Contents

  Chapter 1: Thirty-Seven

  Chapter 2: Surface

  Chapter 3: Doss

  Chapter 4: Aurelius

  Chapter 5: Compression

  Chapter 6: Channels

  Chapter 7: Medic

  Chapter 8: Routine

  Chapter 9: Inversion

  Chapter 10: Rank

  Chapter 11: Hands

  Chapter 12: Night Work

  Chapter 13: Partners

  Chapter 14: Noodles

  Chapter 15: Frequency

  Chapter 16: Allies

  Chapter 17: Field

  Chapter 18: Breakthrough

  Chapter 19: Borders

  Chapter 20: Rivals

  Chapter 21: Sync

  Chapter 22: Closing

  Chapter 23: Push

  Chapter 24: Petra

  Chapter 25: Weight

  Chapter 26: Review

  Chapter 27: Aftermath

  Chapter 28: Morning

  Chapter 29: Reckoning

  Chapter 30: Integration

  Chapter 31: Edge

  Chapter 32: Closer

  Chapter 33: Hollow

  Chapter 34: Horizon

  Chapter 1: Thirty-Seven

  The thirty-seventh time was different.

  I knew the sound by now. Twelve years of it. The low hum of the installation rig powering up, the click of the nerve-bridge contacts locking into the socket at the center of my chest, the whine of the prototype Core spooling to activation speed inside its housing. Then the moment. The held breath between "it's online" and whatever came next. Activation. Failure. Pain. Sometimes all three in that order.

  Dr. Prenn was at the monitoring station. She was always at the monitoring station. Small, grey, her face a permanent mask of clinical detachment behind the kind of glasses that hadn't been fashionable in fifty years. She'd overseen every installation since I was eleven. She'd overseen the one that caught fire inside my chest cavity. She'd overseen the one that worked for six days and then started dissolving. She'd overseen all thirty-six, documented the failures, written the reports, gone home to whatever life she had outside the basement, and come back the next morning to install the next one in the same body that the last one had tried to kill.

  "CV-037, prototype thirty-seven. Activation sequence initiated. Mark."

  CV-037. My designation. The C was for the project code. The V was for Vasik, which was apparently my name, though nobody used it. The 037 was because I was the thirty-seventh subject in the program. Most of the others were dead. I'd outlived them through some combination of Hollow physiology, luck, and what Dr. Prenn had once described in a report I wasn't supposed to read as "an anomalous resistance to prototype rejection that warrants continued investment."

  I was worth keeping alive because I was hard to kill. Twelve years of evidence supported this conclusion.

  The prototype hummed in my chest. The initial activation was familiar: a cold pressure behind my sternum, the nerve-bridge contacts sending exploratory signals through the socket and into the channels that radiated from it. The channels — my channels. The empty meridians that ran through every part of my body, the infrastructure that should have carried Flux from a biological Core to my muscles, my organs, my brain. In a normal person, the channels were rivers. In me, they were riverbeds. Dry since birth. Perfectly formed and carrying nothing.

  The prototype's signals reached the channels and probed them and the channels did what they always did: nothing. Empty space accepting an input signal and returning silence. No resistance, no feedback, no biological Core to create competition or conflict. Just emptiness.

  Then the signal changed.

  I felt it in my fingers first. A warmth that started at the tips and ran backward through the meridians of my hands, up my wrists, through my forearms. Not the burning warmth of a failing prototype. I knew that feeling, the acid-heat of a Core that was devouring its own housing. This was different. Clean. Even. The warmth of something flowing through channels that had been empty for eighteen years and were, for the first time, full.

  Flux.

  I'd never felt Flux. I knew what it was. I'd read the textbooks they left in my cell because they didn't care what a test subject read. I knew that Flux was the universal energy, that it flowed through Cores and channels and powered the world above the basement. A fact about someone else's reality.

