The room had been colonized like a siege zone.
Holographic projections bloomed midair like battle banners, graphs and live feeds jostling for space, overlapping until one blinked out in quiet defeat. Coffee cups dripped quietly onto the metal table like silent casualties. The air was thick with fatigue, caffeine, and the dry scent of sterilization foam that clung to every inch of the lab's surface.
A week had passed since the shipment had finally arrived, and the blur of labor hadn't slowed since. Pallets of metal sheets, chemical drums, petri trays, cryo-casings—and ten stasis-sealed bodies, source cadavers wrapped like ghosts in synthetic mesh. The centerpiece, though, was impossible to ignore.
Ten-by-ten meters of suspended hell.
The Miasma. Pure, unfiltered, unreduced—black as oil, alive with lazy tendrils that curled and floated as if responding to thought alone. Encased in triple-reinforced, Mire-treated glass, humming faintly with containment protocols. A thing dredged from the edge of existence and dropped, wet and humming, into their workspace.
Ricken had stood in its presence and felt his skin rise in gooseflesh, every fine hair on his arms upright, alert, as if his body instinctively recognized it as something wrong. Something antithetical to order, to life, to comprehension.
He had whispered prayer after prayer.
Now he sat with his spine straight, his hands folded in his lap like a child at temple, eyes flicking—not toward presentation, not toward the arguments, but sideways, again and again.
To Douglas.
The man sat beside him, still as a sculpture, arms folded across his chest, breath rising slow and deep. The drone was perched on his shoulder as always, legs twitching, mandibles flexing. Silent threat made mechanical.
It was the first full-team research meeting. Structure, roles, assignments—all formalized now that they had material to work with. Most logistics had been resolved. Ricken and Lian were assigned to lead the genetic implementation, their directive clear: take the Archivist's fragmented notes and make something functional. Identify what traits could be stabilized through nodal influence. Grow the clone. Match it, bone to bone, to the original corpse.
That part, at least, was almost familiar.
But as Ricken tried to hash out chemical requisitions with Siscly, voices around the table were beginning to climb in volume and heat.
Douglas's tone was flat, surgical. Words falling like weighted steel. "Short-range ping system. Minimal delay. Fifty-year deployment history. Archaic. It works."
Ricken blinked. He'd never heard Douglas say that many words consecutively. He wasn't sure anyone had.
Douglas's gaze swept the table. "Reliability is key. Miasmic nodal system is untested. Unknown side-effect is highly probable."
Miriam stood near the projection wall, diagrams of lattice maps spinning slowly behind her. Her eyes narrowed. "Archivist laid the foundation. It's only 'untested' in scale, not in function."
Douglas shifted in his seat—and Ricken's eyes betrayed him, catching on the way the man's thighs parted slightly, fabric pulling taut over sculpted muscle. He quickly looked away.
"Lack of sample size," Douglas said, voice harder now. "Unreliable data. Even an idiot would know."
The air in the room thinned.
It wasn't just what he said—it was how. Flat. Certain. Dismissive.
Miriam crossed her arms. The others stilled. Ricken's gut twisted.
"Then part of our research is increasing the sample size," Miriam countered, her voice lower now. Controlled. Sharp. "That's why we're here."
Douglas leaned forward, uncrossing his arms to press one finger to the table. He traced invisible lines in the air, illustrating nothing but his irritation. "Factor time. Resource. Effort. Risk outweighs return. Especially when return is minor."
"By that logic," Lian chirped with mock alarm, "we'd never have left our planetary womb."
Douglas looked at her. "Not the same. Not actively volatile."
Iblis, still buried in her calculations, added dryly, "Early adoption ensures adaptive architecture."
Fiorence didn't even look up from her tablet. "Aw, Dougie wants to feel included. Adorable. Please—keep going. Love how your mouth moves when you're wrong."
Douglas's jaw tensed. The drone on his shoulder gave a sharp click, the red lens glowing a shade hotter. Ricken could see the muscle along Douglas's jaw ripple, the tension bleeding into his neck, his shoulders.
"Not suggesting regression," he said. "Suggesting stability. Safer."
Miriam matched his posture, leaning forward just enough to make it a challenge. "Ping degrades. You want to crack open a skull every six months for maintenance?"
