For a heartbeat the cold and the noise blurred, the lab floodlights turning to another kind of sterile white in Elias's head.
He was nineteen again, first year at the university, barely two weeks into what he thought was freedom. He'd been sleeping in the lab between classes, drowning himself in work so he didn't have to think about his father's messages or the obligations he'd slipped. And then, after a full day of study, just past midnight, a shout jolts him while walking through one of the corridors; the smell of ether gone sour hits him like a hammer. One of the graduate researchers had been standing at the end of the corridor, grinning like a cracked mask, red power crawling up his arms and circling his throat like smoke. A colleague whose name Elias couldn't remember for the life of him now, just the flash of his badge and the sense that the ether had been trying to use him for something.
The grin on Matteo's corpse was the same.
