Chapter One: Project Chimera
[September 14, 2025 – 9:32 P.M. | Detroit, Michigan]
I died in a parking lot that smelled like wet salt and fryer oil.
Snow had melted into gray rivers that braided along the curb, and the Wendy's sign was blinking like a dying star—WEN—D—YS—stuttering in the cold. I remember thinking how sad it looked, how the universe should retire signs the way it retires jersey numbers. That was my last thought before the headlights carved a screaming arc across the asphalt.
Impact was a fast, bright thing—sound turned inside out. My phone skittered beneath a nearby pickup. My body did not so much fall as fail. Pain came in concentric circles, louder at the edges, quiet at the center. Somewhere, somebody yelled to call 911. Somewhere, a horn kept honking because the driver's skull had face-planted his steering wheel.
I blinked. The world smudged.
Not a bad final night for a twenty-something nerd, I decided. I'd spent it arguing on a forum that the elevator scene in Winter Soldier was peak choreography and that Steve's "Before we get started…" was cinema. I could rewatch the freeway fight until the audio desynced. I'd told myself stories about what I'd do if I had genius like Stark or hands like Rogers.
The snow above me blurred into a clean, white sky.
And then the sky said, "Whew. Messy exit. You want the good news or the bad news, Jamie?"
[February 14, 2014 – 9:33 P.M. | Between Things]
White room. Not bright, not sterile—just white the way a blank page feels before you write the first word. I was upright without having stood. My body felt like an answer that had let go of its question.
Across from me, The Rob lounged in a lawn chair that hadn't existed a blink ago. Hawaiian shirt. Flip-flops. A drink with a tiny umbrella and, for some reason, a curly straw that kept moving in a Mobius loop even when he wasn't sipping. He looked like the concept of vacation had learned sarcasm.
"The bad news," I said, because that's how conversations with cosmic beings work in fanfics. You give them beats; they give you tropes.
"You're extremely dead," The Rob said, wincing with sympathy that felt practiced but kind. "Also: technically your body did the world's most accurate impression of a tossed ragdoll. Ten out of ten on physics. Six out of ten on grace."
"And the good news?"
"You're extremely not done." He swirled his drink. The umbrella spun like a tiny galaxy. "Reincarnation package. Pick-two special. Limited time offer because your variant resonance pinged a narrative seam I've been meaning to stitch."
"Pick-two." My voice sounded like mine. It also felt like it had never done anything as simple as speech before. "Like a drive-thru menu?"
"I like a man who meets omnipotence with deadpan." He wagged a flip-flop. "Yes, two wishes. There are guardrails because some toys blow up universes if you hand them to toddlers. You are, no offense, a toddler."
"None taken." I studied him. "Are you… a person?"
"I'm The Rob," he said, as if that clarified anything. "I am the custodian of creative messes. I sweep crumbs from canon and make sure they become cookies in the right kitchens."
"You're a cosmic janitor."
He considered it. "I'm a cosmic janitor with tenure."
"Okay, Rob. Two wishes." My brain lined up possibilities like cereal boxes. "I want intelligence beyond Reed Richards."
"Spicy starter." He waggled an eyebrow. "Reed is the unfair exam answer key written on a fourth-dimensional napkin. 'Beyond Reed' means you'll see edges he doesn't, but remember: intelligence is a spotlight. Aim it carelessly and you blind yourself."
"I'll take the risk." I breathed in. No lungs. The idea of breath doing the work of breath. "Second wish: the powers of all aliens in the Omnitrix… in my base form."
He whistled, low and theatrical. "Ambitious. And no."
I'd prepared for that. "Counter-offer?"
"I can't hand over absolute reality hacks. Alien X is a committee with the keys to the fuse box. Clockwork plays Jenga with time. Some profiles produce multiversal paperwork." He sipped. The straw looped like an ouroboros. "But I can grant you a lot of them. Integrated. Harmonized. You won't transform; you'll synthesize. You'll still look human—mostly. Some instincts might argue loudly. Think choir, not soloist."
"That works." It worked better than I'd hoped; "base form" had been greed disguised as cohesion. "And the ones you can't give me… I get why."
