Warning: This chapter contains intense scenes of physical violence and torture. Proceed at your own discretion.
"I killed them."
Cypher stared at him for a long moment. His face didn't move, but something behind his eyes had started recalculating.
"How? That's not possible."
"You never said killing was forbidden." Zenon's voice was calm, broken on the inside in a way that didn't reach his face. "I defended myself. I still don't understand what a family like Silvestri wants with ordinary students."
Something shifted in Cypher's expression. Not shock. Closer to sudden attention —
"How did you know my lineage?"
"You look like Sarah." The plainness of it landed harder than any detail could have. Then, heavier: "You people aren't what you seem. Monsters behind a mask."
"And how did you reach that conclusion?"
"You've been playing us from the start. Five dead, dressed up in mystery. Rules full of holes. A fake spy. A fake stimulant." He raised his eyes to meet Cypher's directly. "None of it was real. You want obedient slaves. You're bastards. And I have no way to stand against you."
Cypher went quiet.
"You're right... partly." There was admiration in his voice he didn't bother hiding. "But you're also a killer. Selfish. That doesn't make you different from us. It doesn't make you clean."
"I know. But you're the reason." He glanced at the corner where Haïssi sat trembling, silent. "The percentage is at ninety now. I'll sacrifice myself to close it. Let him go. He becomes a servant, but he stays alive." He raised his eyes. "What do you say?"
Cypher looked at him for a long, silent stretch, then turned his head away.
"Fine. Chain him. Take him to Virüs's lab."
Two men came and seized his arms. He didn't fight them.
In the corridor, he saw a face he knew. Sarah, standing against the wall. When her eyes found him, her expression froze for a second, then she collapsed to her knees.
"What happened to him."
He didn't look back. Kept walking.
---
The lab was a cold, white room, its smell sterilized in a way that hurt the nose. Instruments arranged with excessive precision on a metal table, a white bed at the center. They chained his hands to the frame and left. The door locked.
He stared at the light fixture.
*So. This is the end.*
He didn't think about escape. He didn't want to.
*How's my father doing now? He wanted me in the army. I'm sorry. Even now, I don't know what I wanted to do.*
An image passed through his mind — one that never happened. Waking up early. Breakfast with his parents. A girl laughing at something stupid he'd said. A job. Children. And his father, finally, looking at him differently.
*All of that was possible. Before Alex.*
**But I didn't do anything wrong.**
The door opened.
Virüs walked in, a collection of syringes in his hand. His glasses caught the white light. His expression was that of an office worker walking into his desk on an ordinary morning.
"I prepared quite the selection. I rarely get an opportunity like this." He paused, studied him. "You look calm. Have you convinced yourself you don't deserve to live?"
Zenon spat in his face.
Virüs stopped. He wiped his face slowly, deliberately, with two fingers, as if brushing off dust — nothing more significant than that. Then he picked up the first syringe.
"Bold little dog."
He drove it in.
The scream filled the room.
Virüs laughed, and drove in the second. The third. The fourth. The fifth. Zenon screaming, pulling against the restraints until his wrists turned red.
"Still conscious." He set the syringes aside, picked up a small case of needles. "The body, then."
He drove them into his fingertips, one after another, slow and deliberate. The screaming rose with each one until every needle had disappeared under the skin.
"Ever heard of acupuncture? That's exactly what I'm doing. Treating you for the disease of pain."
He opened a rack. Larger needles, blue. He moved toward his face — Zenon gasping now, tears running down not from grief, but from pain alone, and in his eyes a hatred he didn't try to hide.
"This body." He said it with genuine fascination. He began driving them into his chest.
"That look. So defiant. Let's remove it from where it lives."
He picked up two needles and drove one into each eye.
Then he stopped. He'd noticed something — a needle still protruding from a fingertip.
"How dare you refuse my orders."
He fetched a pair of scissors.
And cut.
---
The screaming reached the corridor.
Cypher, sitting with Sarah some distance from the door, closed his eyes for a single moment. Then he stood.
When he walked in, Zenon had stopped screaming. He was laughing. A broken, hysterical laugh, as if he'd passed through some point beyond the pain and fallen out the other side into somewhere else.
Cypher looked at Virüs with a stare that hid nothing.
"This is disgusting."
"You wouldn't understand." Virüs didn't lift his head from his instruments. "Stay in your lane — war is your domain. We scientists have our own pleasures."
He kept arranging his tools as he spoke.
"Speaking of which. I'm registering this boy as a special case. Number 101. Resisted for a long time, then broke. I don't care what you tell the higher-ups — this boy is mine until I'm finished with him."
Cypher turned toward him slowly.
"You're giving me orders?"
He grabbed him by the throat with one hand, slammed him into the wall.
"You're here to do what I want. This boy belongs to us. To Albatross. I won't let your research — yours and knotch's — wreck our plans. The palace needs servants, not failed experiments. Get out of this room. Now."
"Sir Cypher," one of the workers said from the doorway, cautious, "please, remove—"
Without even turning, he blew the man's head open.
He released his grip on Virüs.
"I'll go." Virüs's tone was calm in a way that felt ominous, straightening his collar. "But next time, the case I experiment on won't be from here. It'll be you. And I'll register you as a case... with no equal."
"You'll die soon. You won't get the chance."
Virüs left. He closed the door quietly.
---
Cypher turned toward Zenon.
He was murmuring, hallucinating, eyes fixed on the ceiling despite everything.
"Dad. Mom." The words came broken, from somewhere far away. "I know what I want now. I'll join the army. I'll wake up early. I'll eat whatever's put in front of me. Haïssi, I'll make new friends. I won't philosophize anymore. I just... want to go back. I want to be ordinary again."
Cypher watched him in silence.
*What a pitiful thing.*
He pulled a syringe from his pocket. Green, faintly glowing under the white light. He drove it calmly into his own arm.
The needles began pulling themselves out, one after another. The severed finger returned. The wounds closed. The eyes cleared.
Zenon took one deep breath.
"This feeling..." He looked at his hands, then at him. "You're—" He stopped. "What was the point of all that suffering?"
"Medicine. To heal."
"Why did you do this?" A simple question, nothing added. "Do you intend to betray them, or what?"
"That simply? That's not what I should be seeing after everything that happened to you. I healed you because I wanted to. Tell me — why did you sacrifice yourself?"
"I won't die." He said it flatly. "I'll survive."
Cypher looked at him, something shifting slowly behind his eyes.
"What are you talking about? What feeling makes you say that?"
"I don't know. But it's a feeling empty of any feeling at all."
"You asked me why I healed you." He looked at him directly now, with total clarity this time. "I healed you so we could start over. You — the one who won't die."
To be continued…