Youri drifted deeper into the watery abyss. There was no up or down anymore, only a slow and endless descent, as if gravity itself had dissolved. The water around him was dark, cold and infinite, pressing in without pressure and holding him without touch. Thoughts didn't form there. Memory didn't sting. There was only motion without movement, sinking without falling.
Then his eyes snapped open, and harsh, sterile white light assaulted him. He gasped violently and dragged in air as though he had been drowning for years. His body jerked forward on instinct, his muscles locking and his fingers clawing at nothing as pain exploded inside his skull.
He was in a medical bay — a capsule-shaped room with walls that curved slightly inward, its cool overhead lights reflecting off a dark polished floor, folded medical arms hanging along the walls. Three beds were set in a perfectly even row, each with its machines humming softly beside it, screens pulsing green with heart rates, neural activity and metabolic readings, and thick cables running from them into ports in the beds — some of them still connected to his body. He was lying in the first bed. For half a second, he didn't understand where he was.
Then the pain hit him properly. It tore through his head like a blade driven straight into his brainstem. He screamed, a raw, animal, unfiltered sound, and his hands flew to his skull as though he could physically hold his thoughts together. "No — no — no—!" He rolled, fell off the bed and hit the floor hard. He barely felt the impact, because the pain eclipsed everything.
Nurses rushed in. He couldn't see their faces clearly — only shapes, white coats, startled movement. Someone was shouting his vitals and someone else was calling his name. "Pilot D7 — Youri — can you hear me?"
He couldn't. Because the abyss had receded, and everything it had been hiding came rushing back. The whole sequence played again in his mind with merciless clarity: the battlefield, shattered Orbitons tumbling through the vacuum with their hulls torn open like exposed ribs, rebel ships rupturing under plasma fire and their crews vaporized before they could scream, missile locks and target confirmations, weapons cycling endlessly and efficiently. Death stacked upon death. He had watched all of it, and he had felt nothing.
And then Volar. The image burned itself into him: the planet hanging there, blue, alive, familiar, its shields flaring desperately as the antimatter tore reality apart, its cities flickering out in an instant, its atmosphere folding inward, its last resistance futile, brave, meaningless. And his finger on the trigger. He had done it. He had erased his home. He hadn't lost it to war, or watched it fall. He had pulled the trigger himself.
He screamed again, louder, until his throat burned. He scrambled across the floor and knocked over a diagnostics stand. Screens shattered and cables snapped loose in showers of sparks while the machines shrieked their warnings. "Get back!" one of the nurses shouted. They did, with real fear on their faces, while Youri thrashed, kicked and smashed anything within his reach, tearing at wires and ripping panels from the walls and sending the medical arms crashing to the floor. He wasn't trying to escape. He was trying to undo it.
Tears streamed down his face as he crawled backward until his spine hit the wall. He slid down it gasping and sobbing, his chest heaving. His hands were wrapped in fresh, clean bandages. Blood was already seeping through them, and his tears fell onto the white fabric and darkened it. He stared at them. Then his fingers curled slowly into fists. He began to turn them on himself, again and again, while the nurses stood frozen and horrified — one of them crying, another fumbling at a comm with shaking hands. "Call security — call the doctor — now!"
"Why?" he screamed, over and over. "Why — why—"
He collapsed forward with his shoulders shaking violently as the grief finally consumed him. He wasn't a weapon anymore. He wasn't a pilot. He was only a broken man kneeling in the ruins of what he had destroyed.
Security burst in moments later. Two of them tackled him from behind, pinned his arms and forced him face down onto the floor while he fought them with feral desperation, screaming incoherently, tears and blood smeared across his face. The doctor rushed in after them with wide but focused eyes. "Hold him — now!"
A syringe flashed into view, and Youri felt its sharp sting in his neck. "No—!" he tried to shout, but the word slurred halfway out of his mouth. The room tilted. The lights stretched. The screaming faded into a distant echo as dizziness swallowed him whole, and the darkness took him again.
When they moved him, he didn't wake. They took him to another room, more isolated and more secure — padded walls, reinforced restraints, constant monitoring. Halvek arrived soon afterward. The doctor met him outside with his hands clasped tightly together and his face pale and drawn with exhaustion and with something deeper. Unease.
"He woke up violently," the doctor began. "Post-Flow cognitive backlash. Extreme emotional overload. He tried to hurt himself, and there were hallucinations, dissociation. We sedated him immediately."
Halvek listened without interrupting, and surprisingly, he didn't look shocked. If anything, he looked thoughtful. "I assume you ran a full scan."
"Yes. The moment he was brought in after the mission." The doctor hesitated. "When he arrived, one of his kidneys was missing."
Halvek's eyes narrowed slightly, but he said nothing.
"We put him on life support at once. Organ failure should have followed within hours." The doctor swallowed. "But by the second day, his body had regenerated the missing kidney. Completely. Perfect cellular reconstruction — no scar tissue, no anomalies. And not only that. Every internal injury — neural microfractures, vascular damage, torn muscle — all of it healed within twenty-four hours."
Halvek turned his head slowly toward him. "…Regenerated?"
"I can't explain it," the doctor said, visibly shaken now. "No medicine we have, no technology, not even prototype nanotherapy could do that. Not in a day. Not ever. And I don't understand how he passed the academy screening. His file shows no genetic markers. No recorded anomalies. Nothing."
Halvek stared through the observation window at Youri's unconscious body, and the silence stretched between them. "What did Altopereh take from him?" he asked at last.
The doctor's lips trembled slightly. "We don't know yet. But something is missing. Not an organ. Not tissue."
"Then what?"
The doctor hesitated, and then answered honestly. "Something that can't be measured."
Halvek looked back at the boy in the padded room. "And when he wakes?"
This time the doctor didn't hesitate at all. "When he wakes," he said softly, "death will be the only thing he asks for."