"Good lad." He clapped once, a sound like a coin flipping heads forever. "Now, constraints. You'll reincarnate in a world that resembles your favorite cinematic sandbox—oh look, Marvel. Neat! Timeline drop: February 2014, a few months before the worst elevator ride in Washington. You'll be fourteen. You'll wake up with a history that fits your new container."
"Family?"
"Orphanage," The Rob said, and his cheer dimmed a hair. "A place that smiles with sharp teeth. HYDRA owns the walls. They have… found something they should not have, and they're making soup with it."
"Omnitrix," I said, throat tight.
"Ding." He tapped the air. A distant chime rang. "The device fell to Earth years ago, caught the wrong eyes. They broke it trying to understand it. It still sings. People like you hear that song in your blood, and the song hurts."
"How many kids?"
"Over a hundred entered the maze," he said softly. "Sixteen walk its halls today."
Guilt arrived like a punch to a bruise I hadn't known I carried. "What do you want me to do?"
"I'm not supposed to want." He set his drink down on nothing. It stayed. "But if I were the type to prefer outcomes, I would prefer you to be kind. To break their machine. To keep your soul when your mind gets very, very loud."
Silence, comfortable and heavy. I looked down at my hands—still mine, unbloodied, unbruised. "Name stays James Martin?"
"James Martin." He nodded. "But the walls will call you Subject 01. They already named you Project Chimera."
I swallowed. "Will I remember… this?"
"Vividly enough to have nightmares, dimly enough to keep secrets." He stood. The lawn chair folded itself into a paper crane and fluttered away, dissolving into motes. "One more thing, Jamie."
"Yeah?"
"Reed Richards thinks in lines that intersect at inevitability," The Rob said, as if sharing gossip he didn't want the universe to overhear. "Don't think in lines. Think in circles. Circles protect."
The white room creased like paper. For a ridiculous instant, I wanted to ask if I could keep the umbrella.
"Good luck," he said, grinning with the sincerity of a prankster who wants you to win. "Try not to let the fascists monologue."
The world folded, and gravity remembered me again.
[February 20, 2014 – 6:12 A.M. | Dormitory Sector, Classified HYDRA Facility Theta-9, Eastern Europe]
I woke to the sound of someone else's heartbeat.
Not near me. In me. Around me. The dormitory was a long, low room with twenty metal beds and sixteen bodies. The lights hummed with a frequency that made a thin silver ring at the edge of my vision. Air tasted like bleach, iron, and slow fear. My sheet was rough. My skin wasn't quite my skin—deeper brown with an undertow of heat, a faint map of ember-veins ghosting the surface when I flexed my hands.
Someone coughed in a bed three down. Female. Dry, irritated. I could tell she'd had a fever last night and hadn't told anyone because she'd coughed into the pillow. I could tell that because my brain had become a crime lab.
Do not panic, I told myself, calmly and somewhat hysterically. You dreamed a cosmic intern gave you cheat codes. Now you are in a prison pretending to be a charity. Also your bones hum.
The door hissed. A guard stepped in. Black uniform, boots that tried to be quiet. His gun smelled like recently cleaned metal and old oil. His fear smelled like overripe fruit. I didn't know how I knew that—only that my senses had rearranged themselves into a new instrument and my mind had learned how to play it overnight.
"Up," he said in German. "Inspections."
I understood him as if the words had been pre-installed. Around me, sixteen bodies moved in a choreography learned by hunger. The kid nearest the door—tall, shoulders like a locker, eyes too old—sat up without hurry. Another kid in the far corner kept his eyes closed a fraction longer than a blink because if he looked at the guard too long, he'd punch him. A girl with hair like burnished wire swung her legs out of bed and made a face at the cold. She radiated heat without burning. Every personality in the room had gravity.
I stood. The world did that very small taffy-stretch, like time had elastic you could see if you stared. I ignored it. Intelligence beyond Reed Richards, I thought, and immediately corrected myself. Intelligence beyond Reed is not a number; it's a method. Observe. Model. Test. Iterate. Survive.
We lined up against the wall. The guard's partner entered, ran a detector wand over each of us. The wand whined when it reached me, a mosquito-pitch that shifted through harmonics. The guard's eyes flicked to his partner. His partner didn't look back. They didn't like to signal worry in front of us. The second guard's jaw muscle twitched anyway.
