He stripped the bandage from his arm, found a functioning injector, and began calibrating the serum container.
The faint glow of the AURORA compound shimmered—a swirl of blue and gold nanites suspended in liquid crystal.
Duswanth fell to one knee, gasping. The edges of his vision blurred.
But beneath the agony came clarity—memories unspooling backward:
Kaviya's anxious smile; Arul's false death; Varsha's warning eyes.
A distant echo of boots on metal snapped him back.
He froze. More footsteps. Voices.
"They're here," he breathed.
He ducked behind a broken column, forcing shallow breaths.
Through the fractured glass door, he saw them—Kaviya, face drawn but determined, flanked by Arul, very much alive, and Varsha, bow ready.
Behind them, armed figures in scavenged armor spread out—the Iron Fangs, the raiders who ruled one of the parts of the southern ruins.
Duswanth's pulse hammered. So Arul had lived—and worse, had joined them.
Kaviya's voice carried through the echoing chamber.
"Duswanth! Please come out. We just want to talk."
Her tone trembled. It wasn't fear; it was guilt.
He stepped from the shadows slowly, every muscle screaming in protest.
The faint luminescence from the serum pulsed beneath his skin like veins of lightning.
"You found your monster," he said. "What now? Chain me, carve me, sell me?"
Arul's smirk was sharp as glass. "You're still dramatic. We just want what you stole. Aurora belongs to the people now."
Duswanth laughed with a dry, broken sound. "People? Or vultures? You joined another base for scraps of tech."
Varsha lowered her bow, eyes glinting. "Stop pretending you're innocent. You worked here before the world fell. You hid that from us."
"I was fired," he snapped. "Fired because I asked what would happen if Aurora went wrong."
"Yet here you are," Arul said, raising his rifle. "Trying to inject it into yourself."
Kaviya stepped forward, voice cracking. "Duswanth, tell me the truth—are you using Aurora?"
He looked at her for a long, silent second. "And if I am?"
Her lips trembled. "Then… you're no different from the ones who started all this."
The words hit harder than bullets.
He turned away, facing the old pod. "You don't understand. Aurora wasn't built to save. It was built to choose—who deserves to live in the new world."
Varsha's breath caught. "And you think it chose you?"
He smiled faintly. "Maybe it already did."
Arul gestured to his men. "Enough philosophy. Take him and search every inch of this place. We need to find that aurora equipment."
As they closed in, Duswanth's mind raced. The faint hiss of the earlier smoke still lingered at the edges of his memory—sweet, chemical, poisonous.
Kaviya's escape had been no rescue; it had been a trap. She had carried that poison and the guilt that came with it.
Now, surrounded, Duswanth straightened slowly. "Wait," he said. "You all want Aurora? Then listen."
He gestured toward the sealed sublevel doors.
"What you're looking for lies below. But it only opens when every registered life-signal in this room is present. That's the failsafe."
Arul hesitated, greed and suspicion warring behind his eyes. "You're bluffing."
"Try me," Duswanth said quietly.
Varsha exchanged glances with the raiders. "If he's lying, we kill him anyway."
They spread out, forming a rough circle around him. Kaviya stood next, her weapon lowered as if lowering it could undo the moment.
The smoke still clung to her hair.
In her face, Duswanth could read everything he had once loved: apology, fear, the outline of a woman who had trusted him.
For a sliver of time, that was worse than the pain of the wound.
"I never wanted to hurt you," she whispered.
It was the same small voice she used in the shelter when nights were cold and stories were kinder.
Duswanth looked at her and the world narrowed to a few sharp images: her laugh while they traded tinned fish, the way her fingers had found his in the dark, the ordinary things that had meant everything.
He felt that past as a physical thing, a burn and a warmth, and answered softly, "If you feel sad for me, then kill them and release me kaviya."
Kaviya's hand trembled.
She had seen him reach for a panel moment earlier; she had assumed, with the desperate logic of someone who wanted to believe, that he only sought a syringe to patch his wound.
The thought made sense: blood, a lab, an injector, everything tidy and survivable.
It let her think he was still the man who put bandages on others, not the man who once pushed a button in a lab that decided who would live.
He let her believe it for one beat more.
