Chapter Text
The room was dim, the blinds along the back wall drawn tight, leaving the lab bathed in the sterile pallor of the overhead lights. They hummed faintly—an insectile drone, constant and insidious, a thin vibration that threaded itself through Janson’s skull. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat, a cold, methodical rhythm that set his temples throbbing, as if some unseen creature fed patiently at the silence within his mind.
The scent here was familiar: alcohol, ozone, and that faint metallic sweetness that accompanied sterilised blood. To Janson, it was the fragrance of order—of something pure, incorruptible, untouched by the world’s spreading decay. A final refuge where chaos could be excised, measured, reined in.
A5 sat bound in the restraint chair at the centre of the medical bay. His wrists and ankles gleamed beneath the fluorescents, steel bands biting faintly into his pallid skin. His head hung forward, hair falling in dull, tangled strands to veil his face. Janson had administered only the faintest dose; he wanted the boy present, aware enough to comprehend the significance of what was about to unfold. Not that struggle was expected anymore. The subject had learned that resistance did nothing but delay the inevitable.
That stillness, Janson thought, was almost noble. Almost beautiful.
Stillness meant comprehension. Stillness meant control.
And Janson liked control.
He paced the length of the room with his hands clasped neatly behind his back, his shadow stretching thin across the tile, fractured by the sterile bars of light. The echo of his boots was the only sound the chamber knew—a rhythm irregular and stuttering, a mechanical mimicry of life. It soothed him, that sound, even as it reminded him of the faltering instrument beating somewhere within his ribcage.
He halted before the boy, studying him with the detached fascination of a surgeon contemplating the architecture of life itself.
“There was a time,” Janson began softly, almost wistfully, “when I believed pain could be measured. That it occupied boundaries. That there were thresholds beyond which the body simply could not go.” His lips twitched into something like a smile, though the muscle along his jaw spasmed with the effort of restraint. “But the Flare…” He exhaled—a sound brittle and dry, almost laughter. “The Flare has taught me there are no limits left. Only continuations.”
His fingertips glided along the back of the chair as he passed behind it. “That is where you come in, A5.”
The boy stirred faintly, voice slurred by exhaustion and the drug’s thin haze. “What are ya even sayin’?”
“Thomas,” Janson said, the name forming on his tongue like a curse—or perhaps a prayer. “Self-destructive. Sentimental to the end. He could no more abandon one of his own than he could stop breathing. It is his most predictable flaw.”
At that, A5 lifted his head. The light caught his eyes—defiantly alive. “So that’s what this is,” he said flatly. “You’re usin’ me as bait? If you think Thomas is that dumb, I can’t help ya.”
“Think?” Janson’s smile widened, slow and certain. “Oh, no. I don’t think.” He leaned closer, voice lowering to something colder than the steel restraints. “I know. I’ve seen the surveillance feeds. As we speak, he’s here. In the city. In this very building.”
He let the words linger, savouring the small flicker of reaction they provoked. Then his tone shifted—cool, didactic, almost professorial in its precision. “Do you know what’s remarkable about loyalty?” he asked. “It is an instinct. A reflex. A mechanism for survival. Humans form attachments because they must—attachments to each other, to causes, to the dim illusion of hope. But loyalty without reason…” He tilted his head, eyes narrowing with amusement. “That, too, is a sickness. And Thomas—poor, righteous Thomas—is infected beyond cure.”
The subject's mouth contorted into a grimace, the expression loose at the edges from whatever sedative still tugged at his nerves. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, words slurring just enough to betray him. “You never stop spoutin’ rubbish, d’you?”
Janson laughed—a fractured, subterranean sound that clawed its way up his throat only to splinter on release. He felt it more than heard it, a tremor of dark amusement rippling through him. “Language, A5. You remain property of WICKED. Try to comport yourself with the dignity of your designation.”
A muscle fluttered along A5’s jaw, a small, defiant pulse under pallid skin. “I’m not your bloody anything,” he rasped. “Not your property. Not your bait.” His breath hitched, the next words scraped raw. “And if Tommy’s comin’… it sure as hell isn’t for my sake.”
