The sirens didn't fade so much as blur into a single metallic thread, then snap.
When sound comes back, it's wrong. Not city. Not street. Air conditioner hum and the faint, antiseptic hiss of recycled oxygen. I open my eyes to a ceiling that could belong to a dentist with a defense contract: matte white panels, recessed lights, a camera in a smoked dome. My wrists are banded in flexible cuffs that look like rubber and feel like intention—warm, firm, obedient to a signal I can't hear. A transparent wall divides the room like a museum case. I'm inside.
My palms sting. I turn them slowly. New skin shines pale where blisters were. The bruises that should have flowered up my forearms are sketches instead—faint lines, like my body is redrawing itself from memory and got bored halfway.
Memory.
A smell that was chlorine and apple is gone. I touch the hollow behind my sternum, as if there's a pocket there where things fall through. Empty.
"Patient is conscious," a voice says. It's female, close, clinical with a rasp like she chews ice. "Visually oriented, responsive. Put the glass to opaque."
The wall fogs half a tone—still transparent, but the reflections sharpen until I can almost see a ghost of myself. A boy who should be shaking and isn't. A boy holding nothing. The pin—
Where is it?
"Don't twitch," the same voice warns, sharper now, a teacher noticing a cheat. "We've already collected the object you extracted from the entity. It's in quarantine."
My hands go still. The urge to lunge is there, a habit that arrived with adrenaline and refused to leave. I remember the weight of the pin in my fist and the way the world arranged itself around it, like furniture sliding to the walls to make space. I remember the hunger. I remember—
No. I remember that I forgot.
A second camera blinks awake. The wall clears another degree. I see them now: four people in a room that mirrors mine on the other side of the glass, only their walls aren't glass. A long table. Two uniformed responders from the street—same badge, a stylized eye with a lightning bolt through the pupil. One drone hovers near the ceiling, its thrusters whispering. And a woman in a charcoal suit with a white lanyard and a bob haircut that looks like it could cut through wire.
She leans into a mic. "I'm Lieutenant Mara Ito. City Defense, Special Hostile Anomalies Unit." No smile. "You're in a holding suite below District Seven Response. Nothing you say is an admission of guilt. You are not under arrest. You are also not free to leave."
"Sounds like arrest with extra steps," I say. My voice surprises me. The fear I should be hoarding is all edges; it cuts clean, leaving only clarity. "You saw what happened on the street."
"We saw a civilian engage a Class-B intrusion unit with no equipment and survive," she says. "We saw that same civilian retrieve a component that is, by all metrics, fused with his biology. We saw a second breach forming and collapse with no intervention we could measure." Her eyes are steady, neither hostile nor friendly—like she's evaluating balance sheets where numbers are lives. "We also saw the entity appear to… defer to you."
The drone tilts, amused.
"I didn't ask it to bow," I say.
"You didn't have to. Sometimes gravity doesn't ask." She taps a finger against her lanyard. "Name."
"Ryo." My mouth moves with confidence that isn't earned. The rest of it—surname, address, school—arrives with a split-second hesitation that she notices. "Ryo S—" A hard skip. Static behind my tongue. "Ryo."
Her eyes flicker. "We can help you fill in blanks, Ryo," she says, and the way she lingers on help tells me that's bait. "But first, I need to know what you took and how you took it."
"I reached into a hole and pulled." I hold up my hands like they can testify. The skin at the base of my fingers is pink as if I've been playing with a soldering iron. "I didn't know I could until I could."
"And now?"
"Now I know it hurts," I say. "And it took something."
Her jaw moves a fraction. The word took does something to the room. One of the uniformed responders, a big man with a tan line where his wedding ring should be, shifts his weight like he's standing on an extra floorboard that might squeal. The other, younger, lets his eyes slide to the drone, then away, like there are rules about looking at certain kinds of listening. The woman in the suit—Mara—regards me like I'm the lab rat that picked the lock.
"What did it take?" she asks.
