The Reclaimer: Harvest of the Dead
Chapter 4 — The Breach
The lights died in a single, clinical breath.
One second the room was plain and white, the next it was a ceiling of black glass and the smell of burned plastic. Alarms screamed somewhere down the corridor—a raw, animal sound that set teeth on edge.
The mirrored visor of the nearest guard reflected nothing but a smear of red. He fumbled with his comm, fingers jerking. The other guard slammed the emergency latch, and the door thudded half-closed before the intercom cut Venn's voice into jagged fragments over the speakers.
"Secure Interview Suites. Lockdown—now!"
The strip of glass in the door showed movement: a shadow sliding along the corridor, too quick and wrong to be a human gait. It bent through space like a suggestion of motion, joints folding where they shouldn't. A scream echoed, chopped and swallowed.
The console beside my bed flashed: CONTAINMENT: BREACH — EAST SECTOR. Under that line, a new message scrawled itself in a thinner font: SUBJECT 07: RELEASED.
Venn leaned over me as if proximity could make the data read clearer. Her face was pale at the edges. "We didn't plan this," she said, quiet enough so the guards didn't hear. "We isolated Sector E last quarter specifically for—"
A dull thump rolled through the floor, like something heavy shifting in the building's bones. The lights in the Suite guttered, then flared. For a moment the whole room smelled of iron and something sweet under it—ashes and old blood.
"Stay calm," one guard said. He tried to make the sentence a command for himself as much as for me.
Calm was a lie someone told a panicking system. My skin, under the suppression field, bloomed a slow blue. The hum under the floor accelerated; it was as if the building itself had heard the breach and tuned its organs to a new frequency.
Through the glass, a figure slid into view. Thin, wrong-angled. It pressed its palm to the glass and stared in with empty, wet eyes. The veins under its skin glowed the same faint blue as whatever was living inside me, like two halves of a single, ugly map.
The thing's mouth opened and the same mechanical whisper—less voice, more instruction—warped the air between us.
> [RECLAMATION… INCOMPLETE.]
The glass spidered with a web of cracks. Dust feathered down and hung in the air. The guards raised their weapons. Venn went still, hands pinching the bridge of her nose as if she could squeeze logic back into line.
"It's not human," one guard said. His voice lost conviction halfway through.
"It's resonant," Venn said. Her eyes were thin with calculation. "It's a residual—partial processing. Subject 07 must have been in an unstable state—something escaped the Refinery's stabilizers. It's—"
She never finished the sentence. The figure on the other side of the glass slammed its shoulder until the reinforced pane shuddered. The room rolled like a ship hitting a wave.
I felt something reach for me—no, through me. Not hands, not even sound, but a pressure behind my ribs that fit like a key. The whisper braided with a memory I didn't own: a face, a name I couldn't pronounce, heat under nails, the small focus of someone reaching for their last breath.
I fought it. The suppression field tightened, a weight around my chest. The technicians must have raised its amplitude to keep me stable. The blue lines under my skin flared like warning beacons; I could almost see them from my own eyes, a quick lattice of light.
"Don't touch the glass!" Venn ordered. It wasn't for the guard or the creature—she said it to the room, to the building, to the field. She wanted control, and for the moment, her voice carved it thin as glass.
The creature pressed again. The glass bowed. A web of radiating cracks spidered out. Something in the corridor screamed—human or not, I couldn't tell—and the lights surrendered to static.
When the power cut, the suppression field dropped to residual humming. I felt the weight that had kept the resonance mild lift and something inside flared in response. It was small at first, a pinprick of light behind the sternum, then a wave widening.
"Field failure," the tech near the console gasped.
"Manual override!" Venn snapped. "Override now!"
But the console stuttered. Buttons that had been obedient went blank. On the glass, the thing's face had come close enough that I could see the seam where skin tried to close over metal. Its breath fogged the pane.
> [RECLAIM. OPEN. GIVE.]
As if someone had placed another mind next to mine, a second voice—familiar and alien—threaded into the pressure in my chest. For a single, horrible second I believed it was someone I had known. Then the recognition dissolved into a thousand shards of memory: a child calling from below, a man signing a transfer, a mother saying do not look back.
It spoke to me like an instruction. Like a lever. Like an answer I could obey.