Something stirred inside Janson—first a spark of anger, then a dimmer, hollower resonance, colder than either. When he spoke, his voice emerged soft and unsteady, almost tender in its cruelty. “Oh, dear boy. You truly believe that, don’t you? That you mean nothing to him.”
The subject did not answer; his silence stark and accusing in the charged air between them.
Janson regarded him as a scientist might study a specimen on the verge of expiration. “It’s almost admirable,” he murmured. “That certainty. That self-erasure. Oh yes—we know how much you yearn for him. It corrupts all your data. Pages and pages of recordings: heart rates, brainwaves, autonomic spikes that tell us exactly how you tick. What drives you. What restrains you. What excites you.” He smiled thinly. “You’re an open book, A5—laughably transparent, even without the data that this small, useful device in your skull provides. You must understand that the illusions you experienced weren’t random. We shaped them expressly for you, crafted every image to extract the strongest possible response. Unnecessary, in my view. But Paige insisted on a control subject for the races.” His eyes glinted. “How kind of you to volunteer.”
“Fuck you.”
Janson clicked his tongue in gentle rebuke. He stepped closer. The overhead light flickered, dimmed—and in that stuttering heartbeat of shadow, he glimpsed his reflection in the steel instruments arranged beside the chair: a gaunt face, pupils blown wide, skin glazed with perspiration. The tremor playing at the corners of his lips betrayed him, shaping words that felt foreign even as they left him.
“You see, A5,” he whispered, voice trembling toward revelation, “the cure was never meant for all of us. Only for those who earned it—those who proved they could endure. But Thomas can’t see that. He robbed humanity. And for what?”
He resumed pacing, faster now, as though urged onward by some invisible metronome. His hands twitched, conducting an orchestra only he could hear. “He believes himself righteous. He believes defiance is virtue.” His breath hitched. “But you and I—we’ll teach him the price his sainted righteousness was always going to exact.”
His voice cracked, saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth. Abruptly, he stopped, pressing a shaking hand to his temple, fingers digging as though to anchor something slipping loose inside him.
“Do you hear it?” he rasped. “It’s getting louder. The Flare—its clarity.”
A5’s reply was quiet, almost pitying. “You’ve shucking lost it, mate.”
“But madness,” Janson breathed, smiling faintly, “is only the mind’s final evolution.”
Something stirred within him—an idea blooming with the slow, poisonous beauty of dark inspiration. He shifted his stance, his voice softening, coaxing, angling each word with surgical precision toward the boy’s most fragile fault lines.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he murmured. “Perhaps Thomas won’t come. Perhaps he’s learned to let go after all.”
He paused, then laughed—a thin, private sound, as though the notion had curled inward and brushed against some fractured place within him. The laughter echoed once, then collapsed into stillness. For a fleeting heartbeat, he felt calm again, suspended in a clarity that was neither sanity nor surrender.
Of course, he knew the truth. Thomas was here, stalking these very halls—undeniable, inevitable, as real as the virus gnawing through Janson’s mind. But the lie comforted him. The uncertainty. The game, most of all.
He straightened, smoothed the front of his coat with meticulous fingers, and let that calm crystallise into something cold and immutable.
“And if that’s true,” he said, voice returning to its clinical detachment, “then you really are alone. No one coming. No one left. Not worth saving, just as you said.”
The boy’s gaze went distant—not broken, not yet, but dimmed, as though some inner flame guttered low in its socket.
And Janson, watching him, felt the faintest flutter of satisfaction.
Stillness again.
Comprehension.
Control.
The first alarm split the silence like a nerve being severed.
A shrill cry rang down the sterile halls, cresting and breaking, its echo rippling through the walls like pain passing through a body. Janson stood motionless, listening. The sound did not merely fill the air—it entered him, piercing marrow and membrane, setting his blood thrumming to its strange mechanical cadence. His pulse climbed to meet it, beating in wild imitation until the noise without and the one within were indistinguishable.
Finally.
The air itself seemed to alter, thickening with static. He felt the Flare stir inside him—his crawling god—sharpening his senses to a cruel, scintillating pitch. Each pulse of orange light gouged his retinas, thick and searing, as if his vision itself were being forged anew. The skin along his arms tingled, pores flaring open, each one trembling, alert. The infection had become a kind of sight, a sacrament of clarity.
They were coming.
He was coming.
