There were others.
Slabs like mine. Six in total. Three occupied.
Two of them weren't breathing.
And one… twitching.
The one on the far left - a Gifted. I recognized the markings on his arm. The ink. The scars. If you could still call it an arm.
His body… something was wrong. His limbs were stretched. Thinned out. His mouth hung open but no breath. Bones pierced through skin. His eye sockets… bled. Not red. Black. Like oil leaking out.
And then, suddenly, the twitch again. Like he was still trying to live.
Or escape.
The slab beside him. Gifted? Couldn't tell.
No limbs. No life. Just a piece of rotting flesh. Tubes shoved where arms should've been. Something fluid was being pulled out. Thick. Yellow-black.
Why would a Gifted be here?
The third slab was the worst.
I don't even know if it was human.
Just a torso. Its chest were opened. The rib bones were stretched to the maximum. There were tubes stitched straight into it.
Gifted were miracles. Untouchable. Raised above the rest of us. But here…they weren't even people. Just meat. And I was strapped next to them.
I'd heard some rumors. Whispers in sector E. Gifted who entered breaches and never came back.
Were these them?
Why?
I turned my head further. And then I saw the rest. The machines.
Not standard medical ones. Nothing clean or new. Tanks. Metal. Rusted in places. A shelf full of jars. No labels. Inside - lumps of… something. Flesh? Maybe. No shape. Some moved.
The monitors blinked. Everything here looked decades old.
And there - thick syringes stabbed into the gifted. Feeding something in. Something dark.
Like what I'd seen in the artificial Gifted room.
But this wasn't that. This wasn't for Forgotten. Or failed experiments.
This was worse.
No cameras. No drones.
Just one person.
A Bound.
Female. White uniform. Not clean. Stained with red and black. Gloves to the elbow. Eyes cold, unmoving as she stared at the screen near Kalen's head.
She didn't react when he twitched. Then turned and looked directly at me.
I froze.
Then another man entered.
Older. Bald. A Bound, too. I recognized the badge stitched to his collar. High rank. Maybe sector command level.
She muttered something to him and then nodded toward me.
"This one" she said. "He survived direct exposure."
The man studied me. "No fingerprint..." he murmured. "Not gifted... What is he...?"
He looked at the slab beside me. "And the other one?" The man asked.
"Still unstable. But no signs of Type-Z Collapse" she replied.
Type Z..what?
"He's not collapsing?" the man asked, walking toward the monitor.
"No."
"Interesting…"
Kalen wasn't collapsing? His pulse was shallow. His body barely moved. He did. Already.
The lady walked closer to me. "Vitals steady. Conscious."
"Proceed" the old bound said.
Proceed what?
I didn't understand at first. Then I did.
Needles slid into my neck. Thin. Deep. Something cold pushed through the veins. I screamed.
No one flinched.
A monitor near me turned on.
"Two survived" the old Bound said. "If this holds… we don't need to make Gifted anymore."
The last thing I heard. Before everything went black.