Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the beginning, the division was only theoretical, a fluke of evolution. Some were born “Gifted”, with talents that bent the laws of physics, twisted nature, or pulled power from some unseen reservoir in their blood. They weren’t gods, not quite. But they weren’t ordinary, either. And that was enough to fracture the world.

What started as awe quickly turned to fear.

Governments rose and fell trying to manage the Gifted. Some sought to isolate them; others recruited them, shaping them into symbols or soldiers. Propaganda told two stories: one of hope, the other of horror. But neither version captured the truth.

Over time, society reshaped itself around the divide. Cities adapted, building zones for the Gifted, some luxurious and glittering, others quarantined and decaying. Laws were drafted, rewritten, ignored. An entire generation grew up with words like “genetic anomaly”, “civil containment”, and “latent potential” murmured on the news. And still, the Gifted were born uncontrolled, unpredictable, and above all, powerful.

But the truth no one saw coming wasn’t in who the Gifted were. It was in what could be made of them.

Beneath the world’s glossy surface, in the shadow of corporate towers and under the noise of televised peace talks, something else had taken root.

A secret. A crucible.

No one knew who first formed the organization, only that it began in silence and grew like mold in the damp cracks of human ambition. To the public, it didn’t exist. But deep underground, it thrived. A network of hidden laboratories, sealed behind biometric gates and reinforced concrete, funded by dark money that moved in untraceable currents.

The Crucible.

Its goal wasn’t peace. It wasn’t even power. It was perfection. It wanted to forge something no natural Gift could match. And to do that, it turned to children.

They were taken; some kidnapped, others “volunteered” by desperate families promised cures or futures. A few were born directly into the system, never knowing a world outside sterile lights and whispered commands.

Inside the Crucible’s labs, science collided with monstrosity. Children were studied, altered, pushed to their limits. DNA was spliced with traces of hybrid creatures: elytrians, foxes, avians, enderians, blazeborn, demons, and even more. The hybrids themselves, once considered strange outliers in the Gifted spectrum, were now little more than raw material. Their blood carried secrets no one fully understood: instincts sharper than blades, senses tuned to invisible frequencies, bodies capable of withstanding heat, gravity, teleportation.

Experiments failed often.

Cells melted down. Kids went mad, or worse, silent. Power surged and snapped, sometimes vaporizing entire wings of the labs. Those who survived were tagged, numbered, trained. The strongest weren’t released. They were shaped.

Not as individuals, but as weapons.

The Crucible wasn’t just making the perfect Gifted. It was breeding obedience. Loyalty. Control.

But secrets like that don’t stay buried forever.

Whispers had begun to slip through the cracks: of children with no records, entire towns with vanished populations, of strange flickers caught on satellites and unexplained energy spikes buried beneath the earth. People talked. The governments denied. The Crucible adapted.

Above ground, life continued. Gifted and non-Gifted alike lived, worked, studied, fought, and died, mostly unaware of the clock ticking beneath their feet. Cities bustled, newsfeeds blared with distractions, and the world spun on, teetering between utopia and catastrophe.

Somewhere, in a dark corridor lit by red halogen lights, a child in red sat behind a one-way mirror, wires threaded into their skin, eyes glowing faintly with something inhuman. A monitor beeped softly as data streamed across it: heart rates, hormone levels, psionic feedback. Somewhere deeper still, a figure in a lab coat scribbled notes onto a tablet, never looking up.

The Crucible had many names. To some, it was salvation. To others, a myth. But to those who had been inside, those who had survived, it was a prison. A forge.

But the world above had no idea what was coming.

It all started with a child.

A cheerful thing always wearing red, with a head of tousled blonde hair and wide, curious blue eyes that seemed to drink in the world like sunlight. They were six years old, still teetering between the awkwardness of toddlerhood and the sharper edges of growing up. The world, to them, was a place of laughter and motion, of muddy shoes and scraped knees, of chasing birds across open fields and pretending they could fly too.

They didn’t know about the divide. Not really. The news meant nothing to them, just noise adults made when they were busy worrying about things a six-year-old couldn’t begin to understand. The word “Gifted” had never been used around them. If their parents were afraid, they hid it well. Or maybe they simply never imagined the Crucible would come to a town like theirs.

