"Daughter."
The word didn't echo. It arrived. Like a fingerprint pressed into the back of Lana's skull. Like something warm and wet whispering from inside her own ribcage.
Jason stumbled. Nyx blinked. Kieran's breath caught mid-groan and turned to a hiss through his teeth.
Specter only smiled.
The corridor breathed.
Not metaphor.
The air changed pressure—rising and falling in time with a heartbeat none of them could hear but all of them felt. The walls pulsed softly. The floor grew warm.
"Something's fixing the scale," Nyx whispered, hand still on the bone.
Lana turned, but Nyx's eyes were far away. Her fingers twitched as if echoing someone else's motion.
Jason steadied himself against the wall. "That sound… it wasn't just noise."
Kieran collapsed to one knee.
His veins were black.
Lana reached him in time to catch his head before it hit the ground. He was shaking—not violently, not convulsively, but rhythmically. Like a tuning fork vibrating with sound only he could hear.
She gritted her teeth. "We're losing him."
Specter nodded. "That's the point."
Lana's eyes snapped to her. "Don't start."
Specter stepped forward, calm as always. "He's bifurcating. Alpha blood versus corrupted shifter. Whichever side wins, the other dies."
Kieran twitched. He coughed blood onto her arm.
Jason stepped in. "His hybrid strain's destabilizing. The Eclipse compound must've activated his spinal overrides."
Specter gestured to the stone slab at the center of the chamber. "Put him on the table."
Lana narrowed her eyes. "Why?"
"It's not a table. It's an interface."
"I don't care what it is."
"You will. In five minutes, he'll either be dead or something worse."
"I'm not letting you sacrifice him to a rock altar."
Specter didn't flinch. "It's not a sacrifice. It's a choice."
Lana hesitated. Kieran moaned.
Specter's voice dropped half an octave. "This place doesn't want blood. It wants alignment. He either becomes the thing it remembers… or the thing it rejects."
Lana cursed.
Jason and she lifted Kieran. His skin felt wrong—fevered and too tight. Like it was struggling to contain whatever war had started inside him.
They placed him on the slab.
Immediately, tendrils slithered from the edges—pale cords of muscle and cartilage, wrapping his limbs gently, then with pressure.
Kieran gritted his teeth but didn't fight.
The slab lit up.
A dull, throbbing red beneath him. His pulse synchronized with it—his chest rising and falling in perfect time.
Lana looked down.
His expression was shifting between terror and surrender.
Specter gestured to the floor. "Now her."
Lana's body coiled before she even heard the words.
"No."
"She's not going on the slab."
"No," Specter said. "Beneath it."
There was a hollow under the altar, carved in the shape of a small curled child. The size was perfect.
"She's the translator," Specter explained. "You don't want to hear the corridor raw. You'll bleed out of your ears."
"You expect me to just put her in the bones?"
Nyx walked forward on her own.
"I remember this," she said softly. "I remember laying down."
"You've never been here," Lana said.
"I know."
Nyx slid into the hollow. The bone closed around her like memory. No chains. No straps. Just a perfect lock.
Lana stood frozen.
Jason muttered, "What is this place?"
Specter looked up.
"It's not a corridor. It's a skull. We're inside a fossilized alpha brain. One of the first."
Jason paled.
Kieran twitched again. The veins in his neck flared silver. His claws etched hairline fractures in the altar.
The lights shifted.
Blue.
Then violet.
Then black.
The whispering began.
Not words.
Sensations.
Lana's throat tightened.
Then Kieran spoke.
Not in his own voice.
In Evelyn's.
"You don't get to love her if you keep hiding what you are."
Lana flinched.
Then her own voice came from his lips:
"If I have to kill him to protect her, I will."
She hadn't said that.
Or had she?
The slab vibrated.
A pulse under her boots. A message.
Will you trade control for truth?
Lana's breath caught.
She looked down at Kieran.
He was no longer shivering. He was still.
Eyes wide open.
Empty.
Specter stepped forward, voice quieter.
"You're not making this choice for him. You're making it for yourself."
"I didn't ask for this."
"Neither did Evelyn."
Specter's voice cracked—just slightly. A ripple behind her usual calm.
"I told him to stop it. Once. Before the first prototype. He said he loved her too much to kill her future."
Lana's throat tightened. "So you let it happen."
"I was twelve."
For one heartbeat, the perfect soldier mask slipped.
Then it snapped back into place.
Lana turned away.
The floor pulsed again.
Will you surrender what you think you are, to become what the corridor remembers?
Lana closed her eyes.
And let go.
Not of control.
Of self.
Of the last thread she'd been holding—the image of her old life, her old face, her old name. The hunger that first brought her here. The job interview. The clean suit. The girl who flinched from a paper cut.
She whispered, not aloud, but in blood:
There is no Lana without this.
Then she stepped forward.
The tendrils loosened.
Kieran rose.
Not sat.
He rose—levitated an inch above the stone, chest to the ceiling, arms splayed. His body lit from within. Veins glowing. Scars pulsing.
On his sternum, over his heart, a new mark burned into being.
A spiral. A mouth. A crown.
Jason gasped.
Nyx opened her eyes beneath the slab.
Her voice emerged doubled—one child, one something else:
"Ask it your question."
Lana stepped forward.
Heart pounding.
Voice shaking.
"Was I ever free?"
The walls answered with memory.
A girl in a glass cage, age five. Screaming. Evelyn slamming a hand to the glass. Kieran outside, unmoving. Blood on his hands.
Specter floating in a tank.
Jason, fifteen years older, burning a folder with Lana's name on it.
Evelyn again.
Crying.
"I tried to balance blood with love. It wasn't enough."
The memory bled away.
Lana stood trembling.
Tears on her face she hadn't felt fall.
Specter looked at her.
"Well?"
"No one ever gave me a choice."
"Then take one now."
Lana stepped to the altar.
Touched Kieran's chest.
The chains unwrapped.
He floated down.
His breath deepened.
Nyx's hollow opened.
She sat up slowly.
Her eyes shimmered with recognition.
"I remember now."
"What?"
Nyx touched the scar on her wrist.
"I didn't come from you," she whispered. "I came through you."
Lana stared.
Kieran opened his eyes.
No longer gold.
No longer wolf.
Something older.
He looked at her.
And dropped to one knee.
Not in pain.
In deference.
Behind them, the walls pulsed.
The corridor exhaled one final word—
One final promise:
"Balance."