The guards' weapons fired. The sound was sharp and metallic, the rounds pinging off the reinforced glass with false confidence. The creature hissed, a sound like wind through rust, and the seams of its skin shuddered. Where bullets struck, the light in its veins smudged and returned like oil on water.
"Venn—" one guard said. "We can't hold it."
"We hold protocols," Venn said. She didn't sound like a person saying words. She sounded like someone reciting the only prayer she allowed.
Something inside me answered. It wasn't my choice. Pressure lined my lungs; the whisper poured into the hollow space where calm might be. I tasted the air behind my teeth—metal, the tang of ozone—and heard myself make a sound that was not a word and not a scream, a soft, inward pull.
The glass buckled. For a heartbeat the pane became water and then — with a sound like a sigh and a snapping of held breath — it gave.
Air met air. The creature's hand slid through as if the barrier had always been a suggestion. The guards fired and then realized the wrongness of firing: the rounds punched through someone who had been—just a moment before—both corpse and machine. Blood pooled like oil.
Venn's scream broke like a dropped thing. I heard orders, panicked and precise, then the metallic thud of heavy boots. The room filled with noise—shouts, alarms, the low clank of an approaching transport lift.
The thing stepped toward me. I tasted memory—old soup, a broken lullaby—and then the pressure in my chest translated that taste into a direction: open the door.
I should have resisted. I should have clung to whatever humanity I had left. Instead my arm moved of its own accord, muscles finding paths I didn't remember learning. The strap popped with a sound that felt obscene. The gray jumpsuit slid with my skin. The guard grabbed for me, fingers cold and fast, but the pressure in me pushed harder.
The door clicked. It hadn't been a command from me but something I heard as necessity. Maybe the creature wanted freedom. Maybe it wanted me. Maybe the resonance wanted both.
The guards lunged. Venn's face was a mask of milestones—fear, calculation, grief. She moved faster than I expected and planted herself between me and the doorway. Her hand came up and this time her words were not science, they were a pleading edge of humanity.
"Don't," she said. "If you go, you'll trigger the field network. It will cascade. Hundreds will be—"
The pressure folded like a whisper. For a second I imagined Nurse Hana down in Processing, the one who patched my knuckles years ago with a bandage she couldn't afford. I thought of the Spire's pale lights and men who bought time with someone's body.
The creature looked at Venn, then at me. It raised its head, and in the dimness I swore I saw something that almost looked like sorrow.
It spoke—this time not to the room but to me.
> [TAKE ME HOME.]
The resonance inside my chest reacted. Memory and command braided into a single, fatal logic: release or be released. Venn lunged. A guard tackled me from the side. Pain exploded along my ribs.
The thing put its hand on my shoulder.
Cold. Not the absence of heat but the presence of something that had lived in cold for a very long time. It used no force. It simply let itself be against me, as if to remind me of a geometry I had forgotten.
And then the transport lift's doors screamed open in the corridor, a black maw of light. Heavy boots descended. A voice I recognized as Director Elvan's cut across the chaos—sharp, certain, and carrying authority like a blade.
"Secure that subject. Move him to transport." His voice commanded the air. "Lock down the Vault protocol. No unauthorized transfers."
Venn's hand was on my arm, her eyes urgent. "Cole. They'll take you to the Vault. Don't let them sedate you. Promise me—stay aware. Learn. If they sedate you, they own the resonance."
The creature's hand tightened, a pressure not unkind. I nodded because there was nothing else to do. Because my chest was full of voices and memory and because a part of me had already walked through half the door.
They hauled me up, half-carrying, half-dragging. Venn pressed something small into my hand—her pen, smudged with code. "Remember," she hissed. "Not everything can be catalogued. Not everything calculates."
The corridor was a river of flashing red. They shoved me into a transport case as if I were fragile glass, then sealed the hatch. The metallic smell came again—ash, disinfectant, something burning.
The last thing I saw before the case closed was the creature standing with its hand against the broken glass, watching me go. It turned its head as if following a thought down the corridor, toward the place where machines kept secrets.
Elvan's voice rode over the metal as the case thudded. "If it attempts to interface—terminate."
The case locked. The world narrowed to my breath and the faint blue threads under my skin. The resonance hummed not as threat now but as promise.
They were taking me to the Vault.
And whatever waited there was not going to be kind.
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*(End of Chapter 4 — Next: Vault Transfer / The Vault Begins)*