The new facility was colder.
Not temperature-wise—though it was that, too. But there was a stillness to the air, like the very walls held their breath.
Gone were the scratched steel floors and humming rune beds. Here, the room was a dome, sleek and seamless, made of some alloy-glass hybrid that shimmered faintly under soft blue lighting.
The five children stood in a line.
Stripped of shoes. Dressed in their threadbare hospital tunics. Their hair, uncut and tangled, framed hollow eyes and cracked lips. Chains with essence-inscribed clasps hung loosely from their wrists and ankles.
At the far end of the dome, the Plague Doctor waited.
He stood like a priest before a twisted altar, arms folded behind his back, his mask gleaming under the surgical lights.
"Welcome, little mistakes," he said, voice laced with casual malice.
"You are not children. Not people. You are clay. Property. Empty vessels waiting to be filled. Each of you—my creation in the making. My pets."
His gaze swept over them.
"You will not question. You will not speak unless commanded. You will not think. Thought is a gift you were not born with."
The girl with the bloated frame whimpered. Her lips twitched. Her knees buckled.
The poisoner stood still, but a drop of acidic mist hissed off his shoulder.
Umbra's eyes remained blank.
The Mirror Boy began to repeat the words spoken. Softly. Like a recording with delay.
And her.
She stared back.
Face neutral. But her fingers twitched. Her jaw clenched tight enough to ache. Her mind cracked—fractures spiderwebbing under pressure. Memories blending. Thoughts folding in on themselves.
But in the eye of that storm, something held.
A rhythm. A thread. Echoes of logic and memory that tethered her just enough.
They were placed back in seats. No restraints this time—only a gentle web of essence threads that wrapped around their skulls and pulsed like veins.
Monitors floated above them, showing rapid streams of data—language, symbols, voices. The essence threads carried information directly into their minds.
It was brainwashing, but precise. Designed to seep past thought and bleed into instinct.
It hurt.
The girl gritted her teeth as patterns flowed into her head like static, like a flood of noise with no outlet.
But instead of surrendering, she parsed.
She didn't know the runes.
She didn't understand the technique.
But her brain—rewired from years of physics, anatomy, astrology—began to match patterns.
The equations weren't random.
They were chaotic systems.
Recursive loops. Inverted feedback.
Essence matrices imitating logic gates.
And slowly, it began to make *sense.*
A memory flickered.
Another dome. A lab.
On Earth.
The anomaly. The shard.
Back then, it hadn't looked like this. It was fractal, black on black, a three-dimensional negative space encased in quantum glass.
She had touched it.
It had screamed.
Not audibly. But in her head.
A thousand fractals unfolding.
And then the explosion.
Here and now—
The moment she remembered, the shard in the corner of the dome pulsed.
Not light.
Not heat.
But **recognition.**
Her mind jerked backward. Her breath hitched.
But she didn't break.
She *twisted.*
The next data stream hit her... and passed through.
She blinked. Straightened.
Calm.
Composed on the surface.
But inside her—something had clicked.
She was *learning* the pattern.
Not just resisting.
*Rewriting.*
But the cracks were there. Deep, echoing. She felt like two versions of herself—one clinging to cold, sharp thought, and one lost in tangled whispers of a world that burned. Her laughter came hollow. Her thoughts repeated in loops. She remembered names that didn't exist here.
---
Above, behind a blackened one-way glass in the observation dome, the scientists observed.
One sat hunched over a console, fingers tapping nervously.
"She's resisting. Not entirely. But adapting."
The Plague Doctor stood beside him, arms folded.
"She is… stable?"
"For now," the scientist said. "Better than the others. Her neural pattern is erratic but flexible. We've never seen recovery this fast. Emotional suppression mixed with tactical assimilation."
"She was always meant to lead," the scientist continued. "Even her genetic traits suggest dominance. If she completes the transition—"
"She will command the others," the Plague Doctor finished. "And she will do so without ever knowing she chose to."
Silence.
"But she's showing signs of personal autonomy," the scientist added, worried. "Her dreams are vivid. She fights back in patterns. Remembers things that weren't programmed."
"She is closer to godhood than you understand," the Plague Doctor replied. "All gods begin as madness refined."
He moved slowly to the glass.
Below, the girl twitched once.
"She's our perfect test. The others are mutts. Useful, but broken. She will lead the first wave."
The scientist swallowed. "And if she fails?"
"Then she will die. And we will rebuild her from the bones."
The Plague Doctor's voice lowered further.
"After all, isn't that what this place is? A crucible for divinity?"
The scientist turned, hesitated. "Your veins... they're—"
The Plague Doctor extended his arm.
The skin glowed faintly beneath his glove. Twin strands of crimson and pale blue pulsed side by side—burning and freezing, coiling like serpents fighting beneath flesh.
"The cost of wielding fire and ice in harmony," he said. "Bloodline deviation. It eats you. Slowly. Painfully."
The scientist flinched. "And you still use it?"
The Plague Doctor slid his glove back on.
"I have no choice. Sacrifice defines salvation."
He returned his gaze to the girl.
"Besides," he whispered the light reflecting off the eyes of his mask, "she holds my cure"