He pointed at the door. "Breakfast."
We filed into the corridor. Concrete painted the color of old teeth. Cameras nested in corners like glassy spiders. I counted them without deciding to—seventeen in the main hall, two with dead LEDs, one running a loop. There was moisture in the air, not enough to make a bloom like mold but enough to let certain spores live in corners if a girl wanted to grow something there with a thought. I filed that away.
The cafeteria smelled like oatmeal's apology. We ate in silence. Every metal spoon clinked with equal shame. A speaker somewhere played a soft, pretty song designed by someone who'd read once that classical music makes plants grow faster and decided that meant it made soldiers more obedient.
I lifted the spoon, paused. The bowl's surface strobed with minute ripples: ambient vibrations mapped in milk. In the reflection, my eyes were my eyes, but the iris ring was tighter, more precise, like the aperture of a camera.
"Hey, Professor," someone murmured to my left. Female. Amber eyes that looked like they'd swallowed a furnace. She smirked without moving her mouth. "You back from the dead?"
Ava Reyes. The memory arrived complete with context: flames that bloom white when she gets angry; loyalty that burns hotter. My brain didn't just recall; it cross-indexed. Names became files with footnotes. It wasn't telepathy; it was the way a detective remembers faces but with all the inference engines turned to eleven.
"I slept," I said.
"Liar," she said cheerfully, and ate like the food had personally wronged her.
Across from us, the tall kid with the locker shoulders kept his spoon steady even as the table creaked. Tyrese Cole. Power in reserve. Smile like a safe place. He lifted a brow at me—checking that the floor under my head wasn't broken—then nodded once. Another kid two tables over flicked his fingers at a cracked fluorescent tube, and the light steadied. Jason Alvarez. Electricity held on a leash made of breath.
I did not let my gaze rest on the cameras. That would be like winking at a sniper.
[February 20, 2014 – 9:02 A.M. | Medical Wing, Theta-9]
New day, new indignities. We were marched to the medical wing for "assessments." The hall to the right led to doors that always smelled like antiseptic grief. The hall to the left smelled like metal and money. We went right.
"Subject Zero-One," a voice said as I stepped through the scanner arch. Female, clipped. The kind of voice you sharpen on spreadsheets. I knew that voice from nightmares I hadn't earned yet. Dr. Krüger ran Project Chimera like a chess game against God.
"Here," I said.
She didn't look up from the tablet. She never looked at us like we were people unless something surprised her. She gestured at the scan bed. "Vitals."
I lay down. Cool metal greeted spine. The scanner canopy slid over me, and the air tasted like ozone. A graph bloomed on the screen to my right, garbage to most eyes, songs to mine. Heart rate. Radiation absorption curve. Cellular coherence index. Eight overlapped waveforms with distinct phase offsets dancing around a constantly adjusting mean—harmony found at speed.
Omnitrix signatures, my mind labeled. Not a device now—debris, an orchestra exploded into instruments and lodged in sixteen chests.
The scan's hum wove through my jaw. Beneath skin, a second rhythm answered. The NRG strand. A reactor that ate stress, heat, light. I breathed slow, feeding it calm.
"Stable," Krüger said, disappointed. "Annoying."
"Thank you, doctor," I said, because sarcasm is social armor.
She glanced down then, a flicker of curiosity like a darting fish. "Your humor calibration remains intact."
"I calibrate as needed."
Her mouth made the shape of a smile but didn't commit. "You will report to Sector K after lunch. Cognitive and motor tests."
"I love standardized tests," I said. "They make life feel graded."
"This one is pass/fail." She made a note on the tablet. "And everything fails eventually."
She dismissed me with a tilt of the head. As I slid off the bed, the scanner canopy thrummed a fraction too high; a hairline crack webbed from its edge like a frozen lightning fork. Her eyes flicked to it, then to me. I looked bored. Bored was safe.
