Cold metal pressed against my cheek. My body hurt—everywhere, all at once, like the beatings but deeper. Inside.
I opened my eyes. Bars. Darkness beyond them. The smell of stone and something else. Something wrong.
Voices drifted from somewhere I couldn't see.
"—specimen 203 is stable. The goblin's core is responding better than the previous subjects—"
Goblin.
The word meant nothing. Just sound. But the human said it while looking at papers, and I knew—somehow I knew—he was talking about me.
What was a goblin?
The darkness pulled me back under.
Smell.
That's what I noticed first when I surfaced again. Not the pain, not the cage. The smell.
It was wrong. Everything in the cave had smelled like something—blood, waste, rot, flesh, fear. The world was made of smells that told you what was real, what was dangerous, what you could eat.
Here there was almost nothing.
Clean. Sterile. Like the air itself had been scrubbed of life.
It made my stomach turn worse than hunger ever had.
Hands on my body.
Cold. Clinical. They moved over my ribs, pressed against my chest, lifted my arm and let it drop. I tried to pull away but my limbs wouldn't obey. Heavy. So heavy.
"Fascinating. The musculature is underdeveloped even for a juvenile. Malnourished, certainly, but the bone structure suggests—"
The voice kept talking. I couldn't understand most of the words. Didn't matter. I knew that tone. The same way the stronger goblins looked at the kill before they tore into it.
Hunger. But not for food.
I saw his eyes once.
Just once, when the haze lifted enough for me to focus.
He was leaning over me—the human, the one who'd caught me—and his face was close enough that I could see every detail. Pale skin. Sharp features. Eyes that caught the light like a predator's.
But it was the expression that burned into my memory.
Happy.
Not the savage joy of a successful hunt. Not the satisfaction of a full belly. This was something else. Something sickly and eager, like a young goblin who'd found a wounded rat to play with before killing it.
He was excited.
I was his new toy.
The darkness took me again before I could scream.
Other cages.
I heard them before I saw them. Breathing—labored, wet, wrong. Scratching. Whimpering.
When my eyes focused, I saw shapes in the darkness. Creatures. Not goblins. I didn't know what they were. Didn't matter. They were dying.
One of them looked at me. Its eyes were clouded, filmed over with something white. Its body was twisted—limbs bent at angles that shouldn't exist, skin pulled too tight over bones that jutted wrong.
It opened its mouth. No sound came out.
Then it stopped moving.
The table was cold.
Metal. Flat. I was on my back, staring up at lights that hurt to look at. My arms and legs were strapped down—thick bands across my wrists and ankles that didn't give when I pulled.
I pulled anyway.
"Subject 203, beginning implantation procedure—"
Something sharp bit into my chest. I screamed. The sound echoed off stone walls, came back to me distorted and small.
The pain was different from the beatings. This was precise. Deliberate. It knew exactly where to go to make me feel it most.
They were cutting me.
Opening me.
I felt hands inside my body—cold and invasive and wrong—and I couldn't do anything but scream and scream until my throat was raw and the darkness finally, mercifully, dragged me down.
The number came later.
I don't remember them doing it. Just woke up one time and felt the burn on my neck. Raised my hand—they'd taken the straps off—and touched the skin there.
It was raised. Scarred. Deliberate.
Later, much later, I would learn what it said.
That's what I was to them. Not even a creature. Just a number.
The cage again.
Always the cage between the table and the darkness. Cold metal floor. Bars on all sides. A corner where I'd soiled myself because there was nowhere else to go.
The smell of my own waste mixed with that sterile nothing-smell.
I curled up small. Made myself as tiny as possible. It didn't help.
Nothing helped.
Time stopped meaning anything.
Was I here for days? Weeks? The lights never changed. No sun, no moon, no way to count the hours. Just the cycle: darkness, the table, pain, darkness again.
Sometimes I heard screaming that wasn't mine.
Sometimes I heard nothing at all.
The drugs made everything soft around the edges. Reality became something that happened to someone else, somewhere far away. I floated through it, disconnected, watching my own body suffer like it belonged to a stranger.
Maybe that was mercy.
Maybe that was worse.
His hands again.
Always cold. Always precise. They moved over my body like I was a puzzle he was solving, piece by piece.
"The channels are integrating better than expected. The core hasn't rejected the foreign structure—in fact, there seems to be a symbiotic relationship developing—"
Words. Just words. They washed over me like water.
But I felt what he was talking about. Something inside me was different now. Changed. There was a new sensation beneath my ribs—not pain exactly, but presence. Like something had been planted there and was growing roots.
I didn't understand it.
I didn't want to.
The alarms started while I was on the table.
I'd been drifting—half-conscious, the drugs pulling me down into that soft gray nothing—when the sound cut through everything.
Loud. Piercing. Wrong.
Red lights began flashing. The human's hands jerked away from my body. I heard him swear—the first time I'd heard emotion in his voice that wasn't that sickly excitement.
"Containment breach in sector seven—all personnel—"
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. More humans were shouting now, running, their footsteps echoing off stone.
Something had gone wrong.
Very wrong.
I turned my head—the straps were loose, he'd been in the middle of adjusting them—and saw the human's face. The excitement was gone. Now there was something else.
Fear.
He looked at me one last time. Then he ran.
The alarms kept screaming. The red lights kept flashing. And I was alone on the table, straps half-undone, something burning and wrong inside my chest where they'd cut me open and put things that didn't belong.
I knew, with the certainty of prey that's learned to read predators, that whatever was happening—
It was very, very bad.