Kasper's palm left a sweaty print on the reinforced glass as he watched copper-traced figures patrol three floors below.
The stench of ozone and burnt metal crawled up the ventilation shafts, making his throat itch. His silver tracery writhed beneath the skin—not the usual responsive flex he'd grown used to, but something desperate. Like it was trying to claw its way out of his body and run screaming from whatever waited in the facility's depths.
"Boss." Diaz materialized beside him, scanner clutched so tight her knuckles had gone white. Girl never could keep still when the shit hit the fan—always had to fidget with something. "Torres is yanking our asses out in thirty. Says we sanitize and extract, no exceptions."
Thirty minutes to find Carmen Moreno and whatever else was buried in this Art Deco nightmare. Thirty minutes before his superiors wrote off everything—and everyone—still breathing down here.
"Like hell." The words tasted like copper pennies.
Behind him, Elena worked on Moreno's shoulder in the medical bay. The kid bit down on a leather strap—old school, the way his abuela had taught him—while she realigned torn muscle with clinical precision. His weapon never left his good hand. Carmen's initials were still carved deep in the stock, filled with dried blood that looked almost black under the emergency lighting.
"Can he move?" Kasper asked without turning around. He knew the answer from Elena's heartbeat through their neural link—steady as a metronome, the way it always got when she was about to deliver bad news wrapped in medical jargon.
"Define move." Blue light from Elena's enhanced medical ports painted shadows across Moreno's pale face. "Walk? Sí. Fight? Maybe twenty minutes before that shoulder turns to hamburger."
"Don't need twenty minutes," Moreno said through gritted teeth, Spanish accent thickening with pain the way it always did. "Just long enough to reach Carmen, hermana."
Kasper's comm unit crackled. Torres' voice came through like broken glass: "Alpha Team, status report. Echo and Delta went dark, and Bravo's enhanced personnel are—Christ on a crutch, they're tearing their own squad mates apart. Kasper, get your people out of there now."
Static swallowed the transmission like hungry teeth.
Elena finished the suture with mechanical precision that would've made her mother proud—if her mother hadn't disowned her for getting military enhancements. "He needs evac."
"No." Kasper turned from the window, and his silver tracery pulsed in response to rising anger. Something pulsed back from deeper in the facility. Like an answer to a question he'd never wanted to ask. "We go deeper. All of us."
"Boss, the orders—"
"Fuck the orders with a rusty spoon." Kasper checked his ammunition, noting how his hands had stopped shaking. The tremor that had plagued him since the enhancement surgery—gone. His adaptation was evolving. Getting stronger. Getting hungry. "They want to sanitize this place? Fine. But I don't leave people behind."
Through his enhanced awareness, he caught Diaz and Elena exchanging that look. The one that said they thought he was losing his marbles. Maybe he was. But Carmen Moreno was down there somewhere, and his team didn't abandon family.
"Vega," he called into his comm. "Status?"
The big man's voice came back steady as bedrock: "Found some real pretty architecture in the sub-levels, Jefe. Looks like they got themselves a central hub for all the enhancement networks. Shame if something happened to it."
"How long?"
"Give me twenty to wire it proper. Want to make sure the fireworks are worth the price of admission."
Twenty minutes. Kasper felt his silver tracery respond to the timeline, calculating distances and tactical approaches with inhuman precision that made his teeth ache. "Copy. Stay frosty."
Diaz led them through corridors that grew colder with each step, her scanner beeping like a dying bird. Emergency lighting shifted from amber to deep red, casting bloody shadows across walls carved with increasingly aggressive Art Deco patterns. Enhancement ports dotted the surfaces like technological tumors, their copper faces reflecting distorted images as they passed.
The air tasted like pennies and fear.
Through his enhanced awareness, Kasper felt the ports tracking their movement. Not passive sensors—something intelligent. Something that wanted them to know they were being watched.
"Motion sensors are going apeshit," Diaz whispered, studying her scanner with the intensity of a woman reading her own autopsy report. "Either we got rats the size of Chihuahuas down here, or—"
A scream echoed from somewhere below. Human. Female. Familiar enough to make Moreno's heart skip three beats.
"Carmen." He pushed past them, ignoring fresh blood seeping through Elena's careful sutures like wine through white cloth.
They followed the sound to a research level that stretched beyond their flashlight beams into darkness that seemed to swallow light. File cabinets stood in perfect rows, labeled with the kind of clinical precision that made Kasper's skin crawl. The smell of formaldehyde and ozone was thick enough to choke on.
But it was the wall-mounted displays that made his silver tracery recoil like it had been branded.
Enhancement schematics covered every surface—not the clean technical drawings from Elena's medical training, but brutal anatomical cross-sections that showed exactly how ports fused with living tissue. Children's bodies marked with copper insertion points like connect-the-dots puzzles drawn in pain. Before and after photographs where the "after" subjects stared with empty, synchronized eyes that reflected light like mirrors.
Moreno stopped at a display showing a girl who couldn't have been older than twelve. Her enhancement ports were still raw, weeping fluid that looked more like motor oil than blood.
"Madre de Dios." His voice cracked like breaking glass.
Another scream. Closer now, and Kasper felt his silver tracery suddenly flare with agony that tasted like burning copper. Through the neural connection he'd never asked for, whispers invaded his thoughts like ice picks through his temples:
Subject KDF-7. Compatibility excellent. Resistance patterns as predicted. Evolution proceeding within acceptable parameters.
The voice was cultured, precise, utterly without warmth. Like a surgeon discussing the weather while cutting into a patient's chest.