In the adjacent bay, a boy's echoing voice fractaled into a dozen whisper-voices before he coughed them back into one throat. Noah Quinn. Across from him, a girl in a dark bob let a black sheen creep over her hand and slip into the port of the med console. The machine chirped in a language it wasn't built to know. Mina Takahashi. In the far room, the temperature dropped as if the air had forgotten how to hold heat. Lena Petrov, walking frost past a warming lamp without knowing she was doing it. We were a parade of gods in handcuffs.
[February 20, 2014 – 1:26 P.M. | Sector K – Cognitive Assessment]
Sector K was a white cube with a chair and a glass wall that promised to be a mirror and lied. Two cameras. One microphone. One man in the observation room pretending to be two by moving between two chairs when he thought I wasn't looking.
"Subject Zero-One," the intercom crackled. "We'll begin with pattern recognition."
They started simple. I didn't answer; I remodeled. Shapes became rules became predictions. The screens tried to surprise me; they became predictable in how they surprised. Memory tests tried to saturate working memory; I built an indexer out of synesthetic cross-tags—numbers got colors, colors got sounds, sounds got faces until the facts stuck like burrs.
In the final battery, the room changed. The chair became a bar stool. The stool wasn't there; my brain told my legs to behave as if it was. The wall wasn't glass; it was a screen. The man in the other room wasn't two; he was one, and he was tired, and he didn't know why he was doing this work for people who edited his calls to his mother.
"Very good," the intercom said.
"Very derivative," I said.
A new test: a translucent cube hung in the air with latticework inside, impossible angles that rotated through themselves. Escher by way of MRI. Most people would pick the path through the lattice that broke the least rules. I picked the path that made a new rule and then made that rule retroactively true. The cube shivered. The lattice reconfigured, as if relieved.
They made me run. The treadmill offered incline and speed. My legs offered more. There was a moment where the belt and I negotiated with physics, and physics blinked.
"That's enough," the intercom said, breathless in a way you don't teach an intercom to be.
I stepped off, heart steady. Sweat scented like copper and rain. My reflection in the fake glass looked like a kid who'd learned not to smile unless it bought him a second chance.
[February 20, 2014 – 7:43 P.M. | Lower Research Wing, Secured Access]
Night in Theta-9 was a rumor. Lights dimmed, but cameras didn't sleep. Guards relaxed the way snakes relax—coiled in different shapes. If you were brave or stupid, you could map their patrol patterns, chart the minutes when a door forgot to be guarded because the man who guarded it got bored and checked the time.
I was brave and stupid and burning with a second sun under my ribs.
Mina's eyes found mine across the common room earlier, a quick glance like a key turning in a lock. No words. She didn't waste them. Her mouth didn't move, but the lights in the ceiling gave one slow blink, and I read in their rhythm: vent. Two left. Eleven paces. Now.
Now didn't mean now then. Now meant now later. So I waited until the guards' conversation in the hall hit the exact laugh they used when telling the story about the mouse in the break room that had startled their superior. Then I stepped into the corridor as if I had been ordered to step into the corridor.
No one stopped me because my body language said I belonged to a task. The second guard's eyes slid over me like water over stone. I walked past Sector H—hydraulics, I guessed—past Sector L—logistics, according to the clipboard a bored woman held—and turned left where the cameras were down for scheduled maintenance because scheduled maintenance is when you are sure the universe loves you.
The vent was where Mina had said: two left, eleven paces. The plate was screwed in with star-heads because the maintenance department believed in small inconveniences as security. I placed my palm against the metal and felt it, not with my skin but with the Jury Rigg part of my mind that liked the taste of wrong. The screws considered my hand. It wasn't magnetism. It was persuasion. My fingernails throbbed with the memory of a species that loved to build. I rolled my wrist, and the screws unwound like obedient little planets leaving their orbits.
Inside, the vent was cold and smelled like dust and heat. The metal vibrated with a thousand stories. I slid forward, counting crossbeams, mapping the grid in my head. Intelligence beyond Reed was not about clever jokes; it was about becoming a file system with feelings.
At the third branch, I turned right. The vent narrowed. I exhaled and flattened, joints finding angles they hadn't had before the day I woke up. Somewhere in the walls, a steady hum deepened, expanded, layered. Not electricity. Not air. A note older than either.
I reached the grate above the Lower Research Wing and looked down.