"Irrelevant." His voice was ice. "Initial install is sufficient."
Siscly snorted. "So dramatic."
"You worked with the Archivist," Miriam snapped. "You of all people should know what the nodal system's capable of."
Douglas paused. His body relaxed just slightly, tone cooled. "Yes. Containment mechanism. Nodal fixture. I know the dangers."
"She's the best there is. We're here to make the impossible possible. We won't do that by crawling back to safe old tech."
And then—
All eyes turned.
Miriam turned to Ricken, smile thin and sharp. "Well? You've been very quiet."
Ricken stiffened. That familiar duality flared again—two gravitational pulls at odds. The team: logical, confident, stable. And Douglas: singular, potent, alone. A pillar carved from something ancient and immovable.
'Follow Livia's guiding hand. Do not doubt Her children's voice.'
Ricken swallowed, breath shallow. "I think… both have merit," he said carefully. "Miasmic nodals are promising. But volatile. The ping method—proven. Conservative, yes, but stable. Maybe… use the nodals now, with ping as backup?"
Miriam nodded, approval sliding behind her eyes. "Thank you, Ricken."
Fiorence was already swiping files over. "Running nodal baseline. I'll prep the synthetic folds."
Within minutes, reports were drafted and shipped upstream to the Archivist.
Douglas was silent.
Stone still.
Then—
"Fuck this."
He stood, fast and abrupt. The chair scraped back hard against the metal floor. He didn't look at anyone. Just spun on his heel, the drone tightening on his shoulder as the door hissed open and slammed shut behind him.
Siscly lifted an eyebrow. "Charming."
"Is he always that outspoken?" Lian asked, tilting her head.
Miriam smirked faintly. "Youngest one on the team. He'll grow out of the tantrums."
"Stars, I hope not," Fiorence drawled, eyes on her screen. "That ass does fascinating things when he's stomping."
Ricken blinked hard. His face flushed instantly.
He buried his face in his datapad, fingers flicking uselessly through empty menus.
But it was too late. He could see it.
Douglas.
Stalking away, every stride taut, hips shifting, muscle flexing under tight fabric.
His brain flooded with heat.
***
Ten bodies.
All laid out in their stasis coffins, perfectly preserved, cold and inert beneath layers of gel membrane and synthetic mesh. Skin like wax, colorless. Tags embedded and stamped along their temple ridge, just under the dermis—long serial strings and internal IDs.
M-12. K-04. J-09…
The numbers ran down the side of their faces like brandings. Not names. Not even aliases. Just inventory codes. Proof of prior utility.
Ricken's fingers moved across his databand, cross-referencing tissue reports and neurological integrity. His eyes moved, scanning: somatic stability, enzyme degradation, myelin decay, signs of trauma. Internal vitals locked into static values.
They were still beautiful, in a strange way. Preserved just moments before decay could begin. Like statues sealed beneath glass. Like promises waiting to be broken.
They had been like him, once.
Employees.
Not martyrs. Not criminals. Not volunteers. Just workers. Systems analyst. Marketing manager. Field agent in corporate espionage. A mineral archaeologist. A lab assistant.
Human beings with salaries and pensions and inboxes full of unread messages.
Ricken's hand paused, hovering mid-air. A flutter of something caught in his chest.
He reminded himself—again—that he had filed his repudiation clause. He wouldn't end up here. He'd made sure. His family, devout and meticulous, had taught him early: read the fine print. In death, his rights defaulted to next of kin, and failing that, to the Temple of Livia. His flesh would not serve a second life in corporate hands.
These people hadn't done the same.
Or they had no one left to claim them.
No contract override. No will. No temple.
Now they were here.
Working for FuturesTech one more time.
Their muscles would twitch again in nutrient baths. Their eyes might open, and somewhere inside those skulls, fragments of themselves—old, ghostly, hollowed—would be overwritten. Nerve by nerve. Thought by thought.
Ricken exhaled slowly, the breath catching faintly in his throat before he forced it free. His hands moved with ritualistic precision—flicking through interface panels, swiping across control tabs. One by one, the stasis pods stirred to life, soft whirs and hydraulic hisses filling the sterile room as they lifted from their locked racks.