Drawn by gravity, by guilt—by the havoc Janson himself had unleashed with trembling hands. The symmetry of it struck him, terrible in its perfection, inevitable enough to feel almost poetic.
Thomas.
It rose in him like fever—an abhorrence hot enough to blister thought itself. Thomas. The name vibrated through the marrow of his skull, conjuring that face—defiant, foolish, incandescent with youth and conviction. Janson’s cracked lips twisted into a smile. What moved in him was not joy, nor hatred, but that trembling anticipation which heralds epiphany: the quickened pulse before the incision, the breathless hush before a bloodcurdling scream.
The boy who had dismantled everything.
Years of calculation and sacrifice—undone by the blunt force of idealism.
WICKED’s spine shattered in the name of friendship.
Weak. That was Thomas—weak and sentimental, a creature born of attachments and soft devotions. And yet there was power in that weakness, a power Janson had never succeeded in unmaking. It baffled him. It frightened him. It made his blood itch beneath his skin.
He pressed his palm to the cold steel of the operating table, feeling the vibration of the alarm pulse through it—an orange heartbeat echoing his own. The Flare murmured beneath his flesh, curling its electric tongue through his nerves, sweet with corruption.
He had almost forgotten how alive loathing could make him feel—how near to divinity.
“Do you hear that, A5?” he murmured, the edge of a purr curling through the words. “That’s the sound of your saviour arriving. Right on cue.”
The boy did not lift his head. Only his fingers stirred once—the faintest tremor against the cold bite of the restraints. It was enough. Janson’s smile deepened—thin, patient, knowing.
Footsteps gathered down the corridor, echoing in broken rhythm along the walls. They came closer—an inexorable percussion. Each strike seemed to vibrate through the floor, through the air, through him. His reflection quivered in the polished tray beside the chair. In that shifting glass, he looked both god and ghost, sanctified and undone.
The Flare pulsed within him—soft, seductive—a hum beneath his ribs that blurred the edges of thought. It had burned away the remnants of fear, charred the last sinews that tethered him to empathy, and left behind something purer: hunger, honed and cruel.
He let his fingers drift over the instruments arrayed before him like an offering. Scissors. Clamps. Scalpels. Each blade gleamed in the pulse of the alarm, each promising a private sacrament, a communion of blood and purpose.
He selected one with reverence.
A scalpel—narrow, immaculate.
Turning it between his fingers, he watched the metal catch the shifting light until the gleam grew almost blinding. Then, with deliberate grace, he pressed the edge to the inside of his wrist.
The blade whispered through his skin, parting it in a thin, obedient line. Dark blood welled to the surface—thick and slow, patient. The sight pleased him. It was order incarnate, proof that something in the world still bowed to the laws of cause and consequence.
For an instant, he felt peace—a grotesque serenity, radiant and absolute.
And when he lifted his gaze again, his reflection was smiling back at him—red-eyed, luminous, and wickedly exultant.
Then, with a small, almost dismissive motion, he set the scalpel aside and reached for a larger blade—one with weight, with presence, with the theatrical gravitas the moment demanded. Calm settled over him like a physician’s apron as he lifted it; the metal glinted between his fingers, bright and cold as a sliver of the long forgotten winter sun.
He stepped beside A5. The flat of the blade traced a slow line across the boy’s throat—no pressure, only promise—just as the door exploded inward.
Light and motion crashed into the room.
Thomas came first—ragged of breath, eyes flooded with panic, the gun quaking between his hands as if his very essence had been wrought into the metal, his heart molten and bleeding into the steel, a vessel for the frantic rhythm of his own pulse. A7 followed, a storm of wrath made flesh, every fibre of his being wound tight, his very presence shaping the room into a crucible of combat. Both were clad in black WICKED guard uniforms, the irony almost tactile, seeping from the fabric, as if the universe itself conspired to mock their pretensions.
Teresa lingered in the doorway, ghostly pale, eyes alight with quiet dread, the muted horror of one who had beheld catastrophe too near to turn away.
Janson registered her expression—guilt, yes, but also regret, and worst of all, pity.
Something twisted in his gut, an acidic coil of revulsion.
Pity.