  Now it was in my body. Moving through the dry riverbeds, filling them, running through pathways that had never carried anything. The sensation was overwhelming. Not painful. My frame of reference for physical experience was heavily weighted toward pain and this wasn't pain. It was fullness. Presence. Every channel in my body lighting up simultaneously, the entire meridian network activating at once because there was no biological Core to shape the flow, no pre-existing pathways to prioritize. The synthetic prototype was pumping Flux into a completely unbiased system and the system was accepting all of it, everywhere, equally.

  My hands clenched. My feet flexed against the installation table's restraints. My jaw locked and my vision sharpened and my hearing, which had been the flat acoustic of the lab for twelve years, suddenly included frequencies I'd never registered: the hum of the installation rig's power supply, the whine of Dr. Prenn's monitoring equipment, the heartbeat of the guard standing by the door.

  I could feel the guard's heartbeat. Through the wall of my chest, through the channels that now carried Flux, through some extension of perception that I didn't have a name for. His pulse was 72 beats per minute. Calm. He wasn't expecting anything different from prototype thirty-seven.

  "Core activation confirmed," Dr. Prenn said. Her voice was the same flat tone she used for everything. "Flux output stable. Channel uptake at... at..."

  She paused. In twelve years, I'd never heard Dr. Prenn pause.

  "Channel uptake at full capacity. All meridians active." She was reading her screen. Her glasses reflected the data. "That's not — the prototype's rated capacity is 12% meridian coverage. It's reading at 100%." She looked at the technician beside her. "Check the sensors."

  "Sensors are clean. This is real-time."

  "It can't be full capacity. The prototype doesn't have the output for full meridian coverage. The channels should be selective."

  "They're not selective. They're all open. Every channel is carrying."

  The conversation was happening above me and around me and I was lying on the installation table with Flux running through my body for the first time in my life and the sensation of it was so massive and so good that I was crying. Not from emotion. From the physical response to an eighteen-year absence being filled. My channels were full. The riverbeds were running. Something that had been missing since the moment I was born was present and the presence of it was so fundamental that my body wept from the relief the way a dehydrated person weeps when they drink.

  "Sir, the output is climbing. The prototype is... it's drawing from the subject's channels. Not just outputting. Drawing."

  "That's impossible. The channels are empty. There's nothing to draw."

  "The channels aren't empty anymore. The Flux is circulating. It's going out through the channels and coming back through the channels and the returning Flux is denser than the output. The prototype is compressing on the return cycle."

  Silence at the monitoring station. I lay on the table and felt the Flux running and returning, running and returning, a circulation that was building in density with every cycle. Each pass through the unbiased channels refined the energy. The channels didn't shape it toward any particular frequency or purpose. They just carried it, cleaned it, let it flow, and sent it back. The prototype received the refined Flux and pushed it out again and the cycle continued and the density climbed and the monitoring equipment was making sounds I'd never heard it make.

  "Get Hendricks," Dr. Prenn said. "Now. Get him out of bed. Tell him thirty-seven is working."

  The technician left. The guard by the door shifted his weight. His heartbeat climbed from 72 to 78. Not alarmed. Interested. Something was happening that didn't usually happen and even the guard could feel it: the Flux output from the table was raising the ambient energy level in the room. The lights brightened by a fraction. The monitoring equipment's screens flickered. The installation rig's power supply began to resonate, the hum climbing in pitch as the prototype's output exceeded the rig's shielding capacity.

  I could feel the room. Not see it. Feel it. The Flux flowing through my channels was extending past the boundaries of my body, pushing into the space around me, and the space was returning information. The installation rig: Flux-powered, magnetic locks on the restraint clamps, the lock mechanism running on a low-frequency current that I could trace from the power supply through the conduit to the clamp at my left wrist. The monitoring station: Flux-integrated screens, data cables carrying energy as well as information, the whole system humming at a frequency that my new senses could read the way eyes read light. The door: heavy, reinforced, locked from the outside by a magnetic bolt that drew its power from the same Flux grid that powered everything else in the lab.

