Shadows flicker at the edge of my vision, shifting and always out of reach. There’s something in front of me—clear, but solid enough to keep me stuck on this side. No matter how hard I stare through it, I can’t break through. My brain moves like it’s underwater, thoughts dragging slow and thick, everything muffled by the heavy liquid pressing in on me. I’m stuck in place and floating at the same time.

  I try to make a sound, anything at all, but nothing comes out. The silence feels packed-in, swallowing every noise before it starts. My lips move—nothing. No voice, no feeling. Panic jumps up fast, sharp in my chest. I open my mouth wider, hoping for even a gasp or a word—but nothing breaks through; the silence doesn’t give an inch.

  I try to lift my hands—at least I think that’s what I’m doing. It’s like moving through syrup, slow and sticky. My fingers leave soft ripples behind as they drift upwards until they finally find my face. There’s something cold and rigid covering my nose and mouth—a mask strapped down tight enough that its edges bite my skin. Every breath comes out forced and shaky; air rattles in past the valves.

  I squint hard to get a better look around, but everything stays fuzzy, gray around the edges. The thing right in front of me has a shine to it—must be glass. I lift my palms against it—tentative at first, then pushing harder as annoyance creeps in. I thump once, then again—harder still—but every hit is dull and distant with all this fluid swallowing up the sound. Even inside my own head, every noise sounds flat and far away.

  Who am I? The thought jumps up from nowhere, bringing a wave of confusion with it. My chest tightens as I reach for an answer that just isn’t there. My name... what was it? Fleeting scraps of memory spark at the edges but disappear before I can catch them.

  I twist around clumsily—my limbs feel wrong, like someone else is moving them by remote control. I turn back to the glass and press my face close even though the mask digs into my skin. Past the barrier: just darkness—and shapes moving slowly back and forth on the other side like they’re waiting.

  One of them drifts closer.

  He comes into focus slowly—a man, though his features are all smeared by the layers between us. His eyes are what hit me first: a washed-out yellow that makes my skin crawl, fixed straight on me and not blinking. His blond hair is almost suspiciously neat, just catching the faint bit of light, and there’s a streak of blue through it that matches the rims of his glasses as he peers at me, studying every move I make.

  He gets close enough to lay his palm on the glass right where mine is pressed already. For a second we line up—my trembling hand under his steady one—and something about that makes my skin prickle uneasily. Is he trying to comfort me? Or am I about to regret this?

  He says something now—I can’t hear him but I focus on his mouth anyway, trying to catch some clue from the way his lips move.

  Then he glances off toward someone else lurking nearby and mouths words clearly enough for me to understand:

  “Give him more,” he says.

  The words hit—not because I hear them but because somehow they hum straight through me in this watery haze. More? Of what? Panic rips through me as I flinch away from him, bracing myself for whatever “more” turns out to be.

  But there’s nowhere to go.

  A crushing weight settles over me; it’s like gravity just doubled and everything inside me slows down with it. My heart beats heavier; darkness closes in at the corners until only those pale yellow eyes are left watching while everything goes quiet again.

  Just before it all cuts out there’s one stray thought barely hanging on:

  Why am I here?

  And then nothing.

  White light burns behind my eyes, pain lancing through my head—sharp where panic left off. The tank is gone—the liquid and glass replaced by something hard underneath me, pressure holding me down from above. My arms are strapped tight; no more mask over my face now, but there’s something digging into both temples instead, keeping me pinned in place. The air bites at my nose with the stink of burnt plastic and hot metal.

  I try moving but nothing happens; even blinking takes effort and when I do manage it halfway open, all I get is a flash of realization—I can’t move at all. Pain starts blooming under my skull in slow waves. A shadow slides across the overhead light for half a second before another face slips into view: jaw set tight and eyes unreadable.

  Before I see what’s coming next, a high-pitched buzzing starts up—a sharp whine that slices through what's left of the world around me and rattles around inside my teeth. The pressure behind my eyes doubles; pain sharpens and gathers at the points where the metal bites into my head. Someone’s hands—small, quick, efficient—steady my skull, and there’s a wet slide as something cold and sharp splits the skin above my ear.

  “Hold him steady,” a voice says—impossibly calm.

  Something clicks. A needle’s length of pure burning runs down the side of my head, then burrows deep; I feel it scrape bone. The pain is so sharp it’s clean—untouchable, like a line drawn in glass. I want to scream but my mouth won’t open, jaw locked tight by whatever they’ve pumped into me. I can only stare up at the ceiling, eyes watering, while the blonde-haired scientist leans in and adjusts something on a console just out of my sight line, and suddenly the world cracks open in a lightning-white instant. My body jerks—if not for the restraints, I might have torn myself apart. It feels like all my thoughts have been ripped from their moorings, floating free, and in the vacuum left behind, everything is raw sensory overload: the taste of copper in my mouth, a sound like paper tearing right through my eardrums, the stench of ozone so thick it’s suffocating.