Duswanth's eyes swept over them, calm and deadly.
"Do you all want to know one thing: why did this lab have minimal damage when the entire area was flooded for months? This lab was built with one purpose above all else," he said, voice low but carrying through the chaos.
"In case a pathogen or any failed experiment escaped, it would trigger the highest-level lockdown."
"Nothing gets in and nothing gets out without the code. No infection, no disaster, nothing reaches the world beyond these walls."
The raiders froze, their greedy hands faltering on crowbars and consoles.
Faces drained of color as they realized the implications.
"What… what are you trying to do?" one of them stammered, disbelief and twisting his voice.
Varsha's bow twanged as she stepped forward, eyes blazing. "Stop him! Stop him now!"
Then Duswanth's thumb found the cracked insert on his wrist: not a medical latch but a security relay, a quarantine panel salvaged from the pod console.
He had slipped it from the console earlier and kept it folded against his chest.
Where Kaviya had seen only a syringe, he had seen a key.
His fingers pressed the panel in a steady motion.
Lights across the room winked in sequence, a slow, mechanical heartbeat.
Kaviya's hands trembled as she stepped forward, voice breaking.
"Duswanth, if you do this, if you trigger that panel, everyone here will die, including me. Stop this madness. Stop the theatrics."
He watched her, something like sorrow and steel in his face. For a moment he looked almost apologetic.
"Kaviya… I'm sorry. I never wanted to put you through this."
She swallowed, tears bright on her lashes. "Do you intend to kill me? You said I was the one you loved."
He let a slow, tired smile cross his mouth, the kind that had no tenderness left in it.
"Your loved one? I said you were someone I loved in the past. Not now. Don't dress this in soft words and call it mercy. You are fine with killing me, but why can't I be the same as you, Kaviya?"
There was a hard honesty in him that stung worse than any blade.
"So don't ask me to spare you because of a word you remember. This isn't a love story anymore."
Now for anyone who had worked on the site before the sky burned, the sequence read like an old, bitter lullaby:
QUARANTINE PANEL — AUTHORIZED INPUT.
A low hiss rolled through the warehouse as heavy steel shutters began to grind. The raiders shouted, misjudging the meaning of the noise.
Some thought the doors closing meant escape, others thought it meant containment.
Nobody moved quickly enough to guess the truth.
"That's not—" Arul began, but an arrow from Varsha clipped the console in his hand and cut the word off.
Kaviya's fingers went white on her bow.
Her eyes were wet and hollow.
She had come here wanting the salvation she believed Aurora would bring.
She had not wanted the cost.
Duswanth watched the panic burn across their faces and felt only a single cold clarity: they did not know what Aurora was.
They had pictured a watch, a chip, a tool they could strap on and become something else.
They had heard that rumor shouted across ruined streets so often that the idea itself had become a myth, an object external to the human soul.
They could not imagine the truth.
The truth stood behind the shattered glass cylinders at the far end of the bay.
Duswanth turned them slowly toward the containers.
"You're looking for a device," he said. "A watch, a chip, a box you can carry out and wear. You think that's the final form."
They were already moving, eager hands searching corners and cupboards, fingers prying at rusted panels.
The Iron Fangs called to each other, the clink of scavenged metal like the sound of an old song. Greed makes quick work of caution.
"Try to find it," Duswanth laughed.
His throat was dry; his voice brittle as wire.
His eyes pointed with a shaking hand toward the row of large, sealed vats that lined the lab a bank of glass cylinders big enough to drown a man.
Inside each floated a syrup-thick liquid that shimmered in slow, impossible colors: blue, gold, a slow aurora trapped in glass.
Tiny motes swam like living stars in the viscous pool.
"They thought—" Varsha said, the whisper leaving her mouth like a confession.
"They thought those were chemicals. Industrial coolant, maybe. Waste." Her voice went away. "We never knew."
Kaviya moved closer to herself, drawn to the strange beauty of the liquid. She pressed a gloved finger onto the outer glass and watched the motes refract.
"What is it?" she murmured.
Duswanth let out a ragged breath. "Prototype. Aurora in a jar. The early stage. Before it became a program, you could push into a chip. Before, they made it polite and wearable. Before the labs tried to package life."
