Connor Hale was the third of six children, born into a house that ran more on coffee and arguments than electricity and peace. The Hale household in New Jersey was the kind of place where cereal boxes were used as bowls when dishes piled too high, and bedtime was less a rule and more a hope.
But even as a child, Connor was... different.
While his brothers tore through backyard fences and his sisters sang into hairbrush microphones, Connor would sit cross-legged in the hall, quietly dissecting his old toys with a butter knife, trying to figure out what made the gears move. Not just how the robot danced, but why it danced at all.
It wasn't long before toys turned to biology books, and curiosity turned to obsession.
He wanted to know what made people tick.
Why fear made the hands shake.
Why joy flushed the cheeks.
Why love could break a heart or heal a mind.
By fourteen, he was auditing online neuroscience courses. By sixteen, he was tutoring his teachers. By eighteen, he was already publishing under anonymous aliases because journals wouldn't believe someone so young had cracked parts of the limbic decay model.
And then—Genesis came calling.
It was a quiet offer, slipped into a brown envelope during his freshman year at MIT.
A full ride. A private lab. A chance to work on the most advanced human regenerative project in history.
Project R3—Reconstruction. Regeneration. Rebirth.
Connor Hale, the poor kid from a cluttered house with creaky floorboards, had finally made it. And yet, standing in The Womb, deep beneath Manhattan, surrounded by keycards and triple-sealed doors, he no longer felt like a genius.
He felt like an inmate.
He never married.
Hell, Connor Hale never even tried. He'd been on maybe four dates in his entire life, and on all of them, his mind had wandered somewhere else. While the woman across from him laughed nervously into her wine glass, Connor would be silently calculating the behavior of mutated protein structures in autoimmune patients or sketching synaptic response chains on a napkin with the tip of his fork. Time always seemed to fast-forward when it wasn't spent inside a lab.
Eventually, people stopped inviting him out. First it was friends, then classmates, then colleagues. He became that strange, brilliant man in the corner of every room, the one who nodded politely but never really arrived. Detached. Obsessive. A living ghost walking among the well-adjusted.
But Connor didn't care. The only pulse he needed was data. The only voice he trusted was evidence. The only beauty he longed for was locked in molecular bonds waiting to be unraveled.
His lab was his church. His microscope, a stained-glass window.
And Genesis… Genesis had given him a cathedral.
Still, even a temple can become a tomb.
And that morning, if it was still morning, the underground lights always lied, the tomb began to stir.
It started in Containment Wing E. The heartbeat sensors in Lab 3 began to blink erratically, then all at once flatlined. Connor stood motionless at his workstation, eyes flicking between readouts like a man watching lottery numbers he already knew would damn him.
"Subject E32 unresponsive. Pupillary constriction reversed. Limb spasms noted."
The voice of the AI system, GEN-I, came calmly through the speakers, calm as ever, no matter what she had to say.
Then, a second voice broke through the comms, Dr. Soraya Glenn, in full panic.
"Control to Lab 3—lock it down now. Now!"
Connor turned. On the screen, he saw it.
The test subject had risen. No, launched. Eyes white, mouth open in a scream with no sound. Then glass shattered. And The Womb was breached.
He watched the monitors, frozen.
It all happened so fast—too fast.
One moment the observation logs showed brainwave spikes and containment vitals. The next, blood smeared the camera lenses and motion trackers flickered red like stuttering heartbeats.
The immaculate corridors, once white, polished, sacred, were now nothing more than slaughter halls. Places where dreams had once taken shape now drowned in their own betrayal. Broken glass. Torn limbs. Bodies twitching. Some dragged themselves along the floor. Others… stood.
And rose.
Connor's hands trembled above the console. For the first time in his life, he had no answer. No theorem. No escape plan.
He felt powerless. Helpless.
And worst of all, responsible.
"What could I have done?" he whispered.
But luck, cruel, guilt-wrapped luck, had kept him in the most secure wing that morning. Deep in Subsection Theta, where the "magic happened", as he once used to say with a half-smile.
No visitors. No interns. Just him, his machines, and the ghosts of sleepless nights.