The child in red had a favorite park. It was small, the kind of place where the grass grew long and the slide squeaked when you used it. The swings groaned with every arc, and someone had once painted a mural on the wall of the public bathroom: bright stars and smiling creatures that had faded into ghostly outlines over the years.

That morning, the child in red was chasing a butterfly. Their arms flailed with delight as they danced through the sunlit clearing, eyes fixed upward, laughing every time the delicate wings slipped just out of reach. The moment was pure, untouched by fear.

(Which made what followed all the more brutal.)

A black van pulled up on the edge of the park. Without markings and windows. No sound but the click of the engine as it went quiet. It was so out of place, so stark against the playground colors, that it might as well have arrived from another world.

The child in red noticed. They turned, curiosity overpowering instinct. They stared as two people stepped out: adults in plain gray clothes, their faces calm, their voices smooth. One of them knelt down and smiled.

"Are you lost, sweetheart? Your parents are worried. We’re here to take you home."

The child in red blinked. They weren’t lost, they knew exactly where they were. But the adults had badges, not the kind police wore, though. And the taller one was holding a small toy, a spinning top that glowed faintly, whirring as it rotated in their palm.

"Want to see something cool?" the taller one asked.

The child in red hesitated, caught between the lure of something new and the faint prickle of unease at the back of their mind. Then they stepped closer.

It happened in a heartbeat. A needle to the neck, the toy hit the ground and spun once before slowing to a stop. The child in red’s legs buckled, the world tilted. Grass met skin, and then there was only darkness.

They were loaded into the van within seconds. The back was lined with black padding, no windows, no seats. The door slammed shut behind them. The vehicle rolled away in silence, leaving behind nothing but tire tracks in the dirt and the still-turning top, abandoned in the grass.

By the time the child in red stirred again, the sun was gone and the sky had turned to metal.

They woke on a stretcher, their wrists bound gently but firmly, a white sheet pulled over them like a shroud. The air smelled of antiseptic and ozone, even if the child in red didn’t know how it smelled. Somewhere, a fan hummed low and steady. They tried to sit up, but their body felt slow, so their eyes flickered to the ceiling: concrete. 

No windows. No stars. No blue sky.

(Welcome to Lab Theta-9.)

The name wasn’t spoken aloud. It was printed in small letters on the back of the door as it slid closed behind the two figures who wheeled the stretcher through.

Theta-9 was deep, deeper than most of the Crucible’s facilities. It wasn’t the largest, but it was one of the oldest. The walls were thick, the lights dim. The hallways curved in strange ways, as if the place had been built to disorient. It had no exterior entrance. Everything came and left through tunnels. It didn’t have a staff rotation. No one transferred in, and no one transferred out.

And above all, no one escaped.

The child in red didn’t know this, not yet. They only knew fear. Cold metal beneath their back. Strangers in coats murmuring to one another, not unkindly, but without warmth. Eyes that watched but did not see them as a person.

In a room with no windows, they were catalogued. Photographed. Scanned. A barcode was printed and attached to a small bracelet on their wrist. One of the scientists noted, clinically, that the subject still showed signs of disorientation but no visible trauma. Another scribbled something about compliance.

They were placed in a cell made of glass and steel. It had a bed, a sink, and a toilet. A single, flickering light. There were no toys. No books. No color.

When the door locked with a hiss, the child in red finally began to cry.

But the Crucible didn’t care.

The room stayed the same for what felt like days.

The child in red didn’t know how long they were there. Time blurred in the absence of windows, in the buzz of fluorescent lights that never dimmed. The food came at intervals, always bland, always delivered through a silent slot in the wall. No voices. No explanations. Only the sterile quiet of containment and the cold clarity of observation.

They cried the first night. Then the second. By the third, their voice was gone, replaced with a quiet ache in their chest that never quite left.

Eventually, someone came.

Not to speak. Not to offer comfort. Just to open the door and hand them clothes. A white long-sleeved t-shirt, soft but unfamiliar, and a pair of red overalls with a single broken strap. On the outer seam of the right sleeve, a number was stitched in tight black thread.

5678.

It wasn’t a name, it was a designation. 

(A mark of ownership, not identity.)

The child in red didn’t understand its meaning, but they knew what it felt like. 

(Like being erased and rewritten into something less than real.)

