“Molt”

Part I

Cameron Reddick didn’t think of himself as unlucky. He thought of himself as someone who had made his share of bad calls—some just poor timing, others a little too desperate—but never someone the universe had singled out to punish. That was important to him, the distinction. It allowed him to get up, to shave each morning, and to keep his head level even when the mirror showed more scalp than he remembered from the day before.

The job at Velrua Pharmaceuticals had come out of nowhere, just a week after he’d landed in Kingbridge, South Carolina, with his pickup, his duffel bag, and two boxes of paperwork the divorce lawyer had encouraged him not to throw away. It was a clean town, small enough to feel safe, and distant enough from his previous life that he could pretend he hadn’t left anything behind. The listing was vague—“technician-level contractor, materials processing and containment, clearance required”—but the salary nearly doubled what he’d made working logistics at Fort Benning, and the signing bonus had cleared three of his debts the same day it landed in his account.

The first morning he showed up for orientation, the air was already thick with humidity and fertilizer from a nearby sod farm. The Velrua campus loomed past a rusted gate flanked by two armed guards who never smiled and didn’t seem interested in small talk. Beyond them stretched an angular complex of poured concrete and dark glass, built with the kind of money that didn’t advertise itself but never apologized for its size. He was escorted through three badge checkpoints and down a long, clean hallway that smelled faintly of bleach and static electricity.

His handler for the day was a tall woman named Daughtry who handed him a laminated booklet full of legal language, none of which he understood. She wore a badge with a red stripe down one side and answered every question with a smile that never quite reached her eyes.

“There are six decontamination steps before you’ll enter the zone,” she said as they passed a blank wall with a small security camera blinking steadily. “They’re automatic. Don’t try to rush them. Your gear is standard military hazmat—Level C, positive pressure. You’ve worn one before, right?”

Cameron nodded. He had, in Afghanistan. The ones they’d used back then were old, the faceplates scratched and yellowing, and always smelled faintly of rubber and sweat, no matter how often they were wiped down or put through the extractor.

“Good,” Daughtry said. “Everything is scrubbed after every shift. You’ll be expected to report any compromise in the material. Even a pinhole.”

“What kind of radiation levels are we talking about?” Cameron asked. He was trying to sound casual, but something about the way the hall absorbed sound made him lower his voice anyway.

“It’s all within federal safety thresholds,” she replied, the same way someone might answer whether the water in their pool was properly chlorinated. “You’ll be scanned daily, bloodwork weekly. Any anomalies get flagged and rerun. Standard protocol.”

He didn’t ask what counted as an anomaly.

The work itself was dull, at least at first. Every morning, he suited up in the antechamber while a robotic voice recited safety instructions over the PA. The room he worked in was called the Green Hall, though there was nothing green about it. It was an elongated chamber of stainless steel surfaces, fixed piping, and soft amber lighting, where canisters the size of propane tanks were slid into pressurized slots on an assembly wall. Each tank had a Velrua logo stamped into the cap and a long string of digits engraved beside it. Cameron was responsible for logging those numbers, checking the internal pressure, and preparing the units for cold storage. What they contained was never specified.

By the end of his second week, he began to notice patterns. Each shift began with a briefing—three sentences, always the same cadence, always delivered by one of three rotating supervisors with the same dead smile:

“Today, we’re advancing the front lines of medicine. Today, we protect lives. Today, we honor progress.”

None of them seemed to know his name, despite the fact that he’d signed it in triplicate at the end of every form they’d given him. The few coworkers he did pass in the locker area spoke in clipped murmurs, their eyes tired and sunken, and none of them ever made it past a week without disappearing.

One man named Allan, who had started on the same Monday as Cameron, hadn’t shown up the following Friday. When he asked about it, Daughtry told him Allan had “transferred to internal development.” She offered no further explanation, and Cameron didn’t press.

He told himself to stop overthinking it. The job paid well. His first month’s rent cleared with room to spare, and he was finally making progress on the hospital bills that had followed him like a ghost since the accident three years ago. Still, something about the place gnawed at him—not through noise or threats, but through how carefully quiet it remained. Everything seemed designed to avoid scrutiny.

Then his hair started falling out.

It wasn’t dramatic at first. Just a few extra strands in the drain, a few more clinging to his pillow in the morning. He assumed it was the new water. Kingbridge had a different filtration profile than Atlanta, and the town’s tap carried a faint chlorine scent. He bought bottled water and started washing his scalp in the sink, gently, using his knuckles to massage instead of his fingers.

But by the third week, he could see the white of his scalp peeking through the thinning patches above his ears. When he reached up to touch it, his fingertips came away with dust-colored strands that crumbled as he tried to brush them off.

He reported it to the clinic on-site. The nurse who checked him in didn’t write anything down. She scanned his radiation badge, frowned slightly, and told him it was “within the expected window.” Then, without explanation, she drew blood and asked him to open his mouth for a cheek swab.

“I didn’t see that on the schedule,” Cameron said.