This wing was where Genesis kept the raw code. The source samples. The original strain that was supposed to save the world. And it was protected by every biometric lock human minds could conceive: retinal, DNA, neural print, even emotional-pattern recognition for emergencies. If your heart didn't believe you belonged there, the doors wouldn't open.
And behind those doors, GEN-I stood watch.
The facility's defense AI, calm and clinical, controlled everything: automated drones, electrified gates, pulse-turret sentries, flame barriers, and viral lockdown seals.
But Connor knew, none of it would hold forever.
Nothing did anymore.
He stepped back from the console and stared through the thick glass of his chamber's viewport, eyes haunted, breath shallow.
Down the far corridor, something moved.
Something that used to be Soraya Glenn.
The room Connor stood in was a fortress of glass and algorithms.
Reinforced walls wrapped the perimeter, lined with triple-layered polymer shielding. Outside the main chamber, an array of purge systems lay in wait, silent, deadly. If activated, they could ignite firewalls, flood the corridor with halothane gas, or trigger the electric flooring into a death grid. It was everything Genesis prided itself on: safety in science. Control over chaos.
But control had already failed.
Connor stared out through the pane as the hallway beyond dissolved into hell.
They were there—his colleagues. The ones he used to share stale coffee with during night shifts, who teased him for never remembering birthdays or movie quotes, who always saved him the last muffin in the breakroom like it was some private joke.
Now they were monsters.
Twisted. Bleeding. Eyes devoid of thought but full of hunger.
They banged on the glass, not with fists, but with purpose.
They wanted him.
To devour. To make one of them. To end.
And at the center of it all, stood Soraya Glenn.
Her white coat was soaked crimson, one sleeve torn down to bare muscle. But her posture, rigid, trembling, was unmistakable. Some part of her still knew him. Or maybe it was just reflex. The way the human body remembers familiar faces, even when the mind is gone.
Soraya had always seen him. Not just the numbers. Not just the awkward silence.
She was the only one who ever asked, "How are you really doing, Connor?"
Now she clawed at the glass with shredded nails, eyes wild and unblinking. Blood smeared in frantic streaks as her mouth opened in something between a scream and a gurgling growl.
And Connor… couldn't move.
His hand hovered above the panel. He could end this. One button and the hallway would be purged. Cleaned. Sterile. Silent.
But that would mean burning them all.
His team. His friends.
Soraya.
Or, he could try to salvage what he could. Download what remained of the Genesis source code. Escape into the Maze.
Save what was left of humanity.
The glass pulsed again. A face slammed into it. Then another.
Blood webbed out like flowers across the surface.
"Decision required," GEN-I said softly.
"Hallway breach detected. Executive override pending."
"Connor Hale… confirm."
He closed his eyes.
* * *
GEN-I's voice echoed softly through the chamber, its tone carefully engineered to soothe. A warm, female lilt, just human enough to sound like a friend. Just artificial enough to remind you she wasn't.
It had been a decision made in boardrooms, by engineers who'd spent too many nights in lonely labs. They called it "empathic algorithmic cadence." The rest of the staff just called it comfort.
But to Connor now, it was a blade to the ear.
"Fire purge activated," GEN-I announced, gentle as a lullaby.
"T-minus 30 seconds… 30… 29… 28…"
He should've looked away. Should've turned. Pressed the emergency seal. Grabbed the drive and left. But he didn't.
His eyes opened.
And then, he saw them.
Soraya. Dorian. Katarina.
All of them, faces smeared with gore, jaws slack, teeth bared, but the eyes…
There was something in their eyes.
Not just rage. Not just hunger.
Something behind it. A flicker. A twitch. Like a signal lost in static.
"17… 16… 15…"
Connor's breath caught. He spun back to the monitors, hands trembling as he cycled through their neural readings.
Still active. Weak. Drowning in chaos, but still there.
Delta waves. Subconscious pulses. Like dreams in the middle of a nightmare.
"Are they… still in there?"
"But how?"
The firelines in the ceiling hissed as they prepared to purge. The room outside would be ashes in seconds.
All of them gone.
Even the sparks. Even the whispers.
"11… 10…"
Connor stared at Soraya as she pressed her forehead to the glass. Her mouth didn't open this time. No snarl. No scream.