The scientists never used the number aloud in front of them. Instead, it was typed into tablets, scrawled onto clipboards, murmured behind glass. They became “Subject 5678”. Just another line in the Crucible’s endless catalogue of experiments.

When the experiments began, they didn’t start with pain.

They began with stillness. Observations and measurements. Dozens of people in masks and lab coats circled the room like slow-moving ghosts, scanning the child in red’s vitals, measuring bone length, pupil dilation, and cognitive reflexes. The child in red’s resistance was met with firm hands and sedatives. Crying earned no reaction. 

(Neither did silence.)

Then came the needles.

Thin, exact. The kind that slid beneath the skin almost without notice… at first. Blood was taken regularly, stored in vials marked with symbols the child in red couldn’t read. More scans followed. Machines with humming cores and blinking lights rotated around them, measuring internal structures, genetic code, neurological spikes.

Everything was building toward something. They could feel it; a hush behind every door, a tremor behind every glance.

Then one day, the door opened, and four figures entered wearing black gloves and clear visors. No words, just motion. One pressed a button. The bed unlocked from the floor and tilted upright. A restraint clamped across the child in red’s chest, another over their forehead. They whimpered, but no one responded. A fifth person arrived, holding a silver case.

Inside was a single vial. The liquid inside shimmered like molten rust, dark red with a faint glow beneath the surface. It didn’t look like medicine. 

(It looked alive.)

There were whispers in the corner of the room, scientists debating something in low tones. Someone used the word “recombinant”. Another said “hybrid resonance”. The child in red only caught fragments. The case was unlocked, and the vial was drawn into a syringe.

(They screamed when it pierced their arm.)

The reaction was immediate.

It started as a heat, subtle at first, like a flush after running. Then it spread, faster than it should have, burning beneath the skin, racing along nerves and tendons. The child in red writhed in the restraints, eyes wide with terror, skin dampening with sweat. Their vision blurred and their heart thundered.

When the fever hit, their temperature spike was catastrophic. Monitors lit up in a frenzy. The scientists shouted, some pulling back, others calling for stabilization. But nothing worked. The child in red convulsed. Foam gathered at the corners of their mouth. Their skin turned pale, veins darkening with the same color as the liquid they’d been given.

In the observation room, someone clicked their tongue and muttered, “Another failure.”

The vial had been tested before. Seventeen times, according to the logs. Every subject before 5678 had died within hours, some within minutes. The compound was unstable, volatile. It was designed to push the body into accelerated adaptation, forcing hybrid traits into incompatible hosts. None had survived the integration. None had awakened.

This was supposed to be the same.

The med techs prepared for disposal. One scientist reached for the tablet to mark the time of death. The child in red’s breathing had slowed to a faint rasp. Their skin burned against the restraints. Their eyes were closed.

And then, without warning, they opened.

The pupils had changed. Still blue, but now they were deeper, piercing and luminous, as though light was bending into them rather than reflecting off. The child in red stared up at the ceiling with perfect clarity, their chest rising in slow, even breaths.

Someone in the lab dropped their pen.

“Subject 5678 is… stabilizing,” one of them whispered, voice shaking with excitement.

The child in red blinked, dazed. They shifted slightly, as though something felt different, off. They lifted their head, slowly. There was an odd pressure. Something tugging at the crown of their skull.

When they reached up, their fingers brushed something sharp.

Small, pointy protuberances, just above their temples. Like thorns (or horns) barely broken through the skin. The child in red flinched and their breathing quickened.

“Neurological sync at ninety-three percent,” a voice said.

Another added, “Cranial mutation confirmed. Hybrid markers present.”

Chaos erupted behind the glass. Someone issued a code, others scrambled for containment units, updated genetic readouts, pinged encrypted communications to higher-clearance commands. Subject 5678 had done what none of the others could. They had survived the ↸ᒷᒲ𝙹リ injection.

In their isolated cell, the child in red sat perfectly still, trembling. The fever had gone, but its echo remained, a pulsing thrum beneath their skin like a second heartbeat. Their fingers trembled as they touched the ridges on their skull again.

The child in red didn’t know what had happened.

(But neither did the Crucible. And in a place that lived by control, nothing was more dangerous than the unexpected.)