The room below was not a room—it was a cathedral built by people who did not believe in God but believed profoundly in precision. A cylinder rose from the floor, cored out and ribbed with containment rings. The rings were lit from within, not with light but with the idea of light. In the cylinder's heart, something hovered, broken and whole, shards arranged by magnetism into the memory of a circle.
The Omnitrix.
Not the green watch that sold toys and moral lessons. The core. The star inside the watch. It was cracked. It was singing. The song made my skin remember other skins, my bones remember other gravities. The parts of me I could not name answered in eight voices.
On the catwalks, scientists moved like careful ants. Krüger stood at a console, hands behind her back, head tilted in worship disguised as math. On a secondary display, a timeline scrolled: recoveries, failures, splices, fatalities. They had started with over a hundred.
Sixteen dots pulsed at the bottom of the list.
My breath misted the grate. Down below, the core shivered, and its voice reached up through the seam in the vent and pressed a symbol into my brain—a sign that wasn't Earth language but meant, unmistakably: stop.
They didn't know what they were touching. They thought they were writing a symphony with stolen instruments. They were making feedback.
I should have left. I should have closed the vent, gone back to bed, and waited to gather what we needed. Instead, I stared too long, and the vent did the tiniest thing a piece of metal can do to betray you: it pinged.
Heads turned. Krüger lifted her gaze without moving her neck. Her eyes tracked the ceiling not by sound but by pattern; she was the kind of predator who noticed small changes in the most manuel of taks, as everything within the faculty had a set procedure which almost never changed.
Move, said the part of me that knew speed. Move now.
I slid back. The screws did not want to be quiet going back in. They wanted to argue. I argued better. I sealed the grate and crawled like a blueprint through the dark.
At the junction, I stopped because stopping was smarter than running. Breath quiet. Muscles quiet. The facility listened, and I listened back, and for a moment we were two chess players thinking the same move and hating each other for it.
Boots below. A flashlight beam painted the corridor in white. The guard's breath sounded like stale coffee. He spoke into his radio. The radio crackled back. They were going to sweep Sector K and L and then pretend they'd always planned to sweep Sector K and L.
I waited until boredom and humiliation did their work on the guard's shoulders. He yawned. He turned. He left. A minute later, I slid toward the dormitory with the quiet of a plan assembling itself.
[February 20, 2014 – 11:58 P.M. | Dormitory Sector]
We slept in rows like commas in a sentence too long to finish. Except we didn't sleep. We performed sleep. When the lights dimmed to night mode, the room shifted into its other life. People breathed words into their pillows that never made it to air. Tyrese's chest rose and fell like a tide. Ava's fingers twitched, little sparks that didn't quite become flame. Noah's mouth moved, a whisper-choir kept under a blanket.
I lay on my side and stared at the wall and watched the patterns in the paint reorganize themselves into maps. Plans are not choices; they are the skeleton of choices. This skeleton needed muscles. It needed names.
I waited until the cameras turned — not off, just away — and then I slid out of bed and walked the aisle like it was a church and I was both sinner and priest.
Ava's eyes opened as I passed. She was always awake when it mattered. "Field trip?" she mouthed.
"Soon," I mouthed back.
Tyrese didn't open his eyes. He didn't have to. "You look like you found something," he murmured.
"I found the reason we can't survive if we leave it behind," I said softly.
Mina sat up without a sound, black-sheen fingertips retracting from where she'd been speaking to a busted lamp. Caleb Vance rolled onto an elbow two bunks down, light glinting in his pupils as if his body could refract it. Jason flicked his fingers; a static halo fizzed and died. Nadia was asleep sideways with one foot on the wall because of course she was. Tariq blinked once, very slowly, and I felt a tug in my bones as if gravity had cleared its throat. Lena's breath fogged the air an inch in front of her lips. Eli's eyes were open and gold in the dark. Noah's echo finally settled into him, and he let out a relieved little sigh. Sienna smelled faintly of green things that had never seen sunlight down here. Marcus was a shadow on a shadow. Riley's pulse was an ocean in miniature. Priya's fingers flexed like wings dreaming. Jonah had his head tipped toward the ceiling as if listening for rafters.
Sixteen. A number small enough to memorize. A family large enough to be dangerous.