The cadavers drifted in sequence, guided by embedded magnetic stabilizers, their frozen limbs unmoving, eyes forever closed beneath synthetic membrane. Death made mechanical.
He watched the bodies slide into their temporary compartments—labeled, cataloged, made neat. All ready for further processing.
The cranial masses would need to be extracted and routed to Neuralogics. Miriam and Fiorence were expecting them, eager to begin their dive into the soft ruins of memory, personality, cognition. Neural tract mapping. Nodal compatibility. Whatever spark remained in those heads would be picked apart, neuron by neuron, until they found what they needed—or until nothing was left.
As for the rest of the flesh?
Waste.
Once DNA samples were drawn and properly sequenced, there would be no reason to keep the husks. No legal obligation. No ethical tether. Disposal was still a matter of team contention, but one suggestion had emerged with a sort of morbid popularity:
Jettisoning.
Right into Heremedicus. The red dwarf's gravity well would strip them down to atoms before they even crossed its event horizon. Quick. Clean. Irrevocable.
Ricken tried not to picture it. The slow drift. The release. The final burn.
He wasn't squeamish—this line of work had a way of burning the softness out of you—but something about today felt too... close. Too intimate. Thinking of what these bodies had once been, what they were now, and what he was doing to them…
It sat heavy on his chest.
He looked around the room, half-lit and humming with quiet machinery. The time flicked across his databand—late. Close to the curfew. The agreement he had made with Douglas: one o'clock, always back by one. It wasn't a hard rule. But it was still a rule.
And Ricken had no desire to spend the rest of the night rinsing bio-gel from his fingers, peeling DNA swabs out of tissue, sawing through bone to get at cerebral stems.
Not tonight.
Not after the weight of all this. The unspoken dead. The utilitarian ritual of recycling the human form.
He ran a final check on the containment protocols, ensured the pods were secured, sealed, and labeled for routing. With a few gestures, the lab lights dimmed to standby, the AI humming acknowledgment through the speaker.
Ricken had barely walked out to the hall when the lights cut out with a soft, traitorous click—then silence. No hum of backup generators. No ambient glow. Just pure dark. Unfiltered. Total.
Ricken froze, mid-step. The shift was immediate, overwhelming. Like the walls had collapsed inward, like the air itself had gone blind. There was nothing beneath his boots. No floor-glow strips. No grid pulse. No service seam to orient by. Just void.
This isn't supposed to happen.
Panic tried to claw its way into his throat, but he swallowed it down. FuturesTech had assured the station was safe—no orbital debris threats, no uncharted anomalies, no external compromise. He knew that. Had read the report twice. This section, this whole quadrant, had been cleared, sealed, secured.
The only reason he wasn't floating or dead was the thin comfort of inertia—no shift in gravity meant the essential systems were still alive somewhere. The core was holding. Life support intact. Stabilizers functioning.
He tapped the side of his databand, pulse jittering under the skin.
A weak circle of light spilled out around his hand. Barely enough to see the walls, let alone find his way. The cold metal of the band felt heavier now, like a relic from another life.
The hallway was unfamiliar in the dark. Wrong. He turned—left, he thought—but it might have been right. The corridors all mirrored each other in the older levels. This wasn't a problem under light. But now?
He pressed forward, breath shallow, footsteps echoing with a deadened crunch. The metal underfoot groaned faintly in the quiet.
The outermost edge of the ring. That's where he had been. He just needed to keep walking, and eventually, the corridor would curve into familiar territory. A stairwell. A lift. Anything.
But time unraveled in the dark.
Minutes bled together. Or was it chrons?
He didn't know.
He stumbled through narrowing hallways choked with conduit bundles and exposed cabling. Some sparked in defiant protest, others hissed as if something living slithered beneath them. The floors were no longer clean. His boots kicked over debris—twisted brackets, disconnected junction nodes, fragments of fractured plex. A long-dead tool case spilled open as he passed, metal clattering into the dark behind him like a warning.
The air changed.
He tasted it first—slightly metallic, too warm. Tainted with the subtle tang of degraded coolant and something fainter, older. Like dust on electronics. Like rot behind steel.
A part of him knew, without being told: this wasn't the refurbished section anymore.
