Zayne had tried calling seventeen times.
Each one went to voicemail. Nana's cheerful recorded voice—"Leave a message and I'll get back to you! Unless you're a Wanderer, in which case, good luck!"—played over and over until the sound of it made something twist painfully in his chest.
He'd left messages. Calm ones at first. Then less calm. Then messages that were barely coherent, his usually precise speech dissolving into fragments of worry.
"Where are you?"
"Please call me back."
"Nana. Please."
By the third hour of silence, Zayne was at the Hunter Association.
The reception desk recognized him immediately—Dr. Zayne Li, boyfriend of the most famous hunter in Linkon, a familiar face by now. The woman behind the counter smiled sympathetically when he asked about Nana.
"Miss Wang checked out this morning. Solo patrol assignment. The outskirts forest." She glanced at her screen. "She hasn't checked back in yet."
"When was she supposed to?"
"Two hours ago."
Zayne's blood ran cold.
He drove to her apartment next. Let himself in with the spare key she'd given him months ago—the one she'd handed over with a dramatic speech about how "true love means trusting someone with access to your snack drawer."
The apartment was dark. Empty. Her parents' shoes were still missing from the entrance—they hadn't come back from their extended trip yet. Nana's boots were gone. Her jacket. Her hunter gear.
Everything pointed to her having left for the mission this morning and not coming back.
Zayne stood in the middle of her living room, phone in hand, and tried to think clearly through the fear that was rapidly consuming every rational thought.
The forest. The same forest with the surveillance cameras. The same forest where they'd found military-grade monitoring equipment pointed directly at locations where Nana fought.
The same forest where someone had been watching her.
He pulled out his phone and called Captain Jenna.
It went to voicemail.
He called again. And again. And tried the Hunter Association's emergency line, and the general dispatch, and every contact number he had for anyone connected to Nana's professional life.
No one answered. No one knew anything. No one seemed to think it was unusual that an S-class hunter hadn't checked in two hours past her scheduled return time.
Zayne's hands were shaking. Frost was beginning to form on his fingertips—his ice evol responding to the fear and frustration that he couldn't control no matter how many breathing exercises he tried.
"Think," he told himself, pacing her apartment. "Think like a doctor. Think like someone who solves problems."
The examination results. The surveillance cameras. The questions he'd been assembling for weeks—all of them suddenly felt urgent in a way they hadn't before.
Someone was watching Nana. Someone knew what she was. Someone had engineered the aether core inside her chest and monitored her performance and watched her fight and—
And now she was missing.
Zayne grabbed his coat and headed for the door.
He was going back to that forest.
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Deep beneath the earth, in a facility that no map acknowledged and no civilian knew existed, Nana was strapped to an examination table.
The restraints were metal—reinforced, designed to hold something stronger than a normal human. Which made sense, because Nana was not a normal human. The evol-suppressing cuffs from earlier had been replaced with a more sophisticated system—a network of dampening fields projected by small devices mounted at strategic points around the table, invisible but constant, pressing against her aether core like hands squeezing a flame.
The blue glow in her chest was barely visible. A flicker where there had been a steady pulse.
She pulled against the restraints. The metal groaned but held. She pulled harder, channeling every ounce of strength she had into the effort, and felt nothing give.
"The dampening field will counteract approximately 94% of your enhanced output," the scientist said from somewhere to her left. His voice was nasal, reedy—less authoritative than the older man who'd explained Avalon, but precise in the way of someone who understood exactly what he was talking about. "Fighting it will only exhaust you faster."
"I don't care," Nana ground out through clenched teeth. She pulled again. The restraints didn't budge.
A younger scientist—female, late twenties, clipboard in hand—moved into Nana's field of vision. She was checking readings on a monitor mounted beside the table, her expression focused and clinical.
"Vitals are elevated but stable," she reported to her colleague. "Aether core output at 6% despite dampening. That's actually higher than projected for full suppression."
"Noted. Adjust field strength by twelve percent."
Nana felt it immediately—a tightening, like someone had wrapped invisible bands around her chest. The faint blue glow flickered once more and then dimmed to almost nothing.
The older scientist—the one with the wire-rimmed glasses, now sporting a bandage across his jaw from Nana's punch—stepped into view. He looked down at her with an expression of detached curiosity, like a researcher examining a particularly interesting specimen under a microscope.
Which, Nana realized with a sickening lurch, was exactly what she was.
"Specimen 21," he said, consulting a tablet. "Female. Age 21. Genetic modifications initiated at age zero. Aether core implantation at age three. Full integration confirmed at age seven." He looked up from the tablet and met her eyes. "You are our most successful creation, Miss Wang. The only specimen to achieve full biological integration without rejection or degradation."
"I'm not your creation," Nana spat.