He could have forgiven betrayal; betrayal at least implied agency. But pity—pity was the indulgence of the uninfected, the clean, the untouched. It was an insult carved deeper than any blade could reach.
“Stay where you are,” he said. His voice held its calm, yet his words vibrated with a twitching undercurrent of agitation.
For a breathless instant, the tableau held.
The acrid tang of disinfectant and iron; the alarm’s pulsing orange, stuttering across white walls; A5 bound to the chair, his breath sliding thin and quick between parted lips. Behind him, Janson stood serene amid the rupture, blade poised, the tip resting lightly against the boy’s throat—a singular point of stillness at the very heart of the storm.
Janson smiled. The expression rippled across his features with a strange, disjointed savagery, as though his face had forgotten how to arrange itself into pleasure.
“Thomas,” he said, almost warmly. “You always did have impeccable timing.”
A5 stirred, lifting his head a fraction, his voice a ragged scrape. “Tommy—”
“Don’t move,” Thomas snapped.
The command cracked halfway through, and Janson savoured it—the fragile tremor beneath authority, that exquisite fracture of fear. Music to his ears, it surged through him, a living thing: fire in its veins, poison on its tongue.
A7’s weapon rose in a sharp, decisive arc. “Let him go, you sick—”
“Another step,” Janson murmured, the words slick with mania, “and your loyalty will be measured in suffering.”
With an almost devotional slowness, he drew the blade across A5’s skin—from the hollow of the throat, over the jut of the collarbone, down to the bound wrist. The metal kissed flesh with barely any pressure. It was not the wound that mattered—it was the inevitability of it, the shadow of pain descending like a veil.
The cut itself was precise, acute. When blood welled, it whispered at first—bright and thin—then thickened, unfurling across the steel restraint like a dark, flowering petal. A5 hissed through clenched teeth, a fleeting spark of defiance tightening his jaw.
Thomas lurched forward, but Teresa caught him, fingers clamping around his arm.
“Don’t,” she whispered, her eyes fixed on the menacing gleam of the blade. “Newt’s not immune, and Janson’s not bluffing—Thomas, you know he isn’t.”
Janson turned his head toward her with a motion slow and serpentine. The overhead lights carved hollows into his face, deepening the shadows beneath his eyes. Blood—his own—slid down his wrist in a thin, glistening ribbon.
He lifted his wrist, holding it aloft with methodical composure—an exhibit offered to the room, the dark runnel of his blood catching the alarm’s pulsing glow, black and viscous like oil, luminous and malign; a sigil etched upon flesh, the scope of his demonstration unmistakable.
“That’s right,” he breathed, voice velveted with decay. “He’s not. Our clever girl, Teresa. You’ve always had a talent for stating the obvious, my dear. The Flare appreciates intelligence—it feeds upon it.”
Teresa’s breath faltered. “Please—you don’t need to do this.”
He regarded her for a long, unnervingly tranquil moment. A faint, curious smile ghosted across his lips. Teresa—prodigal daughter, brightest instrument in WICKED’s grand design. His face held a serenity that bordered on holy, but his pupils had eclipsed his irises, two black suns devouring their own light. When he spoke, it was with the calm lucidity of a prophet foretelling the world’s undoing.
“Need?” he repeated—softly, almost tenderly. “This isn’t need, Teresa. This is order. Balance. The universe righting itself through us. Do you think I enjoy this?”
His mouth twitched; the smile fissured into something raw and aching.
“No. The Flare has taught me—oh, it has taught me—that mercy is not the opposite of cruelty. Mercy…” His eyes widened with ecstasy. “…is cruelty refined to its purest form.”
She swallowed but did not answer.
Thomas lowered his gun, hands trembling, the weapon’s weight seeming to leech the last of his fortitude. “What do you want?” he murmured, his voice a threadbare whisper, worn almost to the precipice of defeat.
Janson’s gaze fixed on him, slow and incredulous. Then laughter tore itself from his chest, jagged and mirthless, a sound that fractured mid-cry, collapsing into a rasp, the noise of a man bent to the inevitability of his own undoing.
“What do I want?” he echoed, voice rising and falling like a tide of spent ferocity. “You dare ask me that—after you stripped from me all that was mine? My work, my purpose, my future?” The words quivered, a dying storm caught in brittle syllables. “You did not merely destroy an experiment, Thomas. You desecrated the only salvation left to this wretched species. You took this—the last fragile hope of humankind—and turned it into an act of childish rebellion.”