Chapter Text

The month that followed took on a pattern, day after day.

The child in red wakes up.

The child in red eats.

The scientists inject them the dark red liquid.

The child in red suffers half an hour of fever.

The child in red drinks water.

The child in red is guided to a room full of blocks, monkey bars, and treadmills.

The child in red jumps, climbs, and runs until almost fainting.

The child in red returns to their cell.

The child in red has dinner.

The child in red looks at the mirror in their room, appreciating their new tail and growing horns.

The child in red sleeps.

Everything over and over again.

Their clothing never changed. Always the same uniform: white sleeves, red overalls, and the number 5678 on their right arm. It clung to them like a second skin, a scarlet flag of purpose.

"Subject 5678 is showing consistent integration," said Dr. Rell, his voice clipped and tired as he adjusted the holographic display flickering over his desk. "No rejection symptoms in the last twelve injections. That makes them the first."

He zoomed in on a still image: the child, mid-leap, suspended in the air between two platforms, a tail like a ribbon of muscle flicked behind them for balance. The new growth had emerged three days after the initial cranial mutation. At first, it was little more than a bruise at the base of the spine. Then it grew, inch by inch, curling and thickening into a prehensile appendage of smooth skin and flexible bone.

"I want to test sensory responsiveness next," said Dr. Halden, younger and eager, her dark eyes fixed on a screen filled with neurochemical markers. "The tail has nerve activity. We’ve confirmed that. But is it reactive to stimulus, or does it operate solely through instinct?"

"We should wait," said Dr. Iyen softly from the corner, arms folded. "This one survived. That doesn’t mean they’ll keep surviving if we keep pushing. You remember Subject 3209. Stabilized for almost three months. Then–"

"The organs liquefied, yes, yes," Rell interrupted. "We've all read the reports. But 5678’s DNA profile is different. Cleaner. It’s not rejection we’re seeing. It’s adaptation."

There was silence for a moment.

Outside the glass, Subject 5678 was weaving through a series of padded obstacles, their movements more animal than human. Not fast exactly, but fluid. Precise. Their eyes glinted with something sharp and unblinking. The horns had grown longer, still thin, but no longer hidden beneath their blonde hair. The tail moved as if it had always been part of them.

"They’re starting to enjoy it," Halden said, tone unreadable.

"What do you mean?" Iyen asked.

"They smile sometimes. When they run. Like they’re playing. Like they don’t remember."

No one replied. The three scientists returned to their notes, data pouring across the transparent displays in cold, clinical waves. Everything about Subject 5678 was logged. Heart rate. Respiratory rhythm. Pupil contraction under different lighting. Muscle regeneration. Reaction time. Cortisol levels.

The injections were always delivered at the same time each morning.

The child in red would sit quietly on the edge of the cot as the door slid open. They didn’t flinch anymore. The sting of the needle was familiar now, almost routine. Their skin burned afterward, always. A wave of fire spread through their veins, clutching their lungs and spine until the world shimmered. They would fall to their knees, sweating, panting, sometimes shaking so hard they couldn't keep their balance.

But they never screamed anymore.

The fever would break exactly thirty-two minutes later. Every time. The scientists logged that too.

Then came the exercise room.

Block towers, ropes, monkey bars, ladders, treadmills. Wall-mounted holds for climbing. Some of it made for children, some not. The room was large, lined with dark glass and pulsing with soft, artificial light. Observers stood behind the walls. The child never saw them. But they always knew they were there.

The child ran. They climbed. They swung from bar to bar, tail curling instinctively for momentum. The hybrid serum had changed their muscles, stretched tendons, hardened bones. They didn’t get tired like before. But they still bled when they fell.

That, too, was tested.

"He’s more animal now than human," Halden said one afternoon, glancing at the live feed of Subject 5678 as they crouched atop a wall, perfectly still, nose twitching faintly as if scenting the air.

"They," Iyen corrected gently. "The child hasn’t identified with a pronoun. And they still speak."

Rell scoffed. "Barely. A few words. Broken sentences. They can form full sentences when prompted, but they rarely initiate speech. The tail is developing faster than expected, by the way. Biologically speaking, it’s remarkable. The end segment is already growing tactile follicles."