He had crossed into the bones of the station. The places still waiting to be reborn. Or forgotten.
Something deeper than dark pressed in from all sides now.
He could call someone—but who?
It was too late for pleasantries, too dark for protocol. Any polite contact would be off-shift, asleep, unresponsive. Maybe one of the maintenance crew? But even that felt thin. Ricken thumbed through his databand, fingers shaking slightly, scrolling through internal contacts, grasping for something that resembled safety when—
1 new msg :: ASTRID Internal MsgNet
--------------------------------
dugchen:
02:48 — Where are you?
02:48 — You were supposed to be back over a chron ago.
--------------------------------
His breath caught.
The air stuttered in his chest as he fumbled with the interface, thumb slipping once before the reply keyed in.
--------------------------------
kently:
02:49 — I'm sorry. I got lost. The lights cut out near the Rebirth Lab and I think I took a wrong corridor.
02:49 — I'm not sure where I am.
--------------------------------
Silence followed.
Long enough that his gut twisted.
Then—
--------------------------------
dugchen:
02:51 — Alright, what do you see?
--------------------------------
Ricken lifted his arm, turned slowly in place. The beam of his databand was weak, ghostlike. He raised the camera, snapped an image: warped deck plating, a peeled-back support girder, cables like veins pulled through the metal, and ahead—a black void in the wall, the edges scorched, faint vapor still hissing out in slow ghostly tendrils.
He sent it.
The reply was immediate.
--------------------------------
dugchen:
02:53 — Do not get close to that opening.
02:53 — That's an exhaust breach from the lower vent engines. They go active every half chron. You're standing in a danger zone.
02:54 — Sit down. Stay put.
--------------------------------
He obeyed.
Just gravity pulling him down until he was curled beside a cold bulkhead, knees drawn up, databand flickering dim against the dark.
Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. Twenty.
At twenty-five, the wall screamed.
A roar, deafening and near-invisible, tore from the rupture like hell exhaling. The air warped—bent—as heat blasted across the corridor in a shimmering line of death. Had he still been standing there, it would've carved his skin from his bones.
He couldn't breathe. He might have screamed. He didn't know.
His hands were shaking too hard to feel real.
Still, he typed.
--------------------------------
kently:
03:18 — You were right. There was a vent purge. If I'd gotten closer I think it would've melted my skin.
03:18 — Douglas? Are you there? Hello? Please answer.
03:25 — Please.
03:36 — Are you asleep? Did you fall asleep? I'm sorry if I woke you earlier I just
03:40 — I don't know which direction to go. I'm trying to stay calm but it's very dark.
03:41 — Douglas?
--------------------------------
Nothing.
No reply. No ping. No typing indicator. Just void.
Ricken curled tighter into himself, heart hammering against his ribs like it wanted out. The air was thick and wrong. His skin was tacky, damp with sweat, the heat still clinging even as the silence returned. His mouth was dry. His eyes burned.
He wasn't supposed to be here. This wasn't his place.
He was a geneticist. He belonged in sterile labs and observation chambers, not crawling through dead corridors like a stray rat in a godforsaken metal carcass.
He hugged his knees tighter. His thoughts spun and crashed against each other, louder than the dark.
And just when despair began to thread its fingers around his chest—
Something moved.
A flicker. Distant. Red.
It blinked once, then again—flat against the wall.
Clicking. Mechanical.
Rounding the bend like a predator.
A small, spider-like shape, legs whispering against the floor, optic lens glowing blood-bright.
The drone. Douglas's drone.
Ricken nearly jumped from where he sat, a jolt of unfiltered joy cracking through the haze of fear and fatigue. Never in his life had he imagined he'd be glad to see that infernal, glowing red eye in the dead black of night.
"O-over here!" he called, scrambling upright—but his legs betrayed him, buckling as blood-starved muscle gave out beneath him. He hit the floor again with a grunt, one leg twisted awkwardly beneath him, numb and tingling from too long folded.
The drone skittered over like a summoned thing, fluid and fast, and without hesitation dropped into his lap.
Its weight was negligible. Its presence, overwhelming.