Thomas stepped forward, his eyes sunken wells of despair. “If it’s me you want, take me,” he said, stripped of pretence or pride. “Take your revenge. Just… just let him go.”
“Tommy, don’t—”
Janson cut him off with a soft, indulgent sound. “Oh, I will take you, Thomas,” he murmured, “but not yet.”
He leaned toward A5, the knife gleaming like an icicle at the curve of the boy’s temple. A5’s jaw locked, tendons standing in stark relief as his breath stuttered into a small, trapped thing. Janson could feel the pulse beneath the thin flesh—fluttering, frantic, pressing insistently against cold steel. The intimacy of it delighted him.
“Do you know what’s most tragic about him, Thomas?” Janson pondered, words stirring the boy’s blond hair. “Not his lack of immunity. Not his hopeless, quivering sentimentality. No—the real tragedy is far simpler.”
He drew the blade lightly across A5’s cheek. The boy recoiled; Thomas growled; Minho spat a curse through clenched teeth. Janson drank in each reaction, each flicker of fear and anger, as one might savour the rarest, most intoxicating vintage. He angled the blade again, letting the pulsing alarm-light dance along its edge, watching horror sculpt itself upon Thomas’ features. Then, softly:
“He did not believe you would come. And he cares for you—God, how he cares. Every pulse spike, every neural flare, every scrap of data screamed your name. Thomas. Thomas. Tommy. And yet… for all the affection he nurtures, for all that pitiful, aching devotion—he still thought himself abandoned.”
A faint, tremulous smile ghosted Janson’s cracked lips. “But me…” A shiver rippled through him. “I never doubted you. Not for a single second.”
Janson regarded his small audience with a long, acquisitive look: Thomas’ knuckles blanched to marble around the gun; Teresa’s hand, half raised, as if sheer will could stave off fate; A7, a creature of unbroken motion, stilled at last, seized by consternation.
“Look at him,” Janson murmured, eyes dropping to the dark slick of blood at his own wrist, thin, oily threads black against his skin. “He is a ticking clock, Thomas. Same as I. The Flare waits, patient as death. And I,” he smiled, admiring the line of his wound as though it were a masterstroke, “can hasten it.”
He raised his hand, watching the viscous strands gather at his fingertips. “Imagine it,” he said, “watching him unmake himself. Dissolve, cell by cell, thought by thought. Is that not fitting punishment—for all your faith?”
Thomas’ voice fractured, a brittle shard of sound. “Please,” he gasped, stripped of all strength, “Don’t—I’ll do anything.”
The plea hung suspended, trembling like a bird caught in a cage of invisible wires, each quiver a pulse of pure, frantic terror radiating from his fear for Newt. Janson’s lips curved into a smile that deepened slowly, reverent, almost mournful, yet threaded with a rapture that was wholly his own.
He inhaled, the metallic tang of the air thick in his lungs, and let WICKED’s failures writhe and reveal themselves, their negligence a twisted tapestry unfurling within the theater of his mind; how they had coddled Thomas, spared him the cruelty that could have shattered him utterly, allowed him to walk away whole when they should have torn at the fragile fibers of his ardor. How laughably inept they had been. Fools. And now the instrument they had neglected lay, trembling, in his hands. A5—the axis of all Thomas cherished, the heart of his moral gravity—was the key. No longer incidental, the boy’s fear became a living, breathing instrument, and Janson, at last, its master; every quiver, every ragged inhale, a note to be plucked, a chord in the symphony of his design.
“Weapons down. Ease them to me—nice and slow.”
Thomas did as told, as if some older gravity held him in its palm; each movement reluctant, the slide of metal across tile sanctified by despair. Janson took this compliance as proof, affirming the taut arithmetic of his contrivance —A5 the fulcrum, Thomas the lever.
A7 hesitated.
“Minho,” Thomas said, voice void of all feeling. It was no command, yet A7 followed, relinquishing the weapon not of his own volition but at the silent urging in Thomas’ plea, passing it with the coiled restraint of a predator held fast by inexorable, uncompromising forces beyond his will.
