Chapter 48
Blackout
Lucan
My blood is electricity.
It doesn’t move through my veins like it used to.
It burns. It floods every nerve, every synapse, every hidden wire under my skin and turns my body into something too fast, too loud, too awake.
I can feel my heartbeat in my teeth. I can feel the muscles in my hands flexing before I decide to move them.
I can feel the air change when a door opens three corridors away.
Pain isn’t a warning anymore.
It’s the fuel.
It starts behind my eyes, a white-hot pressure that makes the world sharpen at the edges until everything looks like it was carved out of glass. It crawls down my spine, into my ribs, into my arms, and the only relief is motion. Impact. Destruction. The moment something gives under my hands.
They put it in me.
I don’t need to know the name. I know the taste of it in my throat, the metallic bite that lingers like a coin on my tongue. I know the way my stomach turned, the way my skin went cold and then too hot, too tight, like it couldn’t hold me anymore. I remember the restraints. The lights. The voices.
I don’t think in sentences.
I think in targets.
Door. Lock. Camera. Throat.
I move, and the facility moves with me. I don’t run like a man.
I run like a thing that has decided there is no such thing as exhaustion.
My lungs don’t burn; they work. My legs don’t ache; they obey.
Every step lands heavy, measured, because even my rage has precision.
I can’t stop. If I stop, the pain catches up.
If the pain catches up, I’ll tear myself apart from the inside.
So I tear everything else apart first.
The hallway outside the main lab is bright, red strobes slicing the world into fragments.
The alarm screams like an animal being skinned, but it doesn’t scare me.
It’s just noise. Everything in here is noise.
The only sound that matters is the one inside my skull, the relentless hiss of my nervous system misfiring, overfiring, overloading.
There’s blood in the corridor.
I know the scent of iron. I know the warmth of it, the way it lingers on air. I know where it came from, because I remember the resistance under my hands. I remember the brief, satisfying moment when a body stops moving. I remember how quiet it got afterward.
Quiet is mercy.
None of them deserve mercy.
My fingers twitch as I pass a cabinet of syringes in a different room across the hallway.
Rows of glass like teeth. Labels I don’t read.
I don’t need to. I can feel the danger in them the way a predator can smell fear.
Gasses. toxins. plants turned into poison.
The building is a library of ways to end people.
Henrik built this place like a cathedral to control and decay.
I break the glass.
The shatter rings through the hallway and for a moment it feels like relief.
I don’t choose a vial. My body chooses for me. Something clear. Something that glitters faintly under the emergency light. Silver moving inside like a thought you can’t hold.
My hand closes around it and my grip is too strong, glass cracks. Liquid leaks onto my fingers and my skin flares with sensation, like the world becomes even brighter, even sharper.
Good.
Make it worse.
Make it impossible for them to survive.
Then I choose the gas.
Clear. Heavy. Fast-acting. Designed to shut down higher brain function, to make bodies fold before they can fight back. A mercy, on paper. A weapon, in practice.
I twist the valve.
The canister hums to life in my hand, a quiet vibration that travels up my arm and settles somewhere pleasant in my chest. I don’t rush. I walk to the vent controls and override the system manually.
I release it.
The hiss is soft. Intimate. Like a secret.
The gas pours into the ventilation system, invisible, patient. It will sink. It will spread. It will find lungs.
I move, and shove open another door, metal bending under the force because locks are just lies people tell themselves. The facility tries to resist, panels sliding, shutters dropping, but I’m faster than the mechanisms. The system is designed for containment. It assumes the thing inside will panic.
I don’t panic.
I hunt.
I hear voices, muffled, distant. A gun being raised. A heartbeat. Not mine.
Three.
All the others died already.
I move toward them.
My body hurts everywhere. Deep pain, nerve pain, chemical pain, like my bones are being scraped with wire.
My skin is too sensitive; every brush of fabric is a cut.
My vision vibrates at the edges, like the world can’t refresh fast enough to keep up with me.
My mind keeps trying to form thoughts and failing halfway through, cracking into single impulses.
Kill.
Break.
Silence.
There’s a name that keeps trying to surface.
It isn’t mine.
It’s hers.
Elara.
The sound of it in my skull is wrong; too soft, too human. It doesn’t fit with the blood. It doesn’t fit with the burning. It doesn’t fit with the certainty that everyone in this place should die.
But it’s there anyway. A glitch. A fault line. A piece of memory lodged somewhere deeper than the chemical storm.
I don’t know why, but she needs to be punish for existing inside my head when all I want is destruction.
I know that the name makes the pain spike.
And pain makes me violent.
I follow the scent of them through corridors lined with white walls and glass, past rooms with labeled tanks and sleek metal tables and cages that are too clean to hide what they’re meant for.
The place is a maze built by men who think they’re gods, and I can feel their arrogance in every sterile corner.
I hear the scrape of something heavy being dragged.
Barricade.
Prey.
My mouth tastes like copper. My jaw clenches so hard it hurts. I can feel my pulse in my gums. My hands flex and I imagine them around a throat, the satisfaction of pressure, the way a body gives up.
I reach a door.
I put my palm on the handle.
The metal is cold. For a second, that cold feels like clarity.
Then the chemical surge returns, and cold becomes nothing.
I twist.
It doesn’t unlock.
So I bend it.
The mechanism screams. The handle warps under my grip like cheap wire. The barrier is pathetic, a child’s idea of safety. I can hear them inside. Breathing. Fear. That delicious, sharp scent of it.
The rage rises, instant, volcanic.
I hit the door.
Once.
The barricade jolts. I feel the vibration travel up my arms into my shoulders, into my spine, and it feels good. A clean pain. A pain I can control.
I hit it again.
Glass rattles inside. Something breaks. A vial shatters. A sharp chemical sweetness leaks into the air and my lungs flare with it, hungry.
Good. Make it worse.
I hit it again, and the cabinet shifts, the cart squeals, the barrier begins to give. I can already see the moment when I’ll be inside. I can already feel the room, the bodies, the heat of them, and the lingering gas. The filter of my mask hisses.
The gas pours from above, pale, curling like a ghost. It coats the air. It crawls into the filter. Inside the room, coughing. Choking. A thud, someone falling. Another.
Silence.
For a second, the pain in my skull and the gas in the air and the blood in my mouth all fuse into one single, perfect clarity:
They are down.
They are helpless.
My hands shake, not from weakness, not from pain.
From anticipation.
Because now that the hunt is over, now that they’re helpless and silent and exactly where I want them—
I can take my time deciding who dies first.