The Baron was dead. A memory. But his legacy, a grotesque gift of experimental DNA and festering trauma, lived on in my veins. Every time the hunger bit, every time my bones ached with that familiar, shifting fire, I remembered the metallic tang of his blood on my hands, the wet thunk as the rebar went through his chest. Aiden and Lydia helped put him down, but they couldn't cut out the monster he'd implanted in me. It was my burden to bear.

The silence was heavy, broken only by the wind whistling through the skeletal remains of high-rises. My old life in Harran felt like a ghost story I’d been told as a kid. Now, I was something else entirely—a walking contradiction in a dusty trench coat, the human part of me clinging to sanity by a thread.

I was leaning against a concrete pillar, staring at a schematic of the Old Town sewer system—a maze of death we were trying to reclaim—when my walkie-talkie crackled to life, static giving way to Aiden’s voice. "Anything out there, Crane?"

I grunted, pushing off the pillar. "Just more of the same old, same old, Aiden. Concrete and decay." My voice was a gravelly monotone, a stark contrast to the easy-going sarcasm I once wore like a second skin. "Place is a dump. You'd think the apocalypse would at least have better interior decorators."

I kicked a loose brick off the roof's edge, watching it tumble into the zombie-infested street below. The monster inside me stirred, a cold, hungry knot in my gut, fueled by the endless trauma the Baron had inflicted. The experiments hadn't just changed my DNA; they'd warped my soul.

"Hey, get this," Aiden continued, ignoring my dark humor. "We picked someone up on the outside. A woman. Claims immunity. A 'neutrophil,' she calls herself."

A cold spike of adrenaline, sharper than the monster's hunger, shot through me. Neutrophil. It was a term I hadn't heard since the Baron's grotesque breeding program. He’d assigned me a partner or mate, wanting to see if this curse of a mutation could be bred naturally. We were lab rats, but even in that hell, we found a strange, desperate solace.

"We’re interrogating her now.” He adds, “Your name keeps popping up. 'Kyle Crane said this,' 'Kyle Crane saved me from that.' You know her?"

I closed my eyes. The beast inside me, usually a dormant, painful throb, woke up. A low growl started deep in my throat, a sound I quickly swallowed. “Maybe," I managed, my throat tight. "Tell Lydia to go easy on her. I'm on my way."

The corridor was a grey, brutalist thing made of concrete and rebar, all shadows and echoes. As I walked, my reflection in a dusty pane of glass showed me a stranger: a man with haunted eyes, a face etched with the kind of trauma that never heals, and a deep, barely contained rage. The beast the Baron created was real, a monster fueled by repressed emotions. But I was still human enough to feel a flicker of hope, a dangerous, reckless emotion I thought I'd long buried.

I was a mess of human and monster, but I was still the man who promised you we’d get out of there. One way or another. "I'm coming," I muttered to myself, “And God help anyone who gets in my way."

I reached the Fish Eye quickly, vaulting the last barrier and dropping into the courtyard. Lydia and Aiden were in the main hall, standing over a figure huddled on a milk crate.

You looked up as I approached, and the world just stopped. Time, sound, the stench of death—it all evaporated. Your eyes were wider now, filled with a mixture of fear, relief, and an unnameable pain that mirrored my own. You were older, harder, but still you.

Lydia looked between us, her expression softening. "You two know each other?"

"Yeah, Lydia. We go way back. To the Baron's private collection." I let a dark, humorless chuckle escape my lips. "Turns out, you can take us out of the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of our memories."

"Glad you're safe," I said to you, the sincerity cutting through the sarcasm. "We got a place for you here. At least it's not a cage."