“It’s part of the extended monitoring protocol,” she replied, already labeling the vial.

He tried to ask what they were monitoring, but she’d already moved on to the next patient.

Two days later, they called him back for a second blood draw. No results were shared. When he asked about the levels on his badge, they told him the fluctuations were “environmental noise” and nothing to be concerned about.

He started sleeping with the window open, thinking maybe the air inside the apartment was stale, maybe it was messing with him. But the itching on his scalp only worsened. He scratched at it in his sleep, and each morning his pillow was peppered with tiny, curling flakes—some of them transparent, papery. One night he turned on the flashlight app on his phone and watched his skin shimmer under the light like a reptile about to shed.

That night, he lay awake, eyes on the ceiling, one hand gently pressing against his skull, the other resting on his chest. He could hear the buzz of the old refrigerator in the kitchen and the distant croak of frogs beyond the woods behind the building. He thought about the signing bonus that had bought him peace for the first time in years. He thought about his ex-wife’s voicemail still saved in his phone. He thought about the debt collectors who had finally stopped calling.

“I’ll give it another week,” he whispered aloud.

Outside, the frogs fell silent all at once, but he didn’t notice.

Part II

Cameron woke to find the sheets stuck to his legs.

For a few seconds, he thought it was sweat. The nights had been hot lately, the A/C unreliable, and he’d taken to sleeping without a shirt. But when he sat up and pulled the sheet away, something crinkled under his fingers—a dry, elastic whisper of movement that didn’t belong to fabric. The light from the streetlamp outside reached only so far into the bedroom, but it was enough to show the pale, curled film draped across his thighs. At first, he mistook it for peeling sunburn.

Then he saw the full outline—a nearly complete shell of himself, fragile and translucent, clinging to the sheets like shed plastic. It had come off in one piece, stretching from his shoulders to his calves, even the individual ridges of his toes preserved like pressed flowers.

He didn’t scream. He sat there staring at it for what felt like an hour, though the clock told him it was only six minutes. The air in the room was stale and slightly sour. His skin—what was left of it—felt raw and tight, as if the new layer hadn’t quite settled in. He stood and moved to the bathroom, flicked the light on, and saw that his chest and arms were pink and slick, the surface glistening faintly under the overhead bulbs. When he touched his ribcage, it felt unfamiliar. Thinner. Cleaner, almost.

He dumped the shell into a trash bag and sealed it before it could fall apart in his hands.

That morning, he wore long sleeves for the first time since moving to South Carolina, despite the heat already rising into the nineties. The synthetic fibers itched against his new skin, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t explain it to anyone, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

The molting returned two days later, then again the next. Each time, the outer layer came off faster and more easily, like it no longer belonged. He stopped sleeping in his bed and began laying out a plastic painter’s tarp on the floor each night, curling up under a single sheet and a shallow layer of shame.

His fingernails were the next to go. It started with a dull ache under the cuticles, the kind he associated with hangnails or mild infections. But the pain worsened every time he touched anything, and he found himself handling objects with the flats of his fingers, avoiding pressure altogether.

One by one, the nails detached. There was no blood. They didn’t rip or tear. Instead, they simply let go, curling slightly at the base before lifting off like dried leaves. For a day or two, he walked around with exposed nail beds, the tissue beneath soft and blue and pulsing with sensitivity. Then the growths started.

The new material was nothing like keratin. It was darker—more of a deep gray with a subtle blue shimmer, like graphite under water. It grew quickly, faster than seemed natural, and emerged in ridges that felt flexible at first but hardened within hours. When he held them up to the light, they looked almost translucent, but when he tried to trim one with a pair of clippers, the blade snapped.

He kept the broken tool in a drawer, unsure why he hadn’t thrown it out.

Then came the teeth.

It began on a Thursday, while he was eating a microwaved chicken breast he’d picked up from the gas station. The meat had been too dry, and he’d chewed it longer than necessary. A sharp pain shot through the left side of his jaw, followed by the unmistakable crunch of something cracking in his mouth. He spat into his hand and found a shard of his molar, jagged and yellow at the root.

Over the next three days, the rest followed.

The pain was excruciating. There was no polite way to describe it. The pressure began in the jaw and radiated outward, as if something inside his skull was pushing out, making room. He began grinding his teeth in his sleep, waking with blood on the pillow and soreness in his gums. At night, he could feel the roots loosening, flexing against the pressure from below. When they finally dropped, they fell in pairs—sometimes while he was brushing, sometimes while he was talking aloud to himself without realizing it.

He didn’t call the clinic immediately. He wanted to believe it was stress, a cascade of symptoms caused by overwork, heatstroke, or chemical exposure. Something they’d missed in his pre-employment physical. Something human.

But when the replacements started growing in, he knew he couldn’t pretend anymore.

The new teeth pushed up faster than baby teeth. They weren’t quite the same shape as the originals—longer, sharper, and slightly curved. They caught the light strangely, with a kind of dull glint that reminded him of obsidian. The pain during regrowth was constant. Not like dental pain—deeper than that, as if the bones themselves were splintering and reshaping from the inside.