The red optic lens whirred into focus, adjusting, centering on Ricken's face. The mandible-like appendages clacked against its shell in rhythmic twitching. It stared, unblinking. Then it began circling—tight, precise spirals—around the length of his thighs as if dancing a mechanical waltz of triumph.
"H-hello…" Ricken muttered, voice shaky, lips curled in a weak smile. The absurdity wasn't lost on him—being relieved at the return of a spider drone. But he welcomed it, ridiculous or not.
Moments later, the echo of footsteps drifted through the corridor. Measured. Bare. One foot heavy. One foot bare.
Douglas appeared in the dim.
His usually slicked-back hair was a mess, strands falling forward in damp waves, framing his pale face in shadow and disorder. His eyes were low-lidded, mouth parted slightly—still not fully awake, or simply existing in that hazy threshold of awareness that made him somehow more dangerous. His coverall was only partially fastened, chest bare beneath the loose fabric, pale skin catching what little red light the drone offered. One boot on. The other—missing.
He stopped a few marks away, gazing down at Ricken with unreadable silence.
Ricken scrambled to explain. "Uh—i-it's my leg, just—just a minute, I just need to—" He hissed through his teeth as he tried stretching it, the numbness stubborn, clinging.
Douglas didn't wait.
He closed the distance in two steps and crouched beside him.
And then—without warning—his hand was on Ricken's calf, thumb pressing into the muscle with brisk, practiced strokes.
Ricken knew the technique. FT first-aid manuals had diagrams for it. It was textbook—stimulate circulation, relieve tension, assist reoxygenation.
But to Ricken, in this moment, it felt like everything else.
The pressure. The heat. The hand.
And worst of all, the traitorous rush that hit him a heartbeat later—blood pooling, but not to his leg.
"N-no, stop!" he cried, voice cracking, panic flaring. His face burned crimson, the shame boiling so fast it made his vision blur.
Douglas stilled instantly.
The drone's optic clicked, the only light between them painting Douglas's face in eerie red glow. And what Ricken saw in that moment made his pulse stutter.
The man's expression wasn't one of confusion. Or annoyance.
It was still. Intent. Focused.
Predatory.
His features, cast in dim red, were shadowed in ways that turned the sharpness of his jaw and cheekbones into something feral. Hungry.
Ricken swallowed, his voice a trembling whisper.
"I-…I can do it myself. Please don't… don't touch me."
The silence stretched. And then—Douglas lifted his hand away. Wordless. He rose, stepped back. The pressure evaporated.
Ricken's breath hitched. His body was trembling with something more than cold. He murmured, barely audible:
"...thank Livia…"
He forced himself upright on shaky limbs, eyes down, hands trembling as they brushed off nonexistent dust from his thighs.
Douglas turned without a word, the hem of his half-fastened coverall swaying slightly with the movement. The drone zipped ahead, its glowing red eye illuminating the hallway in jittery pulses, casting long, warped shadows across the walls. Ricken hesitated only a moment before following, legs stiff, breath still shallow.
His heart hadn't stopped racing. His cheeks still burned. And—Livia forbid—he didn't even want to acknowledge the tightness still haunting the front of his pants.
He needed distraction. Anything.
"Th-thanks for… coming to get me," Ricken blurted, his voice cracking a little too high. The words spilled out, rushed and unsteady. "I—I didn't think you'd come yourself…"
Douglas said nothing. Just walked. The silence gnawed.
"I thought you were still…" Ricken continued, desperate now, "…uhm, mad. About earlier. The meeting. The vote."
Still nothing. Only the drone's legs clicking along the corridor's side like mechanical rain.
Ricken's voice cracked into the air again. "I—I'm not even sure how I got down here. I could've sworn I just went straight—but maybe the corridor shifted, or I missed a junction…"
The light from the drone flickered unevenly down the hall. The station walls here were rougher—filthy, untreated, still bearing scorch marks from whatever accident or neglect had left this sector half-eaten. Corrosion kissed the joints. Debris cluttered the corners. This was rot—the unremodeled.
"Why did the lights go out? D-do you know?" he asked, half-hoping for an answer, half-dreading what it might be.
No reply.
Just Douglas' footfalls. Calm. Unchanged.
The drone clacked once, louder. As if to remind him: You're still being watched.