Just that look.
Recognition?
Regret?
Or was that what he wanted to see?
"9… 8…"
He reached for the panel. Hovered over the cancel.
He pressed the override.
"Fire purge… deactivated," GEN-I announced.
And for the briefest moment, Connor could swear the AI sounded relieved, as if something behind its code had exhaled. Or maybe it was just his own breath, crashing out of him after being held for too long.
Didn't matter.
They were spared.
For now.
* * *
His colleagues, if that word still fit, slumped slightly against the glass as the threat of flame faded. But their eyes remained locked on him, twitching with chaotic hunger, with… presence.
It wasn't over. Not even close.
But they were alive.
If that could be called living.
Connor stepped back, his heart hammering in his chest. He'd just gambled the safety of the entire sector on a gut feeling, on a faint spark in a flood of blood. He wiped a trembling hand across his mouth. The taste of copper lingered, he must've bit his lip without realizing.
He turned to the console. Fingers flying.
"Initiate core data dump. Genesis Prototype Pathways. Batch X-4 and X-5."
The screen flickered. Error lights blinked red across half the panel. Sections had already gone dark.
But some data, some hope, could still be salvaged.
He reached for the neural drive, locking it into his jacket. The lights in the lab began to dim, emergency protocols cycling. A countdown had started somewhere above them. The Womb was beginning its shutdown. Soon, all that would be left was blackness and screams.
Connor stared at the glass, his breath fogging faint crescents in front of him. All around, the infected swarmed like moths to heat—scraping, snarling, eyes gleaming with that maddening something. It was like being buried alive in a coffin of light.
"Core shutdown initiated," GEN-I informed.
"Primary memory vaults will be purged in T-minus 17 minutes."
Panic rose like bile.
The Womb was closing. The system didn't trust its creators anymore. Only authorized touch could abort the purge now.
And Connor… wasn't authorized enough.
Level 7. Top of the scientific ladder. Head of Research in Neural Advance. But that didn't mean much when the real kill-switches were held by board members, defense liaisons, and that bastard Wilmar Kent, the public face of Genesis.
He pressed his palms to the console, trying to think. His pulse roared in his ears.
"GEN-I," he said through clenched teeth, "What is the closest authorized individual with clearance to override core purge?"
A pause.
"Doctor Evelyn Wu, Genesis Director of Biosecurity, Sector D2. Status: Unknown."
"Administrator Wilmar Kent. Status: Biometrics detected in Server Room 1."
Connor blinked.
"Detected?"
"Affirmative. Heartbeat within acceptable variance. Subject is alive."
That meant Kent was still inside.
Still breathing. And, likely, cornered.
Connor exhaled slowly.
He didn't like the man. Never had. A smug politician in a lab coat. But now… Wilmar might be the only ticket out of this place. The only hand the system would listen to.
The only hand that could override it all.
Connor looked back at the glass. One of the infected had started gnawing at the frame, drool mixing with blood on its chin.
He checked his wrist.
Only one path. Through the purge corridors. Through the madness.
"Then I'm coming for your hand, Kent," he muttered, " And not in marriage, sorry, I'm taken…"
Alive or not.
Connor realized there was only one way to the server room, straight through the mob of hungry beasts.
As if he could ever just walk among them and not be turned into minced meat. No. That path was a death sentence.
Something had to give.
Then it hit him.
The Genesis Code.
It wasn't magic. It wasn't a curse. It was just that—a code. A biochemical encryption. A cascade of instructions designed to do one thing:
Identify dead or infected cells. Assimilate. Destroy. Purge.
That was the core function, the original purpose. The way he and others had written it, nurtured it like fire in a petri dish. How it had mutated, become this… anomaly, he didn't yet understand. But a new thought crawled out of the terror:
What if he could isolate that original version?
Or better yet… mimic it?
His breath caught. His skin turned clammy. His whole body trembled at the thought.
"If I inject myself with a dormant version... maybe they'll see me as one of them."
A crazy thought. A desperate one.
And if he was wrong?
It wouldn't just kill him. It would unmake him, limb from limb, soul from scream.