Then came the blackout.

He had gone to the grocery store late, after dark, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses to hide the state of his skin. He remembered parking, entering, selecting a bag of rice and some canned soup. He remembered standing in line behind a woman with two screaming children. He remembered pulling out his debit card. Then everything went black.

When he opened his eyes, he was behind his apartment building, half beneath the wooden steps leading up to his back door. His clothes were torn at the knees and elbows. His hands were caked with soil. Both palms were scratched and bleeding. There were pebbles embedded in the skin around his knuckles, and when he pulled himself upright, his joints creaked with effort.

He checked his pockets. The groceries were gone. His wallet was still there.

He went inside, washed his hands, and examined his fingernails. Underneath the new ridges was a layer of dirt so deeply impacted that it took nearly twenty minutes with a soft brush and warm water to dislodge. The water turned brown, then gray, then pink. He didn’t know what had happened or how long he’d been out. The receipt in his pocket showed a time stamp from just before 10 p.m.

It was now 3:27 in the morning.

He called the Velrua clinic as soon as the line opened. His voice cracked when he described the blackout, and the woman on the other end transferred him immediately. He was told to come in for a “follow-up consultation” and to bring any documentation of the incident. When he arrived, the lobby was empty. The nurse at the window avoided eye contact and handed him a clipboard with a fresh stack of nondisclosure forms. There were more pages than last time. Many of them had new language about “spontaneous neurological episodes” and “adaptive physiological responses not indicative of pathogen exposure.”

He didn’t understand any of it, but he signed anyway.

Dr. Karen Mayes saw him personally that day. Her hair was pulled back tightly, and she wore a white coat over a business suit instead of scrubs. She read from a tablet, asked him to describe his symptoms in his own words, and nodded at each one without reacting.

When he mentioned the blackout, her expression changed slightly—not surprise, but something closer to recognition.

“We’ve had a few early-stage subjects report similar incidents,” she said. “It appears to be an unintended side effect of cellular realignment. Most resolve within a few weeks.”

“I didn’t consent to anything like this,” Cameron said. “I thought this was about radiation monitoring.”

“It still is. But what we’re doing here is more advanced than traditional containment. You’re part of something that’s never been attempted at this scale.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she was already preparing a syringe.

“We’ll be conducting a full-body scan, followed by a spinal tap. The second is optional, but recommended.”

“Recommended for what?”

“Monitoring progression.”

Her voice was too calm. It was the kind of calm that didn’t offer room for negotiation. He nodded once, numb, and rolled up his sleeve.

By the time they finished, it was nearly evening. The sky outside had turned a dull gray, the sun hidden behind a thick layer of low clouds. Cameron sat in his truck for almost an hour before starting the ignition. He drove home with the radio off and didn’t notice when he passed his own street the first time.

That night, he avoided mirrors. He left his phone powered off on the kitchen counter. He took one of the white pills they’d given him—no label, no instructions—and lay down on the floor tarp again. He locked the doors and slid the deadbolt twice, then curled up beneath his blanket and tucked a kitchen knife under his pillow.

Sleep took longer to come than he expected. When it finally did, it came without dreams. The last thing he remembered was the sound of cicadas through the open window and the faint click of something shifting in his jaw.

Part III

The man’s name was Jermaine, or at least that was the name stitched on the patch over his chest the last time Cameron saw him. He had started working in Green Hall three days prior, soft-spoken and clumsy with the badge reader but polite enough to earn a passing nod from the regulars. Cameron had never exchanged more than a few words with him.

That morning, as Cameron exited the prep chamber and stepped into the corridor outside the containment floor, he saw Jermaine being led away between two men in tactical vests. Their uniforms bore no insignia. One held Jermaine by the upper arm, the other carried a silver case marked with biohazard warnings. Jermaine looked pale and unsteady, his right hand wrapped in a bandage soaked with something dark and viscous that didn’t look like blood.

Cameron opened his mouth to ask what had happened, but Daughtry appeared beside him so suddenly it seemed she had stepped out of the wall.

“Not your concern,” she said, offering a clipboard.

When he didn’t take it, she added, “Jermaine’s being reassigned to another division. It’s internal.”

No one reassigned people with black, leaking wounds.

Later that day, he overheard two techs whispering in the airlock, their voices barely audible over the ventilation system. Their words stopped the moment the door hissed open behind him. The one on the left—a tall woman with a gray streak in her ponytail—glanced at Cameron with something between fear and warning, and then resumed wiping down her gloves with slow, meticulous strokes, as if scrubbing away what she had almost said.

Cameron began to notice the pattern. Anyone who came in with symptoms—peeling skin, tremors, coughing blood—vanished by the end of the week. No one asked questions aloud. Conversations shortened or ceased altogether when a supervisor passed nearby. And although he kept his head down, Cameron began catching glimpses of mirrored eyes behind faceplates, or stiff posture at the ends of shifts that suggested more than fatigue.