Then Douglas turned—sharply—veering into a narrow side passage tucked into a recess of the corridor. The light thinned immediately. The walls narrowed. A maintenance duct turned hallway.
Ricken hesitated.
"I—I don't think I've passed through here before," he said nervously, stopping at the threshold. "Not that I'm—uh—not that I'm doubting you or anything!" he added quickly.
Douglas poked his head back around the corner, shadow sliding across half his face. His eyes gleamed faintly in the red light.
"Shortcut," he said and disappeared again down the hall.
Ricken stood frozen for a beat longer, stomach twisting.
The image came unbidden—those old Livian fables they'd told at the temples, whispered in candlelight. Wicked men who lured pious daughters and sons of the Order down into the depths of the world, into abandoned mines, broken cathedrals, hollow ships. Seduced them with promises. Dragged them into temptation. Led them into the abyss.
His throat dried.
"Blessed are the sons who turn from the shadows and know the voice of the divine."
Ricken stepped into the narrow hall.
To his surprise, the footing was smoother here—no more treacherous gaps or loose plates. The walls, though still unadorned metal, bore a faint sheen. The drone's red optic bounced off the reflective surfaces, amplifying its glow. It was almost bright in here, relatively speaking. A brief reprieve from the darkness.
"Uh… I…" Ricken started again, clinging to the sound of his own voice like a lifeline. "You… type better."
He immediately winced.
"I mean—you type more. Like, more words than you speak. Because, you know…"
He trailed off, soul evaporating. His voice should be classified as a self-destruct protocol. He wanted to curl into the wall and cease.
Douglas slowed, glancing back.
The passage forced him to slouch slightly, the ceiling low enough that his broad shoulders looked out of place here—like something carved from stone forced into a corridor meant for pipes.
"…easier to write," he said at last. His voice was low, half-muttered. Then he turned and continued down the path.
Ricken blinked, surprised he got an answer at all. "What do you mean? Oh! You mean it's easier to express yourself?" The excitement bled into his words too quickly, too eagerly. "I feel the same way too! That's why I write journals. Helps keep my thoughts straight. It's great for tracking prayers and daily confessions and everything."
His voice bounced against the metal walls.
"My sisters recommended it when I was five. Said it helps train emotional discipline and keeps sin at bay—"
He stopped. Douglas hadn't said a word since.
Ricken glanced over at him, shrinking a little. "I—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, uh… bore you."
His voice went quiet. Embarrassed. Eyes looking anywhere but the man beside him, desperately scanning the floor like it might open and offer him a hole to vanish into.
"…not bored," Douglas said, voice even. They emerged into a wider corridor—newer. Clean. It bore the signs of refurbishment: smooth plating, cable mounts aligned, conduit housing polished and bolted down. It still smelled of treated polymer and thermal sealant.
Douglas stopped, raised his arm, and projected a full map of the station from his databand. The blue light bled across his body—mixing with the ambient red of the drone's optic.
"Just thinking," he said, spinning the map in 3D. "About the blackout. Probability of faulty wire. Old hardware." His eyes scanned the network nodes. "Working on solution." Then, after a pause: "No journal. Just messages."
Ricken didn't hear most of it.
He was staring—too long, too obviously—at Douglas's chest. The interface's soft light lit his exposed skin in washes of blue and crimson. The contrast made his torso look sculpted from living marble—tight lines of muscle catching each hue like brushstrokes.
Ricken was still staring when Douglas turned his head—and caught him.
He snapped his gaze up too fast.
"…uh—I was…" His voice cracked. "I was checking your map."
It was a lie so flimsy it dissolved mid-air.
Douglas gave no reply. No smirk. No nod. Just turned again and continued forward without a word.
Ricken followed in dead silence the rest of the way.
The moment they reached the room, Ricken broke off like a fugitive fleeing guilt and shame, beelining to his cot. He dropped into the sanctuary of the blanket without ceremony, dragging it up over his head like armor.
He didn't remove his lab coat. Didn't kick off his boots.
Just buried himself.
And prayed the blankets would burn the memory of Douglas's gaze out of his skull.
***
"He's a nanotechnologist, technically," Lian said with a dismissive flick of her fingers, eyes glued to the glowing projection as she manipulated the 3D gene map.