But there was a problem.
A huge one.
Connor was in a biohazard wing, yes, sealed tighter than a submarine's heart, but it wasn't the one he needed. He wasn't dressed in a hazmat suit just for show. Genesis had a portfolio of plagues cooking beneath Manhattan, not just the Cancer Cure. Projects they whispered about even in secure meetings.
He was in the wrong lab.
Wrong virus. Wrong code.
The one that started all this, the root, the prime code, wasn't stored here. Not even close.
He knew where it was. Knew exactly.
Right across the hall.
And between him and that room was a crowd of shambling, twitching, blood-glazed former friends who would greet him with claws, teeth, and an overwhelming urge to redecorate the floor with his insides.
The room he needed, the one holding the original strain was
sealed behind triple-reinforced glass, a dual-stage airlock, and biometric locks.
Access?
He had it. Full clearance. Level 7. He was one of the architects, after all. The code bore his digital fingerprints.
No, that wasn't the problem.
The problem was what stood between him and the door. Dozens of them. Snarling, twitching, jaws half-unhinged and eyes still wet with the memory of being human.
His colleagues. His friends.
Soraya… Katarina… even the intern who brought him coffee with exactly one sugar, Dorian.
That hallway had once smelled of antiseptic and ambition. Now it reeked of copper and rot.
Connor closed his eyes, head resting briefly against the glass wall.
It was right there. Just… twenty meters and a few dozen nightmares away.
"Well... this sucks," he muttered.
"Alright, science… time to grow teeth."
He needed a decoy.
If the Genesis strain had one consistent behavior, it was this: it hunted warmth.
Living tissue. Still pumping blood. Still fresh.
It didn't just crave life, it craved proximity to it. Echoes of vitality.
But he wasn't about to sacrifice another human being just to fetch a vial of corrupted hope. Even if he could find one. The odds of another uninfected soul walking those halls were close to zero.
No. His only option… was himself.
Connor yanked open the drawer. Snatched a sterile syringe. His hand hovered for a moment, trembling.
Piercing the hazmat suit meant exposure. Contamination. But sitting here, he was already a dead man marinating in recycled air.
How long could he last? A week without food? Days without water?
He had to move.
Without another thought, he jabbed the syringe into his forearm, through the sleeve.
Pain flared.
Red flooded the barrel, his blood, still warm, still alive.
"Alright," he muttered, sealing it tight. "Let's see if the monsters still believe in bait."
"GEN-I!" Connor shouted, his voice cracking through the quiet like a whip.
"Initiate Fire Suppression Protocol. Activate the Mist!"
"Confirmed," the AI replied in its ever-calm, ever-human voice. "Deploying now."
With a low hiss, nozzles embedded in the ceiling clicked to life.
The room exhaled.
A dense, cold fog spread outward, water vapor laced with the fire retardants designed to smother flames and smoke. But in this moment, it became something far more valuable:
Cover.
The creatures outside tensed, their snarls faltering as the corridor clouded over, their vision blurred by the sudden downpour of artificial rain. Connor didn't waste a second.
He slammed his palm on the panel. The outer airlock cracked open with a sigh. A wave of rot surged toward him, but the mist masked him well enough.
He flung the syringe, his blood, toward the far end of the hall like a twisted offering. It sailed through the fog and clattered on the metal floor with a tiny, perfect ping.
Then came the reaction.
Every head turned. The Remnants snapped to the scent like starved wolves, breaking into a frenzied scramble in the opposite direction.
A snarl here, a screech there, his blood had done its job.
Connor didn't breathe. Didn't blink.
He stepped forward into the storm of madness with only seconds to spare.
He moved, not a sprint, not a crawl, but that perfect, urgent rhythm between the two. Low, fast, quiet.
His breaths came in shallow bursts, each one fogging the inside of his visor.
One desk, then the next. A fallen chair. A shattered gurney.
His world had narrowed to shadows and shapes, blood on tile, footsteps carefully measured between pools of rot.
Then, something at his feet.
Dr. Marvin's cane. Polished mahogany, ornamental silver grip. Fragile. Useless. But right now? It was a sword.
Connor gripped it. Not as a weapon, but a chance.