He found himself watching for cracks in the illusion. Every twitch, every new stain on someone’s gloves, every poorly hidden limp became a sign. He wasn’t the only one changing. He was just the only one still trying to pretend it might stop.

On Friday morning, after a particularly bad night—the pain in his jaw now near-constant and accompanied by sharp, random pulses down his spine—he returned to the clinic. This time, he didn’t wait to be called back.

Dr. Mayes met him with the usual calm, her clipboard held like a shield, her smile professional and noncommittal. Cameron refused to sit.

“I want to know what’s happening to me,” he said. “No euphemisms. No scripts. Just tell me.”

She didn’t argue. She nodded, folded her hands on the desk, and leaned back in her chair with the air of someone bracing for a difficult conversation that she had rehearsed a hundred times.

“There have been some deviations in baseline responses,” she said. “You’re not the only subject experiencing what you’re experiencing, but your particular rate of change is… ahead of expectations.”

“Expectations?” he repeated. “You’re saying this was intentional?”

“Not your symptoms. Not exactly. We’re monitoring adaptive thresholds. The trial is designed to explore tolerances in previously unmodeled physiological environments. Your reactions fall within acceptable experimental margins.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Cameron said. “My nails are gone. My teeth are not my teeth. I blacked out and woke up under my porch with dirt jammed so deep in my hands I thought it was growing out of me.”

Dr. Mayes didn’t flinch. Instead, she reached into a drawer and produced a manila folder. Inside was a new stack of forms—longer than the last batch, denser, printed in the kind of language that made Cameron’s stomach twist before he even reached the signature line.

“These are addendums to the previous agreement. Given the progression of your case, we’re requesting expanded biometric consent and formal indemnity acknowledgment. You’ll continue to receive the highest level of care. Refusal would result in immediate revocation of security clearance and termination of employment.”

“You mean I’d be fired.”

She nodded once, slowly.

“You’d be released from the contract. But I should stress, the condition you’re describing may worsen without ongoing oversight.”

“Condition?” he asked. “You mean the thing your company caused?”

“We didn’t cause anything,” she said, but there was something brittle in her tone now, something that cracked at the edges like thin ice under too much weight.

He signed.

He didn’t read the fine print. He didn’t want to know whether it used the word irreversible, or whether it mentioned experimental thresholds for post-biological integration. He scrawled his name at the bottom and tried to steady his breathing.

They led him down a hall he hadn’t seen before—past the standard clinic doors and into a room marked with a blue triangle. Inside was a reclining chair surrounded by polished metal arms that held various instruments: scanners, needles, and something that looked like a carbon-fiber brace for a leg, though it was mounted at head height.

A nurse—faceless in full bio-suit—inserted an IV. Cameron didn’t ask what was in it.

The headache began five minutes later.

It wasn’t like any headache he’d had before. It didn’t start at the temples or radiate from the base of the skull. It arrived all at once, a lance of pressure behind his eyes so intense he thought they might burst. His mouth opened to scream, but the sound didn’t come. His limbs went stiff, then limp. Vision tunneled, then collapsed inward, folding his world into black.

When he came to, the ceiling was gone. The lights were gone. There was only sky.

It stretched wide above him, jagged with stars, clear and cruelly sharp. He was lying on his back in a field, the grass damp beneath his shoulders, the smell of soil thick in his nose. The air was cold. His skin was bare below the knees.

He sat up slowly, unsure how long he’d been out, and tried to stand.

Pain erupted from both legs. He collapsed again, gasping. The bones weren’t just broken—they were wrong. He could feel the shape of them pushing beneath the skin, curving in directions they shouldn’t. His right leg bent outward just below the knee, and when he rolled up the fabric of his pant leg, he saw the shape bulging beneath the skin—splintered, split open, and riddled with something hard and dark pushing up from within.

It looked like metal, but it wasn’t metal. It looked like bone, but no bone should be hollow at the core, filled with a pulsing matrix of something that shimmered like oil.

He lay still for a while, breathing shallowly, watching the stars.

Then the colors changed.

At first, he thought it was the pain. The sky above him shifted, just slightly—no movement, just a subtle wrongness in the hue. The blackness wasn’t black anymore. It had taken on a kind of ultraviolet sheen, as though he were seeing into a wavelength that shouldn’t exist. The trees at the edge of the field pulsed with outlines he couldn’t describe, glowing softly in shades that made his head spin to look at them for too long.

He blinked. The colors remained.

The nausea came next.

Then came the sound, low and distant at first, like an engine idling far away. It grew louder, accompanied by the crunch of tires over gravel. A set of headlights broke the tree line. The vehicle that emerged was matte black, boxy, and unmarked. Its windows were tinted. The engine didn’t sputter or growl. It purred.

The van stopped twenty feet away.

Two men stepped out—tall, heavily armed, dressed in full tactical gear. Neither spoke. One of them held a long rifle at his side. The other carried a heavy canvas sack.

Cameron tried to sit up again, but the pain dropped him back to the grass.

