He Drained My Blood for a Fake, Then Destroyed Time to Bring Me Back

Chapter 2 A Fatal Transaction and a Frame-up

The red digits of the countdown bled onto the sterile white wall, a constant, silent scream. **21:47:13**. Twenty-one hours left to become a ghost. My plan was simple in its audacity, but the path to the Blightstorm’s core was a relic of the old world, a maze of forgotten tunnels and sealed conduits. I couldn’t walk out the front door.

I needed a map. And a key.

Sliding down to the floor, I pressed my thumb to the hidden panel. The world dissolved into the cool, silent data-stream of the Mainframe.

"Mainframe," I subvocalized, my thoughts weaving through layers of firewalls I had once helped build. "Access the scavenger network. Encrypted channel. Find me Jax."

`Searching…` The AI’s response was a placid whisper in my consciousness. `Contact established. Patching you through.`

The clean, orderly space of the Mainframe was corrupted by a burst of static, like sand grinding against glass. A voice, rough and laced with the weariness of the wastes, crackled to life. "Who's asking?"

"The one who recalibrated your rig's energy cycler last year," I sent back, cloaking my signal in three layers of ghost protocols. "You owe me a favor, Jax."

A low chuckle, filled with dust and distrust. "Subject 00. The ghost in the machine. I figured they'd have fried that little backdoor of yours by now. What do you want? Don't have any spare sapphires for you today."

Sapphires. His name for my blood. The thought made my stomach clench. "I don't want blood. I want information. The old schematics for the outer rings. Specifically, the maintenance access for atmospheric exhaust conduit 7B."

There was a long pause, filled with the hiss of the storm outside his makeshift shelter. "Conduit 7B? That's a one-way ticket into the Blightstorm's heart, kid. No one's been down there since the Fall. It's a tomb."

"I know what it is," I replied, keeping my tone flat, transactional. "I need the access codes. The new security protocols have locked it down, but the old manual overrides should still be in the legacy system."

"And what's in it for me?" he grunted. "My debt isn't that steep."

"Your bio-monitor," I said, pulling up a file I’d flagged months ago. "The defibrillator function is running on a corrupted driver. Next time you take a shock from a rogue drone, it won't restart your heart; it'll cook it. I can write you a clean patch. Send it over the same way I'm talking to you now."

The silence stretched, thicker this time. I could almost picture him, a wiry man with tired eyes, weighing his life against a dead-end tunnel.

"The storm's getting worse," he finally said, his voice dropping. "The sky's turning green. We're seeing beasts we've never seen before. Whatever you're planning, you're running out of time."

"The codes, Jax."

"Fine," he sighed, the sound resigned. "Sending the patch now. You'll have the override sequence in five minutes. Don't say I didn't warn you, kid. Whatever's in that tunnel is probably worse than what you're running from."

He cut the connection. I leaned my head back, the cool metal of the wall a small comfort. He was wrong. Nothing was worse than this cage.

In the pristine, opulent quarters of the Command Level, Elara watched a flag flicker on her private monitoring console. It wasn't a standard alert. It was a silent tripwire she’d paid a disgraced technician a fortune to install—an alert triggered by any unauthorized query into the bastion's legacy schematics, specifically those connected to the old atmospheric and waste disposal systems. The systems that ran directly beneath the ruins of the original laboratories.

Her heart gave a painful, panicked thud. She’d built her entire life, her safety, her union with Kaelen, on a single, fragile lie. She was the hero who had saved him, the brilliant botanist whose unique immunity had synthesized the cure. The truth—that she was nothing more than an opportunistic lab assistant who had stolen the research, the credit, and the silver locket from a feral, bleeding girl they’d found in the rubble—was a secret she guarded with the ferocity of a cornered animal.

And that girl, Subject 00, was now digging into the city's foundations.

Panic gave way to a cold, sharp-edged resolve. She couldn’t let Kaelen find out. She couldn’t let anyone find out. She had to cut the threat out before it could grow.

She smoothed her silk robe, practiced a look of fragile terror in her reflection, and walked barefoot to Kaelen’s office.

