The device felt alive in Marcus's hand.
That was his first mistake—thinking of it as a device. It wasn't. The moment his thumb pressed the activation stud, the thing recognized him, and recognition implied consciousness, and consciousness in something designed to rewrite human cellular structure was a thought Marcus would have preferred not to have.
Too late now.
The band contracted around his wrist with enough force to crack bone. He heard it—a sound like green wood splintering—felt it as a white-hot lance of wrong that shot up his arm. His training said to stay quiet, stay controlled, but his body had other ideas.
Marcus screamed.
The device pulsed once, crimson light bleeding through his skin like he'd swallowed the sun. Then it opened.
Not mechanically. Organically. The band flowered into dozens of hair-thin tendrils that punched through his skin with the precision of surgical needles and all the gentleness of prison shivs. He felt each one find nerve clusters, burrow into muscle tissue, wrap around bone.
His HUD—because apparently he had a HUD now, projected directly onto his optic nerve in a way that made his eyes water blood—showed the process in clinical detail:
WAVELENGTH MATCH CONFIRMED
CRIMSON RESONANCE: 94.7%
INITIATING CELLULAR INTEGRATION
WARNING: REJECTION PROBABILITY 87%
PAIN THRESHOLD EXCEEDED
CONSCIOUSNESS FAILURE IMMINENT
"Marcus!" Mara's voice, distant. Or maybe she was right next to him. Hard to tell when your entire nervous system was being used as a conductor for something that felt like liquid lightning.
The tendrils reached his spine.
That's when the real pain started.
Director Cross's Office (Wraith - Command Deck)
6:52 AM - Five Minutes Earlier
Cross watched through the observation window as Kane activated the Crimson unit.
He'd seen this fourteen times before. Thirteen of those times ended with body bags and hazmat teams.
The fourteenth—Subject Twelve, a SENTINEL operative named Victoria Chen—had survived six minutes before her heart exploded.
Cross had written the report himself.
Declared the project a failure.
Recommended immediate shutdown.
Command had overruled him, classified everything, and kept going.
Now Command was dead, and Cross was using their failure as humanity's last desperate play.
He wondered if he'd burn in hell for this. Decided he probably would. Added it to the list.
"Vitals spiking," his remaining tech officer reported. Lieutenant Sarah Vega, Beijing station, one of the few intelligence analysts who'd been off-site during the attack. She looked like she hadn't slept in three days. Probably hadn't. "Heart rate 220 and climbing. Blood pressure critical. Core temperature—Jesus, sir, he's at 104 and rising."
"Expected," Cross said, which was true but unhelpful.
"Brain activity is—" Vega stopped. Stared at her screens. "Sir, his neural patterns are synchronizing with the device. I've never seen anything like this. It's like they're becoming one organism."
Also expected. Also horrifying.
On the monitor, Kane convulsed. The other four survivors had backed away, which showed good survival instincts. The young one—Park—looked like he was about to vomit.
"How long until we know if he survives?" Vega asked.
"Another ninety seconds. If his body accepts the integration, the pain should decrease to merely agonizing. If it rejects..." Cross didn't finish. Didn't need to.
They watched the timer count down.
Hangar Bay
6:53 AM
Silas Chen had seen a lot of things in his eight years with SENTINEL. Interrogations that violated six international treaties. Black site research that made Mengele look restrained. The Jakarta files, classified so deep they didn't officially exist, detailing exactly how SENTINEL had "pacified" a city of two million.
He'd seen horrors. This was worse.
Because Marcus Kane—who five minutes ago had been a man, damaged and grieving but fundamentally human—was becoming something else.
The crimson light had spread from his wrist to his entire body, visible beneath his skin like bioluminescent veins. His back arched at an angle that should have snapped his spine. Blood ran from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes.
And he was still screaming.
"We have to stop this," Jesse said, voice high and tight. "We have to—"
"Can't," Mara interrupted. She'd moved closer, clinical fascination overriding self-preservation. Her biochem training, probably. "Look at his wrist. The device has integrated into his circulatory system. Removal would be amputation at minimum. More likely fatal hemorrhaging."
"So we just watch?" Jesse's hands were shaking.
"Yes," Atlas rumbled. He hadn't moved from his position against the crate, but his eyes tracked every detail. "We watch. We learn. We decide if we follow."
Silas pulled up his tablet—he'd grabbed it during the Beijing evacuation on pure instinct—and started recording. Data. That's what he needed. Information. Something to make sense of the senseless.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up everything SENTINEL had on Project Spectrum. Most of it was redacted, but Silas had spent his career breaking SENTINEL encryption. Old habits.
What he found made his blood ice over.
PROJECT SPECTRUM - TRIAL LOG
Subjects 1-13: Deceased
Cause of Death:
Subjects 1-4: Cellular rejection, total organ failure
Subjects 5-8: Neural feedback cascade, brain death
Subjects 9-11: Successful integration, cardiac arrest within 10 minutes
Subject 12: Successful integration, survived 6 minutes, spontaneous combustion of cardiac tissue
Subject 13: [DATA EXPUNGED]
Survival Rate: 0%
"Oh, fuck," Silas whispered.
Mara glanced at his screen. Read the data. Her expression didn't change, which was somehow worse than if she'd reacted.
"They sent us here to die," she said, conversational. Like discussing weather.
"They sent us here because we're already dead," Atlas corrected. "Question is: do we die doing nothing, or die trying to hurt the bastards who killed everyone we knew?"
Silas looked at the massive Russian. At the bandage around his head, already showing fresh blood. At the way he held himself—like a man who'd already decided his answer.
Jesse made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. "This is insane. This is—we're talking about suicide."
"We died when the Covenant attacked," Mara said. She was still watching Marcus convulse. "Everything after is just deciding how we spend the time we have left."
On the hangar floor, Marcus's screaming cut off.
For three seconds, there was perfect silence.
Then crimson light exploded outward in a wave that sent all four of them stumbling back.
When Silas's vision cleared, Marcus Kane was standing.
No—not standing. He was transformed.