"Hold still, or I'll accidentally hit a nerve and you'll spend the next week pissing on your shoes," Elara snapped.
She didn't look at me. She was too busy prepping a vacuum vial, her fingers moving with a clinical precision that made my skin crawl. We were crammed into a safehouse that smelled like ozone and damp concrete, the kind of place where people went to disappear or get murdered.
I shifted on the rusted exam table, the cold metal biting into my lower back. "You're not a doctor, Quinn. You're a rogue engineer with a stolen kit. Why the hell are we doing this again?"
"Because your blood is doing things that shouldn't be biologically possible," she said, finally meeting my eyes. Her gaze was ice, but there was a flicker of something else—hunger. Not the kind that wants dinner. The kind that wants a breakthrough. "And because I'm the only reason you aren't a specimen in a corporate jar right now."
She stepped closer. Too close. I could smell the sharp scent of sterile alcohol and something faintly sweet, like vanilla hiding under a layer of industrial chemicals. She reached for my arm, her grip firm, pulling me toward the edge of the table.
"Don't fight me," she whispered, her voice dropping an octave. The authority in it was sudden, heavy. "Just let me take the sample."
I looked at the needle. Then at her. "What happens if I say no?"
Elara paused, her thumb brushing against the inside of my wrist. The contact was brief, but it sent a jolt through me that had nothing to do with the glitches in my system. She leaned in, her breath warm against my ear. "Then you can find another way to keep your heart beating while the Hounds are tracking your scent across three sectors. Your choice, Kyle."
I scoffed and relaxed my arm. "Fine. Just don't take too much. I'm already feeling lightheaded."
"I'm not a vampire," she muttered, though the way she watched the dark red fluid spiral into the vial suggested otherwise.
For a few minutes, the only sound was the hum of a portable centrifuge and the distant scream of a siren somewhere in the Rust Belt. I watched her. She was focused, her brow furrowed, a stray strand of dark hair falling across her face. She looked fragile, but the way she handled the tech—the absolute dominance she had over the machines—told me she was the most dangerous thing in the room.
I tried to sit up, but a sudden wave of nausea hit me. My vision blurred, the edges of the room fraying into static.
"Whoa, easy," Elara said, her hand instantly on my chest to push me back down.
Her palm was warm, pressing through the thin fabric of my shirt. I could feel her heartbeat—or maybe it was mine. The proximity was suffocating. I could see the tiny gold flecks in her irises, the way her lips parted slightly as she scanned my face for signs of shock.
"I'm fine," I lied, my voice sounding like it had been dragged through gravel.
"You're lying. Your pulse is spiking," she countered, her hand lingering on my chest a second too long. She didn't pull away. Neither did I. There was a tension between us, a wire stretched so tight it was humming. It wasn't trust. It was something uglier, something born from the fact that we were both desperate and trapped in the same sinking ship.
She shifted her weight, her hip brushing against the side of the table. "You're a glitch, Kyle. A beautiful, walking disaster. Do you have any idea what your blood does to chrome?"
"I've noticed things break when I touch them," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "Not exactly a great party trick."
"It's not breaking," she whispered, her eyes dropping to my neck. "It's consuming. You're not just destroying the implants. You're eating the data. The power. You're a living EMP with a digestive system."
She reached out, her fingers grazing the skin of my forearm, right where the needle had entered. The touch was light, almost tentative, but it felt like a brand. I didn't pull away. I wanted to see how far she'd go. I wanted to know if she was actually afraid of me, or if she was just pretending to be in control.
"Why do you actually need this?" I asked, my voice low. "The 'cure' story. Is that all it is?"
Elara's expression hardened. The vulnerability vanished, replaced by that cold, corporate mask. She stepped back abruptly, the sudden distance leaving me feeling strangely cold.
"My business is my own," she said, turning back to the centrifuge. "Your job is to stay alive long enough for me to figure out how to stop your cells from rotting you from the inside out."
"And if I don't want to be fixed?"
"Then you'll be a very expensive pile of organic sludge in about a month," she snapped. "Now shut up and let the machine run."
I leaned back, staring at the ceiling. The silence returned, heavy and oppressive. I could hear the centrifuge whirring, a high-pitched drone that felt like it was drilling into my skull. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the chrome—the way it melted, the way it screamed.
Ten minutes later, the machine beeped.
Elara didn't say a word. She stepped toward the monitor, her silhouette sharp against the blue glow of the screen. I watched her shoulders tense. I saw her breath hitch.
"No way," she whispered.
I sat up, ignoring the dizzy spell. "What? What is it?"
She didn't answer immediately. She was scrolling through the data, her eyes widening. She looked at me, then back at the screen, then back at me again. There was a look of genuine shock on her face—maybe even fear.
"This isn't possible," she said, her voice shaking. "The sequence... it's not just mutating. It's rewriting itself in real-time. Every time I run the scan, the markers have shifted."
"Speak English, Quinn. Am I dying or not?"
She turned the monitor toward me. The screen was a mess of cascading red and gold lines, a genetic map that looked more like a circuit board than a human DNA strand. The markers were shifting, sliding, evolving right before our eyes.
"You're not dying," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "But you're not human anymore, Kyle. Not in the way that matters. Your genes... they're not just fighting the chrome. They're integrating it. You're becoming something the Corps didn't think was possible."
I stared at the screen, a cold feeling settling in my gut. "What does that mean?"
Elara looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a flash of something like pity. "It means the Hounds aren't just coming to kill you. They're coming to harvest you. And according to this..."
She stopped. The monitor suddenly flashed a bright, aggressive crimson. A notification popped up in the corner of the screen—a remote override. Someone had breached the safehouse's encrypted line.
"Someone's in the system," Elara gasped, her fingers flying across the keyboard to lock the port.
But it was too late. A voice boomed through the room's intercom, distorted and metallic, echoing off the concrete walls.
"Sample 0-Alpha detected. Location locked. All units, converge on Sector 4. Burn everything but the blood."
Elara froze, her hand still hovering over the keyboard. She looked at me, her eyes wide with a sudden, sharp realization.
"Kyle," she whispered, "they didn't just track your scent. They tracked the scan."