"There's only one way out," Dev said calmly.
His voice echoed strangely now—like the room bent itself around his words.
Maya was holding onto Elias, who still looked pale and shaken from the trance. Kiran stood beside them, unusually quiet, fists clenched, like something inside him was resisting a scream.
Dev stepped forward.
"We go down."
Kiran blinked. "Down?"
Dev turned slowly toward the rusted elevator shaft sealed behind steel doors at the far end of the hallway—where the emergency signs had long peeled off and the walls looked scorched.
> "Where it all started," Dev said. "The original Thanaton Core is in the sub-basement. Lab 0."
Maya's voice trembled. "How do you even know that?"
Dev didn't answer.
---
The descent began.
They pried the shaft doors open manually. The elevator hadn't worked in decades. The air smelled of iron and something older—like rust mixed with rot.
They descended by ladder. Step by step.
The walls grew darker. No pipes. No wires. Just smooth concrete, like the whole lower floor had been buried on purpose.
When they reached the bottom, the silence was different.
Thick.
As if sound had no place here.
---
Kiran froze midway through the hallway.
His fingers twitched violently.
His breath caught.
And suddenly—he spoke in a voice that wasn't his.
> "Subject 12-K: vitals stable. Neural sync complete. Initiate fragmentation process."
He blinked rapidly.
"What the f—what was that?" he gasped, grabbing his head.
Blood trickled from his nose.
Elias looked at him, terrified.
"You're glitching," Dev said, almost sympathetically.
"We all will. Eventually."
They moved forward. Slowly.
The hallway opened into a massive circular room.
High ceiling. Dome-like.
Glass panels shattered. Monitors broken.
But in the center—
The Machine.
The original Thanaton Core.
A giant coil-like structure, part-organic, part-metal, shaped like a human spine—but ten feet tall, cables tangled like nerves. Transparent pods lined the walls, each holding…
"Are those—?" Maya's voice caught.
Bodies.
Human.
But only partly. Some were emaciated. Others were too still.
And a few stared right at them, eyes open.
Frozen. But aware.
---
Kiran stumbled back.
> "They're not dead," he muttered.
"They're stuck."
And then he vomited on the floor.
Elias approached the machine.
Something pulled at him.
A low-frequency hum crawled under his skin. Like his heartbeat was syncing to it.
He reached out—and the moment his fingers brushed one of the machine's coils—
FLASH.
He wasn't in the lab anymore.
---
> He stood in the same room.
But the lights were red. Alarms blared. Scientists screamed.
And someone—a woman—stood by the console, yelling:
"We can't turn it off now! They're inside it! If we shut it down, we kill them all!"
Elias looked down.
He was wearing a lab coat.
He turned toward the glass reflection.
And saw—Dev.
But he wasn't older. Or changed.
> Dev stood beside him. In the reflection.
Also in a lab coat.
Smiling. Calm.
Too calm.
> "Fragment 26-E successfully embedded," Dev said. "Syncing partial memory states to peripheral neurons."
Elias looked at his own hand.
It shimmered. Not flesh. Not fully. Something was wrong.
> "You're not the researcher," a voice whispered inside his head.
"You're the fragment that hid inside him."
---
The vision shattered.
Elias staggered backward, gasping.
Dev caught him.
"I know what you saw," he whispered.
"You're not the first to remember your other lives."
---
The machine came alive.
It groaned. The lights on the pods flickered.
And one of the bodies in the glass—moved.
Its lips twitched.
It began to mouth a name:
> "E… li… as…"
---