"You are." He said it simply. Factually. The way one might confirm that water was wet. "Every cell in your body has been touched by our modifications. Your skeletal structure was reinforced at the molecular level—that's why your bones don't break when you engage in hand-to-hand combat with creatures that would shatter a normal human's skeleton. Your metabolism was enhanced to process nutrients and oxygen at three times the standard human rate—that's why you never died of starvation in Avalon, even when every other subject did. Your cellular regeneration was accelerated beyond anything previously achieved in genetic modification research—that's why wounds that would kill a normal person heal in days for you."
Each explanation landed like another piece of a puzzle clicking into place. A puzzle Nana had been trying to solve for over a year, desperately seeking answers that everyone around her had refused to provide.
"The fire spirit," Nana said through gritted teeth. "The poison gas. The flood cycles. You said I survived all of them."
"You did. Spectacularly." The scientist actually sounded impressed. "The fire spirit event was particularly informative. Standard subjects in that district experienced burns covering sixty to eighty percent of their bodies. Most died within hours. You sustained surface-level burns that healed completely within forty-eight hours. The data from that event alone justified six months of continued observation."
Nana closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, she could see it—the fire sweeping through the district, the screaming, the bodies dissolving in flames. She'd survived it without understanding why. Had assumed it was luck, or skill, or something about Avalon's death-rebirth cycle.
It had been science.
Their science.
"I want to see it," Nana said, opening her eyes. "Show me. Show me how you make the monsters."
The scientist hesitated, glancing at Captain Jenna who stood near the door with her arms crossed. Jenna gave a slight nod—imperceptible to anyone who wasn't watching for it.
"Very well." The scientist gestured to one of his colleagues. "Show her the production line."
A screen was lowered into Nana's line of sight—a large display that showed a live feed from somewhere deeper in the facility. What she saw made her stomach drop through the floor.
A massive chamber. Clinical white walls and industrial lighting and rows upon rows of containment units—glass cylinders, each one roughly the size of a human body, each one filled with a viscous amber liquid.
And inside the cylinders—
Creatures.
Hybrids. The twisted, half-human monstrosities that had terrorized Avalon's districts. They floated in the amber liquid with their eyes closed, their bodies twitching occasionally as whatever process was creating them continued its work. Some were partially formed—skeletal structures wrapped in incomplete muscle and skin, visible through the transparent walls of their containers. Others were fully developed, their bodies coiled in the tight space, waiting to be released.
Vampires too. Their wings folded tight against their backs, their red eyes closed in artificial sleep. Row after row of them, hundreds, maybe thousands, all growing in perfect, sterile conditions.
Demons. Giants. Creatures Nana had fought and feared and grieved over—the things that had killed Mina, that had injured Jisu, that had driven survivors to madness and desperation across every district of Avalon.
All of them manufactured. All of them products.
"The creatures deployed in Avalon are not naturally occurring," the scientist confirmed, watching Nana's reaction with clinical interest. "They are engineered organisms created from Wanderer dust as a base material. Wanderer energy provides the fundamental instability necessary for the creatures' aggression and combat capability. Our scientists then shape that raw material into specific creature types based on the behavioral data we want to collect from our subjects."
An older man—grey-bearded, wearing the same white coat as the others but with an air of authority that suggested he was someone important—moved to a control panel mounted on the wall beside the monitoring station. He pressed a sequence of buttons with casual efficiency, barely glancing at the screen.
On the Avalon monitors, Nana watched.
A section of grey sky in one of the districts rippled. The air itself seemed to tear—not violently, just a smooth, controlled opening, like a zipper being pulled. And through that opening, creatures began to fall.
Dozens of them. Hybrids, mostly, their bodies tumbling from the artificial sky like rain. They hit the ground of Avalon's district and immediately began moving—hunting, searching, their instincts driving them toward the nearest human presence.
On another screen, Nana could see the humans. Survivors huddled in an abandoned building, completely unaware that death had just been dropped on them from above. A mother holding her child. Two men with makeshift weapons. A teenager crying silently in a corner.
They had seconds before the hybrids found them.
"Stop it," Nana whispered.
The old man didn't even look at her. He was already checking something else on the control panel, his expression focused and businesslike.
"Stop IT!" Nana screamed, pulling against her restraints with everything she had. The dampening field held. The metal held. She couldn't move.
On the screen, the hybrids broke through the building's door.
The screaming started.
Nana turned her face away, tears streaming down her cheeks. Not from pain—from something deeper. Something that had cracked open inside her chest and was hemorrhaging grief and fury and a kind of horror she didn't have words for.
"This is what you do," she said, her voice shaking. "You drop monsters on people. On innocent people. And you watch them die. And you call it science."
"We call it preparation," the scientist corrected. "The Wanderer threat is growing. Every year, the creatures become stronger, more numerous, more difficult to contain. Standard military and hunter forces will not be sufficient to protect the civilian population indefinitely. We need something more. Something stronger than human."
He turned to look at her directly, and for the first time, something almost like conviction entered his detached expression.
"Something like you."