The work was grueling.
Stem cell duplication, genome priming—that part was standard. Corporate biotech ran entire divisions on routine BioSynthesis. But introducing epigenetic traits through a Miasmic node interface? That was another animal entirely. A wild, unknown thing neither of them had ever worked with before. And it showed. Every time a node sync failed, every time a sample degraded unexpectedly, every time the miasma refused to integrate, it reminded them—this wasn't in the manuals.
"Technically?" Ricken asked, delicately lowering the access node—a small, ring-sized device inset with a pocket of suspended miasma—onto a petri dish. The fluid inside shimmered like ink under pressure.
"Mhm," Lian replied, half-distracted. "Title only. But no credentials. No academia. No records. No listed apprenticeships. Not even a shadow-internship with a minor house."
She let out a delighted squeal as her own sample began to shift—stem cells reacting visibly under magnification, blooming into complex shapes like time-lapse footage of embryogenesis.
Ricken paused, hand hovering above his next sample. His brows furrowed. "But… how does that work, then?"
"No idea," she replied, finally lifting her head from the scope. The skin around her eyes was red, marked where she'd pressed too long against the interface. "Miriam probably knows. She has access to more of the internal files. Not that she's sharing much."
She gestured absently toward his workstation, and Ricken, flustered, returned to it—adjusting the calibration on the node carefully, trying not to spill a drop of the miasma onto his gloves.
Then Lian's voice came again, softer. Curious.
"Is he bothering you?"
Ricken nearly dropped the petri dish. His fingers jerked, catching it mid-air before it could tilt.
"What? No—no, not at all," he said quickly, too quickly. The laugh that followed was brittle, a thin sheet of ice over boiling water. "Why would you think that?"
"Because you're asking all these questions about him," Lian said lightly, almost sing-song, though her eyes never left the interface. She adjusted the render angle with a flick of her wrist, magnifying a cellular junction to triple scale. "And I can't imagine why you would, unless he was making you uncomfortable somehow."
Her voice softened, just enough to make the next word heavier.
"Or unsafe."
That landed harder than it had any right to.
Ricken felt his face begin to flush—heat crawling slowly up his neck like rising water. Not from fear. Not entirely. But something adjacent. Something darker. Unbidden images surged forward again, dredged from the pit of his memory like guilty treasure.
Douglas's hand on his leg.
The pressure. The heat. The focus.
His calf ached faintly, like the imprint of a brand long faded.
Ricken shifted in his seat, eyes fixed firmly on the genetic interface, as if by sheer force of will he could exorcise the thought from his body. "N-no," he stammered. "Nothing like that. I just…"
He swallowed, voice brittle. "I just thought it was a good idea. To know my team. Understand who I'm working with."
It wasn't a lie. Not exactly.
It just wasn't the whole shape of the truth.
Not when every time he closed his eyes, he could still see him. That pale chest half-bared. The dip of his collarbone. Those goddamned lips—just parted enough to suggest—
"Here," Lian said, waving him over with one hand, her voice tight with excitement beneath her usual ease.
Ricken set the petri dish aside, fingers trembling slightly, and moved to her workstation. The interface glowed with soft white-blue light, and there, suspended midair, was the genomic structure rendered in full detail—a perfect helix, strands laced with their epigenetic fingerprints, trait markers glimmering like embedded stars.
Not just any gene set. The gene set.
A perfect duplicate.
Every sequence accounted for. Every fold in its place. Every trait expressed as it had existed in that final, frozen breath of the donor's life. Preserved, captured, replicated.
Ricken's heart stuttered. Then fluttered.
"Is it—" he began, but the words failed him. He didn't need to finish. Didn't need her to say it aloud.
The data was the confirmation.
They had done it.
They had folded reality itself. Bent chaos to the shape of memory. Crafted an exact replica of identity, preserved not just in DNA, but in state—a genetic snapshot calibrated to the precise temporal imprint of death. Miasmic nodal influence had held. The impossible—held.
This wasn't just a clone. It was a resurrection in molecular language.
And he had helped build it.
Ricken stood in silence for a long breath, the glow of the interface painting him pale.
He had never felt so close to divinity.