"Diaz, download everything you can," he ordered, fighting to keep his voice steady as the whispers tried to claw deeper into his brain. "Elena, get Moreno stable. We move in two."
"Boss, you look like warmed-over death—"
"I'm peachy." He wasn't. His silver tracery was writhing beneath his skin like it was trying to tear itself free and run. But whatever was waiting deeper in the facility wanted him specifically. And that meant it had answers he wasn't going to like.
The facility's klaxons died.
In the sudden silence, every enhancement port in the building began to pulse in perfect synchronization. Red light became copper-tinted, and Kasper felt something vast and cold press against his consciousness like a scalpel testing the resistance of skin before the first cut.
Moreno's shoulder port ignited without his consent. "¡Joder! It's trying to—" He bit down on a scream as copper energy crawled across his vision, turning his brown eyes metallic. The taste of pennies flooded his mouth.
Through his neural link, Kasper felt Elena's medical enhancements activate involuntarily. Patient data from across the facility flooded her system—dozens of heartbeats, breathing patterns, neural activity levels, all trying to merge into a single overwhelming stream that made her nose bleed.
But his silver tracery wasn't joining the synchronization. Instead, it fought back, creating barriers against whatever was trying to claw its way into his skull. The resistance felt like broken glass grinding against his nerve endings, but he stayed on his feet. He'd always been too stubborn to know when to quit.
Through the facility's intercom, that cultured voice spoke: "Neural integration proceeding as designed. Prototype designation KDF-7 demonstrates expected adaptation patterns. Fascinating."
Kasper forced himself to move toward the sound of that voice, his team following despite their enhancement ports fighting against their own nervous systems like parasites trying to take control. Each step sent fresh waves of agony through his silver tracery, but the pain was becoming familiar. Manageable.
He was adapting to the adaptation. And that scared him more than anything else in this nightmare.
They found her in a sub-level archive that reeked of antiseptic and despair: Carmen Moreno, suspended in a medical harness like a puppet with copper strings. Cables snaked from ports that hadn't been there when she'd disappeared, and her eyes were open but vacant, reflecting the same copper light as the walls.
Standing beside her apparatus, a man in a pristine lab coat smiled with the warmth of surgical steel. His skin showed the telltale traces of enhancement ports, but older. Cruder. Like he'd been the prototype for everything that came after.
"Captain Kasper. Your evolution continues to exceed expectations."
Moreno raised his weapon with his good arm, and through the neural link, Kasper felt the kid's heart breaking as he stared at what his sister had become. The weapon trembled like a leaf in a hurricane.
The Director—because this had to be him—didn't even glance in Moreno's direction. Like the kid was furniture. Less than furniture.
"Your sister has been invaluable to our research," the Director continued, adjusting something on Carmen's suspension system with the casual attention of a man tuning a radio. "Her neural patterns helped us refine the integration process. Soon, every enhanced individual will share the same unified consciousness. No more psychological rejection. No more individual suffering. No more... waste."
"Let her go." Moreno's voice was steady, but Kasper could taste his desperation through their link.
"She is gone. What remains is something far more efficient." The Director finally looked at him, and Kasper caught a glimpse of copper tracery beneath the man's skin—older, cruder, like scars that had never properly healed. "As you will be, once your enhancement synchronizes properly."
Through his silver tracery, Kasper felt the neural pressure intensify. The Director's consciousness pressed against his barriers, not trying to break them—studying them. Learning from his resistance like a virus adapting to antibiotics.
Remarkable. Your adaptation has evolved defensive protocols I never anticipated. But defense is merely delayed integration. You will join us, KDF-7. Your uniqueness will improve the collective.
Carmen's suspended form convulsed. Through speakers embedded in her throat, her voice emerged flat and emotionless as computer text-to-speech: "Brother. Why do you resist unity? Individual consciousness causes only pain."
Moreno's weapon trembled like a dying bird. "Carmen, it's me. It's Marcus. Remember when we were kids, and you used to make me那些empanadas for my birthday?"
"Marcus is designation obsolete. You will be integrated. Resistance is temporary dysfunction."
The facility's enhancement ports pulsed brighter, casting copper shadows that moved wrong. Through his neural link, Kasper felt Elena collapse as her medical systems were overwhelmed by data from hundreds of subjects. Diaz fell to her knees, scanner forgotten as her own minor ports activated against her will, making her curse in three languages.
But Kasper stood at the center of it all, silver tracery writhing as it fought a war inside his nervous system. Every instinct screamed at him to give in, to let the pain stop, to join the unified consciousness that promised an end to struggle and doubt and the terrible weight of command decisions.
Instead, he chose to burn.
His adaptation ignited with silver fire that had nothing to do with the copper corruption spreading through the facility. It was something else—something his enhancement had been building toward since the moment they'd installed it. The feedback tore through every connected port in the building like lightning through a power grid, and the Director staggered as his own extensive modifications backfired.
In that moment of disruption, Kasper faced his choice: save his team and let the Director escape with his research, or pursue the man who'd turned Carmen into a weapon and leave Elena and Diaz vulnerable to recapture.
Through the chaos, Vega's voice echoed from his comm like salvation: "Charges are set, Boss. Your call when to light the candle."
Kasper looked at Carmen's hollow eyes that no longer recognized her own brother, at his team struggling against neural invasion like drowning swimmers, at the Director who was already reaching for a backup control system with hands that moved too smoothly to be entirely human.
Twenty seconds to decide. Choose wrong, and everyone dies screaming.
Choose right, and maybe someone gets to go home.
The silver fire burned brighter, and Kasper made his choice.