"A memory." The word falls like a coin into water and doesn't hit bottom. "Someone laughing. In a kitchen. I can't—" I press the heel of my hand to my eye until light flares. "It's gone. When I grabbed the—" I don't say pin. It isn't a pin if it didn't come from a hinge. "When I grabbed the bone-thing, something in me decided there was a price."
Mara looks, for the first time, humanly tired. "That aligns with results from other survivals," she says, mostly to herself, the way you say out loud what you don't want to live alone in your head. "Costs. Exchanges. Adaptations."
"Other survivals?" The question is sharp enough to shave.
She nods once. "There are civilians who've reached into breaches or entities and come back with… changes. The sample size is small." Her eye ticks toward the drone, and I catch the bureaucratic nausea in her mouth, that sour look people get when they have to talk around a secret. "Most don't articulate a cost. You are the first to say it's memory."
I sit with that. A room somewhere thumbs through folders labeled with other names. I try another memory on purpose. First day of school. A red coat. My father's— Did I have a father? The question should be insulting to reality. It isn't. My heart stutters like it tripped. The ceiling leans.
Mara's voice is suddenly closer, gentle without being soft. "Breathe, Ryo."
I breathe. The world retreats to where it belongs.
"Can I see it?" I ask. "The… object." Maybe touching it will give the memory back, like buying something you already paid for and finding the receipt.
"No," says a fifth voice, new, nasal, eager to be important. A man slides into view from a side door I didn't see, holding a tablet like a priest holds a relic. He wears a lab coat over a t-shirt that says SAVE THE DATA. His hair is the texture of electrical fire. "Absolutely not. It's in a sealed chamber. We're reading emissions across spectra our sensors don't have names for. You don't get to smudge it with your little—" He flutters his hands. "—greasy human prints."
Mara doesn't look at him. "Doctor Kwan is our consultant from the Institute," she says. The way she says consultant carries a hidden syllable: necessary. "He's very attached to his toys."
"It's not a toy," Kwan says, affronted. "It's a key. Possibly literally. The lattice structure is a miracle of—"
"Doctor." Mara's voice is one degree colder. He stops.
I let them argue air for a breath and focus on the cuff. It's simple: a band with no seam, charged from a base I can't see. I flex my wrist. The inside surface warms in response—not feedback so much as a reminder. You belong to someone else's idea right now.
"Why am I here?" I ask. "You said I'm not under arrest. Am I a patient or a weapon?"
"Depends who wins the meeting that started five minutes ago," Mara says. For a heartbeat her mouth twists, an almost-smile aimed at no one in particular. "We have policies. They were written last week and will be rewritten tomorrow. My piece of those policies includes keeping you alive."
Kwan makes a noise like a small dog choking on a philosophy. "Preferably with both hemispheres intact," he says, then leans closer to his mic. "Ryo. When you held the component, did you experience any new… capabilities? Motor-sensory integration? Predictive mapping?"
"Numbers," I say, before I can decide to lie. "Distances. Angles. Paths. Like lines between things that wanted to be connected. Shortcuts."
Kwan vibrates. "Ha! Vector intuition. Do you know what we could—"
"Kwan," Mara says. Two syllables. This time he shuts up properly, but not before I see the hunger on his tongue. It looks like mine, only his doesn't apologize.
The drone murmurs, adjusting. The room seems to grow a little heavier, like the building has exhaled and remembered it is underground. I follow the feeling down through the floor with my mind and hit a guess: two levels below, machines that need vibration isolation. A lab, yes. A vault, maybe. A place you put things you don't want confused with people.
"Can I ask a question?" I say.
Mara nods.
"The thing I killed." The word killed tastes wrong; I push through it. "What was it?"
"A scout," Mara says. "We think." The way she locates we and think tells me a room bought a theory and is paying it off in installments. "We've identified classes. A—seeds. B—scouts. C—harrowers. D—structures. The letters aren't meaningful, just a way to be wrong with order." Her gaze cuts to the ceiling as if she can see through. "What came through after—what almost came through—looked like a C."
"Harrower," Kwan says, reverent and delighted and a little afraid.
"Harrows what?" I ask.
"People," Mara says. No metaphor. "It makes the ground they stand on not theirs."