The room stilled with the weight of the admission. To many of them, the revelation was incoherent: an AI as a liquid, an evolutionary serum that could be injected and would carry code into biology.
To Duswanth, it was the only thing that had ever made sense—why the rats had become hunters with a shared mind, why the Cyber Rat's commands had synchronized the swarm like a conductor's baton.
The experiments had worked on animals first, and the animals had learned how to ask for more.
"Why didn't you tell us?" Varsha demanded, an edge of accusation in her voice that cracked the space between them like thin ice. "Why bring us here to die?"
He laughed then—a short, broken thing that did not sound human.
"Tell you? What would I have said? 'Hi, everyone. I used to help build the thing that turned your neighbors into hunting machines'?" He ran a hand through hair that had been signed by dust and static.
Duswanth took a slow breath, eyes scanning the panicked faces around him.
"I've come to a conclusion," he said, his voice steady but heavy with doubt.
"There are two types of monsters in this world. First… those changed by the cosmic explosion, the creatures whose intelligence, strength, or speed were altered when the space around Earth shifted. They evolved on their own, naturally… or unnaturally."
"And second… Aurora. It's an evolutionary platform, a tool that can enhance anyone, even an animal, pushing them beyond their natural limits."
He let the words hang in the smoke-filled air.
"At least… that's what I think. I don't know for certain if I'm right, but everything I've seen points to this."
"Now that you know," Duswanth said, the words small and terrible,
"You can take it and make yourselves new gods. Or you can walk out and try to be human again."
Panic rose then like a tide.
Men cursed and lunged for the glass, crowbars and knives smashing into the sealed lids.
A spray of broken glass and liquid splashed across the floor.
Someone screamed and stumbled back with burning hands where the vapor had touched skin but most of them perfectly injected the liquid.
Kaviya's chest heaved. Her eyes were wells of sorrow.
"Dush," she whispered, one word that held pleas and blame and memory, "Don't do this."
He watched her with a patient, cruel tenderness.
"You have already chosen. You came here with those men. You put poison in the smoke so you could get away. You thought no one would tie the pieces together."
He looked at her wrist, remembering how deft her hands had been to hide a vial without his noticing.
"You thought love would disguise it."
She made a sound that was half prayer and half apology. "I—" She had no defense that would make the wound except anything less than truth.
By now the raiders had pried at the tanks, yearning for a taste of the myth.
The room stank of greed and fear. Arul barked orders, the authority of a man who had traded his past for survival.
His men shoved and pushed, greed softening into the animal panic of a hunted pack.
Duswanth said that everything was going according to his plan.
He could have shut the vats down, sealed the samples, and walked out.
But he knew that seals are only temporary. He knew the temptation would survive them all.
Now everyone except Duswanth injected aurora into their bodies, their bodies filled with a slight passing through of electricity in their veins.
"I wanted to share Aurora with everyone," Duswanth said with a voice cold and steady.
"But you all tried to hoard it for yourselves. Instead of letting it belong to no one, you chose betrayal. That's why I'm initiating the lockdown. You tried to kill me, you betrayed me—and now you'll see the consequences of that choice."
Duswanth turned to them, voice flat and terrible in the small room.
"You won't get out of here—not the way you think. If Aurora is injected in its liquid prototype form, it doesn't make you faster; it anchors your metabolism throttles, reflexes dull, movements become heavy. It binds code to flesh and slows a body, so the program of muscles can rewrite it."
"So basically, what I am trying to say is your body needs atleast 5 hours to accept that liquid form of aurora, that's why it didn't become the final product."
On hearing this, everyone's face clearly shows that they were in shock.
He let the words settle like smoke, then pressed the final button and smiled without warmth.
"Then let the destruction of betrayal begin."
SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE AUTHORIZED.
BEGIN COUNTDOWN: T – 00:59
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AUTHOR'S NOTE – KNOWN INFORMATION
AURORA – Prototype Liquid Form
It can enhance any living being, boosting intelligence, strength, and reflexes beyond natural limits. While most humans believe it to be a device or wearable, only Duswanth truly knows its secret, having worked as an engineer at the lab before being fired.
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