He was almost there. The door glowed faintly behind the thinning fog, the promise of sanctuary whispering to him through cracked speakers and chaos.
But then…
One of them. Right in front of the entrance.
A Remnant. Just enough human left to hesitate. Just enough rage left to rip him apart.
The mist was lifting. The others were starting to stir, sensing the deception. Connor's heart was a war drum now. He had seconds—no, less.
He lunged.
The cane cracked across the Remnant's temple with a hollow, sickening thwack. It stumbled, shrieked, a sound of pain and memory colliding, the ghost of a man trying to scream from inside.
But Connor didn't stop. Didn't look back.
He slammed his palm against the scanner.
"ACCESS GRANTED," GEN-I chimed.
The doors hissed open, and he threw himself inside just as the Remnant reared back.
Safe, but how long?
* * *
She was being eaten alive.
No metaphor. No poetry. Just raw, searing agony as teeth crunched through the bone of her forearm and tore away strips of her flesh like butcher's ribbons. She didn't scream anymore. Her voice was long gone, spent screaming for help that never came, for a miracle that never happened. For Connor.
Now, only the wet sound of chewing filled her ears. That, and the silence inside her mind.
Not the silence of death. The silence before the noise.
The pain wasn't sudden. It built, brick by brick, as her brain tried to register the impossible. Teeth, human teeth, were tearing into her flesh, not with hunger, but frenzy. Her left arm was nothing more than exposed sinew and shredded muscle, but what unsettled her most was the sound. The slurp. The crunch. The way Dorian's jaw unhinged like an animal's as he fed.
"Dorian…?" she whispered, not in hope, but denial.
Pain bled into numbness. Numbness into cold. Her body trembled once… twice… and then stopped resisting. She didn't scream. Not anymore. She was floating.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to no one. Not to the beast chewing her arm off. Not to the security cam that blinked overhead. To Connor. To Katarina. To Dorian. Her little family of thinkers and misfits, pieced together over years of loneliness. A surrogate child, a wayward daughter, and an intern with a crooked smile who still brought her black coffee with two sugars even after the infection reports started piling up.
The world pulled away like smoke from a burning photograph. Darkness came, not sudden, but soft. Like sleep, like morphine, like surrender.
Then...the shift.
Not like slipping into unconsciousness. No, this was different. This was being torn from the self. Unspooled. She felt her breath stop, but she kept existing. Her fingers twitched. Her eyes opened wide, unblinking. Her head turned. Not by her own will. Her muscles fired like puppet strings, jerking in cruel parody.
But deep inside...she was still there.
She opened her eyes, but they weren't eyes anymore. Not really. Everything was raw. Too loud. Too sharp. Every breath a howl. She felt herself moving, but she wasn't the one pulling the strings. Her fingers dug into flesh she used to know. Her teeth pierced what once shared laughter with her across morning coffees.
Stop.
She tried. She screamed, inside, but nothing responded. Blood. Everywhere. On her. In her. She was full of it. And starving still.
It wasn't silence in the dark, it was whispers. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
"Where am I?" "I didn't mean to…" "It's not me. It's not me. It's not me."
The thoughts weren't her own. And yet, she understood every one.
"Connor…" she tried to say, but it came out as a growl. Still, someone heard it.
It started as a hum. Low, like a distant earthquake under skin. Then words. Not hers alone.
"Where am I?"
"I can't move…"
"It hurts...it HURTS..."
"They're still here. All of them. Are we dead? Are we dreaming?"
And then, her voice, clearer than she expected.
"Shut up. Just shut up for one second."
Silence.
"We're still here. All of us. Whatever this is, it hasn't taken everything. Yet. So we hold the line. We stay. We watch. We remember."
The others seemed to listen. Or perhaps obey. Maybe something inside them still recognized the cadence of command. Maybe grief had a frequency. Maybe leadership did too.
"Soraya?"
Dorian. Young, terrified Dorian.
"You're here too?"
"We're all here."
Katarina. Steady, composed. Even now.
"We're inside it. Together."
She didn't know how long it had been since her body stopped being hers. Hours? Minutes? Time didn't work the same anymore.
