The echo of the elevator's ascent faded into silence.
Dr. Ekra Chang stood alone in the corridor outside the sealed door. Her breath felt wrong inside her chest. It was too tight, too shallow, like the walls themselves were pressing in, remembering everything she hadn't said.
The surveillance orb above the archway flickered once, then settled back into dormancy.
It had seen nothing. Or thats what she wanted to believe.
She turned on her heel, walking back the way she had come, not toward the exit, but deeper, away from the official access route.
Ekra walked quickly, her heels barely whispering on the obsidian-tile floor. Each step was measured. The walls here didn't echo, but they listened.
She passed the remnants of what had once been called the Chamber of Nine, now abandoned. This was the chamber that Lamia found a shoe in. The pods inside had been altered. Most of the things here was cleaned before Lamia and Goldberg had arrived. Sanitized, sterilized. Scrubbed of guilt.
But the walls still remembered.
She didn't stop.
Not until she reached the false wall, two chambers beyond where Gary had asked about the camouflaged door. Here, a sliver of dark stone met with magelocked steel. No guards. No runes. Just a smooth panel, invisible to those not born into the clearance. But Gary had seen it or maybe sensed it.
She pressed her palm flat against the wall.
Her fingers shook.
"Chang-37E," she whispered. "Override protocol, Omega Grave."
Nothing moved for a beat.
Then the stone itself sighed, the center seam hissing open along invisible fault lines. A low, hungry groan followed. It was not mechanical but seemed alive. Like something had been waiting behind it.
Ekra stepped through.
The corridor on the other side was colder.
Not sterile but cold. Like ice lived in the walls. The lights here were different: a dim teal glow pulsed in intervals, casting shadows that seemed too slow to follow motion. Pipes ran along the ceiling, stitched together with black aether cables and strange bone-etched runes, old, necrotic tech, long since outlawed in open Dominion circuits.
She passed through the first checkpoint, a circular chamber lined with softly humming resonance mirrors. These weren't for security. Again, they were for containment.
She reached the last vault and keyed in the sequence. The wall slid open with a sighing hiss.
The room inside was a cradle of horror.
The lower wing mirrored the chamber, the chamber of nine where more pods were placed and replaced before Lamia and Gary arrived. There were the same alloy walls and the same arcane fiber running along the corners like veins. But this place wasn't in ruins. It thrummed with active resonance.
On her left, a line of sealed rooms, each with wide reinforced observation glass and sigil-cast lighting. She passed them without slowing.
One chamber held an infant suspended in a nutrient chamber, wrapped in coils of aether tubing.
Another displayed a toddler curled inside a sigil-drawn ring, unblinking. Its breath fogged the glass.
In a third room, two researchers stood beside a data column while an emaciated child was being examined, its skin lined with residual runes as if they'd grown there like cracks in marble.
The researchers didn't look up. For them, this was routine.
At the far end of the wing, beyond two biometric doors and a second retinal scan, lay the secondary vault.
There were nine chambers in that place, lined against the circular wall four at one side while six at the other. the space in the center contained four terminals for the researchers.
Three of the chambers held the surviving children from the first cycle, the ones left behind during the breach. The children Lamia and Gary never knew existed. From the chamber of nine, four were taken, two killed and three were left behind who were later moved to the next compartment.
The other six had pods which were filled with infants, tiny, floating shapes submerged in suspension gel, their small bodies threaded with IV tubing and faintly glowing sigils that pulsed across their skin like premature spells.
She stopped first at the old ones.
The survivors.
Subject V-08: a boy with white eyes and fractured aura lines, the type that made machines blink too quickly around him.
Subject V-09: a girl with hollow skin and a heartbeat that altered the rhythm of spell glyphs drawn within ten meters.
Subject V-10: a child who had never spoken, never moved, but whose eyes followed you no matter how carefully you avoided them.
None of them had names. Only numbers. Sigils. Ranks. Ekra stared through the reinforced glass.
"You don't know how lucky you are," she whispered. "You were forgotten just long enough."
She didn't linger. She walked towards the other chambers. Pods were at the center of all six of them, far more sophisticated, silver suspension cradles fitted with neuro-engraving stems, pre-birth incantation codices, and aether-fed feeding systems.
The infants inside were smaller. Some born weeks too early. Some not born at all, yet already changed.
Arcane life before breath.
They were still. Silent.
But their pods hummed.
And the Dominion believed that was enough.
The data pad on the nearby wall buzzed. Elira scanned the logs.
[AETHER PROJECT – EXPANSION LOG] Phase 5: In Utero Arcane Alteration. Subjects: 6 viable. 2 exhibiting premature arcane flares. 1 breach expected.
She reached up and muted the display.
Elira moved to the terminal in the corner, not the main console, but her private one. She keyed in the encrypted path and opened her mirrored backup logs.
The screen flickered. It displayed the data that no one else would see.
[BREACH REPORT // RESTRICTED ACCESS]
SUBJECTS TAKEN: V-01 (Selene), V-03 (Wren), V-06 (Cael), V-04 (Thira)
STATUS: Escaped / KIA / REDACTED
SUBJECTS REMAINING: V-08 (Kami) / V-09 (Rizm) / V-10 (Carlos)
SUBJECTS TERMINATED: V-02 / V-05
PROJECT: LUCENT HERITAGE
STATUS: DIVIDEDINSTRUCTION: MONITOR REMAINING INFANT COHORT – PHASE 5
INITIATEDEXPANSION CONTINGENCY TRIGGERED // OBSERVATION PRIORITY: WREN (IF RECOVERED)
She tapped the line under Thira's file.
It blinked: "Unconfirmed."
That was a lie.
Thira had helped them.
She hadd shot the wards. Killed the handlers. Helped Darius escape. She'd turned against the Dominion the way Ekra had never found the courage to do.
But someone had redacted her file, marked her as a lost subject, not a traitor.
A courtesy? Or a future tool?
Ekra didn't know.
But she left a note in her hidden folder: Thira was not taken.
She chose. She saved the shard. Then turned to leave. As she passed the older pods again, one of the surviving children opened their eyes.
Ekra froze.
She didn't know which one.
All three looked the same behind the containment glass. Pale skin. Faint silver etchings under their eyelids. Perfectly still, except for that blink, slow, deliberate.
Watching her.
Not judging.
Just… waiting.
As if they knew.
As if they all did.