I crouched between the beds and spoke barely above a thought. "They broke something they don't understand. It's the heart of what made us. As long as it beats in their house, we are songs that belong to someone else."
Mina's eyes narrowed. "The core."
I nodded.
"How bad?" Caleb asked, quiet and razor-dry.
"Bad enough that destruction will be an act of kindness," I said. "Bad enough that if they stabilize it, we become blueprints for future projects."
Ava's mouth curled. "So we break their toy."
"Not tonight," I said. "Soon. We need access, keys, redundancies. We need their schedule to love us. We need alibis that are true and lies that only sound true. We need to eat for what we're going to ask our bodies to do."
They all chipped in with ways they could help with their escape. We breathed together—the weirdest choir, sixteen notes from sixteen throats, and for a heartbeat the facility felt smaller than us.
"We have two weeks," I said quietly. Krüger had mentioned timelines without meaning to; her tablet had shown the schedule for Phase IV conditioning when she rotated it too far. "Then they start the reprogramming. They scrub us. They make us love the wrong things."
Ava's jaw hardened. "They won't get that far."
"They won't," I agreed, and the words didn't feel like bravado. They felt like the moment The Rob had told me to think in circles, like the circle had closed around this night and this promise. "But before we leave, we end what they're using to make more of us."
Mina tilted her head. "You're sure we can break it."
"I'm sure we can break anything together," I said, and it wasn't a line; it was a diagnosis.
Silence again. The kind with a pulse.
From somewhere deep under us, the Omnitrix core sang. It wasn't a song of invitation anymore. It was a warning written in frequencies no human ear had earned.
I looked at my hands. They were my hands. They were not only my hands.
I thought of The Rob's umbrella spinning like a galaxy. I thought of Reed Richards drawing straight lines through a curved world. I thought of circles—how they keep things inside and keep other things out, how they aren't walls but promises.
"Sleep," I said. "Eat in the morning. Fail your tests just enough to be boring. If you get bored enough, tell me and I'll assign you homework."
Ava snorted the tiniest laugh. "Professor."
Tyrese closed his eyes and let that smile rest where it belonged. Mina's lashes lowered. Caleb rolled onto his back and stared up, counting reflections. Jason laced his fingers and let his palms hum a lullaby only power lines know. Nadia turned fully upside down because gravity is an option, not a rule, when you are Nadia. Tariq went absolutely still. Noah put his hand over his heart like he could keep all his voices under it if he pressed gently. Sienna, soft as prayer, brushed a fingertip over Lena's sleeve; frost didn't bite. Marcus pretended to be asleep so he could guard us. Riley made the air smell like clean water. Priya watched the vent and timed her breath to the facility's, refining the map she saw when she closed her eyes. Jonah did not move for a long time, then moved with such quiet that the cameras could write poetry about it and still not catch it.
I lay back down and told my new body to rest. It did not like that instruction. It preferred motion, argument, building. I gave it a compromise: rest is preparation, and preparation is doing.
In the dark, the plan coalesced like a picture in a developing tray. Steps, contingencies, fallback routes. Who goes first. Who stays visible. Who never does. Where Sienna can grow a door in a wall that has never known sunlight. Where Tariq will make gravity choose sides. Where Priya will thread the needle of air ducts and distance. Where Tyrese will be the last thing a door ever remembers being.
And at the end of all those steps, a room like a cathedral and a broken circle that thought it was the center of a map.
We would draw a better circle. One that closed around us, and opened for no one else.
I closed my eyes. The last thing I felt before sleep found me was the hum beneath the floor easing a fraction, as if the core recognized something in the shape of our vow and stepped back from the edge of breaking.
[February 21, 2014 – 7:02 A.M. | Dormitory Sector, Classified HYDRA Facility Theta-9, Eastern Europe]
Morning came like a rumor no one wanted to believe.
The ceiling lights brightened from indigo to sterile white, and the intercom chirped the way it does when it thinks it's being polite. "Rise and prepare for routine evaluation."
Routine. The word had lost its definition here. Routine was repetition without purpose. Routine was obedience disguised as breakfast.
Ava groaned first—loudly, performative. "I swear if they feed us that sludge again, I'm combusting."