“Get up,” one of the men said. His voice was muffled, filtered through a helmet mic. “Now.”

“I can’t,” Cameron replied. “My legs—”

The rifle was raised.

“You don’t need to walk. Just don’t resist.”

The man with the sack approached and pulled it down over Cameron’s head. He felt zip ties around his wrists and something cold click shut at his ankles.

They dragged him.

He was lifted into the back of the van. The interior was colder than the night outside, lined with hard plastic walls and a chemical smell that reminded him of acetone. The doors slammed shut. The vehicle started moving.

He tried to count the turns, to estimate the time, but everything blurred. His legs ached, twitching with every bump in the road, as something deep inside them shifted and stretched, knitting itself together in patterns he couldn’t feel without wincing. The pain was constant, but it no longer felt like damage. It felt like movement. Like work being done.

Somewhere ahead, a voice crackled over a radio:

“Containment breach confirmed. Subject is en route. Prepare intake.”

Cameron swallowed against the bile rising in his throat.

In the darkness of the sack, he began to shiver—not from cold, but from the growing certainty that whatever was happening to his body had already passed the point of return.

Part IV

The cold that greeted Cameron when the van doors opened wasn’t the kind that lived in weather. It was the kind born of depth and pressure, the kind found far beneath the earth where nothing living was meant to breathe. Even with the sack over his head, he felt it press against his skin—damp, mineral-heavy, and humming faintly, as though the walls themselves carried current.

He was pulled out by gloved hands, his legs still unstable beneath him. The bones inside had reformed just enough to bear his weight, but not without consequence. With every step he took, something within his knees clicked, not with pain, but with mechanical certainty.

No one spoke as they led him inside. The floor beneath his feet shifted from gravel to metal plating, then to something smooth and porous—polished concrete, faintly warm. After a long corridor, a door opened with a hiss, and a rush of antiseptic air flooded over him.

He was brought into a small, silent room and made to sit on a bench bolted into the floor. Someone removed the sack. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in long, gridded panels. The walls were white, though not quite clean, with hairline fractures branching out from the corners like veins.

The men who had brought him in exited without a word.

Cameron was alone for three hours.

There was no clock, but he counted sixty-second intervals in his head until he reached 10,000, and then stopped. At some point, a panel slid open in the wall and a tray was delivered—lukewarm broth, a protein bar, and a bottle of thick orange liquid that smelled faintly of copper. He drank it all without thinking.

Later, two new guards arrived. They were younger, more lightly equipped, but carried sidearms and stun batons. One wore mirrored goggles. The other had an earpiece and a nervous jaw.

“This way,” the taller one said. “Don’t touch anything unless instructed.”

Cameron followed them through another corridor, this one narrower and darker, until they reached a reinforced door labeled HOLD 7. The guard scanned his badge. The door unlocked with a clunk and drew back into the wall.

The room beyond was low-ceilinged and lit with soft amber sconces embedded in the corners. The air was cool and dry. There were six others already inside.

They watched him enter in silence.

One of them—a woman sitting cross-legged on the far cot—gave a faint nod. Her hair was patchy, her skin pale and slick, and her eyes milky at the edges like overexposed film. Another figure stood in the back, leaning against the wall. His arms were crossed, and his torso was wrapped in something that might have once been a flannel shirt but now hung in shreds over shoulders too broad for his frame.

The others sat in varying states of collapse. A man near the center twitched rhythmically. A second woman, younger, had a bandage over one eye and muttered to herself, her breath fogging the air in front of her, though the room was not cold enough for that.

“You’re the new one,” said the woman on the cot. Her voice was low, dry, but carried clarity. “You smell like field soil and bleach. That means they didn’t process you here.”

“They didn’t tell me anything,” Cameron replied.

“They never do.”

She stood with difficulty, her movements stiff. As she approached, Cameron saw the fine lines etched into her arms—cracks, almost like mosaic tiling, as though her flesh were preparing to split and rearrange itself. Her fingernails had retracted, replaced by dark glassy growths. A lattice of thin black tendrils traced their way from her temples down the side of her neck.

“I’m Lisa Thornhill,” she said. “Former research consultant at Arcadia SkinWorks.”

“I don’t know that name,” Cameron said.

“You wouldn’t. They were a front. Like Velrua. Like Halvex. Like Colbridge Minerals. All owned by the same investment firm. We figured that out last year.”

“Last year?” he repeated. “How long have you—”

“Time gets strange down here.”

Another figure stirred at the back. The man in the shredded shirt stepped forward. Cameron’s stomach turned as he realized the man’s arms were no longer fully organic. Beneath the skin, joints and bones had been replaced by ridged columns of something matte and dark, reinforced with fibrous bands like carbon muscle. His eyes were sunken and shadowed, but his jaw was firm. His voice, when he spoke, sounded processed.

“That’s Theo,” Lisa said. “He’s been here the longest.”

Theo nodded once, not at Cameron, but in recognition of his presence.

“They always bring them in late,” Theo said. “Right before shutdown. It means they’re getting ready to close the file.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means containment.”

