Chapter 1|Burn Out

Chapter 1: Chapter 1|Burn Out

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The alarm had been screaming for about four minutes.

Damian counted it the way he counted everything automatically, without thinking, the way living six years inside a facility teaches you to count things that matter. Four minutes meant the secondary lockdown was active. Four minutes meant the Shepherds were already pulling Subjects from their cells to run containment.

Four minutes meant he was already behind schedule.

He hit the corner of Corridor Seven at a dead sprint, shoulder scraping the wall as he turned, and didn’t slow down. His bare feet slapped against cold concrete. They’d taken his boots two days ago. Standard procedure before a termination. Strip the Subject down. Make the harvest cleaner.

He hadn’t planned on being harvested.

The door at the end of the corridor was sealed. A heavy thing, reinforced steel, the kind that needed a keycard and a six-digit code and a retinal scan to open from the inside.

Damian raised his right hand.

Flux surged from somewhere in his chest. Hot, immediate, answering before he’d even finished the thought. Fire gathered at his palm in a dense, compressed ball, deep orange at the edges and white at the center, and he felt the familiar burn of it pulling at something inside him. Not pain exactly. More like a drain. Like water rushing out of a cracked container.

He threw it.

"BOOM!!!"

The door didn’t open. It ceased to exist.

The blast wave knocked him back two steps. Smoke and twisted metal filled the gap where the door had been, and through it he could see the next corridor. Longer, lit in red emergency lighting, two guards already turning toward the sound.

[Flux: 61%]

The notification appeared at the edge of his vision like it had been there his whole life. Clean white text, no interface he could see, no screen. Just there. Present. Real.

It had appeared the moment he crossed the threshold of his cell tonight. No explanation. No source. Just a system that had apparently decided he was worth attaching itself to on the worst night of his life.

He didn’t question it. He didn’t have time.

He moved through the smoke at a run.

The first guard raised his weapon. A suppression baton, standard Nexarion issue, designed to overload a Subject’s Flux pathways on contact. Damian had been hit with one before. He had no interest in repeating the experience.

He dropped low under the swing, came up inside the guard’s reach, and drove his elbow into the man’s throat. Clean. Fast. The guard went down without a sound.

The second one was smarter. He didn’t swing. He backed up three steps and reached for the radio at his hip.

Damian was already moving.

He caught the guard’s wrist before the call connected, twisted until something popped, and used the man’s own momentum to put him face-first into the wall. The radio clattered to the floor. Damian stepped over both of them and kept running.

[Flux: 58%]

Three percent just from the physical exertion. His dissipation rate had always been the thing the lab techs whispered about when they thought he couldn’t hear. Subject 07 burns inefficient. Subject 07 leaks Flux even at rest. Subject 07 is fundamentally flawed.

Subject 07 was currently the only one trying to escape, so he figured he was doing fine.

He found the maintenance shaft on the east wing exactly where the facility blueprints said it would be.

He’d spent three months memorizing those blueprints. Not all at once. A section here, a section there, stolen glances at screens during lab transfers, piecing it together the way you piece together anything when you have nothing but time and the understanding that one day you’ll need it.

Tonight he needed it.

The shaft was narrow. He moved through it on his elbows, fast and quiet, the metal cold against his bare arms. Behind him he could hear the facility’s noise shifting. The alarm’s pitch had changed, which meant they’d upgraded the lockdown. Full containment now. Every exit sealed. Every Subject recalled.

Every Subject except him.

Then a notification popped up from the system, appearing at the edge of his vision like it had been there his whole life.

Ding!

[New Skill Acquired: Grade Scan]

[Passive. No Flux cost. Activates automatically within visual range.]

He paused for half a second, reading it.

Then kept moving. He’d figure out what Grade Scan meant when he wasn’t inside a building full of people trying to stop him.

The shaft opened above a storage room on the facility’s ground floor. He dropped through the ceiling panel, landed in a crouch between shelving units stacked with equipment cases, and stayed still for three seconds, listening.

Nothing. The room was empty.

He found boots in the third case he opened. Too large by half a size, but he laced them tight and they’d hold. A jacket. A keycard that got him through the storage room door and into the loading bay beyond it.

The loading bay had a ceiling thirty feet high and a rolling door at the far end the size of a shipping container entrance. It was sealed.

It also had a woman standing in the middle of it, staring at him.

Damian stopped.

She looked mid-thirties, dark hair pulled back severely, wearing a white lab coat over a grey uniform. A researcher, not security. No weapon, no baton, no radio he could see. She had a tablet in one hand and an access badge clipped to her lapel and she was looking at him the way people look at things that aren’t supposed to exist.

For a moment neither of them moved.

Then, at the edge of his vision...

[Grade Scan: Active]

[Subject detected.]

[Grade: A]

Damian felt it before the text finished rendering. A pull. Low, automatic, like his body registering something it needed before his mind caught up. His Flux reserves had been draining steadily since the first corridor. He was at fifty-four percent and falling just from standing here, just from existing, and the dissipation wasn’t going to stop because he needed it to.

He needed to refuel. He didn’t know how much further he had to go.

And whatever Grade Scan was telling him, it was telling him she could give him sixty-five percent back.

The woman found her voice first.

"Who are you?" she said. Her voice was steady. Steadier than it should have been, which meant she either had training he couldn’t see or she was running on the same adrenaline he was.

Damian looked at her for exactly one second.

Then he looked at the sealed rolling door behind her, calculated the Flux cost of blasting it open, looked at his current reserves, and looked back at her.

"Someone who needs your help," he said. "And not a lot of time to explain why."

[Flux: 52%]

[Warning: Dissipation rate accelerating. Refuel recommended within estimated 40 minutes.]

The alarm kept screaming.

Outside those walls was a city that didn’t know this building existed.

And the woman with the A-grade reserve was still staring at him, tablet clutched to her busty chest, and she hadn’t run yet.