Epilogue
MAXENCE
Light seared through a dark unconsciousness. White, blinding, sterile.
My eyes blinked open, but my limbs were too heavy to move. I was strapped down to a table, my head still free to swivel back and forth. A mask covered my mouth as I tried to shout. The rhythmic pace of a machine recorded every beat of my heart.
I barely remembered being brought to the Anatomical Wing. Though I knew I’d been stripped, washed, scrubbed, and gowned. They’d prepped me for surgery, and I was immobile on a stretcher, fighting the panic rising in my throat.
“What are you doing with him?” someone asked.
A body in a white coat stepped between us, blocking my view. “None of your business, Broussard.”
Broussard… That was impossible. That was the name of Nina’s mentor. He was here?
“What are you doing to him?” he repeated, louder this time. “Leave him alone already!”
The staff continued to speak over me. “How do his levels look?”
“Appropriate.”
“Blood count?”
“Low, but we can infuse at some point. He can take anything, remember?”
“True, true. If he can take a three-hundred-year-old heart, he can take a few pints of blood.”
“A heart?” Bernard shouted. “What do you mean, he can take a heart?”
The monitor raced with the pattern of my fear. Feeling restricted by the bindings, I panicked and began struggling against the restraints hard enough that my mask slipped from my chin.
“Now, you’ll need this, Max.” A woman in a lab coat replaced it over my face, and I snapped at her with elongated teeth. She shouted at someone across from her. “We’ll need more sedative.”
“No,” I pleaded. Begged. If there was truly an Architect, a god, a divine beyond the boundaries of this realm who’d be willing to help a shitty soul like mine, I begged them to make this quick.
And then the bed began to roll.
“Hey! You bring him back right now, you bastards!” Bernard shouted after me, but it was useless. He was as powerless as I was to stop this now. My chest rose and fell in gasping breaths, inhaling something sweet through the mask. Everything doubled in my vision, my eyes unable to focus.
The lights above my bed changed—harsh and painful.
My head fell to one side, stare gliding over the surgery room. A table of sharp knives and suture supplies sat ready on a table. Nearby was a large jar filled with a peculiar liquid. Inside—a preserved organ.
A heart.
I’d received so many transplants in my time, I knew what to expect. The next steps would be total agony. They wouldn’t numb me. I’d feel everything until I passed out from pain and panic, but not before I smelled the cauterized flesh, the unpleasant scent of bone dust from their saw.
Reven appeared next to the heart, his hands gloved, his alchemy robes covered with a sterile gown. “The day we’ve been waiting for, everyone. Decades of preparation, all leading to this very moment.”
I trembled in the bed. Every memory of a past procedure entered the forefront of my mind.
“It’s alright, Max. The world will remember what you did for progress and peace. The sacrifice you made for the Architect.”
Something cold washed across my chest as they prepared me for the first cut.
“Why?” I asked.
“This is the Awakening.” Reven smiled behind his mask.
A grin that crinkled the edges of his eyes.
“You’re the perfect recipient, able to take any divine organ.
Dupont tried to make his own, using my notes on you, but he couldn’t recreate what I’d done.
He couldn’t replace you, my special son.
Just one more, Maxence. Bring him back to us. ”
I shook my head. “Please…” I had no choice in this now.
This was the price for Nina’s mother. Yet I pleaded nonetheless, begged him to change his mind as I always had before he cut me.
My fists strained against the ties, my legs kicked, my body thrashed.
Instruments fell off the worktable and onto the floor.
A tray crashed with a harsh bang. I couldn’t calm down, knowing what would follow.
Everything went black, and I could feel humanity slipping away from me, feel my soul pushed aside and replaced with something else.
Someone else.
Darkness waited beyond the agony. I was stuck in a place of in-between, belonging to neither life nor death. A place of languid dreams, of phantom whispers without origin, of strange suspension in time.
Then, in a single moment as brief as a heartbeat, the world came rushing back. Cold air filled my chest as I drew a slow and mechanical breath. For a few shattering moments, I lay there, listening to the sound of my heart.
No… not my heart. The heart of the Architect. Of Reven’s god. The divine organ they’d carved into me.
The foreign heart beat faster, and I sensed a flicker of excitement.
Awake. Alive. Reborn.
These words weren’t mine. These emotions weren’t familiar. I sensed a new power chasing the medications in my veins and a new presence shifting my soul aside.
But something kept me tethered here, rooted to my own consciousness.
Nina.
Her name was a spark in the darkness of my thoughts.
I clenched my jaw, the only muscle I could move without searing pain.
If this was the consequence, so be it. Whatever this did to me, whatever I had become, it would be worth it to keep her safe.
They could have this body, this mangled mind, this soul. But they would never have her.
The monitors screamed as the heart inside my chest responded. Frantic. Furious.
She’ll turn on you when she sees what you’ve become. The Architect spoke clearly then, poisoning my good thoughts of her with venom. When she does, she will be the first one we destroy.
My defiance shoved back at the voice. There was no code that could change the way I felt about Nina, that could make me her enemy. I had no way to resist. Even my body was no longer my own, but I’d destroy myself before I ever let this thing in my mind hurt her.
Till the end, until this heart was silenced for good, I would fight for her.
* * *