SYSTEM ASCENSION

Claude opened his eyes to cold water dripping somewhere in the dark.

The room around him was vast and black, smelling of bleach and copper, and for a few seconds his memories wouldn’t sit right. His hand clenched around something. He raised his hand and opened it. The familiar cracked necklace he had picked up moments before.

The last thing he remembered was leaving the medical ward with the board members, and entering the meeting room. He remembered being questioned alongside Kael.

”I must have fallen asleep. Is this a dream?”

He squinted his eyes.

White lights flickered on overhead, revealing a sterile lab full of chrome tables and humming machines. People in lab coats moved between them, talking in low voices about dosages and neural responses while they scribbled on clipboards. None of them noticed him standing there.

”This is a dream. It feels so real.”

’Why do I feel like this dream has something to do with this necklace?’

He walked among them, watching as they worked. His eyes caught on a woman strapped to a table, probably unconscious. He stared. She looked familiar. Oddly very familiar. He stepped closer and peeped at her face.

A figure flashed his eyes immediately. A figure that made him stagger back.

The tearing. Multiple hands. My child.

”It can’t be... right...”

He turned.

”Humans can’t turn into creatures like that... ” He almost chuckled, not because it was funny, but because otherwise it is pure absurdity. ”That thing was clearly not human.”

And a tank filled with green liquid where someone floated, curled in on herself. A pale skin little girl. She had white hair and silver eyes. The number ten tattooed on her wrist.

’A numbering? Elias has one on his wrist too. What was it...five?’

The whole place felt barbaric in a way that made his stomach turn.

”Where is this...”

A shriek cut through the room. It was high and broken, the kind of scream that didn’t belong to anyone old enough to understand what was happening to them.

He flinched.

”What the—”

Claude’s body moved before he could think. He ran past the researchers and the monitors, past the equipment that buzzed like insects, until he reached the steel door at the far end where the screaming was coming from.

He slammed both hands against it and shoved it open.

The door slammed open and the screaming hit him full force, echoing off steel walls that were lined with monitors and surgical trays.

A familiar figure trapped in a poison tube caught his eye immediately. The glass cylinder was filled halfway with green liquid that bubbled slowly, and though the figure was familiar to Claude, he was much smaller than he knew, barely more than a child as he pounded his fists against the tube until his hands bled.

”Please no! No!” the boy cried, his voice raw and splitting as he thrashed in the liquid. ”I don’t want to stay here! I’m sorry! Let me out!”

A cold voice ordered from somewhere behind the glass. ”Another dose.”

More poison was released into the tube with a hiss, clouding the liquid darker, and the boy began to gag and stiffen as his body seized against the restraints. His eyes rolled back until only white showed, and his small fingers scraped uselessly at the glass.

Claude couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The sight locked his limbs in place while the boy drowned in poison behind the tub.

One of the researchers chuckled against the glass.

”Do you think this one would kill him?”

Another spoke. ”This is more dozing than we have ever given him. He might end up with brain damage at most.”

Claude grabbed the open door to keep himself on his feet. His hand went over his mouth, trying to hold in the disgust he was feeling.

Then his eye caught something else in the murk.

The necklace.

The dark blue pendant.

It was dangling from the boy’s left ankle, the chain wrapped tight around his thin leg, and the flat dark blue pendant was cracked straight down the middle.

Time seemed to stop at the sight. The necklace was a confirmation of who that was.

Claude turned his eyes from the tube and went around it. He caught sight of the person who had spoken.

The man was seated behind a wide observation window, dressed in a dark coat rather than the white ones the researchers wore, and he carried a giggling girl on his thigh who couldn’t have been older than ten. She pointed a small finger toward the tube, directly at the boy’s leg where the necklace hung beneath the poison.

”I want that jewellery!” she said, her voice bright and delighted against the sound of the boy choking.

The man sighed and adjusted her on his lap, looking more tired than disturbed by the scene unfolding in front of them. ”Ume, you know it won’t come off. We already tried cutting the chain last time.”

The girl’s giggle died instantly. Her face twisted, and she stamped her foot against the man’s leg.

”Then cut his leg! I want it!” she screamed, her small hand balling into a fist as she pointed again.

The man didn’t even flinch at her words. He just looked back at the tube, at the boy still seizing in the green liquid, and raised a hand to signal the researchers.

”Another dose,” he ordered, his voice flat as he nodded toward the researchers behind the glass.

As another dose was poured into the tube, the liquid turned almost black and the bubbles rose faster, thick and sluggish around the boy’s body.

The screaming had stopped by now. His crying slowed to wet, broken whimpers that barely made it through the glass.

”...help...”

His bleeding hands stopped hitting the tube. They floated instead, twitching as the poison took hold of his limbs.

”Ma...” the boy choked, his lips barely moving under the liquid as his eyes rolled back again. ”Mother... help me...”

The word was so small. So hopeless. It didn’t sound like it belonged to Elias at all.

Claude tried to move. Tried to scream or break the glass or do anything, but his body wouldn’t obey him in this place. He could only watch as the boy’s small frame went still in the poison.

And then —

Claude woke up.