  The magnetic bolt. I could feel it. A small, tight knot of Flux energy, holding the door's locking mechanism in place. The power was consistent, clean, and about one-thousandth of the output that was currently circulating through my channels.

  I don't know if the thought was conscious. I don't know if I decided or if my body decided or if the synthetic Core decided. The d
istinction might not exist. What happened was: the Flux in my channels pulsed, a single sharp contraction, and the pulse traveled through the air and hit the magnetic bolt and the bolt's power supply overloaded and the lock disengaged.

  The door clicked open.

  The guard heard it. His heartbeat jumped to 94. His hand went to his sidearm. He was looking at the door, not at me, because the door was the thing that had changed and the test subject on the table was still restrained and test subjects didn't open doors.

  I pushed at the restraint clamps. Same method as the door lock. Flux pulse, sharp, directed. The magnetic locks on both wrist clamps disengaged. Then the ankles. I sat up on the installation table with the prototype humming in my chest and Flux running through every channel and tears still wet on my face and the nerve-bridge contacts pulling free from the socket with a sensation that was not unlike pulling a plug from a wall — the connection severed, the rig's hum dying, but the Core didn't stop. The Core was self-sustaining now. It didn't need the rig.

  The guard turned. Saw me sitting up. Unrestrained. His heartbeat hit 112. His hand found the grip of his sidearm and he was drawing it and his mouth was forming the first syllable of the word that was probably "down" or "stop" or "don't," and I pushed.

  Not at the locks this time. At him.

  The Flux pulse hit the guard in the chest and threw him against the wall. I heard things break — the wall panel, something in his rib cage, the sidearm clattering to the floor. He hit the ground and didn't get up. His heartbeat went irregular and rapid and I didn't know if I'd killed him or just broken him and I didn't stay to check.

  Dr. Prenn was standing at the monitoring station with her glasses reflecting the emergency lighting that had replaced the overhead fluorescents when the door lock failed. The lab's alert system was active. Red lights, rotating, painting the room in slow pulses. She was looking at me. At the empty restraint clamps. At the guard on the floor. At the test subject who had spent twelve years being cut open and put back together and who was now standing in the middle of the lab with Flux pouring off him in waves that made the monitoring screens distort.

  "CV-037," she said. "Return to the table."

  Her voice was flat. Clinical. as if the situation was a data point rather than a collapse of the fundamental dynamic that had governed our relationship for twelve years. She was the researcher. I was the subject. The subject returned to the table because the subject always returned to the table because there was nowhere else.

  I walked past her. She didn't move to stop me. I don't think it occurred to her that she needed to. The guards stopped subjects. The researchers documented them. The roles were clear.

  The corridor outside the lab was long, white, and familiar in every detail. I'd walked this corridor to and from every installation, every test, every medical evaluation. The cells were on the left. The labs were on the right. The elevator was at the end. The corridor was supposed to be staffed by two guards at all times but one was on the floor in the lab behind me and the other was at the far end, near the elevator, turning toward the sound of the alarm.

  He was bigger than the first. Armored — light tactical vest, the kind that absorbed Flux-based attacks by dispersing the energy across its surface. He had his sidearm drawn and his stance was professional and his heartbeat was 88, which meant he was alert but not panicked, which meant he'd heard the alarm but hadn't been briefed on what triggered it, which meant he saw me as a subject out of containment rather than a threat.

  "On the ground," he said. "Hands behind your head."

  I'd been on the ground with my hands behind my head for twelve years.

  The Flux pulse hit his vest and dispersed across its surface as designed. The energy spread, thinned, dissipated. His stance didn't waver. The vest worked.

  I pushed again. Not at the vest. At the floor beneath his feet.