Lisa gestured toward the center of the room, where the others had gathered in a loose circle. Some were whispering. One was crying softly into a torn pillow.

“We were all promised different things,” she said. “A cure. A trial. A contract. I was supposed to be working on synthetic skin grafts for burn victims. Instead, they infected me with something that liquefied my epidermis and regrew it from a scaffolding of programmable silicon. That was two months ago. Maybe longer.”

Cameron sat down slowly on the bench along the wall. His legs were aching again. The pain no longer flared—it pulsed, steady and low, like a drumbeat beneath his skin.

“What did they give us?” he asked.

“No one agrees,” Theo said. “Some say nanotech. Some say engineered retrovirus. There’s one guy in HOLD 3 who swears it’s alien DNA. All we know is it doesn’t stop. The body doesn’t reject it. The body becomes it.”

“They told me it was a cancer treatment.”

Lisa smiled, bitterly. “It’s not a cure. It’s a replacement strategy.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not trying to fix broken tissue. They’re testing whether they can overwrite it. Not just physically, but neurologically. They want to see if we can be made better—faster healing, harder skin, stronger bones—but still be controllable.”

“I didn’t sign up for that.”

“None of us did. But we signed something.”

Cameron pressed his fingers into his knees. They felt firmer than they had the day before. Too firm. He didn’t want to touch his teeth.

A sound broke the stillness—a buzz followed by a hydraulic hiss. The door at the far end of the holding room opened, and a tall figure stepped through. He wore a slate-gray suit, pressed and pristine, with a badge that had no name, only a single white triangle on a black field.

No one spoke.

The man surveyed the room with detached disinterest, then produced a tablet from his coat.

“My name is not important,” he said. “You may refer to me as the Handler. I’ve been appointed as final custodian of this site and its contents.”

“Final?” Lisa asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Due to recent developments, the program is being discontinued. Effective immediately.”

Theo stepped forward. “So what happens to us?”

“You are considered virologically unstable. Your presence constitutes a containment risk. Until we determine whether you present a transmissible threat, you will remain in isolation.”

“For how long?” Lisa asked.

The Handler didn’t answer.

“You’re going to kill us,” she said.

He didn’t confirm it. He didn’t have to.

He turned and left. The door closed behind him with a sealed hiss.

No one spoke for a long time.

When they did, it wasn’t in words. One of the others began to sob. Another muttered prayers. A third grunted as he stood and began to scratch at the corner of the room with one elongated finger. The material of the wall groaned under the pressure, a sound like concrete cracking from within.

Cameron watched as the man’s arm bent backward at the elbow, and then again at the wrist, reconfiguring itself in real time. Bone—or what used to be bone—shifted inside like a piston assembly warming up. The fingers at the end of the limb tore into the wall with inhuman force, flaking bits of reinforced plaster with every swipe.

Lisa sat beside Cameron and placed her hand on his, gently, though her skin felt like thin vinyl stretched over wires.

“They told us there were stages,” she said. “Adaptation. Integration. Stabilization.”

“And after that?”

“There is no after. Just more.”

Another thump echoed from the far wall. Theo stepped closer to the man scraping and put a hand on his shoulder.

“No one leaves,” Lisa whispered.

And Cameron, even before the lights dimmed and the walls vibrated with the first tremors of panic, already believed her.

Part V

There was a rhythm to the place, even without clocks. Meals arrived on steel trays at precise intervals. Lights dimmed and returned in predictable cycles. Footsteps in the corridors always followed the same tempo—three short steps, then a pause, then two longer strides as the guard passed the observation window.

Cameron counted them in his head to keep from unraveling.

But the others no longer seemed to care about the patterns. They had begun to change again—not just their bodies, but their minds. One woman had stopped speaking entirely and now stood in the corner for hours at a time, face to the wall, whispering things in a language no one understood. Another man, whose skin had turned a dull slate-gray and hardened into segmented ridges like fossilized bark, now trembled whenever the lights dimmed, eyes wide, muttering that something inside him was “waking up.”

Lisa no longer sat with the others. She crouched beneath one of the metal bunks, her back pressed to the wall, her breathing shallow and constant. The filament lines on her arms had thickened into cords, and they now pulsed faintly beneath her skin. When Cameron approached her the day before, she didn’t speak. She just looked at him and shook her head once—slowly, as if mourning something neither of them had said aloud.

Theo watched everything in silence. He stood near the reinforced wall, head down, jaw clenched, as if waiting for permission to act. His hands had reshaped themselves into something unrecognizable: thick, callused palms ending in blunt, heavy digits that cracked the concrete floor when he walked too hard.

Cameron’s own pain had become something else—no longer a warning, no longer even suffering. It was a current running beneath the surface of his flesh, humming with silent energy, shifting parts of him he could no longer see but could now feel moving on their own. His right eye had begun picking up strange shadows along the periphery—shapes that twitched and flitted outside the visible spectrum.

He hadn’t slept in two nights.