Nana stared at him. At the man who had spent twenty-one years shaping her body and her abilities into a weapon, who had watched her suffer through nine months of hell while taking notes, who had let her believe she was losing her mind rather than reveal the truth.
"You're monsters," she said. "All of you. You're worse than anything you created in Avalon."
The scientist's expression didn't change. He simply turned back to his tablet and continued making notes.
It was Captain Jenna who spoke next, stepping forward from her position by the door. "The emotional response data is significant. Note the sustained distress indicators alongside maintained cognitive function. Previous specimens in similar revelation scenarios showed psychological collapse within minutes. Specimen 21 is maintaining rational thought processes despite acute emotional trauma."
She was analyzing Nana's breakdown. Recording it. Using it.
Nana wanted to scream. Wanted to tear the table apart with her bare hands. Wanted to do anything other than lie here, helpless, while the people who had built her nightmare stood around cataloguing her reactions like she was an experiment—
Which she was.
Which she had always been.
The realization settled over her like ash falling after a fire. Every moment of her life—every achievement, every struggle, every battle she'd fought and survived—had been observed. Measured. Evaluated. She had never been free. Not once. Not ever.
The facility hummed around her—the sound of machinery and recycled air and the distant murmur of hundreds of scientists and soldiers going about their work. The sound of an operation that had been running for over a decade. An operation that had consumed countless lives and called it data.
And then the door at the far end of the examination room opened.
Two people walked in.
Nana recognized them before her brain had fully processed what she was seeing. The recognition was instant—bone-deep, cellular, the kind that couldn't be faked or misidentified.
Her mother.
Her father.
Her mother was wearing a white coat. Of course she was. It fit her perfectly—the same way it fit the other scientists in this facility, like it was simply part of who she was. Her hair was pulled back in a neat bun, her glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, a tablet in her hand. She looked exactly like she had at breakfast last week, when she'd kissed Nana's forehead and told her to be careful on her mission.
Except now Nana could see the way she looked at her—not as a mother looks at her daughter. As a researcher looks at a subject.
Her father stood beside her, his hands clasped behind his back in a posture Nana had seen a thousand times. The same posture he used when he was thinking. When he was solving a problem. When he was engineering something.
He looked at Nana on the examination table with an expression that was not quite cold and not quite warm. Professional. Evaluative. The look of a man examining his work product and determining whether it was meeting specifications.
"Mom?" The word came out broken. Barely a whisper.
Her mother's expression didn't change. Not a flicker of emotion crossed her face as she looked down at the daughter she had apparently spent two decades engineering.
"The emotional response is consistent with projected parameters," her mother said to the scientist beside her, her voice calm and clinical and completely, devastatingly empty of anything maternal. "We should begin the emotion-mapping study once she's stabilized. The data on her aether core's response to acute psychological distress will be invaluable for the next phase of the specimen program."
Nana's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
Nothing came out.
Her father stepped forward—not toward Nana, but toward Captain Jenna. He exchanged a few quiet words with her that Nana couldn't hear over the blood rushing in her own ears. Then he turned and looked at his daughter one final time.
"Bring her to the observation rooms," he said to the nearest soldier. His voice was measured. Controlled. The voice of a man who had built an empire of suffering and saw no reason to apologize for it. "She needs time to calm down before we can conduct the emotional stability assessment. We need accurate baseline readings—agitation will contaminate the data."
He turned away. Didn't look back.
Nana watched her parents leave the room—her mother still making notes on her tablet, her father already on his phone discussing something that had nothing to do with the daughter strapped to a table behind him.
The soldiers moved to release her from the examination table and transfer her to whatever "observation rooms" meant. Nana didn't fight this time. Didn't have the energy. Didn't have the will.
She let them unstrap her. Let them guide her upright. Let them lead her toward another door, another corridor, another sealed space in this underground labyrinth of horrors.
As they passed the wall of monitors, she caught one last glimpse of Avalon. Of the districts and the creatures and the humans still fighting, still surviving, still desperately hoping for escape that had been engineered to be impossible.
And somewhere on those screens—in some district she couldn't see from this angle—new portals were opening. New souls were falling through. New subjects were beginning their journey through a hell that had been built by her parents, monitored by her captain, and justified by the people who claimed they were protecting humanity's future.
Nana walked between two soldiers into the observation rooms, and the door sealed behind her with a sound like a coffin lid closing.
And for the first time since she'd woken up in this facility, she didn't think about fighting.
She thought about Zayne.
About him waiting for her call that would never come. About him checking his phone and getting voicemail and not understanding why. About him driving to her apartment and finding it dark and empty.
About the man who had promised to love her regardless of what she was.
Who had no idea what she was.
Who had no idea where she was.
Who had no idea that the woman he loved was being held in a government facility by the people who had spent twenty-one years building her into a weapon.
*Find me,* she thought, pressing her forehead against the cold metal wall of her new cell. *Please. Find me.*
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To be continued.