Chapter 54 Broken
ZARA’S POV
Waking up wasn’t a gasp of air. It was a slide into ice.
There was no warmth. No electric heat from Kai’s touch. Just the sterile, biting cold of medical grade steel against my spine.
I tried to lurch forward, to fight, but my body refused. Heavy, mag-lock cuffs clamped my wrists and ankles to a chair that felt less like furniture and more like an altar.
I blinked, my vision blurring.
The room was vast. Circular. The walls weren't made of brick or plaster but of a dark, obsidian glass that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic blue vein. It looked like the inside of a heart that had forgotten how to beat.
“Heart rate elevating,” a calm voice noted. “Cortisol spiking. She is awake.”
I knew that voice.
I snapped my head up.
Dr. Voss stood by a console that looked like it had been grown rather than built. But she didn’t look like the stern, tailored headmistress I’d seen in the corridors of Shadowmere.
I think it had been a while since I saw her actually looking like the stern headmistress she had always been.
Maybe she was like that to other students.
Her skin was… translucent.
Faintly glowing.
Underneath the surface of her face, I could see shifting geometric patterns, like circuitry woven into bone. She turned to me, her eyes devoid of whites entirely filled with that liquid mercury silver.
“Dr. Voss?” I rasped. My throat felt like it was filled with glass.
“In a manner of speaking,” she replied, tapping a holographic interface.
“Though names are a primitive construct we abandoned cycles ago.”
What was she talking about.
Where was Kai? I don't know if she had any idea about what had happened with Kai.
“Where is he?” I demanded, pulling at the cuffs.
“Where is Kai?”
“He is exactly where he was designed to be.”
What was that supposed to mean?
She gestured a long, slender hand to the left.
My breath died in my chest.
Kai stood ten feet away. He wasn’t restrained. He was standing at attention, stripped to the waist, his body hooked up to tubes that ran from his spine into the obsidian floor. His eyes were open, silver and burning, but they were vacant.
He was looking right at me, but he wasn’t seeing me.
I didn't know how to feel about that.
“Kai!” I screamed.
He didn’t flinch. Not a muscle twitched.
“Save your breath, Zara,” Voss said, walking toward me. Her heels clicked on the floor, but the sound was wrong. It was heavy.
“The unit you call ‘Kai’ has been reset to factory settings. The conflict in his programming, the human error, has been purged.”
“He’s not a unit,” I snarled.
My inner wolves were pacing, scratching at the back of my skull, but they were terrified. They were whimpering. Wrong scent. Wrong time. Wrong.
“He is a hybrid,” Voss corrected.
“A bridge between what you are… and what we became.”
“You mean aliens,” I spat.
“You’re the invasion. You’ve been hiding here, using us...”
"You're unworthy to be called a person."
Voss stopped inches from me. She tilted her head, a look of genuine pity on her glowing features.
“Oh, Zara. You still think in three dimensions. How quaint.”
She leaned in, her breath smelling of ozone and dead stars.
“There are no aliens. There is no invasion force waiting in the sky.”
What?
What did that even mean?
She swept her hand around the room. The walls shifted, displaying images, not of space, but of Earth. A burning Earth. Cities crumbling to dust, oceans boiling, and wolves… millions of wolves, starving, dying, their bodies withering away.
“Look closely,” she whispered.
I looked. The wolves in the projection weren’t just dying. They were changing. Losing their fur. Their flesh turning grey, their limbs elongating, their eyes turning to silver circuitry to survive the toxic atmosphere.
They were turning into her.
My stomach plummeted.
“That’s…”
“Us,” Voss finished softly.
“The future.”
The room spun.
“We didn’t come from the stars, Zara. We came from tomorrow.”
She turned back to the console, her voice taking on a terrifying, rhythmic cadence.
“In three hundred years, the war for resources destroys the planet. Werewolves, the most apex predators, starved first. Our biology requires high energy. To survive, we had to evolve. We merged flesh with tech. We transcended the physical form. But in doing so… we lost something.”
