The door closed behind them with a sound too soft for what waited on the other side.
It didn't latch loudly. It didn't click with authority. It slid shut like the room itself was holding its breath.
Inside, the air was wrong.
Not rotten—yet—but heavy. Humid in a way hospitals were never supposed to be. The smell sat low and thick, layered in stages: antiseptic first, sharp and familiar; copper beneath it, unmistakable; then something warmer, sweeter, faintly sour, like meat left too long near a heat vent. Under all of it lingered the sterile tang of latex and bleach, fighting a losing battle.
Evan was on the bed.
Restrained.
Wrists first—leather straps pulled tight enough to blanch the skin. Ankles next, the buckles cinched hard. Chest straps crossed his torso in a pattern meant to keep a panicking patient from thrashing.
They weren't enough.
The bed frame creaked softly as he moved—not violently, not in wild flailing motions, but with steady pressure. Testing. Leaning. Pushing in small increments, like something learning the limits of a cage.
The sound of it scraped across Sharon's nerves.
Leather pulling.
Metal groaning.
Fabric rasping under tension.
It wasn't rhythmic.
It was deliberate.
"He's stronger," Patel murmured through his mask.
Sharon nodded. "Postmortem muscle recruitment."
Reyes swallowed audibly. "That's… not possible."
"It shouldn't be," Sharon agreed. "But here we are."
Evan's chest did not rise.
His lungs were still.
Yet his body moved anyway.
His head lolled to one side, chin slick with dried foam that had crusted pale along his mouth. His eyes were open now—fully open—but unfocused. The pupils were blown wide, swallowing almost all the iris, reflecting light with a dull, glassy sheen that didn't belong to anything alive.
His skin tone had shifted.
Not gray. Not blue.
Mottled.
Patchy flushing bloomed across his chest and neck in irregular islands, while other areas drained pale. Capillaries stood out starkly in places they never should have, like a roadmap drawn too close to the surface.
Reyes took a half-step back. "His color—"
"Peripheral vasodilation," Sharon said. "But not uniformly."
Patel leaned closer, careful, observant. "It's selective."
Sharon's gaze sharpened. "Say that again."
"The blood flow," Patel said. "It's not random. It's prioritizing."
They stood in silence for a moment, watching.
Evan's fingers twitched.
Not spasms.
Articulation.
The tendons along his forearms flexed beneath the skin, cords standing out sharply as his hands curled and uncurled—slow, clumsy movements, as though the instructions were reaching the muscles out of order.
Sharon stepped closer.
"Baseline vitals," she said. "Now."
Patel glanced at the monitor. "Heart rate: none. No electrical activity."
Reyes stared. "Then how is he—"
"Spinal reflex arcs," Sharon said. "Possibly brainstem-driven motor output."
"That doesn't explain coordination," McAllister said quietly from the corner.
Sharon didn't argue.
She picked up a penlight.
The beam cut across Evan's face.
His pupils constricted.
Reyes gasped. "That's… that's a brain response."
"Yes," Sharon said. "But not a conscious one."
She leaned closer, voice steady despite the way her pulse pounded in her ears. "Evan."
There was no response.
She touched his cheek with a gloved finger.
The skin was hot.
Not feverish.
Active.
Like heat generated from within rather than trapped beneath the surface.
She withdrew her hand slowly.
"Temperature?" she asked.
Patel checked. His eyes flicked up. "Rising. Thirty-nine point five and climbing."
Reyes shook her head. "That kind of hyperthermia would destroy neural tissue."
"Unless the tissue is no longer behaving normally," Sharon said.
She nodded to McAllister. "Scalpel."
The word landed heavy.
McAllister hesitated only a second before passing it over.
The blade gleamed under the fluorescent light.
Sharon positioned herself at Evan's side, movements precise, practiced. She didn't rush. Rushing led to mistakes. Mistakes got people hurt.
She made the first incision along Evan's forearm.
The skin parted easily.
