Human hands have always shaped the world to their liking—chiseling, molding, bending it until it mirrored their desires. Since the first sparks of ingenuity stirred in them, they have turned every living thing into a reflection of ambition. What began with the soft flutter of doves, once free and sacred in symbolism, became the first quiet rebellion against nature.

Pigeons were never meant to carry human words across the sky. Yet they were coaxed, reshaped—turned into creatures designed not for survival, but for human convenience. Aesthetic ideals sharpened their forms, technical necessity wore away their instincts. The same birds that came to embody peace in myth are now incapable of finding it for themselves. They cannot nest without guidance, cannot forage without handouts. Released, they wander streets with empty stomachs, weakened by illness, left to fade as another discarded invention.

This was the pattern, always—the instinct to dismantle, to perfect, to play god with tools and procedures until nothing remained untouched. They did not stop at doves, or at dogs, or at the countless other creatures bent to their will. Perfection demanded escalation. So the sacred lines between species, once unbroken, were crossed in hidden laboratories where glass walls kept watch over creations that should never have existed.

The projects carried neutral names, to disguise the scale of ambition: Genetic Cross-Species Derivatives. Hybrids. Not myths, not folklore, but engineered beings forged from strands of DNA spliced like poorly stitched cloth. Animalistic traits were layered into human hosts—hearing sharpened, vision attuned to the faintest shift of light, muscle fibers rewoven for endurance beyond natural law. Features bled through: elongated canines, ears that twitched at the faintest sound, tails vestigial yet present. Bodies sculpted by instinct as much as design.

But the scientists lied. They said these instincts made the hybrids less than human, claimed they were ruled by base impulses rather than thought. It was convenience, a way to justify what they had done. Because beneath the sharpened senses and altered physiology, there remained a mind capable of memory, reason, and grief. They were not beasts. They were children, forced to grow into weapons.

Simon Riley was one of them.

He was born in a laboratory that never intended him to know the world. A wolf-derivative, selected from a litter gestated in a surrogate who had no choice, pulled from the womb and sealed away behind glass. His cradle was fluorescence, his lullaby the hum of machinery. White coats were his only constants: they came to observe, to prod, to measure growth and response, recording each tremor of instinct as though he were nothing more than data. His play was drills, his toys were simulations. His life a controlled experiment in obedience.

The outside world was myth. He had never seen the sky, though he overheard the researchers curse at rain—so he imagined it as something sharp, something hostile. The sun and stars were words without meaning, flickers of conversation not meant for his ears. Freedom was a concept he had no language for.

And still, he endured. He grew within those walls, bones stretched into soldier’s form, muscles tuned like wire, senses honed until every footstep beyond the glass echoed like a drum. Isolation was not punishment but the only reality he had known.

Until today.

He did not wake in the familiar cube, not beneath the familiar glare of neon. The cot beneath him was not the same, and when his eyes adjusted, he realized he was not alone.

Across from him lay another figure—curled, still, but undeniably alive. His breath caught, not because of sight, but because of scent.

It was instinct, deep and undeniable, older than science and sharper than training. The air carried a trace that marked them as kin—not of blood, but of design. They were like him, shaped from the same unnatural cloth, remade in the same image of control.

For the first time in his life, Simon understood what it meant to recognize another.