Janson bent and let his fingers close around the cold metal. He emptied the Launcher first with a kind of methodical, languid contempt—cartridges spilling across the floor like desiccated seeds, the rattle of them stark against the stillness—then cast the hulking device aside as one might discard a spent sacrament whose miracle had soured.
He turned the smaller pistol in his hand with reverence. It's cool weight settled into his palm like a nexus for his intent, drawing it, sharpening it, bending his focus into a single, merciless point.
“You imagine there’s virtue in deprivation? A prize in toppling WICKED?” he said, voice tossed out carelessly. To speak was merely to purge an irritation from his lungs. “Some grand moral victory to balance the scales?” The question was rhetorical; it drifted between them like a noxious vapour, curdling the air it touched. “You didn’t destroy corruption—you murdered the only chance we had. You took hope and transmuted it into defiance.”
His gaze slid to Teresa. Contempt rose in him like bile, bitter, bright, scalding. “And you—our prodigy—bartered reason for sentiment.”
He lifted the pistol to A5’s temple. The boy flinched, a small, perfect motion—too slight to break the silence, yet enough to consecrate the moment. His muted fear cast the room into a fevered liminality, made the space pulse with a paradoxical holiness and corruption.
“Don’t.” Thomas’ warning rasped from him, a syllable torn open and left bleeding into the air. Janson found it exquisite; the brittle fracture of command splintering beneath terror’s weight.
“Put the gun down,” Teresa said. Her hands trembled, the quiver coursing through her like a dark augury, a whisper of doom threading through bone and blood.
“Please.” The word slipped from Thomas as he sank to his knees, as if the very axis of the world had tilted to force him downward. “Don’t… hurt him. I’ll do anything—anything at all. Just don’t hurt him.”
Every heartbeat, every flutter of the chest, every trembling finger fed the architecture of Janson’s obsession.
Newt’s fragile form, bound and quivering, was the anchor, the lodestone that drew Thomas’ soul compulsively toward him, a spindle of coercion around which all resolve might twist and contort—a living instrument for Janson to wield, the tender thread of sentimentality laid bare for him to exploit.
The world contracted to this, a lattice of fear and fidelity, and he, its unseen arbiter, could direct, coax, and torment with the slow patience of a composer summoning the final, perfect chord. The boy’s despair became a living thing, breathing and bending, a melody wrought from innocence and anguish, and he was its conductor—revelling, revering, worshipping at the altar of chaos he had conjured. Yes… let them see. Let them…
The act of supplication was nearly sacred; Janson closed his eyes and let it wash over him. The Flare thrummed in his skull, a metallic whisper contracting cognition to a single, insatiable point. Anything. He let the vision unfold: Thomas behind glass, a specimen resubmitted, restrained, the great experiment unmade and then remade in Janson’s image.
Anything.
“Ah. Begging,” he breathed, more to himself than to those present—“the purest truth.”
The pistol slid from A5’s temple with the ease of inevitability, levelled now at Thomas. The barrel hung there, motionless, implacable—a sentence carved in steel.
“No,” A5 gasped.
“Stop it!” Teresa cried, stepping forward, but Janson did not spare her a glance. Fever dictated each motion; each residual quiver honed to a fine, lethal acuity.
“All actions summon their reckoning,” he said, each word a decree. “And Thomas here,” he added, eyes locked on the boy, “he must understand that.”
Thomas’ voice broke, ragged with entreaty. “I do. I understand now.”
“Tommy—”
Teresa’s voice rose, sharp and tremulous as a struck chime. “Janson—listen to me.”
He turned, slow as a pendulum; the hunger in his attention became a blade unto itself. Her face was ashen, lips quivering like a moth’s wings. She bore the countenance of one who had traced loss so thoroughly that its lines were tattooed upon her heart, a map of suffering no soul could read and remain unshaken.
“You cannot kill him,” she said. “You do not understand—Thomas is the solution. He is the cure.”
Silence descended, dense and almost tangible. The fluorescent hum receded, dulled as if some unseen hand had throttled it; the world contracted to three faces in the doorway, the dark bead of blood at Janson’s wrist, and the shallow, measured rhythm of breathing.
