...
[Unknown Date]
Somewhere beneath the Siberian ice, the cold hum of fluorescent lights echoes over surgical steel and screaming minds.
[Krasnohrad Research Blacksite]
The lights had been out for nine minutes.
The emergency sirens should have been triggered, but the control panels were silent. Red bulbs blinked like dying eyes in the hallway. Somewhere in the east wing, the walls were smeared with static and frost, the kind that wasn't made of water—but failed probabilities.
Footsteps echoed.
Dr. Yelena Sobolev moved like she was walking across broken glass—slow, cautious, breath held. Her left hand bled from a shattered screen. Her right hand gripped a clipboard full of sealed Archive pages. Each one hummed with forbidden logic.
The whispering had started seven minutes ago. Not voices. Just... variables.
" ∂s / ∂t = 0"
Vector field collapse
Interference threshold breached
She had seen children die here. Dozens. But none of them had been him.
---
Room 102 wasn't locked anymore. The door had turned inward—ripped from its hinges, not blasted. No explosion. No heat. Just a perfect inversion of force.
Inside the chamber, the temperature was wrong.
Heat drifted upward, curling along the ceiling like reverse smoke. Papers didn't fall—they hovered in midair, quivering gently like leaves suspended in jelly.
He stood at the center.
Subject 102. The boy without pulse, but not dead. White hair fluttering, despite the lack of wind. Wires dangled from his spine like broken threads of a marionette.
And the bullets—
Five of them. Midair. Frozen between him and the last remaining guard.
The guard's corpse was against the far wall. Bent wrong. No blood had spilled. The body had folded.
Yelena's throat tightened. She took a step forward.
"Vector…" she whispered, "you're not supposed to be awake."
The boy tilted his head slightly. No warmth in his face. No spark of pain or joy. His lips barely moved, yet his voice was perfectly clear.
"Observation: variables hostile."
"Response: adjust trajectory."
"Result: elimination."
The five bullets rotated. A soft metallic hum. Then—
Crack.
They launched backward. Each pierced a wall, deeper than a sniper round.
Yelena dropped the clipboard. Pages scattered.
He looked at her.
And for the first time, she saw it—not a boy, not even a mind. Just directions. A being whose very existence was built to reject the world.
---
[Elsewhere – Storage Sector 315 | Two levels below]
Another child coughed, dragging his body over chalk dust and cold stone. His wrist was cut—not deep—but bleeding over a scratched circle.
He was alone.
Nobody screamed for him. No bullets. No guards. Just cold.
But he had remembered something.
"Not a weapon. Not math."
"A dream."
He muttered softly, eyes unfocused.
"To gain something... I must give something. Something of meaning..."
From his torn gown, he pulled a string. A paper tag: SUBJECT 315 – ZHUKOV REN.
He placed it in the center of the circle, just as his blood touched the line.
The room pulsed.
A low, harmonic tone filled the air. Lights flickered—but not on. They flickered inward, like the hallway was being remembered by something bigger than time.
"I give my name," he said. "In return... open the way."
The circle ignited—not with flame, but with intention.
A doorway bloomed in the far wall. Behind it: stars, scattered like teeth in darkness.
He didn't hesitate.
Not because he was brave.
But because there was nothing left of him to lose.
---
Somewhere beyond the known layers, two signals pulsed in the Archive's cortex.
__[VECTOR NODE_102: ACTIVE]__
__[KHEMIC NODE_315: AWAKE]__
A whisper followed...
"The equation has been broken. The Offering has been made. One walks against force. The other walks against fate."
"Let them climb."