The trigger came without warning.

One of the prisoners, a thin man with sunken cheeks and a purple bruise beneath one eye, began to convulse mid-sentence. His body seized, arms flailing against the floor as foam bubbled at the edges of his mouth. Others rushed to help him, but the seizure gave way to violent thrashing, and he leapt upright with a howl that echoed through the room like a burst of static.

He lunged at the nearest person—an older woman whose spine had grown visibly longer than her torso could accommodate—and drove his head into her chest with enough force to knock her across the room. She hit the wall and crumpled.

The room erupted.

Screams filled the chamber as the convulsing man turned on another prisoner, this time raking his fingernails—if they could still be called that—across the man’s face, carving deep gouges down to the jaw. The wounded man shrieked, stumbled backward, and clutched at his torn skin.

That skin began to fall away in strips.

But beneath the red, glistening muscle, there was something else—something dark and solid, not like exposed bone, but like armor. Matte and seamless, it shimmered faintly with iridescent oil.

And it began to mend.

The flesh knitted itself back together before their eyes, not smoothly, not cleanly, but with writhing, twitching spasms. The man screamed harder as it happened, as if the healing hurt more than the wound itself. He dropped to his knees and clawed at his own arms, peeling them in strips to reveal the growing shell underneath.

The others panicked.

One prisoner began to scream that he could feel his skin crawling. Another collapsed and began slamming his face against the floor until a tooth popped loose. Yet another stood still in the chaos, eyes wide, arms limp, and wept as the edges of his mouth split into black fissures.

Then came the frenzy.

They turned on each other, not with rage, but with desperation. Some clawed, some bit, others simply screamed. The guards burst through the door seconds later, shouting commands that went unheard over the chaos.

Stun batons lit the room with blue arcs, striking bodies that twitched and fell—only to rise again. One prisoner took three shots to the chest and still stood, trembling but unfallen. A second tackled a guard, ripping off his helmet and driving him to the floor. Blood splattered the wall, but the prisoner didn’t stop. He continued pounding the guard’s head against the tile, even as the man went still.

Theo moved.

He crossed the room with a speed that defied his size, ducked beneath a swinging baton, and caught one of the guards by the shoulder. With a grunt that sounded almost mournful, he threw the man across the room into the steel door.

Then he turned to the security gate.

It stood ten feet tall, framed in concrete, lined with internal struts and sealed with locking bolts. Theo walked toward it with the same steady rhythm he’d kept in stillness.

“Move!” someone screamed, but no one could reach him.

He raised both arms and slammed them into the gate.

The impact echoed like a muffled explosion. Cameron felt it in his ribs.

Theo struck again. And again.

With each hit, the bones in his arms shifted—compressing, fracturing, then realigning. His shoulder popped audibly, the joint twisting out of socket and reforming higher on his frame. His body hunched, then surged forward. The wall buckled at the seam.

On the fourth impact, the upper hinge cracked. Dust spilled from the ceiling.

Cameron ran to him.

“Theo, you’ll kill yourself!”

“It’s got to be one of us,” Theo said. His voice was garbled, half-machine, but resolute.

The fifth impact took the gate down. It buckled inward and fell with a shriek of warping metal.

Beyond it lay a dark corridor.

Theo turned, his face blank and bloodied, and motioned to Cameron.

“Go. You still have lungs.”

Then the air changed.

There was a hiss, subtle but wrong, and then a scent—sweet, sharp, and metallic, like ammonia left in the sun. A mist spilled into the chamber, fine as fog. It clung to the skin.

One of the prisoners inhaled first. A tall woman with pale streaks down her arms screamed once, staggered, and fell to her knees.

Then she began to melt.

Her scream became a gurgle. Her body sagged, her limbs dissolving into black sludge. Her eyes popped like bubbles. The skin peeled backward in long, curling strips. Within seconds, she was a puddle, steaming faintly, bones gone to slurry.

Cameron didn’t breathe.

He pressed his hand to his mouth, sprinted through the wreckage of the gate, and vanished into the tunnel.

Behind him, someone else screamed. Another inhaled and dropped.

Cameron ran harder, blind in the dark, lungs burning, legs aching. His vision shimmered. Pain spread up his spine like fire.

The tunnel angled upward.

His hand brushed a wall. It was wet with condensation and something thicker. He didn’t stop to see what. His foot caught on a step—he stumbled, rolled, and collided with a metal hatch.

It was already open.

The cool of night hit him like a bucket of water. Fresh air surged into his lungs as he collapsed into it, choking and gasping.

Above him stretched stars. Trees. Wind.

He was free.

But as he tried to rise, his joints spasmed. His bones cracked softly beneath the skin.

The damage was still there, and it was still moving.

Part VI

The trees offered no comfort.

Cameron staggered through them like a man pulled forward by hooks embedded in his spine, his lungs rasping with every breath. The wind carried the faint scent of moss and pine, but also something deeper—something faintly electrical, like scorched wire buried beneath the loam. The stars above him were too bright, their constellations crawling just slightly when he wasn’t looking directly at them.