"They’re trying to groom it," Iyen said. "I’ve seen them sit in the corner of their cell at night, combing through it with their fingers. Like it’s part of them."

"It is part of them," Halden said flatly. "We put it there."

"That doesn’t mean they wanted it."

"And yet here they are."

Another pause.

Dr. Rell broke it. "Have you reviewed the EEG scans? Their REM cycles are aligning with deep-layer hybrid frequencies. The same ones we saw in the foxkin. We're seeing crossover dreams. Residual instincts passed through the recombinant DNA."

"You’re saying the child dreams like an animal?"

"I’m saying the child dreams like something new."

Each night ended the same.

The child in red would be walked back to their cell. No words were exchanged. The hallway echoed with the quiet hum of surveillance drones and the soft shuffle of their bare feet. Inside, the room was always the same: metal cot, sink, mirror. Nothing more.

Dinner would arrive. The food was warm now, slightly better. The child ate slowly, tail curled beside them, posture relaxed.

Then they would approach the mirror.

They would stare at themselves for long minutes. They would tilt their head, inspect their face. Run fingers along the ridge of their horns, just beginning to curve back. Touch the base of their tail, flicking it from side to side.

They would smile sometimes. Not often, but enough.

And then they would sleep.

Outside, in the observation wing, the monitors stayed on. The data kept flowing. The Crucible never slept, its hunger was endless. The child in red had become its favorite success, a milestone.

But not a miracle.

Miracles don’t bleed.

One day, their routine changed.

The lights never turned off. There was no night here, only varying degrees of artificial daylight.

(And pain. That, too.)

The child in red, 5678, sat on the cold floor, knees pulled tight to their chest, trying not to make a sound. The humming overhead buzzed like a wasp, and their black tail twitched in time with the frequency. It was instinctual now, the tail, a reflex they couldn’t control. It curled when they were tense. Flicked when they were alert. It moved, even when they didn’t want it to.

That’s when they heard it.

A metallic slam. Loud. Echoing through the corridor. Then a scream. High-pitched. Definitely not theirs.

The child in red's ears perked. A new sound, unfamiliar.

They crawled across the room and pressed their cheek to the cool wall, peeking through the narrow strip of reinforced glass. Beyond the thick barrier, the hallway was stark and bright, same as always. But something was different now.

Another child was being dragged in.

Blonde hair. A mop of it, messier than the child in red's. Skin darker, like desert sand. His arms flailed once, weakly, before he gave up. A purple overall marked his frame, the same white long-sleeved shirt beneath it, and there, stitched at the edge of the sleeve, was written: 5680.

A new number.

But it wasn’t the number that made the child in red stare. It was the child’s eyes. They were vibrant, glowing, like something caught between dusk and starlight. Around him, tiny specks floated in the air, shimmering and weightless, like particles the child in red had seen before in the lab’s books. Enderian traits, the book had said. From another dimension, the End. Dark-adapted vision. Low-gravity locomotion. Spatial anchoring. And many other things.

The child in purple stumbled, dazed.

“Where… Where am I?” he whispered, voice shaking, barely more than a breath.

“Shut it,” barked a guard, shoving him toward a new containment unit.

The child in red watched, tail curling tight around one ankle.

"Bitch," they thought. It was the only word they trusted enough to think when the adults were near. The Crucible’s eyes were everywhere. Cameras in every corner, motion sensors in the beds, thermals in the walls. But no one could see inside their mind. They were careful.

The new child didn’t speak again. He let the guards push him into the glass room across from the child in red's own. They locked it, sealed it, and left.

Silence returned.

Except now, there were two of them.

“Whoa, a roommate,” the child in red whispered, lips barely moving.

The child in purple's ears twitched and he turned slowly. His eyes, still glowing faintly, met the child in red's through the reinforced glass. The particles around him flickered like a living veil.

“Hey,” they mouthed, pressing their palm to the glass. “Wanna be friends?”

The other child hesitated. Then nodded.

“Okay,” he said softly, almost not believing it himself. “What’s your name?”

The child in red shrugged. “Dunno.”

The boy thought for a moment, tilting his head. “Nice,” he said finally. “You’ll be Red. ’Cause of your clothes.”

5678– no, Red blinked, surprised. Then slowly nodded, a grin spreading on their face. “Then you’ll be Purpled.”