  The Flux hit the floor and the floor's material — Flux-integrated composite, designed to conduct ambient energy for climate control — carried the pulse laterally and upward through the guard's boots and into his legs and the pulse was raw, unshaped, running through channels that had no frequency bias, and the rawness of it bypassed the armor entirely because the armor was calibrated for standard Flux attacks at known frequencies and what I was producing was not standard and not known.

  His legs gave out. He dropped to his knees. His sidearm discharged into the ceiling — a Flux bolt that blew a hole in the composite tile and rained debris. I walked past him while he was trying to understand why his legs didn't work. His heartbeat was 134 and climbing. I felt sorry for him in a distant, analytical way that occupied approximately three percent of my attention while the other ninety-seven percent was devoted to the elevator.

  The elevator was Flux-powered. I could feel its systems: small knots of energy, waiting to be told what to do. I told the elevator to open. It opened. I stepped inside. I told it to go up. It went up.

  The elevator climbed six floors. The lab was deep. I'd known it was underground but I hadn't known how far. Six floors of Korvane BioSystems between me and the surface, each floor's Flux infrastructure visible to my new senses as a layer of humming energy. I passed through them. The elevator deposited me in a hallway that smelled different from the basement: cleaner, dryer, with a chemical edge that I identified after a moment as air freshener. The surface smelled like air freshener. I didn't know that.

  The hallway led to a lobby. The lobby had glass doors. Beyond the glass doors was outside.

  I'd been outside once before, when they moved me between facilities at age nine. I remembered fragments: light, noise, the heat of sun on my face. The memory was degraded. Nine years of basement had worn it smooth.

  I pushed through the glass doors and outside hit me with everything at once.

  Sound. The city was loud in a way that the lab's acoustic-dampened corridors had not prepared me for. Traffic: the hum of Flux-powered vehicles, the whine of public transit, the distant bass of something industrial. People: voices, footsteps, the aggregate murmur of human beings existing near each other in quantities that I had never experienced. The lab had four researchers, six guards, and me. The sidewalk outside Korvane's front entrance had more people than I'd seen in my entire life.

  Light. The city was bright. Street lamps, building facades, the glow of Flux-integrated signage, vehicle headlights, the ambient luminance of a civilization that ran on energy and radiated it from every surface. After six floors of fluorescent tubes and emergency red, the visual input was staggering. My eyes watered. My new senses were worse. I could feel the Flux output of every lamp, every sign, every vehicle, a tidal wave of energy data that my synthetic Core was trying to catalog and process simultaneously.

  Air. The air didn't smell like antiseptic or recycled filtration or the ozone tang of prototype installations. It smelled like exhaust and food and rain-wet concrete and something organic and green that I learned later was the tree planted in a sidewalk cutout ten feet from Korvane's front door.

  I stood on the sidewalk. People walked past me. A man in a coat glanced at me — pale, thin, wearing the medical gown that the lab issued because test subjects didn't need real clothing — and looked away. Another person stepped around me. The crowd flowed and I was a stone in it, stationary, staring at a city I'd never seen.

  The alarm from the basement wasn't audible at street level. But I could feel, through the Flux sensitivity that was still expanding with every heartbeat, the energy signatures inside the building changing. Security stations activating. Communications firing. The second guard's heartbeat stabilizing as someone reached him. Dr. Prenn's monitoring station transmitting an alert that propagated through Korvane's internal network at the speed of light.

  I ran.

  Not toward anything. Away from the building. I picked a direction and I ran and my body, which had spent twelve years in a cell and on a table and was not conditioned for sprinting, carried me approximately three blocks before my lungs failed and my legs buckled and I collapsed in an alley between two buildings that smelled like kitchen exhaust and garbage.

  I sat on the ground in the alley. My medical gown was wet with sweat. My feet were bare on the concrete. My chest was heaving and the synthetic Core hummed behind my sternum, steady and warm, unbothered by the fact that its host was gasping in a pile of trash bags in a city he'd never seen.