The room dimmed again as Jack pulled up the archived footage, grainy and flickering like a dying film reel. The timestamp in the corner read [03:12:09 – CAM 47-L], archived under Level Five blackout conditions. Lower Lab.
Buried. Forgotten. Hidden for a reason.
The camera's angle was fixed, high, slightly off-center, its lens fogged at the edges from condensation or neglect. It captured the full breadth of the operating room below: stainless steel counters, surgical racks, IV hooks, and in the center, the figure of Selene Marrow.
She was frozen mid-motion, one gloved hand hovering over a scalpel, the other adjusting a row of clamps along a prone subject's exposed spine. The body beneath her was motionless, save for the slight mechanical rise and fall of the chest, a ventilator, no doubt. But Selene didn't seem to register it. She didn't look at the face. She didn't look at the clock.
She didn't look up.
She never looked up.
Jack stared at her through the feed like she was a ghost.
He let the video roll in complete silence, his breath shallow, ears filled with nothing but the soft hum of the surveillance interface.
Five minutes passed.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
She didn't move like a person. She moved like a process, elegant, efficient, terrifying in her consistency. Every motion was economical, unbroken by fatigue or hesitation. She made a micro-incision just above the second thoracic vertebra, adjusted the flow of a clear solution dripping into a glass line, and began embedding a silvery filament along the subject's nervous column.
Her gloves never slipped. Her expression never changed. She could've been threading a needle or wiring a bomb.
There were no assistants. No monitors beeping in rhythm with a heart rate. No voice dictating notes for the record.
Just her, alone in the sterile underbelly of White Angels HQ, sculpting something inhuman from something once human.
A sculptor at work. A machine in a woman's body.
A god who didn't need worship, only results.
"She doesn't talk. She doesn't sleep. She builds."
The words left Jack like a diagnosis, muttered into the low flicker of monitor light as he leaned forward, chin resting against laced fingers. The footage played on, Selene motionless except for the slow, surgical precision of her hands. He studied the angle of her neck, the subtle tension in her shoulders, the absence of breathless motion, or even the twitch of fatigue.
There was no humanity there. No spark.
No hesitation.
"She doesn't talk. She doesn't sleep. She builds."
The words were bitter in Jack's mouth, less observation, more accusation. He leaned in, chin braced against laced fingers, the glow of the monitor painting harsh shadows across his face.
The footage played on in silence: Selene Marrow, precise and mechanical, her hands ghosting over the exposed chest of some sedated subject like a pianist practicing scales. No wasted movement. No visible emotion.
He studied the tilt of her head, the way her expression never shifted, not even when the subject convulsed under the restraints. She simply recalibrated. Adjusted. Kept working.
There was no exhaustion. No malice.
No curiosity.
Only calculation.
He swallowed hard.
She'd always been like this.
Not human. Not really. Not since the beginning.
He remembered her from the facility when he was a boy, long before he wore a badge, before he'd even understood what the White Angels were. She'd spoken to him only once, in a hallway that hummed with low lighting and antiseptic stillness.
Her voice was quiet, almost kind. She'd asked if he wanted to see how something worked. Then she opened a door and showed him a heart still beating in a glass case.
That was her version of welcome.
As he grew older, she remained a constant, never aging, never changing. While others rose and fell in the organization's ranks, she was always there, one floor lower, two floors deeper, always building.
At some point, Jack had stopped seeing her as a person at all. She was infrastructure. A fixture. Something that couldn't be removed, only endured.
He'd clawed his way up through operations, earned loyalty in blood and fire, took command of elite units, and made himself impossible to ignore. His people followed him. His orders made or broke missions.
But it didn't matter.
Because Selene didn't need to command people.
She just had to build the system they operated inside. And eventually, they bent to her without knowing it.
"Loyalty doesn't matter to her," he muttered. "Only legacy."
Now she watched the world tilt off its axis and said nothing. Offered no directive. Let the chaos rip through the estate like a controlled burn.
Because maybe that was what this was. A test.
Not of Subject Eight. Not even Gene.
Of him.