She and the others were pressed against the glass of the Isolation Hall. Connor was inside, pale, frantic, his hands bloody and trembling. He looked so small in that room. So young. Her boy. Not by blood, but by bond. Her eyes locked on him.
He was right there.
Connor. Pale. Still human. Terrified.
Soraya pressed her bloodied hands against the glass. She didn't lunge. Didn't snarl. Didn't try to claw her way through. Just watched him.
Her boy.
Not by blood. But by something deeper. Something earned in late nights and shared discoveries. In trust. In time.
He trembled with indecision. She saw it—the war behind his eyes. Logic wrestling grief. Protocol smothering love. The burden of survival in the bones of a child who had only ever wanted to understand.
Her hands left smears on the glass, not of malice, but of memory. She leaned in.
"Please, understand."
She poured it all into her gaze—everything she had left of herself. The part that still remembered his laugh when he cracked a joke about mitochondrial DNA. The pride she felt when he solved the protein-folding puzzle no one else could. The warmth of knowing she'd mentored something brilliant, something better.
For a heartbeat. just one, she saw it.
A flicker. A stutter in his breath.
His eyes met hers.
And in that flicker, she knew he saw her. Not the rot. Not the monster. Her.
"He still sees me. He still sees me!"
She could almost feel her vocal cords strain, though no sound came.
"He's still solving problems... that's my boy."
Behind her, Katarina twitched violently, head jerking in an impossible angle. Dorian's jaw unhinged, snapping at nothing. But Soraya? She stood still. Watching. Screaming inside.
"Connor. Sweetheart. You brilliant idiot. Don't let them win."
And then, for a second time… she saw it. Another flicker. The way he looked at her. Like he heard her. Not the monster.
"Good thinking, Connor," she whispered inside her own head.
"Be the scientist I taught you to be."
* * *
The Choir quieted, just for a moment.
Then voices...
"I killed them. I ate them," Soraya thought. "My friends…"
"Not Agatha though," Katarina chimed in dryly. "She sabotaged your DNA trials."
Soraya snorted. Or tried to. Whatever that sound was now. And just as quickly, she remembered Agatha.
That smug little backstabber with her fake lab smile and her backhanded compliments.
"You stole my prototype, Agatha," Soraya muttered in the Choir's shared mindspace, "and now you're eating brains in the hallway. Who's the top researcher now, you spiteful cow?"
A few others laughed. Laughed. Or at least tried. It came out like garbled groans, but inside, it felt like air. Like humanity.
Even in undeath, even as monsters, they still had jokes. Still had scars.
Still had her.
She watched him, Connor, her brilliant boy, moving with a desperation that only brilliance could justify. Decision after decision, each one bolder than the last. He was calculating under pressure, adapting like she taught him, turning fear into function.
And for a moment… she felt it.
Pride.
Real, aching, mother-shaped pride.
When he activated the Mist, she didn't snarl like the others. No. She understood.
"Smart move, Connor. Distract us. Use the blood. Get to the code. That's my boy."
She didn't speak those words, of course. Not aloud. But they echoed through the Choir, through the fractured static of their broken minds, and maybe, just maybe, somewhere, he felt them too.
Her body moved without permission, twitched, jolted, turned. Her legs stumbled forward with the pack, toward the scent of blood flung like bait. Her arms swung like marionette limbs. She was one of them. A beast in motion.
But inside?
Inside she was still… Soraya.
As Soraya's legs jerked toward the syringe like the rest of the Remnants, she steadied herself within, holding to memory like a cliff's edge in a storm.
"Let the body chase. The mind observes."
But then…
A twitch.
A break.
A scream, not hers, cut across the Choir.
"He's going to die!"
"No, he's close, he's close, he's…"
"Too slow. Too slow. They'll tear him open like…"
Dorian.
Young, earnest Dorian. His voice always cracked under pressure. It cracked now, too, splintering through the shared space like glass under boot.
"Dorian. Breathe. If you still can."
Katarina came next. Her tone was cold, scientific, grounded like always, even now, even half-monster.
"You know his pattern. He'll improvise. He'll find the code. Let him. Watch."
"But if he fails?" Dorian whimpered.
