Time, in the Architect's laboratory, was not a linear progression. It was a spiral, tightening around the mind until past, present, and future bled into one continuous, silent scream. For Maya, the silence had become a physical presence—a weight on her sternum, a hum in her teeth.
It started subtly. A metallic taste at the back of her throat that she initially attributed to fear, to the sterile, recycled air. Then came the headaches—deep, orbital pressures that made the white walls pulse like a migraine aura. She'd find herself staring at her own hands, mesmerized by the tracery of veins beneath her skin, wondering if the blue was slowly deepening to black.
Derek noticed first. He was the only one who still tried to maintain a semblance of connection, his voice a hoarse whisper in the unnatural quiet.
"Maya?You're… shaking."
She wasn't.Not on the outside. But inside, she felt a constant, low-frequency vibration, as if her very marrow was being stirred.
"It's nothing," she lied, her voice raspy. "Just the lights."
But it was everything. The sterile environment, once a source of dread, was now becoming a canvas for a terrifying internal metamorphosis. Her dreams, when she could snatch moments of fitful sleep, were no longer her own. She dreamt of dark, warm places, of a pulsing, symbiotic rhythm, of a voice that was not a voice whispering promises of a perfected, painless existence.
One day, she looked at her reflection in the polished surface of a wall panel and her pupils were wrong. They weren't just dilated in the low light; they were… consuming the iris. The familiar brown of her eyes was being swallowed by an expanding, liquid blackness, as if ink were spilling behind her corneas.
She didn't tell the others. What was there to say? That the prison was no longer just around her, but inside her?
The pressure built. The metallic taste became a constant, coppery film on her tongue. The vibrations intensified into a pervasive, inner tremor. She began to feel full, overfull, as if her organs were being gently, insistently rearranged to make room for something else.
Then came the day the chrysalis cracked.
It began with a seizure of pain, so sudden and profound it stole the air from her lungs. She was standing one moment, trying to follow Jordan's pacing, and the next, she was on her knees, a silent, open-mouthed gasp her only expression.
"Maya!" Derek's voice was distant, muffled by the roaring in her own ears.
The pressure in her head crested, and the first trickle of warmth escaped her nostril. She touched it, her fingers coming away stained not with red, but with a thick, viscous black. It was oil-slick and alien, smelling of ozone and spoiled meat.
A strangled sound escaped Leo. Jordan froze mid-pace, his eyes wide with a horror that mirrored the one clawing its way up Derek's throat.
It was not a trickle for long.
With a guttural, choking sound, the black blood began to pour. It streamed from her nose in twin rivers, welled from her ears, and seeped from the corners of her now fully blackened eyes, painting dark, grotesque tear-tracks down her ashen cheeks. She was drowning on dry land, her body expelling a tide of corruption from every orifice.
Derek rushed to her, his own fear forgotten in the face of her agony. "Maya! Hold on, just—!"
He reached for her, but as his hands were about to make contact, an invisible force seized him. It wasn't a physical barrier, but a paralysis of pure will, a command injected directly into his motor cortex. He froze in a half-crouch, his muscles locked, his outstretched hand trembling inches from her shoulder. A silent scream built in his chest, trapped there. He could only watch, a statue of horror.
Maya's body convulsed, her back arching at an impossible angle. A final, wrenching gag tore through her, and she vomited.
It was not stomach contents. It was a deluge of that same black blood, a torrent of it, splashing across the pristine white floor. And within that torrent, something else emerged.
It was large, the size of a small infant, but utterly grotesque in its form. It was pale and glistening, veined with pulsing black filaments. Its body was a tangle of rudimentary limbs and soft, boneless tissue. But the face… the face was what stopped the hearts of everyone watching.
Set into the front of the pulsating mass was a crude, unmistakably human face. The features were blurred, as if sculpted from wet clay by an unskilled hand, but it possessed two dark, sunken pits for eyes, a vestigial nose, and a slack, open mouth. It was a parody of life, a homunculus born of nightmare.
It lay twitching in the pool of black blood, its tiny mouth working soundlessly.
Maya collapsed forward, her body finally empty, the flow of black blood slowing to a seep. She was ghost-pale, her breathing shallow, but she was alive. The thing she had birthed, however, pulsed with a weak, malevolent life of its own.
---
In the Observation Chamber, Eva watched.
The bank of monitors showed the scene in cold, high-definition clarity. She had been their silent sentinel, her guilt a cold stone in her gut as she logged their vitals, their psychological degradation, for the Architects. She believed she was mitigating their suffering, steering the experiments towards less painful paths. She thought she knew the scope of their cruelty.
She was wrong.
When the black blood began to flow, her breath hitched. When the parasite was vomited forth with its horrifying human face, her hand flew to her mouth. But it was the sight of Derek, frozen in place, forced to witness the entire abomination, that shattered her.
This was not just an experiment. This was a desecration. This was what they had planned for her. This was the "Symbiote Assimilation Protocol" she had read about in the classified logs. They weren't just combining DNA; they were using the human body as a living incubator for… for that.
A cold, certain knowledge filled her: I helped put them here. My compliance made this possible.
The weight of her complicity was a physical force, crushing the air from her lungs. The walls of the observation room, her sanctuary, her prison, suddenly felt like they were closing in. The sterile, recycled air tasted like ash and death. The ghost of a similar entity seemed to stir in her own belly, a phantom pregnancy of pure terror.
The urge to escape was instantaneous and overwhelming. Not to flee the laboratory, but to escape the horrifying reflection of her own potential fate, to escape the image of Maya's broken form and Derek's paralyzed grief. To escape the guilt.
Her eyes darted to the emergency sterilization port in the wall—a small, shielded alcove containing a vial of fast-acting neurotoxin, meant for containment breaches. It was a clean, clinical, and final exit.
Her hand moved towards it, her movements jerky, as if she were a marionette whose strings were being cut. The voice of the Architect, smooth and patronizing, echoed in her memory: "Subject E-01, your emotional resilience is your greatest asset."
It was a lie. Her resilience had only made her a more effective tool for this horror.
Her fingers brushed the cold, transparent shield. One push, a hiss of gas, and the guilt, the fear, the memory of Maya's violated body, it would all stop. It was the most logical solution. The only way to break the cycle they had forced her to perpetuate.
She was a breath away from shattering the glass when her eyes flicked back to the monitor. Derek was still frozen, but his eyes, wide with terror, were fixed on Maya's unconscious form. There was no accusation in them, only a desperate, unwavering love.
And in that moment, Eva saw not a subject, not an experiment, but a person refusing to be broken. Even in paralysis, he was fighting.
Her hand fell to her side.
Suicide was an escape. It was also the ultimate form of compliance. It would erase a failed, guilt-ridden tool and please the Architects with one neat, final data point on despair.
A new, colder emotion began to burn through the shock and self-pity. It was not hope—hope was too fragile a thing for this place. It was rage. A pure, undiluted, and surgical hatred for the Architects.
She would not give them the satisfaction of her death. Not yet.
Turning from the toxin, she placed her trembling hands back on the console. Her eyes, now dry and hard, scanned the laboratory schematics. The paralysis field on Derek was a localized energy grid. The creature on the floor was a biological entity, requiring specific environmental conditions.
They had used her. Now, she would use their own system against them.
The chrysalis had cracked for Maya, revealing the monster they had placed inside her. And in Eva, it had cracked too, revealing not a victim, but something else entirely. An architect of ruin, born from their own design.