Monroe raised a brow, her voice laced with smug satisfaction. “He’ll stabilize. They always do.”
“No. They don’t. My god, how many people have you killed doing unauthorized procedures?” Sybil surged forward, snapping at the techs standing near the terminal. “What protocol are you running?”
One of the techs looked at her like a drowning man seeing a lifeboat. “Tier ten override. Stack compression running in loop format, combined with?—”
“Shut it down. Monroe, there are no spinal injections in tier ten. What is in that syringe?” Sybil barked. “Get him down andout of those restraints, now. Place him on a stretcher, full spinal support. Oxygen, IV, run a full diagnostic panel. Bray, help them.”
Maddox was already moving, crossing to the side of the room as the techs scrambled to comply. Tech 1 did as he was told and hit the manual release. The cuffs hissed open, letting Alex collapse forward onto the stretcher below him.
“I said spinal stabilization!” Vance cried.
He didn’t make a sound. His body hit the stretcher like dead weight.
Monroe stood back, lips pursed, arms crossed. “You’re interrupting a process, Doctor.”
“I’m preserving the man,” Sybil shot back. “Or what’s left of him.” Everyone in the room shuddered at her use of the word “man.”
Monroe glared. “Help Dr. Vance with the subject.”
She bent over Alex, checking his pulse, opening his eyelids. His pupils were sluggish and fogged, his skin pale and clammy. She pulled out the pressurized IV lines. His wrists and arms were a dark purple, and his right forearm was severely swollen, indicating the pressurized drugs infiltrated his tissues.
“Get me a fresh line. I need blood drawn. I want fluids in him yesterday. And someone cut the damn heat in this room. He’s overheating.”
One of the techs moved faster than the others, hands shaking as he clipped a sensor to Alex’s temple. The screen lit up with chaotic vitals—oxygen saturation tanking, BP crashing, heart rate like a broken engine.
“He was stable when he returned from the procedure,” the tech mumbled.
“He is dying,” Sybil snapped. “When did he urinate last? What’s his temperature?”
“Last urine was twenty-five ccs yesterday. Temperature is 103.4.” He turned over Alex’s hand. “Dr. Vance, I can’t get the IV,” the tech said.
“Get me a 14-gauge. I’ll try for a line in his jugular vein.” She chewed on her cheek and inserted the needle with practiced precision, drawing blood before taping in the IV.
Bray handed her an oxygen mask, which she pressed over Alex’s face, adjusting the flow. He coughed weakly. A breath shuddered through him.
Alive. Barely.
Monroe watched with disapproval but didn’t interfere. For now.
The two techs exhaled—subtle relief rippling across their tense frames. Sybil Vance had wrested the subject away from death, at least for now.
She stood, blood on her gloves, eyes hard. “If you keep pushing like this,” she said coldly to Monroe, “you won’t have a man. You’ll have a corpse.”
Monroe tilted her head, unfazed. “Then we’ll move to Plan B.”
Sybil’s eyes narrowed. “Monroe, you’ve pushed boundaries since you took over Gideon’s program. Do you even know what the original mission was?”
“You remind me every day. It was to find a cure for the mental woes of pour souls who had tried everything else to cure their depression,” she said mockingly. “Then poor Gideon was caught…” She pressed her hands together as if praying, her voice sing-song. “And when you took over,” she approached Alex on the stretcher, “our government wrested it from you and turned it into a program with a real cause. Our subjects will be a perfect blank slate where they can be programmed to do anything.”
“Your subjects either die or become zombies. There is nothing left to program.”
Monroe’s gloved finger ran down Alex’s torso. “A younger version of him would be the perfect warrior. But even now, he fights to survive. Once I wipe away all memory and conscious thought, he will be perfect. Why we didn’t think to take stronger subjects into the study eludes me.”
Dr. Vance shuddered. “Monroe, you were a gifted scientist when you came to the facility. But your lust for power and control has polluted all intelligent thought.”
Under the mask,Alex Marcel drew another ragged breath—alive but broken wide open. His identity was fracturing, his body failing, and the only thing keeping him tethered now was pain and the echo of a voice he could no longer name.
But somewhere deep inside, a flicker still burned. Not memory. Not thought.
