5 years later
Present Day
10 February 2000
18:30
Sri Lanka, Unknown Warehouse
The warehouse was no longer a place. It was a tomb carved out of steel and shadow. Time dissolved here. No dawn, no dusk. No rhythm of seasons, only the ceaseless hiss of the vents and the metallic pulse of machines that never slept. The fluorescent lights were merciless, buzzing above him like watchful insects. Their glow blurred into sameness, erasing days, months, years until all that remained was endurance.
James William Lukyan measured existence in breaths and in agony. He had long abandoned the calendar the guards once mocked him with, but his mind clung to its own count, a stubborn tally etched against despair. Nine years, he reminded himself, though even that number felt like a ghost now. Nine years of steel restraints, of flesh torn and remade, of refusing the single thing they hungered for: his surrender.
He thought often, because thinking was rebellion. He thought of cobblestones slick with rain, the scent of earth steaming beneath a storm. Of laughter, bright as bells, carried from a girl whose face haunted him in dreams, Tiffany. Her name was carved into him as deeply as any scar. He thought of a small golden locket he had pressed into her hands as a boy, before fire and loss swallowed her. He thought of Lance, his little brother, and their sparring on that last day before the world was ripped apart. Memory was his armor. They could cut him open, drown him in needles, strip flesh from bone, but they could not erase what belonged to him.
The straps bit across his chest as he drew a careful breath. Leather cracked against steel, worn by his weight, by his struggles. His body bore their memory like a map of pain, old scars layered over new ones, grooves that matched the table beneath him. He had become part of this place, grafted to its cruelty.
Sometimes, in the long stretches of silence, he wondered if he had already died. The hum of machinery, the cold, endless air, it felt like the afterlife of a forsaken soul. If this were eternity, then God had a dark sense of humor.
I will not break.
He whispered it inside himself, a vow, a pulse louder than the machines.
The lock turned.
A metallic click shattered the stillness, sharp as a blade across glass. His chest tightened. He knew that sound too well. The footsteps that followed were deliberate, each one echoing authority, each one heavy with the stench of disinfectant and steel.
Dr. Pearl.
James opened his eyes. Not out of curiosity, curiosity had died years ago, but in defiance. Looking away never spared him.
Pearl entered as though the room bowed to him. Cruelty had sculpted him into something poised, almost elegant. His short red hair, now flecked with iron gray, framed eyes colder than scalpels. He moved with the confidence of a man who believed not only the space, but every soul within it, belonged to him.
A tray gleamed in his hands. Instruments arranged with obsessive care: scalpels, clamps, hooks. And the syringes. Always the syringes. One glistened with black liquid that pulsed faintly, as though alive, as though straining to escape the glass.
Pearl set the tray down and hummed softly under his breath, the tune bright and chilling in its cheer.
"The Master is impressed," he said, his voice smooth, deliberate. His gaze lingered on James like a knife pressed against skin. "Nine years, and still you breathe. Still, you endure. Do you know what that means?"
James exhaled slowly, forcing air through a throat roughened with scars.
Pearl's hand, gloved and precise, rested on his shoulder in mock affection. "It means you are chosen. Master Gordon invests in no failures. You are his weapon, his fire made flesh. Every day we peel you back, and still you resist. Remarkable."
James rasped, his voice ground raw by silence. "I'm not… your weapon."
Pearl's smile was thin, cruel. "You already are. You simply haven't admitted it."
He lifted the syringe, turning it so the needle caught the light. The liquid inside shimmered like oil on water.
"This one drowns nerves," Pearl murmured with clinical delight. "Every scream your body sends will arrive at once. You will want to cry out, but your throat will close. Suffering, caged in silence. Beautiful, isn't it?"
The needle pierced his arm. The serum ignited like braided fire and ice, searing every vein. His back arched against the restraints; his muscles tore in their protest. His teeth clamped until blood leaked between them. His body begged to thrash, to scream—but he refused.
A guttural sound tore loose anyway, raw, half cry, half roar. He swallowed it back, choking it down like poison.
Pearl's eyes glittered with fascination. "Exquisite. The body rejects. The mind resists. But even stone crumbles under enough blows. One day, you will beg."
