The only sounds in the tungsten cell were the soft click of chess pieces and the faint, ragged breathing of Jordan, who was currently having his wrist held in a vice-like grip by Maya. It was the seventy-seventh game. Or was it the seventy-eighth? They had lost count along with their dignity.
Jordan had been about to move his knight into a position so catastrophically wrong that Wolfen had actually sighed aloud. Maya, without looking up from the board, had simply reached out and frozen Jordan's hand in mid-air, her expression one of profound, silent suffering.
It was in this moment of shared, chess-induced despair that Maya finally asked the question that had been hanging in the air for a week.
"What's an Alpha, Wolfen?"
The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly. The casual tension of the game evaporated, replaced by a heavy, focused silence. Even Derek, who had been trying to meditate in the corner, opened his eyes. Wolfen, who had been leaning back with an air of bored superiority, went very still. His playful demeanor solidified into something more serious, more clinical.
From her vertical slab, Eva's one good eye opened fully. She had been passively observing the games for days, a silent, muzzled spectator to their captivity. They all knew she was awake, but they had respected the immense, silent chasm of her grief, giving her the space she desperately needed. Now, she was listening.
Wolfen let out a long, slow breath, as if preparing to dissect a complex and dangerous specimen.
"An Alpha," he began, his voice low and precise, "is, in technical terms, a Tier 2 hybrid. But in reality, they almost always belong to Tier 1." He let that sink in. Tier 1. The theoretical cataclysms. The walking extinction events. "The chances of a hybrid manifesting as an Alpha are less than four percent."
He leaned forward, his pale eyes intense. "You all heard Eva roar. But you misunderstand. She didn't roar to be heard. The world simply… learned to listen." He gestured vaguely around their metal prison. "Her presence bends the instincts of other mutations. When she lost control, your own inner monsters didn't just sense a threat; they felt a fundamental shift in the natural order."
He looked directly at Maya. "You fought her. You felt it. That wasn't just strength. It was authority. She hasn't just been mutated; she has conquered her mutation. It no longer owns her. She owns it."
"The Architects," he continued, "see Alphas as the ultimate anomalies. Beings who didn't just survive the experiments; they overcame them. Their cells adapted beyond the original design parameters, creating a new, biological hierarchy. They radiate dominance—physical, mental, even chemical. When an Alpha enters a room, every lesser hybrid feels it in their bones. It's an instinct to obey… or to run. It is the apex predator, made flesh."
He summarized it with chilling finality. "'Alpha' simply means the top of the food chain. The one all others instinctively follow, or fear."
Then, his clinical tone softened by a fraction. "But in Eva's case… it seems she became an Alpha not through controlled evolution, but through emotional trauma. Loss. Anger. A grief so total it acted as a catalyst. The potential was always sleeping inside her; it just needed a nightmare terrible enough to wake it up."
He let the silence hang for a moment, his gaze sweeping over Derek, Jordan, and finally resting on Maya, whose hand was still clamped around Jordan's wrist.
"To put it in terms even you three might understand," Wolfen said, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards into a faint, cruel smirk. "If you made me, in my current, tragically mundane state, and Maya, in her fully transformed glory, fight Eva as she is now… we would lose. Horribly. You'd be scraping what was left of us off the floor with a spatula."
Jordan finally yanked his hand back from Maya, scowling. "Well, when you put it like that, it sounds bad."
"I'm sorry, was my description of our utter and complete annihilation not cheerful enough for you?" Wolfen retorted, his smirk widening. "Would you prefer I sugarcoat it? Perhaps with a little rhyme? Roses are red, violets are blue, if Eva gets angry, she'll turn you to goo?"
Derek let out a short, surprised laugh before he could stop himself.
"Don't encourage him," Maya muttered, though even she seemed to be fighting the faintest hint of a smile.
Wolfen leaned back, the moment of grim lecture passing, replaced by his more familiar, mocking persona. "The point, my perpetually losing chess companions, is that we are now sharing a very small, very strong box with a living, breathing natural disaster. So, I suggest we all be on our best behavior." He gestured to the board. "Now, whose turn is it to be humiliated? Jordan, I believe you were about to sacrifice your queen for absolutely no reason. Don't let me stop you. It's the most entertaining part of my day."
From her slab, Eva slowly closed her eye again. But the tension in her shoulders had eased, just a little. The words, the terrifying description of what she had become, were a dark mirror held up to her soul. But in the reflection, for the first time, she didn't just see a monster. She saw a reason. And in the midst of the roasting and the chess-based humiliation, she felt the faint, fragile stirrings of something she thought she'd lost forever in that cell in the Congo: a connection. They were not just afraid of her. They were in awe. And they were still here.