Katarina's silence answered.
"Then we all die again."
Soraya winced as her jaw snapped open on its own. Her body was growling, lurching. Connor was moving fast, clever, just as she'd hoped, but the others around her were starting to catch on. The Mist was thinning. The blood bait losing its charm.
"Connor…"
She pushed her voice out, useless and soundless. But she focused all her will into her eyes, fixing them through the fogged glass.
That's when Dorian said something that made her freeze, inside and out.
"I still feel hungry… but I also feel love. Isn't that strange?"
Katarina snorted.
"You always were sentimental."
"Shut up," Dorian replied. "You feel it too."
Soraya leaned inward in their shared consciousness. Focused.
"It's not strange. It's the tether. What's left of who we were. Love is memory's last fortress. If we lose that… we're gone."
A quiet beat.
Then Katarina, softly:
"He was your son, wasn't he?"
"Not by blood," Soraya whispered back. "But he was mine."
Their bodies jerked. One Remnant snarled too close to Connor's hiding spot. Soraya's hands twitched to intervene, but they wouldn't obey. Her control was slipping, so was the group's calm.
"Focus!" she barked into the Choir.
They stilled. Just enough.
Soraya poured everything she had left into the moment.
But the body wasn't hers anymore.
The beast snapped control back with a violent jolt, dragging her forward like a rag doll lashed to a speeding train. Her legs bolted without consent. Beside her, Dorian leapt, shrieking. Katarina's limbs twitched with unnatural angles as the pack charged.
Connor was running. Fast. But not fast enough.
The cane cracked against the Remnant at the door, dropping the thing for just a breath. Connor stumbled, blood on his face, desperation in every step.
Inside the Choir, panic.
"RUN, CONNOR!"
"MOVE!"
"DON'T YOU DARE DIE ON US!"
Their monstrous mouths howled nonsense, but in the mind they roared with human fury. Soraya tried to stop. She couldn't. Tried to scream. Only a guttural wail came out. But inside…
"RUN, GODDAMMIT! RUN!"
Connor lunged, hand outstretched.
Soraya's body was only a few steps behind him. She could feel his heat. His scent. Every primal instinct screamed to tear, to feed, to end.
"Don't turn around. Don't look back. Just GO!"
His palm slammed the pad.
BEEP. ACCESS GRANTED.
The doors hissed. Opened.
He dove through.
SLAM.
The blast doors sealed with a final hydraulic clunk, inches from her snapping jaws.
Silence.
Soraya slammed into the glass, shoulder-first, like a feral animal. She felt teeth break. Blood fill her mouth. But inside?
Inside she was laughing.
Not hunger. Not rage.
Hope.
She slumped against the glass, twitching. Watching him on the other side. Safe. Alive.
"You brilliant, stubborn little bastard," she thought.
She had taught him to survive. Taught him to think, adapt, override protocol when necessary, even if it meant breaking the rules.
Now, she could only hope it was enough.
Inside her, the Choir fell quiet.
Even Dorian.
Even Katarina.
For a moment, just a moment, no one hungered.
"He made it," Soraya whispered into the shared dark. "Our boy made it."
Katarina groaned low, a sound more human than any had made in hours.
"Told you the little shit had it in him," she murmured. "Still owes me five coffee runs."
Dorian snorted, a strangled laugh that echoed in her skull.
"I'd kill for a coffee."
"You did, technically," Soraya replied. "Three times."
A pause.
"Fair."
And for a second, just a flicker of impossible, unwanted joy, they were themselves again. Scientists. Friends. Humans in a lab, joking through disaster.
Then came the twitch.
Soraya's left leg jerked, then the right. Her jaw clicked open, wider than it should. The beast beneath her thoughts was waking again, uncoiling.
She felt it, the grief, the guilt, the hunger, like a wave rising from the marrow. A scream built in her throat. Not from fear. From mourning.
"Stay with me," she begged. "Don't let go. Not yet. Please."
But she knew the truth. Control was fleeting. Their shared sanity a flickering match in a hurricane.
Still… they had seen him run.
They had seen hope.
And hope, Soraya thought, might just be louder than the hunger—if only for a little while longer