Silence finds a chair between us.
"Okay," I say, because defaulting to okay is a way to keep parameters small enough to move in. "What happens to me now?"
"We talk," Mara says. "You tell me what you felt, what you feel, what you can do now that you couldn't. In exchange, I keep doctors from treating you like a sample and politicians from treating you like a headline."
"And then?"
"Then I take you upstairs, show you the hole they cut in the street to make the neighborhood feel safer, and ask you not to run."
I look at the cuff again. "What if I do?"
"Then I'll chase you." She says it like she's already mapped the angles, too. "Please don't make me."
I meet her eyes. She's not bluffing. She's also not lying about keeping me alive. The part of me that plays with vectors counts guards, distances, angles, the drop from the bed to the floor, the thickness of the glass. It says possible the way gamblers say luck. Another part, new and unreliable, whispers about costs. It asks how much a corridor buys me versus a question answered honestly.
"Fine," I say. "Ask."
Kwan grabs the opening with both hands. "Describe the internal sensation when the vector intuition activated."
I do. Short sentences. No drama. When I get to the part about the memory, I stop using sentences and let silence describe the shape. Kwan tries to fill it; Mara lets it have a perimeter. The big responder—his name tag says K. Sato—takes a breath through his mouth like he's remembered something he'd rather forget. The younger one, Rey, writes nothing down but doesn't stop moving his thumb in a square on his thigh, tracing the outline of a phone he isn't allowed to hold.
We're still there when the lights shiver.
It's small. Not flicker—shiver. A high-frequency tremor that runs under the skin of the room and over the back of my teeth. The drone's rotors hiccup. The mic cracks. Kwan looks up sharply, the way dogs look at earthquakes two beats before the news.
Mara's hand goes flat against the table. "Report," she says to the room, not to us.
A voice from the ceiling—genderless, institutional—says, "Sublevel three containment reports transient field deviation. All systems nominal. No breach."
The building breathes out. Kwan breathes in. "Transient field deviation," he repeats, savoring each syllable like a new candy. His eyes cut to me. "That's the chamber."
"Doctor," Mara warns, but her eyes are on me, too.
I don't need their looks to know what the shiver means. I feel it across my palms. The new skin itches. The hollow behind my sternum yawns and then closes, like a mouth testing teeth. The thing the pin woke up inside me is awake enough to turn in its sleep.
"Can you bring it here?" I ask, and then hear my own stupidity and try again. "No. Don't. Bring me to it."
Kwan opens his mouth to say yes. Mara is faster. "Absolutely not," she says, overlapping him. "We are not putting you within reach of an unknown exotic sample that likes you."
"Does it?" I ask.
"You tell me," she says.
I almost tell her no—almost. But the truth is a gravity I can't pretend not to feel. "It felt like recognition," I say. "Like it knew where my hand would be before I did."
Kwan stares at my fingers like they're a puzzle box he can solve if he watches long enough. "It's resonant," he breathes. "He's a resonant."
"Stop naming the boy like he's a species you get credit for discovering." Mara stands. The glass brightens a fraction, responding to a command I don't hear. "Ryo, we're done for now. I'm going to get you water and a protein pack. You're going to not do anything interesting until I get back. Sato, Rey—you're eyes. Doctor, you do not leave your sandbox."
"Lieutenant—" Kwan begins.
"Say 'transient field deviation' one more time and I'll transient your field," she says without looking at him, and leaves through the side door with the efficiency of a guillotine.
The room exhales half its tension. Sato plants his feet like roots. Rey glances at me, then the door, then me. He's the kind of person who will bring a stray cat home and lie about it until the cat is sleeping on the chief's desk.
The cuff warms, a warning or a comfort; I can't tell which. I sit back against the bed. The foam sighs. The ceiling goes back to pretending to be a ceiling.
"Hey," Rey says finally, voice barely above a whisper. He leans into his mic like he's trying not to let it work. "You saved people."
I shrug. The motion feels too theatrical, so I stop halfway. Saved is a big word for making something not be alive while something larger looked on.
