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Chapter 32: The Unseen Coil
The scream tore out of Aria's throat before she could stop it—raw and primal, echoing off the vault’s metallic walls. But it wasn’t pain alone that triggered it.
It was memory.
A storm of images cascaded through her mind like shards of broken glass—unfamiliar rooms lit with sickly yellow lights, glass tubes filled with trembling children, and a pair of eyes watching her through thick reinforced glass. Eyes that belonged to him.
Subject Zero.
He didn’t move like a human. He drifted, each footstep not quite touching the ground, his bare skin glowing faintly with blue-veined energy. Wires pulsed along his spine like a symbiotic organism. Where his face should have been was a smooth plate of semi-translucent alloy, beneath which faint features flickered—a