"You say that every day," Caleb said, rubbing sleep from eyes that glinted faintly like cut crystal. "And every day, you don't. Control issues."
She flipped him off, which made his skin refract a mischievous rainbow. "Don't test me, Glass Boy."
I was halfway through tying my shoes before I realized I hadn't untied them last night. My brain was doing that new trick again—micro-autopilot. Each neuron acted like it already knew what I wanted a second before I wanted it.
Across the room, Mina stretched with a feline precision. The nanite veins in her wrist shimmered like living ink before receding. "The cameras are cycling early today," she murmured. "Eighteen-second blind windows every two minutes."
"Perfect," I said. "We'll need those."
Tyrese grinned from his bunk. "You planning homework already, Professor?"
"Always." I glanced toward the door. "The sooner we know this place's breathing pattern, the sooner we can choke it."
He chuckled. "You talk like you were born planning jailbreaks."
"Maybe I was."
[February 21, 2014 – 7:36 A.M. | Cafeteria Block C]
We sat in our assigned spots, spoons clinking in mechanical unison. HYDRA guards lined the walls, eyes flat, rifles easy in their grips. I counted their blinks instead of the seconds.
Sienna sat beside me, coaxing a tiny vine out of the cracked seam of the table. She hid it with her hand, smiling like she'd just saved a secret. "It's just a sprout," she whispered. "One of these days, I'll get it to bloom."
"Make it subtle," I said. "They'd burn it."
"They always burn what they don't understand," she said softly, voice full of centuries she hadn't lived.
On the far end, Riley leaned close to Noah, teaching him how to steady his breath through rhythm. Noah's multiple voices harmonized into a single hum, the whole table vibrating faintly. Ava shot me a glance. Family, her expression said. We're getting there.
[February 21, 2014 – 2:15 P.M. | Training Sector – Observation Hall 3]
Dr. Krüger loved data the way zealots love scripture. She stood behind bulletproof glass as guards ushered us into the hall. The walls were lined with pulse sensors and monitors that displayed vitals like racing scores.
"Subject Zero-One," she said over the speaker. "Demonstrate controlled integration."
I hated that word—integration. It made the miracle in our blood sound like a spreadsheet.
"Yes, doctor." I rolled my shoulders and let the hum start.
The Kineceleran energy came first: a warm buzz in my legs, a tightening of the world around me. Time dilated, motion blurred. Every heartbeat in the room slowed to syrup. I took one step, and the floor cracked where air pressure failed to keep up.
Then the strength—Tetramand density, Appoplexian precision. Bones heavier, joints louder, muscles coiled like springsteel. I exhaled, letting the surge fall before it tipped into excess.
Krüger's voice was low but satisfied. "Perfect regulation. You are more stable than your predecessors."
The word predecessors hung in the air like ghosts. I looked through the glass at her. "You mean the ones you killed."
The pause after that was worth the risk. Her expression didn't change, but the way her pulse quickened gave her away. Even monsters flinch at the word killed when someone says it like math.
[February 21, 2014 – 5:59 P.M. | Dormitory Sector]
The day ended the way all days did here—with silence pretending to be peace.
Lights dimmed. Guards finished their final rounds. Ava sat cross-legged on her bunk, flame flickering in her palm, controlled now. "We'll need a distraction big enough to shut half the grid."
"Leave that to me," Jason said, sparks flickering between his fingers. "I've been practicing feedback loops."
Mina, perched near the vent, nodded. "I can reroute the surveillance lines during his surge. Forty-five seconds, maybe."
"That's all I need," I said.
Caleb folded his arms, crystalline facets catching the low light. "And where do I fit into this genius parade?"
"You're our wall," I said simply. "When they open fire, you make sure we're still standing."
He smirked. "I like the sound of that."
Tyrese clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make the bedframe rattle. "Welcome to the shield division, bro."
We laughed—quietly, carefully, but it was real laughter. The kind that reminds you you're alive.
[February 22, 2014 – 1:04 A.M. | Maintenance Sublevel – Ventilation Shaft 7]
I crawled through steel lungs.
