Week Fifty-One
Meals became the last small mercy. Time hollowed hell into routine; torment learned to worship the clock. The mess hall smelled of old metal and reheated gruel; the steam that rose from tin bowls tasted faintly of ash. F2-03 — red-eyed, vampiric, ringed in collars and runes — was the constant I clung to. She joked. She smiled. The hunger behind her eyes only sharpened, a slow, polite thing that watched the room like a clock watches a second hand.
Sometimes I wondered if my presence would doom her the way it had doled death to Regina. Death had become domestic: you woke, you ate, you were counted. Batch F2 started at thirty. By Week Fifty-One we were thirteen. Names vanished like cobwebs brushed from a shelf.
Once, when we found F2-33's body beneath the slab where they kept the failed experiments, F2-03 whispered one word so low I almost thought I dreamed it: Project Null. Her lips trembled; then she straightened and smiled like someone tucking a knife back into a sleeve. I didn't ask. Curiosity had teeth here.
---
Experiment Report
Spatial Influence on Regeneration Trial — Series-35, Subject-01
Magister Dvergstjarna, Chamber of Spatial Distortion, Sub-Level IV
Objective: Test regenerative limits under spatial compression and dimensional stress.
Procedure (excerpt): Subject secured. Collar engaged—runes thermal to the touch. Baseline: pulse 77. Standard incision, chest cavity, depth 14 cm. Furnace of Rauður Dvergur engaged—iron breath and sulfur smell. Compression field applied; the air tasted small and metallic.
Observations:
Trial 1 (Control): Chest wound closed cleanly in 2:19. The bandage smelled of iodine and—
Trial 2 (Moderate Distortion): Flesh knotted and overlapped; tissue layered crookedly like bad stitching. Field ceased; correction followed. Closure in 7:42. The stitchwork left a puckered scar that itched in damp weather.
Trial 3 (Severed Extremity): New arm sprouted inverted—palm turned backward, digits fused. The subject keened until her voice gave out; alignment restored after 11 minutes. The new skin smelled wrong, like burnt paper.
Trial 4 (Maximum Distortion): Torso fractured inward. Regeneration halted for twelve breaths. When the field collapsed, the body reformed explosively; tissue scattered, then stitched back. Recovery in 14 minutes. Residual anomaly: extra cartilage along the spine that clicked faintly when the subject turned.
—Restricted Note — Dvergstjarna: For twelve breaths, flesh was absent. Her outline remained on the walls—no shadow, not mana, but script, black and scrawled. I glimpsed a name there. Not "F2-34." Not "Subject." Luna. The scribe denies recording this. The words have since vanished.
Conclusion: Regeneration vulnerable to spatial distortion. Repeated exposure may produce permanent mutation. Further trials recommended.
---
The blade split me clean. Heat poured into my lungs like molten iron poured into a cold cup. The furnace hissed; the glass of the observation pane threw F2-03's face back at me—hollow cheeks, eyes rimmed in red, breath fogging the pane. My scream shredded and stopped when cords snapped; sound was a ragged thing after that. The Magister scribbled with a dry nib; the homunculus guards kept their gazes fixed on the floor, the sound of their plates clinking louder than conscience.
I saw myself everywhere after that day: shards of flesh folded like broken mirrors on tile. Blood skittered into letters, half-formed, as if the room itself tried to spell out what it had done. My hands sometimes hung where ribs ought to be; my own reflection looked at me from odd angles and blinked wrong. The chamber inhaled and exhaled—open, closed, open—time stretching elastic and cruel as a cat's tail.
Trial Four rewrote my grammar. For twelve breaths I was an absence with edges. Not a shadow but an outline the eye could read, the wall wearing the negative of me like a tattoo of empty air. When the field collapsed, I reassembled: extra cartilage, wrong angles, a rib that thrummed like a tuning fork beneath a palm. The scribe pretended not to notice. Dvergstjarna wrote what I could not say. He wrote cold numbers and recommendations, as if that mechanical language could fix a body that had become a sentence unraveled.
They measured. They recommended. They called it mutation risk—neat words that smelled like antiseptic and denial. As if naming the wound made it less hungry. As if the sentence of my body could be edited and reprinted without consequence.
---
Dinner that night was a blur: the scrape of forks, the hollow chew, the way food slid without satisfying. I did not see her then; perhaps I could have been pulled from the gray if I'd known how to look. Standing felt like a performance; every set of eyes felt like a needle. Not the homunculi—those pairs didn't count as stare. Their faces were masks. It was the way the other people shifted around me, the way a guard's eyes lingered too long on my face.
Bath was a fleeting escape—the water hot enough to sting, soap smelling of lemon and something chemical. For a moment the scalding made the bone-thrum inside my side hum lower, small comfort. By the time my brain stamped a sense onto the moment, I was back in my room, skin papery, trying to find a voice soft enough to speak comfort into.
Moments slid into gray, then ripped into chaos: a dream-fight tearing me from sleep—metal, barking voices, a scream that tasted like someone else's throat. The cell door clicked. F2-03's compartment opened. Two homunculus stood aside like obedient hinges. She moved with a speed I had only ever seen in emergency drills—hands efficient, fingers closing on my wrist.
"Get up," she hissed. "No time." Her voice was the sound of someone forced to be brave too often. There was practiced urgency under the joke now. Her collar glowed faintly; its runes radiated a metallic warmth against my skin.
We ran through service corridors that smelled of oil, bleach, and old cloth. My legs felt borrowed—jelly and cotton at once. Through grated doors, steam sluices that spat hot breaths, and a smell of burnt iron that clung to hair and lungs, we hurried until the world opened into the yard. Beyond the fence silhouettes moved—patrols or rescuers; I couldn't tell which because my head had become a drum played too loud.
They shoved us into a waiting carriage. Collars bit. Hands shoved. Somewhere, someone inked "mutation risk" in a margin and underlined it three times. The wheels groaned in a rhythm I felt in bone.
F2-03's laugh was a small thing—quiet, broken. "If we survive," she said, and the phrase held more brittle hope than humor, "we eat whatever hell gives us tonight. You pick." Her fingers tightened at the nape of my neck—not a threat, an anchor.
I shut my eyes and let the wheels carry us away. Pain, reports, furnace smoke: these stitched into me like cartography I had not asked to learn. In the margin of that map, a black spiral throbbed beneath skin—a tattoo that felt less like ink and more like a compass. It pulsed with the memory of script on the wall, with the taste of words that had been wiped away. The scribe could erase the name from parchment and plaster, but the grammar had been rewritten in me. For better or worse, I was still a sentence not yet finished.