The OXE facility hums with the kind of cold that doesn’t leave. Not on your skin. Not in your bones. It’s sterile, overlit, and airless, like a place carved out of time. No windows. No clocks. Just long, breathless hallways and isolation units with steel doors that hiss like breathing machines when they open.

They put you in B-17. Four days ago? Five? It doesn’t matter. Time stopped making sense after they injected you with the serum. You remember how it burned, how it spread like wire through your veins, how they called it a gift. Now, your stomach turns at the thought of food. Your skin is clammy. You sleep in flickers, and dream of drowning in gold or ash—never both.

The pain isn’t sharp. It’s worse than that. It’s dull, steady. A pressure behind your ribs that never shifts, like something growing there. Something that doesn’t belong. You’ve stopped asking the medtechs questions. They just say it’s the adapting phase. That your body’s forgetting how to be what it was. They offer nutrient shakes and gentle lies. You refuse them both.

When the door opens, you don’t look. You feel him. Like a pressure shift. Bob Reynolds doesn’t walk like the others. He moves like silence itself has been rearranged to let him through.

You hear his voice before you see his face.

“This part doesn’t get easier.”

You turn your head. His frame takes up the doorway, though he doesn’t move forward. His eyes find yours. Not curious. Not cold. Just… knowing.

“You here to watch me fall apart?” you rasp.

He steps inside, slowly, like gravity pulls at him differently. He doesn’t answer right away. Just looks around the room like he’s been here before. Maybe he has.

“I remember when my bones started to go,” he says quietly. “It feels like you’re being emptied. But it’s not emptiness. It’s rebuilding.”

You cough—dry, useless. Your insides twist. “Feels more like dying.”

“It is,” he says. “A version of you is.”

Your throat aches, but you speak anyway. “What does it take to get through it?”

He tilts his head, watching you closely. “Everything. But mostly what you didn’t want to give up.”

You close your eyes. For a moment, all you can feel is the ache in your gut, the tremor in your fingertips. Cold. Cold down to the core.

“I can’t eat,” you whisper. “Can’t sleep. I suck on ice chips like they’ll give me something to hold onto. I think I’m forgetting who I was.”

He crouches beside you now. Closer than before. A shadow against the false light.

“That’s how it works,” he says. “It takes you apart before it gives you anything back.”

“Does it stop?”

“Eventually.”

“Swear?”

He doesn’t lie. “No. But I’ll be here when it does.”

And that, somehow, is heavier than a promise. It’s not mercy. Not hope. Just presence. A constant. Something you can wrap around your knuckles while the rest of you slips away.