Too easily.
There was no bleeding at first.
Then—slowly—dark fluid welled up, thick and sluggish, seeping rather than flowing. It clung to the edges of the cut, reluctant to leave the body.
Patel frowned. "Viscosity's increased again."
"And clotting?" Sharon asked.
Patel leaned in. "Delayed. But when it happens—it's aggressive."
Sharon nodded. "Local coagulation override."
She spread the incision gently.
The muscle beneath was… wrong.
The fibers looked swollen, engorged, as though they'd been pumped full of something. The normal striations were blurred, distorted, as if the structure itself had softened.
Reyes pressed a hand to her mask. "That tissue should be breaking down."
"It should," Sharon agreed. "Instead it's reinforced."
Evan jerked.
Not violently—but sharply enough to make Reyes yelp.
The restraints groaned.
Sharon didn't flinch.
"Reflexive," she said. "Stimulus response."
She continued.
They sampled hair next.
The follicle bulb came away intact—and stained dark, almost bruised in color.
Patel's voice was tight. "That pigment… it's not normal melanin expression."
Sharon glanced at it. "Metabolic byproduct."
"From what?"
Sharon didn't answer immediately.
She moved to the ear.
Collected wax.
Reyes stared at the sample vial. "It's thicker than it should be."
"Everything is," Sharon said.
Teeth came next.
One incisor loosened with disturbing ease.
When it came free, Sharon saw it clearly—the root wasn't clean.
It was webbed.
Fine, threadlike filaments clung to it, stretching before snapping back into the socket.
Reyes gagged.
"That's connective tissue proliferation," Sharon said, voice tight. "But not human."
McAllister swallowed. "You're saying it's building scaffolding."
"Yes."
"For what?" Patel asked.
Sharon looked up at Evan's face.
"For persistence.
They moved to the eye.
Sharon hesitated for the briefest fraction of a second.
Then she proceeded.
The globe was under pressure.
When the scalpel breached it, fluid leaked out—not clear vitreous humor, but cloudy, tinged faintly pink. The optic nerve beneath was swollen, cordlike, far thicker than it should have been.
Reyes whispered, "It's protecting the brain."
"Yes," Sharon said. "At the expense of everything else."
They exposed the skull last.
The bone was dense.
Denser than expected.
McAllister cursed under his breath as he worked. "This should not be this hard."
When they finally breached it, the smell changed.
Sharper.
Ozone-like.
The brain tissue beneath pulsed faintly.
Not with blood flow.
With something else.
Sharon stared.
"Neural activity?" Patel whispered.
"No," Sharon said. "Neural commandeering."
The tissue was darker in places, streaked with branching lines that glowed faintly under the light—not bioluminescent, but reactive, as if responding to stimulus.
"It's not dead," Reyes said, horrified.
"It's not alive," Sharon corrected. "It's repurposed."
Evan strained suddenly.
The bed frame shrieked as he arched, strength surging through him in a terrifying wave. One restraint stretched—leather cracking audibly.
"Sharon—" McAllister warned.
"I see it," she said.
Evan's jaw snapped shut with a violent clack.
His head thrashed once.
The noise echoed off the walls.
Outside the door, something answered.
A moan.
Closer now.
Sharon met Patel's eyes.
"This is accelerating," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. "And it's loud."
Reyes' voice shook. "What do we do?"
Sharon looked at Evan—at the boy he had been, at the thing he was becoming, at the system rewriting itself from the inside out.
"We document," she said. "We learn."
"And then?" McAllister asked.
Sharon exhaled slowly.
"Then we make sure no one else becomes this."
Evan surged again, restraints screaming in protest.
The room vibrated with the sound.
Outside, the moaning multiplied.
Closer.
Hungry.
Sharon stepped back from the table, heart pounding—not with fear, but with grim clarity.
Whatever this was—
It wasn't random.
It wasn't decay.
It was design.
And it was learning faster than they were.