The first thing Kael felt wasn't pain. It was the horizontal cold of a metal surface and the biting restriction of leather straps across his chest and wrists.
He tried to gasp, but his throat felt like it had been lined with broken glass. A dim, flickering overhead light—recycled biolume from a cracked sensor-casing—blinded him for a moment. The air here was different from the alley; it didn't smell of rot and wet earth, but of sharp, astringent chemicals and the metallic tang of dried blood.
"Don't struggle," a voice said. It was the same woman from the alley, but now it lacked the muffled softness of the outdoor humidity. It was crisp, clinical, and entirely unconcerned with his comfort. "The straps are reinforced Ironbark fibers. You'll only tear your own skin."
Kael's vision cleared. He was in a small, cramped room crowded with shelves of bubbling jars, rusted surgical tools, and humming gene-sequencers that looked like they had been salvaged from a scrap-heap.
The woman—Elara—stood over him. She was younger than Kael had expected, perhaps in her late twenties, with hair tied back in a severe bun and eyes that darted across his body with the intensity of a scavenger counting loot. She wasn't looking at his face; she was staring at the glowing emerald veins pulsing beneath the skin of his chest.
[STATUS REPORT: HOST CONSCIOUSNESS REGAINED]
[Graft Fever: Receding.]
[Bio-Load Stability: 61%.]
[Warning: External interference detected. Nerve blocks active.]
"You... what did you do?" Kael croaked, the words barely audible.
"I patched you," Elara said, picking up a small, glowing vial of blue fluid and injecting it into a tube connected to his arm. "Your 'Acid Spit' graft was leaking into your lymphatic system. If I hadn't neutralized the pH, you'd be a puddle of yellow sludge by now."
She leaned closer, her face inches from his. "But that's not the interesting part. Do you have any idea how rare you are, 'Blank'?"
Kael flinched at the term. "I'm Inert. The doctors said..."
"The doctors at the Node are idiots who follow manuals written for sheep," she interrupted, a flash of genuine anger crossing her face. "Inert DNA isn't a defect. It's a vacuum. Most people have DNA that's already 'written' by their parents' mutations or their environment. When they graft, the new code has to fight the old code for dominance. That's why they turn Feral or reject the seeds."
She traced a finger along one of the emerald veins. Kael felt a jolt of cold static.
"But you? You have nothing to fight back. You're a blank canvas. An Origin Seed shouldn't be able to survive in a scavenger, yet here it is, flourishing because there's no resistance. You're a genetic ghost, Kael."
"How do you know my name?"
"Your scav-tag," she said, nodding toward a pile of his discarded gear in the corner. "Miller's squad. Or what's left of it."
She turned away, reaching for a tray of instruments. The "System" in Kael's head began to thrum, a low-frequency warning that made his teeth ache.
[URGENT: HOST BIOMASS THREAT DETECTED]
[Scanning external entity...]
[Entity: 'Elara'. Threat Level: High (Knowledge-based).]
"You shouldn't be alive," Elara whispered, more to herself than him. She picked up a scalpel—not a rusted scrap-blade, but a sleek, humming piece of medical tech that shimmered with a pale, surgical light. "Your body is holding together grafts that should have shattered your nervous system hours ago."
She stepped back to the table, the scalpel poised over the center of the glowing graft in his chest.
"I spent five years in the Guild labs trying to synthesize what you have naturally," she said, her voice dropping all pretense of kindness. "I'm not letting this opportunity walk away because I was too 'gentle' with the specimen."
Kael pulled at the straps, but the Ironbark fibers held fast. He looked at the blade, then at Elara's eyes. There was no hatred there, which was worse. There was only curiosity.
"Let's see why you're still alive," she said, and lowered the blade.