He was standing before the massive, panoramic window, staring at the swirling, toxic green clouds of the Blightstorm displayed on the armored screen. He didn't turn as she entered, but his posture tightened.

"Kaelen," she whispered, her voice trembling just so. He turned, his face a mask of controlled tension, the lines around his eyes etched deep with the weight of command.

"Elara. You should be resting."

"I couldn't," she said, wrapping her arms around herself. "I… I think something is wrong. Something with Subject 00."

His expression hardened at the mention of my designation. "The extraction was successful. Your levels are stabilizing."

"It's not that," she said, taking a hesitant step closer. "Kaelen, I think she’s trying to sabotage us. I have a source… they told me she was accessing the legacy systems. She’s looking for a way into the primary life support conduits."

She saw it—the flicker of doubt, immediately crushed by the iron wall of his pragmatism. He valued data, proof. A vague "source" wasn't enough.

Elara played her final card, the one that always worked. She let a tear slip down her cheek and touched the silver locket at her throat—*my* locket. "She was looking at the old exhaust tunnels near the labs… where you… where I found you. It feels like she’s trying to undo everything, to poison the very air we breathe. What if she’s unstable? What if her mutation is affecting her mind? She’s a monster, Kaelen. We’ve all known it. What if she’s finally decided to turn on her keepers?"

His gaze dropped to the locket, and his expression shifted. It was his anchor to a past he barely remembered, the symbol of his survival and her supposed sacrifice. Her lie was his history. Attacking it was attacking him.

The cold logic of a commander took over. A security threat, no matter how remote, had to be neutralized. An unstable asset with access to the bastion’s core systems was an unacceptable risk.

"I will handle it," he said. His voice was devoid of all emotion, a flat, hard plane of sound. He turned to his comms panel, his back to her. He didn’t see the flicker of triumphant, venomous relief in her eyes.

"Security," Kaelen’s voice echoed in the quiet room. "Proceed to holding cell 3B. Subject 00 is to be transferred immediately to Quarantine Level 7. She is a high-level biological and security threat. No contact. No questions. Execute."

The door to my cell hissed open. Two guards in full hazard gear stood silhouetted against the corridor lights, pulse rifles raised. I didn't need to be told. I stood up, my body aching, and held my hands out.

They said nothing as they clamped heavy magnetic restraints on my wrists and ankles. They dragged me through the silent corridors, down elevators that descended into the grimy, forgotten depths of the bastion. The air grew thick, heavy with the taste of ozone and decay.

We stopped before a heavy, lead-lined door marked with a stark, black biohazard symbol and a large number 7. One of the guards swiped a keycard, and the door ground open, revealing a chamber even more barren than my last. The walls were dark, pitted metal, and the air hummed with a low, nauseating energy.

Radiation. A constant, saturating bath of it. Cell 7 was where they put things they wanted to forget, where unstable materials and failed experiments were left to decay into nothingness.

It was a death sentence.

A guard shoved me inside, and I stumbled, catching myself on the cold wall. As the door began to hiss shut, I looked back and met the impassive gaze of the guard’s visor. There was no pity there. Only duty.

The door sealed with a final, booming clang, plunging the room into near darkness, lit only by the faint, sickly green glow of the radiation scrubbers in the ceiling.

And the red digits of my countdown, which had followed me here.

**16:21:03**

A strange, almost giddy sensation filled my chest. My blood, my unique crystalline structure, reacted to the ambient radiation. It didn't harm me, not in the traditional sense. It acted as a catalyst. I could feel it, a low thrumming under my skin, the crystals vibrating, accelerating, their matrix destabilizing at a much faster rate.

They thought they were burying me. They believed they had contained the threat, locked the monster in a box to rot.

Kaelen’s cold command, Elara’s venomous whisper—they had unknowingly conspired to give me exactly what I needed. They had taken me from a slow, agonizing drain and thrown me into a crucible.

They weren't killing me. They were setting me free. And they were doing it faster than I could have ever hoped.