Elias counted like he was suturing a wound closed.
One breath in, two out. One breath in, two out.
He kept doing it because numbers usually kept the thing inside him small enough to be ignored.
Only today, that thought didn’t quite hold.
It felt wrong to think of his hands as anything but instrunts.
They bled efficiency. They learned patterns and then morized the exceptions.
He could cradle an artery with a finger and let a man live while the world yelled itself hoarse.
Counting stitches was a discipline; it ant he could ignore the other noises.
The yard rattled. n shouted. The Saint trucks smoked and folded like the false confidence they were.
New bikers moved like a second tide at the edge — well-maintained machines, their helts bright, and hands that had been trained to believe they belonged to the right sort of chaos.
Zubair was a map in motion. He kept the whole thing coherent.
Elias watched him not because he needed orders but because Zubair’s steadiness served as a reference point for the math in his head: positions, off-hand counts, fuel reserves, tis-to-failure.
Zubair’s voice was an equation that balanced the rest.
Elias was not ant to be the center.
He had been a soldier first and then a healer long enough to prefer it that way.
Still, when Sera touched the cage bar and the dead inside tilted like sothing aware of a stronger predator, the thing under his ribs rembered the lab and all the nights of sterile light, and it purred.
Calculate, he told himself. Remain an axis.
The creature wanted sothing vastly different though.
It wanted to na, to choose, to mark. It had been built wrong, and it still knew what it liked: proximity to her, the taste of clean flesh, the comfort of a hand that could stop bleeding.
It was both infant and engine, clumsy and precise.
And around Sera it learned fast.
He checked the bolt on a spare clamp, the practised motion steadying his fingers.
A Saint halfway down the yard started singing curses and got a quieter answer than he expected — a single Alexei shot that ended the noise. The yard shuddered. n ran into cover; others froze like bad animals with too many eyes.
Zubair called them close. "Finish the yard," he ordered. "No theater."
No theater. A logical string. Elias could do that.
He could be the instrunt that turned carnage into a controlled operation. The hum inside him thudded against his sternum at the word finish and it had nothing to do with stitches. It wanted edges. It wanted the closing act.
A wave of bikers moved in a smooth arc, a test. The newcors wanted a look at what this place had held. They wanted to size the horde and find the soft part.
Elias moved with the others of his team. He didn’t want to be near the front; that wasn’t his place, and he never planned it to be.
Zubair had already assigned positions: Lachlan up high with overwatch, Alexei slipping the west line like a shadow, Elias on the right flank covering Sera’s blind side.
Cover.
That word wrapped his shoulders like a coat.
He kept his face composed.
Inside, a different calculation had started. How many seconds between a bullet through a flak vest and a wound that needed imdiate clamps. How long before blood lost clotting capacity in this heat. When to inject tranexamic acid and when to risk morphine.
He read the body like it was an open book.
Nothing could ever hide from him when it ca to others.
But when it ca to himself... well, there was a reason why doctors made the worst patients.
A rider peeled off the pack and aid too close to the cages. He had a pistol and an idea about what law and order ant to him.
But Lachlan couldn’t help the smirk that was forming on his face.
It was clear that the rider didn’t understand basic math. Gas and pressure, the hidden seams Zubair had marked. The rider didn’t know—no one here knew—how fragile a concrete plan could be until soone with sense and ability tested it.
The creature inside Elias didn’t care what the rider knew. It tasted predisposition. Take him, it whispered. Make the math trivial. Get out of your head and relearn what it feels like to crush soone under your boot. You used to be so good at it. Why did you forget? Did the illusion of civility beco your reality?
No, Elias answered aloud, to himself and to whatever scaffolding of logic remained. I will not take him. We don’t waste rounds. We neutralize threats that change the balance. As to the rest, I have no idea what you are saying. I am who I have always been.
He steadied his thumbs on his rifle butt and watched Sera out of the corner of his eye.
She was not a commander, she hadn’t been giving any orders lately, not since the labs.
But she was not a statue either.
She was an observation point, a thing that watched until it decided the world had either amused it or not.
And right now, she was watching a boy on a bike like soone watching a toy expected to break.
The creature inside of him slid closer to the surface like it, too, was captivated by the woman in front of them.
Elias felt it as a pressure behind his sternum.
A flashback hiccupped through him — bright lab fluorescents, the sterile whine, the sll of alcohol and hot tal.
He’d been sure then that a map could fix everything.
Procedure could defeat panic.
He’d logged vitals in rows and columns and believed the numbers would explain why a subject thrived or failed. In fact, he had done almost everything he could have except work directly with Dr. Orhan and Dr. Davis to study himself.
But it had still not accounted for a thing that learned.
The creature’s voice had once been clinical notes he could file. Now it was a whisper that argued with his scalpel hand. It wanted to show her. It wanted to be acknowledged.
You keep it down when you count, he told the voice. That was what lab training had drilled into him. The hum receded a fraction. He inhaled, exhaled, and checked the clip.
Lachlan called low from the ridge. "South feed folding. Two trucks down. Holding pattern."
"Copy," Zubair answered.
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