  “There we go. Interface is online,” another scientist says, his voice garbled and distant, like he’s speaking through a badly tuned radio. His hands keep moving, calm and methodical, as if he’s just fixing up a coffee maker instead of plugging into my head.

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  Cold adhesive burns against my skin as it seals the cut at my temple. A metal band snaps into position, icy enough that I almost mistake it for heat. Somewhere inside me, something hums—no real sound, just a pressure running through my skull and down my spine. Suddenly, everything snaps into focus: the cracks in the ceiling seem to multiply; every mechanical whirr clicks together into one complicated pattern that makes too much sense.

  Then a new voice—neither his nor mine—buzzes straight through me. At first it’s all static and noise, then it settles, sharp and too clear: “Testing. Testing. Are you—is it—operational? Confirm.”

  My jaw tries to move but my tongue is useless. I reach for words and something answers for me before I can think to stop it.

  “Operational,” I say—but it’s not my voice coming from my mouth; instead, the words echo from somewhere above me, piped right into the air from a speaker system.

  “Good,” says the man with the yellow eyes, leaning over me. Up close, the blue in his hair is a dark vein, not a stripe. The light catches on the rim of his glasses, and for an instant his whole face is just flash and shadow, fox-bright and hungry. “Patch the second subject in. We’re not getting anything from passive, so let’s force the handshake.”

  Someone shifts at my side, and a woman’s voice cuts in—steady, business-like: “Copy, starting live feed now.” Almost instantly, something new pushes into my head—a wave of interference that blurs the world around me. My boundaries go slack; I feel like I’m both everywhere and nowhere, nerves zinging like loose wires.

  Underneath the chaos, I catch it: a quiet hum that’s been threaded through my panic all along. It crawls under my skin, sharpens, splits—and deep down, I know whatever’s making that noise isn’t something human.

  It doesn’t think in words but in patterns, a steady logic pulsing with hunger and a cold urgency. It coils around my consciousness like a wet cloth, dragging me toward… something. Except there is no centre, no shape, no name. Just a huge presence squeezed into this tiny channel inside me.

  It isn’t alone—not the way a person is. It’s like a splinter of something much larger, a single wrong note from a song with too many voices. Now it’s trapped in here with me. I do the only thing that makes sense: I reach out, completely bare, no filter. I throw everything at it—my fear, the jolt burning behind my eyes, flashes of water and panic, like waking up choking for air. It recoils at first—cold, automatic, jolting my nerves and numbing half my face—but then it stills. I can practically sense it weighing me up.

  Then it shoves something back at me—not an image so much as a raw jolt of urgency, stabbing through all the chaos. Not a shape, not even words—just pure warning: we’re not safe. None of us—the thing, me, anyone in this room.

  I’m gasping but it’s useless; my whole body’s just wires buzzing with terror. Something inside me lashes out and every jerk makes my chest clench harder. The instruments on the table rattle but nobody breaks focus; the scientists are too busy staring each other down over their monitors.

  “Conductance is off the charts—look at that! Those numbers aren’t supposed to do that.”

  “We need to limit input or risk feedback—”

  “No throttling! Hold on.” One of them jabs at a display where code and graphs spike in unison. “It’s catching up. They’re syncing.”

  Across the room, yellow-eyes is glued to two EEG traces marching in lockstep. He’s barely containing a grin—he saw this coming and loves it.

  I try to think but the thing inside chokes out every thought; even my own fear loops back and crashes over itself until it barely feels like mine anymore. My head throbs with its need, one message loud and clear:

  We have to get out.

  Colress—yes, that’s his name—leans in close, looking almost delighted by all this.

  “Incredible,” he breathes. “Better than projected compatibility. Increase coupling now.”

  The tech’s hands shake as she dials something up; her eyes dart nervously across readouts.

  And then everything erupts—pain explodes from the screws in my skull all the way down to my toes. For one blinding moment I’m sure I’m dead—and then realize: no, not dead. Not alone either. The thing inside surges out and through me until we aren’t separate anymore; In that flash of pain and data, we fuse into something new.

  There’s a colour, a taste, and a shape to this pain—like hot rust on the tongue, a blade twisting in my skull. It surges down my spine, every nerve buzzing like a live wire. I jerk against the straps, and for an instant, nothing exists but that high-pitched scream in my head.

