Grant's cot sat stripped bare, restraints dangling loose like broken vines. The walls still hummed from Slha's failed attempts to reroute power; smoke clung to the air.
Anna's voice was the one to break it. Quiet. Uneven. "He ran away."
Every head in the room turned. Her hands were balled at her sides, but her gaze was steady. "He didn't want to be a weapon. Or a symbol. Or anyone's secret. He wanted to decide for himself."
For a moment, silence held.
Then Brakkon snarled and shoved off the wall. "Running into wolves' teeth isn't freedom. And we're just supposed to call that his choice?"
Acuent's jaw clenched, her arms folding across her chest. "Don't twist her words. What she's saying is that our fighting pushed him out that door. You, me, all of us."
Ampra stepped forward before the words could settle.
"No—what pushed him out was this bunker mentality. Years of hiding. Years of running from the public eye like ghosts. How many lives has that saved? How many Weeds"—her word for Gifteds hung like a blade—"died because the world only ever sees shadows instead of faces?"
Slha let out a bitter laugh, sparks jumping at her heel.
"Easy for you to preach when you're adored by the cameras. You don't know what it is to have your name hunted, your family dragged through mud."
Ampra's eyes hardened. "We don't hide because we understand that secrecy breeds fear. You call us naïve, but the truth is—your way hasn't worked. Not once."
Anna's voice cut through again, trembling but fierce. "Stop it. He's not your battlefield. He's not proof for your philosophies. He's a person. He left because none of you saw that."
Xylo turned to Aldus, voice low. "Where would he run?"
Aldus's voice was flat. "Let's check the feeds."
All eyes snapped to Slha as she cursed and bent over the screens. Static hissed, data streams colliding. Fingers flew across cracked keys until the feed sharpened.
On the monitors, the answer played back in brutal silence. Black transports. Taskforce V restraining Grant's limp body and dragging him into a carrier. His arms bound, sparks still twitching faintly before fading into nothing.
Anna's knees buckled.
Brakkon's fist dented the steel wall. "They have him."
The room spiraled into chaos again. Ampers shouted for retaliation, Volts argued for caution, each accusation cutting deeper.
Finally, Ampra's voice dropped, calm and final.
"This isn't our war. The Volts don't move against Taskforce V—not if we want to keep the world believing in us."
Her squad shifted behind her, uneasy but aligned.
The Ampers stared at them with open fury.
"So that's it?" Acuent's voice broke into ice. "You'll let him rot in their labs because keeping your favor means more than saving a life?"
Ampra didn't answer. She only turned away, walking toward the exit as her team followed.
The divide between them cut deeper, sharp as steel.
****
Sterile white. A ceiling paneled with humming vents. The reek of antiseptic was so sharp it burned the back of his throat.
Grant tried to move. His body didn't answer.
Cold metal clamped his wrists, ankles, chest. Dampener coils webbed across his skin, glowing red at each contact. Needles fed clear fluid in, black fluid out.
He felt hollow—every calorie, every spark already burned away. His body shuddered in weakness, but the restraints held him still.
Scanners swept beams across his frame, skeletal projections flickering. The bones of his arms glimmered with jagged ridges—mirrored in another set of scans beside his own.
Brakkon's.
"Awake at last."
The voice was calm, composed. Colonel Veynar stepped into view, hands clasped neatly behind his back. No armor. No weapon.
"You're in no danger," Veynar said. "Not unless you make yourself so."
Grant swallowed, his throat sandpaper. "Where…?"
"A containment wing. My personal lab." Veynar studied the overlapping scans. "You've already noticed, I assume. Your skeletal structure is… evolving. Almost identical to our other subject."
Brakkon's jagged arm-bones glared from the projection.
Grant strained against the bindings, sparks twitching, but the coils seared them dead on contact.
Veynar's eyes flicked to him, then back to the machines. "You'll undergo a process called A.M.P.—Augmented Militarized Physiology. The government developed it years ago. Painful, but effective."
Panels hissed open above, revealing a tray of gleaming syringes, a rack of metal fragments glowing faintly with inner light.
"Luxium," Veynar continued, almost reverent. "The hardest element on this earth. A gift from the heavens—fallen twenty years ago in Africa, Kukura to be exact. The United States purchased some of it, quietly, of course. We used it once before, to reinforce Brakkon's skeleton. You will be the second."
He circled the bed, each word deliberate, heavy.
"We will fuse it to your bones. Unbreakable. Unstoppable. A weapon that does not shatter."
Grant's breath quickened. "And if I say no?"
Veynar stopped at his side, lowering his gaze. His smile was faint. Cold. "Then your body will fail. And when it fails, I will build it back better."
The tray lowered, the syringes catching the light. One vial shimmered differently—its contents not clear, not black, but a shifting, iridescent red.
"And this," Veynar said softly, "is the serum. Neural latticework keyed to my command frequencies. When your flesh rejects obedience, your mind will not."
Grant's eyes widened, panic cutting through exhaustion.
"You'll find," Veynar murmured, almost kind, "that fate is not given. It is manufactured."
The machines whirred louder, clamps tightening across Grant's limbs.
The experiment began.