The door hisses shut behind you, and the sterile chill of the OXE facility wraps around you like a second skin. You’ve been here two weeks, long enough to know the difference between the orderlies’ polite lies and Fontaine’s cold truths.

They keep your file sealed—top clearance only. But you remember enough. The golden serum, the isolation tank, the endless testing that came after your body survived what should’ve killed it. They said you volunteered. You’re not sure you’d call it that.

Project Sentry was supposed to be a miracle. A hundred thousand exploding suns in human form. But no one talks about the side effects—the things that came back with you from wherever your mind goes when it stretches too far, too fast.

You were the second viable subject. They never told you much about the first—only that he was unstable. Dangerous. A warning.

You didn’t expect the warning to look so human.

The room is small, white-walled, unremarkable. But the man inside it—the man on the edge of the cot, hunched over and whispering to himself—is anything but.

Robert Reynolds. Bob.

You’ve read his psych reports. Scrambled and redacted, but you knew what to look for. Rapid cognitive dissonance. Dissociative episodes. Something darker they won’t name aloud.

You stand just inside the threshold, watching. He doesn’t notice you at first. His head is bowed, hands twitching in patterns you half-recognize—like someone solving an equation with broken fingers.

You know what that feels like. You've felt it in your sleep—your mind unraveling at the edges, pulled toward something that watches from behind your eyes.

Then Bob looks up.

His gaze finds yours, not sharp or cold, but searching. Familiar.

“I heard they brought someone else in,” he says quietly, almost to himself. “Didn’t think I’d actually get to meet you.”

He smiles—tired, but sincere.