  The lab reacts with a vengeance. Sirens scream from every corner, the air thick with the bite of ozone and the reek of fried wires. The metal band clamped to my temple buzzes so fiercely it spits out blue sparks that skitter along my skin. On the other side of the glass, scientists panic—chairs tip, paperwork goes flying, and for once their white coats aren’t a uniform but a flag of surrender.

  Meanwhile, the thing inside me is eating this up—feeding off the bedlam. If I’d be paralyzed by all this, it isn’t: instead, it’s rifling through every system and sensor in reach. The LED strips lining the walls flare blindingly; then comes a shrill whine as cracks shoot through the heavy glass. A split second later, it explodes outward—shards everywhere, alarms tripping over each other to scream louder.

  I barely register the straps snapping open—the numbness in my limbs is all that’s left of them. My body folds forward, but I don’t hit the ground. Whatever’s inside me keeps me on my feet, stiff and upright. My legs start moving, slow and mechanical, carrying me across crushed glass without waiting for input from me. It wants out—but not just out. It wants something else entirely, just past the threshold I can’t see.

  Broken glass crunches underfoot; static and dust hang between me and everyone else. Most of the staff have gone to ground behind desks or against walls, staring like they’ve seen too much already. Only Colress has stayed upright—arms crossed, watching everything without flinching. As I move past him close enough to catch every flicker in his eyes under the harsh lights, he exhales a single word: “Beautiful.”

  I step into the hallway, that presence still humming at my back like a second heartbeat. Every sensor blinks to life when I pass—like they’re all keeping tabs or maybe just making sure I know there’s no going backwards.

  The presence tightens its grip with every step, pushing my focus onto one pulsing line ahead. The corridor twists left then right—a maze lined with little windows blinking with curious faces—but I barely see them; each time I stumble, something inside steadies me before I can fall. I want to ask what it wants—where we’re heading—but nothing comes out except that overwhelming pull forward.

  Doors flash by unnoticed until one stands out: trimmed in blue light against all the haze and chaos. Suddenly nothing else matters—I lurch toward it, chest tight with anticipation or dread (hard to tell). The panel glows: SUBJECT ZERO—ACCESS RESTRICTED. The presence nudges at the lock until it hisses open. Inside looks empty at first—then something flickers above a nest of quietly buzzing magnets.

  It floats there: impossibly blue and soft-edged, brighter than any arc light but somehow gentler too. In the middle is a single red eye—a pinpoint that pins me where I stand and won’t let go. The door seals behind me and suddenly everything snaps into clarity: not a machine, but Beldum—and somewhere deep down my memory stirs at hearing that name.

  For an instant, whatever’s sharing my mind clamps down hard—a leash yanked tight enough to stop thought cold. The humming magnets are nothing compared to what that red eye draws from inside me; my knees threaten to give way as I take another step closer, and deep within something lets out an internal scream—not anger or terror but wild hunger.

  Beldum hangs suspended in the center of a magnetic field, its metallic body rigid and immobile except for the red eye that widens just a little when I enter—like it's been waiting for me, and my stumbling in here comes as no shock at all. Suddenly it clicks: I didn't just wander into this room by accident. This whole time, I've been following Beldum's pull—a mental tether from a physically trapped being that couldn't move an inch toward me even if it tried.

  That familiar presence inside me sparks at the sight of it, syncing up with Beldum instantly, like this was always supposed to happen. It’s only now that I get what’s going on—Beldum is stuck here, pinned down by Colress’s magnetic tricks, and ever since he wired us together, we’ve been tangled up for good.

  All the chaos in the lab—the alarms, the lights blowing out, even the glass shattering—wasn’t random. Beldum was reaching through our connection, using whatever power it could scrape together from me to try and break itself loose. And now here I am, led straight to this point by something bigger than luck—a walking crowbar for Beldum’s jailbreak.

  The way its eye fixes on mine says everything. I can feel its determination humming right alongside my own nerves; we’re linked now, pulled together for a reason. Beldum brought me here because I’m its shot at freedom—its partner in whatever comes next.

  As all this hits me, my nerves settle into a hard line of focus. It isn’t just me anymore. Whatever Colress is planning, whatever mess is waiting past that door—Beldum and I are in it together. And this time, neither of us is going down without a fight.

  Beldum’s eye flicks past me, landing on something behind my shoulder. I glance back and spot a console I swear wasn’t there before—a green panel blinking steadily. Then the thought hits, sharp and insistent: Press it. Let me out. My fingers tingle, then sting, as the urge shoves its way down my arm. I try to hold back for a heartbeat, but the pressure just builds until I can’t deny it anymore—it isn’t my idea, but it might as well be. My hand moves on autopilot, shaky with Beldum’s urgency instead of fear, and slams the switch down.