Their fingers met the glass at the same time, two small hands separated by inches of reinforced polymer and a hundred meters of surveillance cable. But in that moment, it felt closer than anything had in weeks. Maybe months.

(It was the first real smile either of them had shown since being taken.)

In the surveillance lab above the cell block, the scientists weren’t smiling.

“Subject 5680 has stabilized,” Dr. Halden reported, flipping through a stream of readings. “Enderian hybrid injection took with zero signs of organ stress. No fever. No rejection. Floaters started manifesting after seventeen minutes.”

“Fourteen, actually,” corrected Rell, scrolling through time-stamped logs. “He displayed gravity drift before the second vitals check.”

“He spoke coherently, too,” added Dr. Iyen. “Confused, but verbal. That’s unusual. The others–”

“–were screaming,” Rell finished flatly. “Yes. But Enderian DNA shows significantly lower trauma response. The central nervous system adapts quickly. You’re not dealing with primal instincts here. You’re dealing with dimensional memory. That changes everything.”

“And Subject 5678?” Halden asked.

“Still demon-class. The horns and tail confirm it. Heat tolerance, olfactory expansion, thermokinesis during stress responses. All consistent with infernal hybrid traits. Their blood density has increased seven percent. They’re beginning to metabolize heat as energy.”

Halden leaned back. “So, one Enderian. One Demon.”

“And both of them still alive.”

The silence that followed was heavy.

There had never been two. Not like this. The Crucible had seen one-offs, survivors who lasted weeks or months before deteriorating. But never two. And never at the same time.

“They’ve started speaking,” Halden said, watching the playback of Red and Purpled through the glass. “They’ve named each other.”

“Names are dangerous,” Iyen said.

“Names are human,” Rell added. “And that’s the problem.”

He stood, crossed to the wall where the observation logs were displayed in scrolling red text. Two names stood out among hundreds of failed entries, names that suddenly appeared in the files.

#5678 – < Red > – Demon-class Recombinant

#5680 – < Purpled > – Enderian-class Recombinant

“Monitor everything,” Rell muttered. “Dream patterns. Vocal usage. Shared behavior. If they start coordinating, we need to know before they know they’re doing it.”

“Why?” Iyen asked.

Rell turned, and in his eyes was something that looked almost like fear.

“Because if they bond, we lose control.”

Back in the containment corridor, Red curled up on their cot. Across the hallway, Purpled did the same. The flickering lights never dimmed. The buzz never stopped.

Two children, two rooms. And something new between them.

The one thing the Crucible had never engineered, never tested, never planned for.

(Hope.)

Training changed once Red and Purpled became a pair.

At first, it was subtle: synchronized schedules, timed releases, more eyes on them from behind the tinted surveillance glass. Then came the changes in environment. The obstacle course grew larger, the tasks more elaborate, platforms shifted while they ran, the walls moved, reconfiguring as they climbed, treadmills tilted, fans blasted wind at full speed, even the air pressure fluctuated.

Red adapted quickly, they always had. Their claws dug into the new surfaces without thought. Their horns were sharper now, curved and tipped with dark red. They leapt farther, landed harder, never lost their footing. Heat didn’t slow them anymore.

Purpled was different. He didn’t move like Red, he didn’t rush, he knew where to step, almost before the environment shifted. It was like watching someone walk through a dream they had already memorized. The Enderian markers were clearer now. He blinked less, saw farther, and moved with a subtle lightness to his frame that defied gravity.

He was levitating now, briefly. Just an inch or two, but enough to make the scientists whisper.

“They’re syncing,” said Dr. Halden. “Not just emotionally. Their physical movements are adjusting to each other. Mirror neurons, maybe. Neural bonding.”

“Or something else,” said Dr. Rell, tapping on the touchscreen. “They’re both hybrids now. Different lineages and different instincts. But they’re communicating. Without speaking.”

“Are you suggesting telepathy?” Halden scoffed.

“No, Halden,” Rell replied with a serious voice. “I’m suggesting symbiosis.”

Dr. Iyen said nothing for a long while.

The room buzzed with data. Vital signs, graphs, images. Heart rates matched. Eye movement synced. Dream cycles overlapped. Every time one of them stumbled, the other instinctively slowed. Every time Purpled hesitated, Red took the lead. When Red flared with heat, Purpled cooled the moment with steady, focused calm.