Sato doesn't move. "Keep your hands where we can see them," he says, but his tone has thawed a degree.
I lay my palms flat on my knees. They tingle.
The lights shiver again.
This time the drone drops six inches before correcting. Kwan flinches like someone shouted his childhood nickname. The ceiling voice tries to be calm and lands in terrified. "Sublevel three reports field deviation—sustained. Containment integrity at ninety-four percent. Ninety-one. Eighty-seven. Initiating lockdown."
Sato's rifle comes up with professional inevitability. Rey's chair skids. Kwan laughs—a bright bubble of awe and horror. "Oh," he says. "Oh, it's waking up."
Mara's voice cuts in on a layer the building respects. "All personnel: seal. Sato, Rey—secure the subject and ready for evac up one level. Doctor Kwan—"
"Already en route," he says, a guilty child sprinting toward the cookie jar.
"Kwan," Mara says, no more syllables, a whole threat.
He hesitates, torn between holy curiosity and career. Curiosity wins, but he makes it look like duty. "If the component is resonant with the subject, putting distance between them under stress might increase—"
The floor lurches.
Not a quake. A push. Like something pressed a thumb into the building from below, testing for tender spots. A siren drops from a ceiling panel like a red seed and begins to strobe.
The cuff on my wrists cools, then warms, then cools again—software arguing with itself. I stand without thinking. Sato's rifle tracks me. Rey starts to say sit and swallows the word.
"I can help," I say. It isn't bravado. It's geometry. The lines in my head are back, thinner, but there. They point down, and they describe the quickest path through a system designed to keep me where I am. They point also to my hands. The hunger uncoils.
Sato shakes his head, just enough to be a no if you want it to be. His eyes don't leave mine. "Lieutenant will have our skin if—"
The wall turns to mirror, then clears, then turns to mirror again. The system is stuttering. Behind it, through the adjacent room, I see the corridor lights blossoming red one by one like a throat closing.
"Containment at seventy-two percent," the ceiling says. "Sixty-five. Fifty-nine. Hostile field interacting with—"
The building takes a breath and forgets how to breathe.
The Transparent wall doesn't shatter. It bends. The top edge bows inward half a centimeter with a groan that moves in my teeth. Something in the air changes temperature so fast my skin can't keep up.
"Back!" Sato barks. He isn't talking to me.
Through the fogging glass, shapes move in the hall—gray suits, black armor, a stretcher that will not be used for comfort. The strobe catches on a smear across the far wall and decides to call it wet. I don't.
"Lieutenant Ito to all units," the intercom says, taut enough to pluck. "Harrower-class intrusion in sublevel three. This is not a drill. Evacuate civilians. Engage only with paired teams. Ryo—" The voice shifts, not the speaker. She's talking to me on a line that feels personal. "Do not touch the glass."
The hunger laughs in my mouth without sound. The lines in my head draw a map of touching the glass that ends with relief and another map that ends with regret. They are the same map.
"You said you'd keep me alive," I say to the ceiling.
"I intend to," Mara replies. "Don't make that statistically impossible."
Kwan's face appears at the edge of the glass like a reflection moving where it shouldn't. He shouldn't be here; he is. Sweat shines along his hairline. He looks younger when he's scared. "It's reaching for him," he says, voice shaking with the happiness of being right. "The field is… it's syncing."
Sato's rifle lowers a centimeter; his hands don't know what to aim at. Rey's mouth opens. No sound comes out. I look down at my palms. The pink skin glows faintly. Not light. Anticipation.
Something touches the building with the care of a hand on a sleeping child's back.
The cuff on my wrist unlatches with a soft, apologetic sigh.
No one touched it. No one said the word. The band just decides I'm more dangerous tied than loose.
Sato swears, the kind of word you save for last. "Don't move," he says, which is sweet, like asking the tide to take a day off.
"Containment at thirty-eight percent," the ceiling announces. "Thirty-one. Structural stress in—"
A sound tears up through concrete and rebar—a ripping that has nothing to do with matter and everything to do with rules. The lights fail and return like a blink that lasted a lifetime in a different room.
