CRIMSON CAMELLIA

The Capture

It happened on a moonless stretch of road between the institute and the barracks, the kind of ordinary night that makes the worst nights so easy to walk into unarmed. Ethan and Jax walked side by side, arguing lightly about leave schedules and whether Jax's uncle still owed them both dinner from a bet neither of them fully remembered the terms of.

Headlights flared behind them, too close, too fast. Men in black moved with a professional economy that told Ethan, in the half-second before it mattered, exactly what kind of operation this was — no wasted motion, no raised voices, no hesitation. Hoods came down over their heads. Zip ties bit into wrists. A needle found the side of Ethan's neck before either of them could fully process that this wasn't a drill.

He fought until the drug pulled him under. The last clear thing he heard was Jax cursing fluently in Spanish, and then, absurdly, laughing — as if even this, even now, was some joke he still fully intended to win.

When Ethan woke, fluorescent light hummed somewhere above a concrete ceiling he couldn't quite bring into focus. His arms and legs were locked to a medical chair by restraints that didn't flex no matter how he tested them. A cold IV line ran into the back of his hand, and beneath his skin, pain was already building in slow, deliberate waves, chemical and precise, the kind of pain that had clearly been calibrated by someone with a clipboard.

A voice came through an intercom somewhere above him, flat and clinical. "Begin endurance protocol. Record all responses."

The burning started low in his veins and began, unhurried, to climb — and somewhere behind a mirrored wall he couldn't see, a woman with a stopwatch and a folder marked *Liang, E. — Phase Three* was already timing exactly how long it would take him to break.