Mina's nanites guided me, mapping every twist with green points of light that flickered just enough to show direction. She whispered through the tiny comm she'd built from recycled circuit boards. "Left turn ahead. You'll see a valve labeled OX-19. Don't touch it—it's linked to the emergency oxygen cut."
"I'll try not to suffocate us," I whispered back.
Her voice softened. "James… you always joke when you're scared."
"I know." I smiled into the dark. "Keeps me from burning up."
At the end of the shaft, a grate overlooked the research hall again—the Omnitrix chamber. The core pulsed brighter tonight, emerald and amber threads coiling like nerves. Krüger's team surrounded it, murmuring about neural imprint templates. I listened, recording every syllable in a mind that refused to forget.
One scientist mentioned Phase IV neural reconditioning—scheduled February 27.
Five days.
I pulled back, breath tight. "They're accelerating the mind-wipe," I whispered into the mic. "We move sooner."
"Copy," Mina said. "I'll wake the others."
[February 22, 2014 – 3:18 A.M. | Dormitory Sector]
Everyone was awake before I returned. Sixteen faces, sixteen reasons.
"They'll start reprogramming in five days," I said. "We can't wait."
Tariq frowned, gravity rippling faintly around him. "We don't have resources."
"We have each other," Ava snapped. "That's worth more than anything in this hell."
"She's right," I said. "We don't need weapons. We are weapons. And we choose what we fight for."
Lena's breath frosted the air. "What's the plan?"
I laid it out in steps—each one a circle tightening around our freedom. Jason's blackout surge. Mina's system reroute. Tariq's gravity fields locking doors behind us. Sienna's vines sealing hallways. Tyrese leading the breach on the hangar. Priya scouting from above once we reached open air. Everyone else covering, shielding, moving.
"And me?" Noah asked, voice trembling but steady in intent.
"You're our voice," I said. "When they come for us, your echoes will lead them away."
He nodded. "I can do that."
"Good." I looked at all of them. "Because when we walk out, we walk out as one."
A beat of silence followed—then Tyrese's deep laugh broke it. "Professor just declared independence."
"More like a suicide mission," Caleb muttered, but he was smiling.
"Maybe," I said. "But at least it'll be ours."
[February 23, 2014 – 10:10 A.M. | Observation Deck]
Krüger's log played on the monitor Mina had hacked. Her clipped voice filled the room:
"Subject 01's neural structure exhibits full hybrid cohesion. Integration rate 100%. Initiate Phase IV across all subjects February 27. Upon completion, deploy Project Chimera units to STRIKE headquarters for evaluation."
STRIKE. The same division embedded within S.H.I.E.L.D.
Everything connected—the Hydra rot already crawling beneath the world's cleanest organization.
Ava slammed her fist against the console, sparks dancing from her knuckles. "They're turning us into soldiers for them."
"Not if we turn the field first," I said.
[February 24, 2014 – 11:45 P.M. | Dormitory Sector]
We rehearsed without calling it rehearsal.
Tyrese practiced lifting weights until the metal screamed; Tariq stabilized gravity so no one heard.
Mina rewired locks in plain sight under the guise of cleaning duty.
Jason trained to short out circuits without tripping breakers.
Nadia ran laps through corridors until she could draw patrol schedules by sound.
Sienna grew moss to cover security vents.
Riley shaped water lines through the pipes to flood sections on command.
Marcus phased through walls, mapping alternate paths.
Priya measured every ceiling, every vent.
Jonah practiced silence until even Lena couldn't track him.
And me—I memorized everything. Every pattern, every sequence, every possibility of failure.
Five days became four. Then three.
[February 26, 2014 – 8:07 P.M. | Dormitory Sector]
The night before everything.
The facility slept beneath us, unaware that its prisoners were sharpening tomorrow into a blade.
Ava sat beside me on the bunk, staring at her hands. "Do you ever think about what comes next?"
"Freedom."
She shook her head. "After that."
I hesitated. "No. Because thinking that far feels like tempting the universe to notice."
She laughed, quiet and warm. "You sound like a pessimist."
"I'm realistic. The Rob gave me a brain too big for optimism."
"Who's The Rob?"
"No one," I said. "A long story I probably dreamed."
She leaned her shoulder against mine. "Then dream of a good ending."