Theon closed the journal with a heavy heart, his mind racing. What he'd read confirmed much of what he had already pieced together—the formation had been designed to siphon energy from the empire's main network. And yet, from what remained, it was clear the plan had never come to fruition. His thoughts drifted to the scattered corpses he'd seen—the zombies and the abominations that roamed this facility. It was likely they were once the resistance members, their rebellion turned into a grotesque mockery of life.
Theon scanned his surroundings, ensuring the bunker was secure before finally lying down to rest. The underground stillness enveloped him like a thick blanket, the silence a soothing balm for his frayed senses. He hadn't felt this kind of peace since landing on Serena, and his mind, for the first time in ages, began to drift. Sleep took him before he even realized it, pulling him into its depths.
But the peace didn't last.
Theon's eyes snapped open.
Cold. Sterile. Wrong.
The scent of antiseptic clawed down his throat, thick enough to taste—metallic, artificial, like the air had been scrubbed of anything living. His body lay rigid on a narrow cot, arms strapped to his sides with something too smooth to be rope.
His fingers twitched against starched sheets. 'Sheets? Where—?'
The light above seared his vision. When he forced his eyes open, the blur resolved into rows of beds, each holding a motionless child.
No. Not motionless.
Their chests rose and fell in perfect unison. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Too rhythmic. Too wrong.
This place—these walls—were not where he should be.
Yet they were.
'Again…?'
Panic spiked, sharp and acidic, before his rational mind could smother it. What did he mean again? He had never been here!
This wasn't the bunker. This wasn't now. But the dream—no, the memory—didn't care. It dragged him under anyway.
The overhead lights burned brighter. His body moved without his command—limbs folding the blanket, feet aligning on the floor with puppet precision. A whimper lodged in his throat. He couldn't stop it. Couldn't control any of it.
The room stretched endlessly, rows of cots identical to his, each occupied by a child.
No. These weren't just children.
They were subjects.
Their faces were blank, eyes half-lidded, chests rising and falling in perfect unison.
The lights flickered, harsh and sudden, flooding the room in sterile white. As one, the children sat up, their motions unnervingly precise. Theon's body mirrored them, muscle memory overriding his will. He was a passenger in his own skin.
And then he saw him. The boy below, the one sharing his bunk—number 1987.
White hair. Frail. Those terrified eyes.
His frame seemed to shrink under the harsh light, and though his face was a mask of obedience, his eyes were different. When their gazes met, Theon's pulse stuttered. The boy's lips didn't move, but the plea was deafening:
Help me.
A helplessness that screamed louder than any words could.
A strange tightness seized Theon's chest, unfamiliar, like his insides were twisting in ways they never had before. His heart pounded erratically, heavy, as if his very body was fighting against itself.His fingers curled, nails biting into his palms. This wasn't just fear.
It was rage.
It was grief.
It was—
'Mine. This is mine.'
The realization was worse than the emotion itself. This wasn't some phantom sensation. It belonged to him.
Before he could process it further, a voice sliced through the silence—cold, mechanized, devoid of life.
"1983. 1985. 1987. 1990. 1992."
Each number fell like a guillotine's drop.
The white-haired boy—1987—flinched as if struck. The number hung in the air, heavier than a verdict. A death sentence. Theon saw the tears glistening in the boy's eyes, trembling at the edge but never falling.
Theon's stomach churned violently, a sensation so alien that he barely registered it as his own. His body was betraying him, his breath coming faster, shallower. 'Why am I reacting like this?' He could feel his hands trembling, not from weakness, but from something deeper, something… uncontrolled.
1987 stepped forward, joining the others in a slow, defeated march toward the northern wall. Each step seemed to weigh heavier on 1987, his small form appearing to shrink with each movement. He looked like a shivering baby chick, separated from its nest and left to fend for itself in a cold, unfeeling world.
Theon's muscles twitched—'Move, damn it!'—but his body refused. His mind screamed, but his bones were stone.
'Why do I care?'
Yet with every step 1987 took, something inside Theon fractured. The boy's footsteps echoed in his skull, each one sending cracks spider webbing through the hollow spaces of his chest. His pulse roared in his ears. His vision blurred at the edges.
His eyes burned. His throat felt tight.
Then—1987 turned.
Theon saw it—the silent plea in the boy's eyes, the wordless cry that stabbed into him like a blade. It was a cry of help. It was a cry of resignation. The boy's shoulders slumped, his steps dragging like a man walking to the gallows. Theon knew that look. It wasn't fear—it was surrender. He knew, he knew there would be no heroes to save them. And with that gaze emotions surged—raw, unfiltered, wrong—flooding him like a dam breaking.
'What is happening to me?'
He had no reference for this. No anchor. He couldn't dissect it, couldn't analyze or control it like he had always done. These emotions—they weren't just foreign—they were wrong. They didn't belong to him. They couldn't belong to him.
But yet they did.
As the northern wall swallowed 1987 and the others, Theon's breath hitched, his chest tight and constricted. His very soul began splitting open, tearing at seams he hadn't known were there. His soul sea stirred violently, the placid waters churning into stormy waves. Something deep within him—beneath the carefully sewn-together seabed—shifted, loosened.
Theon had no name for what he felt. There was no logic here, no sense, only the chaotic storm of emotion that roared through him like an untamed beast. It was suffocating. Drowning. It left him gasping for air, as if his body was rejecting the very idea of feeling this way.
I don't feel.
That was what he knew.
What he had always known.
Emotions were things to mimic, to study, not to experience. He didn't feel. Not like this. Not this deep. Emotions were tools. Masks. Things to be wielded, not suffered.
He wasn't supposed to feel this way.
Yet here they were—grief, rage, helplessness—clawing at his insides, shredding through barriers he hadn't even known existed.
'No. No, no, no—'
And then, as suddenly as it began—silence.
The churning waters of his soul sea flattened into an unnatural calm, smooth as black glass. His breathing steadied, but beneath that false tranquility, something fundamental had shifted. The stitches binding the seabed of his being had loosened their grip.
Just a little.
Just enough.
Something was breaking.
A soft hiss cut through the silence as the door sealed shut. The lights dimmed, plunging the room into a suffocating darkness that swallowed everything—the cots, the sterile walls, even the ghosts of those hollow-eyed children. The vision frayed at the edges, its colors bleeding away like ink in water. The emotions—those terrible, clawing emotions—drained from him like a tide receding from shore.
Then—a blink.
Reality snapped back into place.
Cold steel pressed against his back instead of starched sheets. The damp, metallic tang of the bunker's air filled his lungs, thick with mildew and rust. Somewhere in the darkness, the ventilation system droned a monotonous lullaby.
Theon jolted upright, his body trembling, his skin slick with sweat. The dream—was it a dream?—already crumbled in his grasp, its details disintegrating like ash in the wind. By the time he gasped awake, only the echo of dread remained—and even that was fading, as if something had reached into his mind and scrubbed the memory clean.