"You'll… never… have me." The words scraped from his lungs, jagged but unyielding.
"Never?" Pearl's chuckle was soft, amused. He lifted a scalpel, tracing its cold tip along James's ribs until red welled. "You speak as if you still possess choice."
He tilted the blade toward the mirrored wall. "Look. See what remains."
James turned despite himself.
The reflection was a stranger. His skin, pale as ash. His once-golden hair is now black, coarse, matted in strands. His cheeks were hollow, his jaw a sharp edge of hunger. A scar slashed across his temple. His face was unrecognizable.
Only his eyes remained. Blue. Dimmed, but not broken.
Pearl's whisper slid into the silence. "The boy you remember is dead. This is clay. And I?" His lips curved into a sculptor's smile. "I shape the clay."
The scalpel pressed deeper. Pain flared white, a scream clawing at his throat. He bit it back until copper filled his mouth.
Pearl wiped the blade clean and replaced it with care. "You endure because Gordon wills it. Because I allow it. Others begged sooner. But endurance is weakness stretched thin. Thin things break." He leaned closer, his breath hot against James's ear. "When you break, you will thank me."
Then he swept out, instruments in hand, the door sealing shut with a hiss like a coffin's lid.
The silence returned—but it was never silence. The machines hummed, the lights buzzed, and blood trickled down his ribs. His body trembled, but he had not screamed. He had not broken.
The lock turned again.
James's body tensed as though struck. Too soon. Pearl never returned this quickly. The doctor's rhythm was exact, cruel but predictable, like the swing of a pendulum. This wasn't him.
The door cracked, just enough for a thin line of light to spill across the floor. It sliced through the gloom, cutting a white scar over the concrete and up the edge of the steel table where he lay bound. His breath caught, his heart a pounding drum against the leather strap.
Someone lingered in the gap. The hinges groaned softly, hesitating.
Then the figure slipped inside.
It was not the sharp glide of Pearl, nor the stomp of guards. This was different—hurried yet careful, a stealth born of desperation. The silhouette flattened against the steel, fingers tightening on the edge of the door before pulling it closed with painstaking care. The latch clicked shut, muffled, as though she prayed even the walls would not hear.
For a long moment, she did not move. Her back stayed pressed against the cold metal, chest rising and falling in quick, shallow bursts. She tilted her head, listening, her breath fogging faintly in the sterile chill. James could feel her fear before he saw her face.
She turned her head toward the corridor she had come from, eyes narrowed, straining for sound. When none followed, she let out a tremor of a breath and peeled herself away from the door, every movement precise, deliberate—like someone crossing a thin sheet of ice.
Her hands clutched a clipboard to her chest so tightly the edges cut into her arms, the gesture less of duty and more of a shield. The fluorescent light caught her hair first: dark strands, glossy as midnight, spilling over her shoulders. Then her eyes—golden brown, flickering, alive with something too fragile for this place. They darted to the corners, to the shadows, to the mirrored panel in the wall, never still, always calculating whether she had been followed, whether eyes were watching unseen.
She crossed to the far side of the room, pausing beside a file cabinet set into the wall, as though trying to disguise her intrusion beneath the pretense of paperwork. Her fingers brushed the metal drawers, but they trembled too violently to be convincing. She was not meant to be here. Every nervous flick of her gaze betrayed it.
James's vision blurred, then sharpened, caught between disbelief and the venom of the serum still burning in his veins. For a heartbeat, he thought his mind was conjuring another cruelty, another phantom from memory.
But the face remained. The light made it real. The delicate features, the cascade of dark hair, the golden-brown eyes that had haunted his dreams when he still believed in them.
His heart slammed against his ribs. His throat closed, yet the name tore out anyway, cracked and raw, a word dragged through years of silence:
"Miss Clark?"
The woman froze. Her body locked as though the word itself had struck her. Her mask faltered: grief, sharp and raw, flashed across her face before she could bury it again. For one breath, she was bare, open, unguarded. Then the composure returned, brittle but forced, the mask of someone who had survived here by hiding what was real.
But she could not hide her voice.
It cracked when it reached him, soft but urgent, trembling beneath the relentless hum of the machines:
"James!"