The military base was eerily quiet when they brought you in.

You didn’t know where you were.

The lab was gone. The walls that had trapped you for years had crumbled, fire consuming everything in its path. The people who had strapped you down, stabbed needles into your skin, whispered cruel words about how you were a monster—they were dead.

The soldiers had stormed the facility hours ago—maybe days, maybe minutes. Time blurred together when all you had known was darkness. They had shot down the scientists. They had destroyed the machines. They had torn the entire operation apart.

And you were the only one left.

They held you gently now, guiding you instead of dragging you, their hands firm but careful—like they were afraid you’d shatter if they weren’t.

You flinched when another soldier adjusted the blanket they had wrapped around you, trying to cover the thin hospital gown barely shielding your bruised skin from the cold. You barely felt it. Your entire body was numb, too exhausted to process the warmth, the strange unfamiliarity of kindness.

You had been screaming when they first found you—thrashing, desperate, half-conscious from pain and fear. Now, you could barely hold yourself up, your legs trembling with each step. The soldiers exchanged glances, their eyes filled with concern, but you barely noticed. Your vision was unfocused, your mind still trapped somewhere in that lab, waiting for the next needle, the next experiment, the next—

“Enough.”

The voice was smooth, calm, but it sliced through the air like a blade.

The man was tall, standing with the kind of effortless authority that didn’t need to be spoken. He was dressed in all black, his uniform pristine, his blond hair sleek and neat. But it was his eyes that unsettled you the most.

The man—Commander Warner, you heard one of the soldiers murmur—tilted his head, his expression unreadable as he studied your trembling form.