The next morning, Nova Veil woke to sirens.
But not the kind that screamed attack. These were internal tones—low, sweeping, and technical. Maintenance rotation. Power reroute. A failure in Chamber Six. A scramble of new recruits being redirected to the edge stations for compatibility testing.
To the untrained eye, it was noise. Confusion.
To Evan Thorne—it was opportunity.
He stood in the northern observatory wing, high above the central courtyard, watching the white-armored soldiers shuffle new Chosen toward the holding decks. Most were still wide-eyed. Some still sick from transport. All of them are waiting to be changed.
Down below, pods hissed open, and pairs emerged different. Taller. Fiercer. Linked.
He tapped his tablet. Cross-referenced guard rotations, diagnostic power dips, and drone lag.
"Tonight," he muttered to himself. "It has to be tonight."
Owen sat on the floor of the lab's adjacent supply room, hunched over a schematic.
He'd traced out the Soul Link process from memory—a messy, half-wrong version sketched in grease pencil on the back of a metal crate. Symbols. Chambers. Energy arcs. The list of transformation phases.
Step One: Neural attunement.
Step Two: Serum assimilation.
Step Three: Thread convergence.
Step Four: Identity convergence.
Step Five: Emergence.
He circled the last one.
Emergence.
The part that scared him the least.
He didn't want to be Owen anymore.
He wanted to be whoever came after.
"Drawn to your own rebirth," Evan said behind him.
Owen looked up. Evan stepped forward with two sealed vials in hand—one orange, one violet-white. Both glowed faintly through their pressurized glass.
"No one's touched this prototype batch since the Ares Variant went unstable," Evan explained, crouching beside him. "But these—these are stabilized. Barely. The orange one's keyed for adult-link males. The violet is cross-binary. Adaptive, but volatile."
"You're giving me the volatile one?"
Evan arched his brow. "You're the one who told me you wanted to burn the old version down."
Owen didn't smile. But he nodded.
The prep began that afternoon.
They secured the chamber—Chamber Nine—using Evan's Level Four override and a blind maintenance order that redirected the guard shift to coolant testing three levels up.
"Oldest trick in the book," Evan muttered. "Make them chase the wrong error long enough, and they'll ignore the real one."
Inside the transformation vault, dust covered everything.
The main pod chamber was circular, ringed with dim light and empty serum ports. A rusted ceiling vent buzzed like a hive. Half the controls were analog, the other half a fused tangle of divine-tech wiring long since outdated.
Owen stared at the chairs.
There were two.
Side by side.
Wire-linked.
Still stained from previous use.
"Have you done this before?" he asked.
Evan shook his head. "I helped monitor one trial, years ago. Saw it go wrong. They weren't compatible. They screamed until they stopped breathing."
Owen clenched his fists. "Will that happen to us?"
Evan didn't answer.
The next part was physical prep.
Evan led Owen back to the private lab and administered a sequence of injections—mild stabilizers to slow his adolescent metabolism, followed by a temporary endocrine synchronizer.
"Why does it burn?" Owen asked as one of the shots made his arms tremble.
"It's rebalancing your internal chemistry," Evan explained. "You're not just taking on a new structure. You're becoming open to someone else's soul. The body has to lower its defenses."
"I never had many to begin with."
"That's what worries me."
They ran drills after that.
Breathing synchronization. Touch sensitivity tests. Reflex merges.
Evan activated a floating orb of light and had Owen match its pulse with his heartbeat. They worked side by side, their patterns inching closer. When Owen's pulse fluttered, Evan adjusted his posture, softened his breath.
"Again," he said. "Stay in sync."
"What happens if we're out of sync?"
"The chamber compensates. And then it panics."
Owen grimaced. "How bad is panicking?"
"Catastrophic."
By the third day, Owen's hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He couldn't tell if it was fear, anticipation, or the neural strain of aligning his thoughts with Evan's over and over. Their daily sessions in the hidden vault had started quiet, almost reverent. But now, everything buzzed with a low urgency.
Tonight was the only window.
If they didn't do it now, the new Overseer rotation would discover the offline chamber, and it would be too late.
That evening, Evan brought a bag of protein packs and water to their lab corner. They ate in silence, leaning against the glass wall, watching the stormlight flicker through the perimeter shields.
"You're quiet," Owen said.
"I'm thinking."
"About whether this is worth it?"
Evan looked at him.
"No," he said. "About what we'll become."
Owen exhaled slowly. "I don't know what I am now. Not really. But every day I wake up, I feel like I could be more. Like the person in the mirror's just a mask."
Evan didn't interrupt.
"So maybe," Owen said, "if I'm going to become someone... I want it to be with someone who sees me already."
Their eyes met.
For the first time, Evan reached out—and placed his hand over Owen's.
The link buzzed.
Not established. Not bound.
But invited.
Final checks.
The chamber was charged.
The vials were loaded.
The identities had been quietly rewritten—Owen Cross marked for "alternate integration," and Evan Thorne assigned to "voluntary off-grid reassignment."
Together, they would vanish from the official record.
Together, they would be reborn as Riley Cross and Daphne Thorne.
In a final act of caution, Evan rewired the chamber's biometric scan. "Failsafe," he explained. "If your vitals start to collapse, the chamber dumps the serum and ejects you."
"And you?"
"No failsafe for me."
Owen swallowed. "That's not fair."
"Life rarely is."
Night came.
The wind howled beyond the outpost walls.
Chamber Nine's ancient mechanisms stirred as the doors hissed shut, and two seats lowered into the platform center.
Evan took one.
Owen—no, Riley, even if not yet spoken—took the other.
The glass closed.
The lights dimmed.
Two vials clicked into place.
Orange.
Violet.
The threshold was crossed.
And everything would burn.