He had emerged from the tunnel less than an hour ago, but his body no longer moved with anything resembling coordination. His joints clicked with every step, and the bones beneath his skin had begun to feel hollow, buoyant, as if they were being slowly replaced by a lighter, more flexible material. His gait alternated between limping and lurching. One foot dragged slightly behind the other, not because it was injured, but because the leg attached to it no longer bent in a way he recognized.

Ahead, a stream cut across the clearing, its surface catching moonlight in broken flashes. He fell beside it without grace, dropping to his knees in the mud, the cold seeping into his forearms as he reached down and cupped the water to his mouth. It tasted sharp and clean. He drank deeply, too quickly.

The reaction was immediate.

Pain lanced through his chest and doubled him over. His stomach clenched so tightly he thought it might rupture. He retched once, then again, until a thick stream of black fluid spilled from his throat and soaked into the moss. It was heavy with shards—rigid fragments no larger than fingernail clippings, but glassy, obsidian-black, and ridged like organic armor.

They clinked faintly against the rock where they landed.

His breath came in staggered rhythm, lungs hitching as his body adjusted to the purge. He rolled onto his side, and for several minutes, he simply lay there, watching the canopy above churn with colors that did not belong in the visible spectrum. Purples too saturated to be natural. Blues that shimmered green at the edges. A core of pulsing ultraviolet that hurt to look at directly.

Eventually, the pain subsided. Not completely, but enough to move.

He sat up and examined his hands.

The skin had begun to separate again—not in flakes, but in long, curling sheets, like the peeling bark of a dying tree. Beneath it, the new layer was not pink, but a smooth gunmetal gray, warm to the touch and shot through with a faint shimmer. His fingernails had fused into dark, curved hooks—articulated and sharp. When he pressed one against the soft part of his palm, it cut without effort.

His arms bent in ways that made him feel nauseous. Not because of the pain, but because of how natural it felt. He reached behind his back without resistance, twisting the joint in a full arc that no human arm should have allowed. Tendons no longer resisted. Muscles simply moved, obeying commands that bypassed pain entirely.

Something in his mind whispered that it had always been like this. That the body he remembered had only ever been temporary.

He climbed to his feet and followed the stream uphill.

The trees thinned near the top of the rise, giving way to a rocky slope that ended at a sheer bluff. A narrow trail twisted upward through the brush, lined with broken stones and clawed-up soil. He followed it, drawn by the distant roar of water.

Each step brought new distortion.

His vision stuttered. Depth reversed. At times, the path beneath him rippled as if submerged in heat. He blinked repeatedly, trying to ground himself, but the images grew worse: branches reaching toward him with fingers, shadows coiling and recoiling with every movement. In the wind, he could hear faint whispers—no language, only rhythm and urgency.

Halfway up the trail, he heard something mechanical.

It was subtle—no more than a flutter, like the distant whine of a drone—but it triggered a response in his spine. The hairs on his arms stiffened, despite the absence of hair. His new senses caught pulses in the air: infrared sweeps, magnetic disturbances, the faint thrum of artificial energy scanning in intervals.

They were looking for him.

He pressed himself into a hollow beneath an outcrop and waited.

Minutes passed. A shape glided above the trees—matte, wingless, smooth and unmarked. It hovered for a breath, scanned the slope, then moved on. Cameron remained still until the sound faded into the wind.

He continued climbing.

By the time he reached the summit, the pain had become a background hum. His joints no longer hurt when they twisted. His lungs no longer burned when he exerted himself. But something inside his chest had begun to throb—slow, heavy pulses that did not match his heartbeat.

At the top of the cliff, he stood at the edge of a gorge.

Below, the river cut through the rock like a silver knife, churning with moonlight and foam. Across the distance, perhaps two miles out, he could see a scattering of lights nestled among the trees—a small town, unaware, unprepared.

Behind him, the wind shifted again.

Voices. Footsteps. Too careful to be animals. Too fast to be civilian.

They were close.

Cameron stepped forward. The cliff beneath his feet crumbled slightly, and loose stones tumbled into the gorge below. The drop was at least seventy feet, and the rocks at the bottom looked as sharp as teeth. He knew what the fall would do. His bones would shatter. His skull would split.

But he would not die.

They had made certain of that.

He took one last look at the lights in the distance.

Then he jumped.

The impact broke him apart. There was no grace in the fall—only weight and velocity, and the dull wet sound of tissue giving way to stone.

For several minutes, nothing moved.

Then, slowly, the pieces began to shift.

A hand flexed, wrong-handed, with too many knuckles. A leg bent upward, the knee backward, folding in on itself until it realigned. The skull reassembled in fragments, the jaw locking into place with a muffled crack. The skin followed, growing across the bone like a fluid, seamless layer that hardened as it stretched.

He rolled to one side, his eyes glowing faintly in the dark, and pushed himself upright on trembling limbs.

Then he began to walk—

Toward the lights, the town, and whatever came next.