He blinked. The smile that unfurled across his features was fragile, like porcelain cracked and rehung. “Ah,” he whispered—an exhalation equal parts grimace and delight. “Of course. Of course he is.”
The motion of raising the gun toward Thomas again was ceremonious, measured, bearing the gravity of both sacrament and sentence. “Then,” he said, low and final as a verdict, “we shall see what happens when the cure bleeds.”
Even as the words left him, they sounded less like threat than theorem—an experiment announced, a hypothesis poised for testing. The Flare thrummed against his bones, a liturgy in electric key; his mind, frayed and luminous, perceived the act not as murder, but as demonstration. He could taste the symmetry of it: cause and consequence, devotion and decay, theory enacted upon the living.
For a fleeting, razor-sharp moment, Janson felt the tug between what the Flare demanded and the ethics his world had once instilled. The infection sang of annihilation as mercy; Teresa’s voice, imploring, suggested a different calculus. In that suspended breath, a shard of reason—some remnant of the architect he had once been—flared.
He did not lower the pistol. He did not yet pull the trigger. But the hand that held it trembled, a quiver not entirely conjured by the Flare—an answering pulse from a conscience he scarcely trusted.
Janson moved before thought, as if some older compulsion buried deep within him had loosened its leash. The butt of the pistol collided with the side of Thomas’ head; for a brief, uncanny instant, Janson stared at his own hand as though it belonged to a stranger. His pulse thundered; the Flare applauded behind his eyes, metallic, exultant, urging him forward.
Thomas made no move to intercept the blow. He crumpled instead, face turned from the light, breath thin and ragged. That stillness—absolute, unresisting—was anathema to Janson, more infuriating than defiance, more intolerable than scorn. Fingers closing like iron about the collar of Thomas’ stolen uniform, he hauled him upright, the black fabric—once a symbol of order, of authority—biting under his grip, a cruel mockery pressed into his palm. How exquisitely ironic, he thought, that the boy who had so often outrun their design now wore their guise, a living testament to WICKED’s failings and a fresh instrument for his own meticulous cruelty.
He shoved; Thomas toppled. The air was rent by cries, indistinct in origin—Teresa, perhaps; A5, beyond doubt. Janson struck again, and again. The blows came fast, animated by a dark will—each contact a punctuation, each shove a line in some perverse rite. Thomas hit the floor with an impact that shuddered through the tiles, brutal yet uncannily clean, reducing the world to the music of breath and the staccato beat of human fragility. Janson’s shadow fell over him like a dark mantle.
“Look at you,” he hissed, teeth bared around the words. “The saviour of the lost. Is this what salvation looks like?”
Thomas’ head lolled; his eyes were glassy, his breath shallow. The absence of retaliation carved a new edge into Janson’s madness, sharpening it into something almost prismatic, jagged and refracting his hunger—rage refined into need. He wanted the boy to shatter, to fling back some incandescent fury that would make the world solid again. In Janson’s fevered mind, rage demanded a counterforce—an answering blaze to prove that cause and consequence still held dominion.
“Fight me,” he snarled, shaking him as one might rouse a torpid animal. “Do something—show me you still believe you’re righteous!” His voice splintered under the tremor of the Flare, cracking in ways that language could not fully contain, a sound simultaneously command, plea, and invocation.
Thomas did not rise to it. He braced instead, receiving each strike as though endurance itself were a sombre, austere absolution. His lip split; his head snapped with each impact—and yet he did not retaliate. That refusal inflamed Janson far more than defiance ever could; to be met with the calm of a martyr was to be mocked by the universe’s own inertness.
“You fancy this atonement?” Janson spat, fingers clawing into the front of Thomas’ shirt, shaking him as though to dislodge a confession. “You think submission will reprieve you?”
Thomas found his eyes then, dazed but steady. “I think you’re already gone,” he said, and the words sank slowly, acid along nerves already raw.
Janson staggered, breath rattling through his chest; the Flare thrummed sharp and bright behind his temples. Gone. The syllable festered in his skull, spinning into a jagged, mirthless chime that grated against thought itself. Gone. Gone. Gone. He tasted it—and felt himself fissure, split in two.