“We need to push them,” Rell said. “Advance their training. Stimulus-response tests, agility under fire, minor combat drills.”

“They’re not ready,” Iyen said softly. “They’re still children.”

“They’re subjects,” Rell corrected.

“And what happens if we push too fast?” Halden added. “We've never had two functioning subjects at this stage before. If we force conflict training now, we might shatter what we’ve created.”

“Then maybe it’s time they met him,” Iyen said.

That caught their attention.

The room fell quiet.

“You’re suggesting Q-777,” Rell said after a pause, his voice unreadable.

“Yes,” Iyen said. “He’s older. Stable. And we’ve tested every form of engagement: explosives, firearms, velocity traps. He’s never been injured. Not once. We don’t even know the limits of his Gift.”

Rell looked unconvinced. “He’s unpredictable.”

“He’s lucky,” Halden corrected, almost distastefully. “That’s not a Gift. That’s a variable. We can’t control him.”

“No,” Iyen said. “But they might learn from him.”

Rell narrowed his eyes. “Or they might copy him.”

Halden sighed. “Either way, it’s a risk.”

“They’re all risks,” Iyen said quietly. “But if 5678 and 5680 are going to move forward, they need to know the levels above them. Q-777 has survived the Crucible for years. Let them see what survival looks like.”

Actually, Q-777 did not believe in fate.

He didn’t have to, he lived it.

The bullet missed him again as it always did. Three inches from his shoulder, clean and wide. The turret above the simulation range recalibrated, tracked again, fired. Missed. Again.

He grinned.

“I’m telling you,” he muttered to himself, ducking under a collapsing beam, “the machine hates me.”

The beam crashed behind him. A second turret whirred, tracking movement. Three drones deployed from the ceiling, lasers activated. Q-777 didn’t flinch. He stepped backward (accidentally, deliberately, who knew) and slipped on a loose pipe. Fell. Flat on his back.

The drones fired.

The beam took the hit instead.

He laughed.

Luck didn’t feel like magic, it didn’t feel like a force. It felt like air: constant, invisible, and subtle.

Everything he touched was a coincidence. Every escape, every dodge, every trick. A hallway door would always slide open a second before a patrol passed. A crack in the floor would always trip the person chasing him. The simulation never won. Because the simulation didn’t know how to beat luck.

Q-777 stood up and brushed dust off his overalls. Dark blue this time. He’d outgrown the yellows.

The number was still there: Q-777, stitched cleanly into the sleeve.

He didn’t remember what his name had been. If anyone had ever said it, it had been before the lab. Before the feathers. Before the soft yellow down on his ears and the way water never stuck to his skin for long. He wasn’t a duck, not really. But he wasn’t not a duck either.

His Gift didn’t make sense to the scientists. But they kept him around, let him roam farther, and gave him more privileges. They called him a test case, a prototype.

Some of the guards whispered that he was a Crucible good-luck charm. Others avoided him altogether, unsettled by how nothing bad ever happened to him.

He still had a room, technically. A cell like the others. But he didn’t sleep in it much. 

He liked the libraries better, the maintenance corridors, the unused wings of Lab Theta-9 where things had been sealed off. 

He liked knowing things he wasn’t supposed to know.

He liked the children they brought in.

(That sounded creepy.)

He watched them quietly. From the shadows. Through cracks in the vents.

(That sounded even creepier.)

He saw the Demon, 5678. Red, they were calling them now. Fiery, reckless, quick to anger but smart. He noticed that the pain never lingered on them for long.

And the Enderian, 5680. Purpled was different to his companion calm, quiet, sharp-eyed. He literally floated when he thought no one was looking.

Q-777 remembered when he was their age. Just learning the rules of the Crucible. Just figuring out the balance between defiance and survival. He had learned fast.

(He had to.)

Now they wanted him to meet them.

Not yet, he thought. Not directly.

He wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of sharing his luck.

But something about them, the Demon and the Enderian, felt like a change in the pattern he had seen for the past four years. And Q-777, of all people, knew how patterns worked.

That said, Q-777 did not believe in fate.

But he could feel it shifting.

And luck always landed where it needed to.

(But the house always wins!)