She looked at Kai, then back at me.
“We lost the spark. The soul. The Essence.”
She tapped her chest.
“We became immortal, but we became hollow. We started fading. Simply… ceasing to exist. A temporal paradox. We realized that to save our future, we had to return to the source.”
She pointed a long, glowing finger at me.
“You.”
“Me?” I whispered.
“The ancestors,” she corrected.
“The primitive, raw, chaotic life force of the werewolf species before we evolved it away. We are not here to conquer Earth, Zara. We are here to harvest it.”
She smiled, and it was a graveyard smile.
“We are eating our own history to stay alive.”
I felt sick. Violent, retching sick.
“You’re cannibals,” I hissed.
“You’re eating your own ancestors.”
“Survival requires sacrifice.” She simply responded.
Voss nodded to Kai.
“Begin the extraction.”
My heart stopped.
Kai moved.
He didn't hesitate. He walked toward a panel of levers near my chair. His movements were fluid, perfect, and efficient.
“Kai, don’t,” I pleaded, my voice cracking.
“I know you’re in there. I know you can hear me.”
He didn't pause. His hand hovered over a lever marked with a glowing red rune.
“Kai, please! You said you felt it! You said you had a soul!”
He turned his head slowly. Those silver eyes bored into mine.
“Subject Night,” he said, his voice a flawless, digital recreation of the man I loved.
“Your compliance is mandatory.”
He pulled the lever.
Clang.
A needle descended from the ceiling, hovering directly over my chest. It hummed with a dark, violet energy, a vacuum energy.
“This will hurt,” Voss noted casually, picking up a datapad.
“The Devourer gene in your blood is potent. It resists extraction. We’ll have to strip your humanity away layer by layer to get to it.”
The needle lowered.
It touched my skin.
A scream tore from my throat, not of pain, but of pure, unadulterated violation. I felt it pulling. Not blood. Not marrow. It was pulling the light out of me. It was sucking the memories, the feelings, the love I had for him, draining it into a glass canister above my head.
And Kai…
Kai stood there and watched.
He watched my agony with the indifference of a statue.
He checked the monitors. He adjusted the flow rate. He was killing me, and he didn’t care.
He’s gone, a voice whispered in my head.
No, I sobbed internally.
He’s gone. He betrayed us. He led us to the slaughter.
The pain spiked, turning white-hot.
My vision tunnelled.
Deep inside the darkest pit of my soul, something snapped.
It wasn't a bone. It wasn't a mind.
It was the chain.
The chain I had wrapped around the monster inside me. The chain I kept tight to be a "good person," to be "human," to be Zara.
If being human meant being food…
If love meant being harvested…
Then I don’t want to be human.
The humming of the machine faltered.
Voss looked up from her pad, frowning.
“Readings are erratic. Kai stabilizes the flow.”
Kai reached for the dial.
“Don’t touch me,” I whispered.
The voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like a thousand graves opening at once.
Kai paused. For a fraction of a second, his silver eyes flickered.
“Stabilize her!” Voss ordered.
Kai reached out. His hand brushed my shoulder.
That was the mistake.
The contact didn't ground me. It completed the circuit.
BOOM.
The glass canister above my head shattered.
Violet energy didn't dissipate. It slammed back into my chest with the force of a collapsing star.
The cuffs holding my wrists groaned, the metal heating up, turning red, then white, then liquid.
“What is happening?” Voss shouted, backing away.
I stood up.
The molten metal dripped from my wrists, sizzling on the floor, but I didn't feel the burn. I didn't feel anything.
I looked at Kai.
He took a step back, his factory-reset face finally showing a flicker of something real.
Fear.
I opened my mouth, and the sound that came out wasn't a scream. It was a roar that shook the obsidian walls.
The Devourer had awakened.
And she was starving.