His gaze drifted to the restraint chair. A5—Newt—still bound, still bleeding from the shallow welts along his wrist, collarbone, and cheek, watched Thomas with wide, helpless eyes, a flame flickering against the encroaching darkness. Janson followed that gaze, and in that suspended, trembling thread, he beheld the apex of his orchestration.
“Ah,” he whispered, a sound both delicate and terrible, “so it comes to this. Neither loyalty nor guilt alone.”
Thomas flinched—almost imperceptibly—but it sufficed. A sudden, undeniable light struck some private rift, illuminating a hidden vulnerability and exposing the fracture Janson had carved meticulously with every insult, every inflicted pain.
Janson studied him with the detached scrutiny of a scientist observing an anomaly. “Love,” he breathed—the word foreign, malformed on his tongue, like a curse misremembered. “That is what you call this sickness. They sanctify it with poetry; I name it contagion—weakness draped in hymnody.”
He leaned closer; his pupils were blown wide, black wells of fever. “The Flare burned that out of me,” he said. “Scoured it clean—the useless parts, the tender machinery that makes one soft enough to die for another.” His voice held no inflexion, only the calm precision of a man stating a fact already proven.
Thomas remained unresponsive. His stillness was confession enough; a wordless admission.
Janson turned his gaze on A5 again. “Is it him, then—you choose him, and damn the rest? Him? Above the sum of humanity?” he spat, each syllable laced with venom, curling and biting through the air. “All your righteousness, all your reason—reduced to this.” Contempt coiled in his chest, thickening, curdling into something almost physical. “Attachment,” he hissed, voice low and dangerous. “Decay masquerading as allegiance.”
He raised the pistol once more, ceremonious, as if delivering a thesis forged in iron. “Let us measure the depth of your fault,” he intoned.
Thomas moved—not with reasoned thought, but with the sudden, animal precision of one defending what he could not surrender. He wrenched Janson’s arm aside; the bullet wailed, a steel-laden lament, ricocheting in vain against the tiles as it tore through empty air toward the ceiling. They collided and fell together, the room contracting into a harsher, smaller world—a universe distilled to the grind of bodies, the rasp of breath, the scrape of fabric against skin.
Janson’s hands closed on Thomas’ throat; Thomas’ fingers clawed at the weapon. They became a violent confluence of heft and will, each desperate pulse a convulsion of force and fury, a grim, malignant rhythm vibrating through the taut space between predator and prey.
The fever thrummed in Janson—divine and diseased in a single, incandescent beat. He hungered, achingly, to see Thomas unmake himself, to watch that light wink and die behind those traitorous eyes. The impulse flared white-hot, a canticle of eradication, and for a moment nothing existed beyond it.
Then, through the static of the Flare, a voice cut like crystal: Teresa’s—sharp, unwavering: He is the cure.
Janson’s arm trembled beneath the weight of a thousand possible endings. The weapon was heavy in his grip, a dark promise coiled at the tips of his fingers. The Flare whispered insistently, a metallic hiss threading through his skull, urging completion—but another current, stranger, the memory of reason, held him back. If Thomas truly was the cure, then to kill him would sever the last tenuous thread of his own sanity.
“Of course,” he murmured, a lacquered calm settling over him like varnish on glass. The words fell softly, clipped, administrative in their cadence, almost indifferent, as his fingers unfurled, relinquishing the tension he had so meticulously wrought. “We cannot squander the cure before the experiment completes. That would be wanton waste.”
Thomas wrenched free, coughing, eyes wide with horror—and something else, a hardened resolve forged in the furnace of despair. Janson staggered upright, swaying; the pistol firmly in his palm. He could have ended it then; he could have let philosophy and consequence collide in finality. The desire burned bright and cruel, a second sun searing his mind.
Yet the cure—the fragile, unyielding kernel of it—still drew him. Even the Flare’s relentless insistence could not drown that need entirely. It reshaped his mania, honing it into something sterner, more exacting.
When he laughed, the sound was thin, splintered—a shard of joy fractured by fever. He smoothed his coat with disdain, ran a hand through his hair, and spoke, voice measured, almost civil, like a lecturer surveying a cadaver:
“A masterpiece. The human mind, unravelling and resisting at once. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Then, with the unhinged ritual of a conductor summoning a symphony, he clapped once and chirped:
“Let us proceed. The cure will not complete itself by chance.”