Part 1 - Chapter 1
The surveillance doors parted with a hydraulic hiss as Nayth stormed through, steel scraping back just in time to keep from catching his shoulder. They should’ve called him the instant she’d hit the grid. Instead, they’d sat around with their thumbs up their asses, and now he was left to clean up their mess.
A half-dozen heads whipped toward him. One tech jolted upright with a hurried salute, another fumbled with a tablet, fingers slipping over glass in panic. Monitors lined the far wall in an unbroken grid of muted blues, but Nayth’s eyes snapped on the feed dead center—Sector 12, Cell 08.
“What the fuck is this?” His voice drowned out the screens’ electronic hum as he stabbed a finger at the monitor. “You’ve had Dekker’s daughter here?”
No one answered quickly enough. He strode forward, boots hammering the metal grate.
“Colgrave, sir…” a young officer started before trailing off into mumblings about orders and supposed protocols. Nayth silenced him with a glare hot enough to melt iron.
“Dekker’s fucking daughter has been in custody, and no one thought to flag a Tier-One alert?”
Behind him, the room shuffled awkwardly. More muttered excuses, talk of clearance levels and compartmentalized intel. Nayth didn’t hear any of it. His eyes had returned to the monitor where Cell 08 filled the frame.
Aeris Dekker hung suspended in the chamber’s center, arms wrenched overhead by magnetic cuffs, pale skin a canvas of bruises, every tremor of her muscles betraying the exhaustion of being forced to hold herself upright. Her head tipped down, and silver-blonde hair fell forward to curtain her face.
Nayth’s fingers curled into fists, the strain coiling through his forearms. He stepped to the main console and snatched the thin folder from its tray—real paper, because no one wanted a digital record of what had been done here. He flipped it open, eyes dragging fast over the endless pages, jaw locking against the grind of his teeth.
It read like a manual written by butchers: three rounds of AMPH-7 injections, neuroburn cycles knifed through the lower spine, repeated blasts of pain resonance, each agony followed by a healing agent to drag her back from the brink so they could begin again. Her nerves had been shredded, rewired, flayed raw until there was little left but reflex—and still, she’d given them nothing.
He snapped the file shut and flung it back on the desk. “Clear the room.”
A few heads lifted in surprise, but no bodies moved.
The officer in charge finally heaved himself from his chair, a stocky man with captain’s stripes on his collar, his jawline choked beneath a patchy beard. “With respect, sir, she’s a dead end. Execution orders came through not twenty minutes ago. We’ve gotten zero intel from her. At this point, she’s just another half-starved prisoner burning resources we don’t have.”
Nayth didn’t spare him a glance. “I said: Clear. The fucking. Room.”
Silence followed the order, two long beats before it broke under the scrape of chairs and the shuffle of boots. One by one, the team filed out, a last scattering of uneasy glances cast toward the monitor’s feed as the door hissed shut behind them.
Only Nayth remained now. Him, the screen’s glow, and the fragile body hanging in its dim-blue light.
He turned from the monitors, anger still drumming relentlessly through his veins. Pain hadn’t broken her. Neither had the drugs—psychological degradation, chemical deprivation, nights bled empty of sleep—none of it had cracked her silence. Which meant it was time to change tactics.
Crossing to the locker set flush into the wall, he keyed in his code. The biometric scanner pinged softly as the seal disengaged. He drew his sidearm from its holster—standard issue, tempered polymer, sight-locked—and stared at it for a long, steady second before setting it aside on the upper tray.
Some idiot years back hadn’t bothered. A prisoner had managed to rip the weapon free mid-session and blown a hole straight through the fucker’s face. She’d taken down half a dozen more officers before they put her down with enough volts to stop a bull’s heart. The cleanup crew’d had to hose down the walls after that incident.
That story was drilled into every new recruit who came through these halls. No one wanted a repeat of that tragedy.
Nayth shut the locker with a final click and turned toward the equipment rack spanning the opposite wall. Rows of military-standard gear hung in orderly symmetry: gloves, visors, body armor plates, hard-case masks, neural dampeners, an assortment of restraints gleaming under the light, injectable vials with neat white labels spelling out their chemical innards. Some cocktails sharpened pain, others stripped the mind, and a few were known to turn soldiers themselves into more efficient killers—allowing the body to bypass its usual limits in strength or stamina.
He passed them all by and reached for what mattered most. A mask—smooth, matte black, curved to sheath jaw and cheekbones. Prisoners rarely survived long enough to care who their interrogator had been, but procedure demanded anonymity all the same. For Nayth, though, the mask was more than a veil. It was a boundary line between man and monster. Slip it on, and the vestiges of humanity fell silent.
A steel-framed mirror leaned just beyond the rack. His reflection caught him there: shoulders broad beneath his uniform, black hair tousled from the day’s chaos, jaw locked tight. But it was the eyes that rooted him—stark, unflinching and unnervingly bright. Kaitoke green, someone had once called them. Like crystalized moss. In the sterile light, they almost seemed to glow.
He stared for a beat longer, then lifted the mask into place. It sealed with a magnetic click, swallowing everything but those eyes.
He stepped to the door and palmed the control. Time to see what she’d do when the pain ended and the real breaking began.