When the emergency shutters fail to drop, everyone understands something at once and differently.
"I can stop it," I say, and realize the 'it' is vague on purpose.
Mara's voice comes soft and fierce over the personal line. "Ryo. Listen to me. Whatever it is doing to the field, it's doing it through you. If you move toward it, you may make it easier. If you move away—" She doesn't finish. There's no good end to that sentence. "Stay put. I am thirty seconds away."
Thirty seconds is a century and a grave. The map in my head draws thirty-second shapes: a door failing, a hallway bending, a doctor dying for data, a building coughing up people like phlegm.
The hunger doesn't argue this time.
It asks me a question.
What are you willing to forget?
I don't answer. I step forward.
Sato raises the rifle, then lets it drop. In his eyes, in that half-breath where you're allowed to be a person before the uniform remembers you, I see a son who will ask him tonight about monsters and a father who will lie the right amount. "Don't die," he says. It sounds like a compromise with gods.
Rey hits the door release. It shouldn't open without a code. It opens. He looks startled to have been obeyed by physics. "Go," he whispers.
The glass door retracts into the wall with the grace of a magician revealing his other hand. Cold air crawls across the floor. My bare feet stick for a fraction of a second to the sterile tile, then flex free. The corridor smells like ozone and the inside of a new battery torn with teeth.
Down the hall, a blast door is trying to remember what closed means. Red lights braid the space like veins. People move like words shouted by a bad connection—stuttering, repeating, dropping. Somewhere someone is praying to a god with a department name.
I pick up the pace. The lines arrange themselves like allies, showing me where the floor wants me to step, where the wall would prefer to be touched, where the next breath will be easiest to take. The world is cooperating because it's cheaper than fighting.
Kwan scrambles alongside me, half-running, half-skip-rushing like his knees don't trust the floor. "This is science!" he says, giddy and out of breath. "Do you understand? This is—"
"Stop talking," I say.
We turn a corner. The air goes thin, like altitude flirting with a migraine. Ahead, the corridor widens into a viewing gallery. Beyond its rail, through a thick pane that looks like glass and is not glass, sits a chamber like a cathedral laid down and hollowed out. At its center, on a pedestal of engineered humility, lies the thing I pulled from a monster: bone-crystal, still red as if remembering heat, latticed like someone braided light and forgot to stop.
It hums.
Not into the room—into me. Like my skull is a bowl and someone is running a wet finger around the rim.
My palms burn with a heat that isn't heat. My chest opens with a relief that embarrasses me.
"Don't," Mara's voice says in my ear, closer now, fighting for breath and authority. "Ryo. Do not touch it."
The chamber buckles.
I don't see it move. I feel the math change. The pin lifts from the pedestal a centimeter, two, three, as if gravity is making exceptions to prove a point. The red inside it brightens from ember to edge. The hum climbs from frequency to intent.
Behind me, boots hammer. Sato and Rey arrive with the terrible timing of good men. Mara appears out of the red light like anger with a job. She takes one look at my hands, my face, the hovering piece of impossible in the room below, and makes the decision you don't make in committee.
"Open the hatch," she says.
Kwan gasps, a child on a rollercoaster as the restraint clicks open. "Yes!"
Sato recoils. "Lieutenant—"
"If it's going to him," Mara says, eyes fixed on me, "we guide the path so the building survives it."
Her gaze locks with mine. "Ryo. You pick it up and you put it down where I tell you. We breathe on my count. We do not improvise."
The hatch seals hiss. The locks cycle.
The chamber door begins to open like a mouth.
The pin rises to meet me.
I feel the memory loosen in my chest—something with a smell like apples, something that was a laugh, lifting like a kite slipping its string.
"Ryo," Mara says, voice low, steady, human. "Look at me."
I tear my eyes from the red.
She holds my gaze like a grip. "Whatever it takes, keep one thing you can't afford to lose."
"What?" I ask, and my voice comes out the way you ask a question when the answer might be the last thing you are.
She doesn't blink. "Your name."
The door opens.
I step through.