They wheeled him into the clinic with more ceremony than a burial.
Core Shelter's infirmary smelled like boiled metal and antiseptic, the kind of clean that pretends chaos hasn't been a city's main export for months. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, throwing everyone's faces a worried, hospital-green. Mira walked beside him, boots clanking like a metronome for panic.
"You nervous?" she asked.
"Terrified," Kael lied, then added, because truth sometimes needs seasoning, "and hungry. Do you feed strange heroes before experiments, or after?"
She snorted. "If you survive, we feed you both."
They strapped him to a narrow bed. They didn't tie his wrists so much as they threaded them into the expectation that he would be interesting and probably ruin everything. A woman in pale coveralls — soft voice, hard eyes — introduced herself as Dr. Inari and explained the procedure in clinical sentences.
"We'll draw a sample," she said. "Analyze resonance markers. It's standard. You'll feel a pinch."
Ashveil's whisper curled around the word pinch like amusement. "Such quaint words for ripping into flesh," it said.
Kael blinked. "That was supposed to be reassuring?"
"Consider it bedside manner," Mira said. "They learned it from old propaganda."
The needle was sharp and quick. He watched the vial fill with his blood and thought, absurdly, that the color looked wrong — brighter than he'd ever seen, like somebody had turned up the saturation on life.
They ran tests. Machines hummed. Screens scrolled foreign symbols until the tech, a lanky man with ink-stained fingers, frowned and tapped a key hard enough to threaten its life. "That resonance reading—" he said. "It's not just active. It's layered."
"In what way?" Dr. Inari asked, eyes flicking up.
The man hesitated. "Like a voice speaking under a voice. Like someone playing two records at once."
Mira leaned in. "Translation: either he's a walking microphone, or there's something living in his bloodstream."
Ashveil made an offended sound. "Tell them I prefer 'soul roommate.'"
The tech's lips twitched. Mira shot Kael an apologetic look. "They humor me when I'm around. I'm sorry about their bedside manner."
They turned the room bright — a bank of lamps that made the edges of everything too sharp. The Wardens loved their light because it made the world look tidy. Clean edges, neat problems.
Kael felt the light like a hand pressing across his skin. Not warm. Not cold. Just insistently accurate.
"Record pain response," someone said.
He kept still, counting the seconds like a man counting the teeth of a dangerous clock. Ashveil muttered behind his ribs. "It smells of order. I could gag on that."
The lamps brightened. It wasn't plain light anymore — there was a frequency inside it, a pattern that ticked at something beneath his skin. Muscles twitched, reflexive and babysafe against his will. The mark on his chest flared, a pale lantern under cloth.
They recorded charts. They hummed with professional interest.
"Take a second vial," Dr. Inari ordered. "We want to see how the Dormant responds if stimulated directly."
Mira's jaw tightened. "And if it wakes fully?"
"We stabilize," Dr. Inari said. "We study. We mitigate."
"Or we cut it out like a tumor," the tech offered, in a way that sounded like curiosity and cruelty had the same taste.
Kael closed his eyes. Ashveil tasted like old bark and moon-ash in his head. "If they cut, we'll bleed names," it warned. "Names leak."
"Don't start tangents," Mira muttered, almost fond. "Save them for the road."
They shone the light lower then — at his arm, at the pulse inside his wrist. His skin prickled; it felt like dozens of tiny lenses being pressed into him. For a second, he thought he saw shapes inside the tubes of blood — shadows that moved with a mind of their own. The tech gasped.
"What did you see?" Dr. Inari demanded.
Kael shrugged helplessly. "Nothing. Everything. A dog that remembered the sea and a child who threw rocks at the moon."
The tech's voice was very small. "We're not supposed to get vision reports."
Mira's hand found his under the sheet and squeezed. "You okay?"
He wanted to say something brave. Instead he said, "No. But I'm good at lying to lights."
They cut him loose after their tests, sticky tape on the puncture that would scab over into a small reminder. In the recovery corridor, an older woman in a patched coat leaned toward him and whispered, "Not all light heals."
Kael laughed once, a dry sound. "Some of it just polishes the fear."
Outside, children — no older than ten — played a hollow game of pretending the streetlamps were suns. One of them saw Kael and saluted solemnly, as if he'd already been promoted by misfortune.
Mira led him to a small room where they kept the Shelter's more useful curiosities. In the center was a small glass case with an object the Wardens liked to show off: a shard of something silver, dull and pitted by time. It caught the lamplight and seemed to swallow it, folding the small beams into itself like a hungry mouth.
"We found that in the ruins of the Observatory," Mira said. "We think it's moon-metal. The Wardens study it. They say it's inert."
Ashveil's voice curled like smoke. "They worship rocks now. How quaint."
Kael looked at the shard and felt something inside him ripple — as if a memory had brushed his spine and revealed an old map. He didn't understand it, but he saw flashes: a lattice of glass, the moon with a hairline crack, a room full of people chanting in a language that canceled itself out.
He reached forward before he thought. His fingers brushed the case. The shard seemed to pulse in answer — faint, almost disappointed.
"Do not touch anything," Mira said automatically. "We've lost better men to curiosities."
"We lost a lot more to boredom and fear," Kael answered. "Curiosity at least burns nicely."
She stared. Then she smiled — a quick, sharp thing. "You're terrible company."
He grinned back. "It's a marketable skill."
That night, as he lay awake on a cot that wasn't his, the lights buzzed in an insomnia refrain. Dr. Inari's tests were filed away in neat categories; the Wardens would argue method and policy over coffee in the morning. People slept on benches, faces softened by dreams of better days.
Ashveil whispered one thing before drifting into a tail of sleeping words. "There is something in the shard. It remembers. And where memory waits, we find purpose."
Kael rolled onto his back and let the glow from the infirmary lamps wash his face. The light felt thinner now — less like salvation and more like interrogation. But under his ribs, the thing they called Ashveil thrummed steady as a metronome.
He'd survived the test. He'd been seen. They'd measured him, cataloged him, and decided to keep him alive one more night.
Outside, the city's lamps blinked in rows, counting the world in soft, indifferent arithmetic.
And somewhere, under their clean glow, something ancient turned its attention toward a man who remembered the moon.
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