The hospital lights flickered. First once. Then twice. Then darkness swallowed the ward.
For a moment, Elias was blind — but not really. The patterns never left him. Even in pitch black, the world glowed with invisible mathematics: angles of walls, echoes of boots, the erratic wave of a dying fluorescent tube.
He stumbled into the corridor.
Smoke stung his throat. Somewhere, alarms wailed in suffocating red bursts. Orderlies ran with restraints. A doctor shouted for containment foam.
And then Elias saw her.
Aria.
She stood in the middle of the hallway, a nightmare of beauty and ruin. White bone jutted from her shoulders and ribs, curling like jagged armor. Her skin split in glowing seams, veins pressed thin beneath protruding ridges. She screamed — but the scream was not human anymore. It was metal scraping stone.
Nurses cowered. One raised a taser.
Elias's world exploded into probability threads. The taser's arc, the nurse's hand trembling, the trajectory of failure — all mapped out in cold equations.
He stepped forward without thinking.
"Stop."
The nurse froze. Aria's head snapped toward him, eyes wide with animal terror. Bone spines shivered across her arms.
Elias's lips trembled, but the numbers gave him clarity. He knew if she struck now, she'd shatter her own joints. He knew if the taser hit her, her body would calcify faster, choking her from the inside. Both paths ended in death.
He chose a third.
"Aria." The name came unbidden, rising from the equations themselves.
Her breath caught. For a second — just one — the bone stopped growing.
Everyone stared.
"How—how do you know her name?" the nurse whispered.
Elias didn't answer. He didn't need to. The patterns had already told him: she was the first, the vanguard of what Catalyst Syndrome would make of humanity.
And somehow… she was waiting for him.
Aria staggered, bone splintering from her forearm, eyes locked on Elias with a mixture of fury and recognition.
Then the quarantine doors slammed shut behind them, sealing Ward C in blaring red light.
They were trapped together.
Two broken bodies.
Two curses reborn as something else.
The beginning of the end.