Zubair stumbled once as the guards pushed him through the plexiglass door, then caught himself with the same neat control he used for everything.

The door to his plexiglass prison sealed silently, and he sank to the floor in his corner, forearms on his knees, his eyes open and steady.

Everyone who knew him well knew what he was doing at that moment. He was counting everything, taking names, and memorizing faces.

It would almost be a pity what he was going to do to those he came across when the situation was turned.

Across the corridor, another plexiglass door swung open, and two guards entered Elias’ small cell.

"On your feet," the taller guard instructed.

Elias rose without bracing a hand against the wall.

The room smelled like chilled plastic and the breath of too many bodies scrubbed out of the air. A curl of tape clung to the threshold, stuck to nothing. He stepped over it and moved into the corridor between two white-coated backs.

Zubair didn’t speak. A small lift of the chin was enough. They had experienced worse and lived through it. They would live through this as well.

The hall swallowed him in an endless amount of white that was completely different from the tundra outside of the penthouse in City H.

Cameras blinked red in the ceiling like patient eyes.

Every eight paces a vent exhaled. The guards walked the rhythm of men who had measured this distance a hundred times and found no surprises left in it.

They cut right at a painted arrow—DIAGNOSTIC—and the temperature dropped a fraction.

Elias marked the change the way he marked a fever’s first half-degree: a different feel against teeth when he drew air in, a thinner noise from the lights. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

The imaging suite waited behind a wire-laced pane.

Through the glass: a gantry ring, table, coils, the clean geometry of machines that only behaved if you treated them like gods. Two techs hunched at a console.

Dr. Orhan stood to the side, the clipboard posed, her pen already hunting. Dr. Davis remained behind her, hands folded, mouth set in calm lines she had probably never seen crack.

"Baseline VO₂, then pulmonary diffusion, then structural." Dr. Orhan didn’t look at him when she listed the order, only at the space he would occupy. "Endocrine after imaging. Tissue last."

The mask came first. Clear, citrus-cleaned, a soft hiss with each inhale.

Elias kept his jaw relaxed so the strap wouldn’t cut. A green trace began to crawl across a monitor behind the glass. The more interesting traces—the ones that would tell them how much he was not—ran on screens he couldn’t see.

"Breathe normally," the speaker instructed. "We’ll ramp flow in three stages."

His lungs took the increase without complaint. He’d trained himself through smoke, cold, and hypoxia in places that did not forgive mistakes.

The numbers would look pretty for a human chart. He kept the rhythm ordinary anyway—let a little inefficiency show, let the diaphragm hitch on step two, let the exhale arrive a hair too soon on step three.

The creature that lived low and quiet under his ribs didn’t push. It folded itself smaller than Elias ever thought possible, like a muscle drawing in. If he didn’t know better, he would have assumed that the smell of iodine and solvent offended it in some way.

Hide and wait. Not fear. Tactics, hissed a voice in his head before everything went silent again.

"Step three below predicted," one tech murmured.

"Note it," Dr. Orhan replied, pen scratching. "Proceed."

They slid him from mask to ring.

The bed support’s inner lip hummed.

He fixed his gaze on a bolt head above and traced the shape of the hex while the machine read him.

No claustrophobia.

He wasn’t fidgeting.

The tech cautioned him not to swallow. He let his tongue settle back and thought about the last night he’d slept in the casino tower—the exact number of steps from the couch to the kitchen, the way Luci’s claws whispered on stone, the way Zubair portioned eggs like he was building a bridge you could eat.

"Hold." The ring clicked. "Breathe."

He catalogued the noises because that was what he did.

A faint harmonic under the main coil. Bearings not new, but not neglected. Fans to the left pulling more than the right—a filter change overdue. None of it useful unless he needed to break the room.

All of it poured into the column in his head marked later.

They moved him to the treadmill next. Mask back on, leads at chest, cuff at bicep. The treadmill’s belt whined low as it rolled. "Start slow," the tech prompted. "We climb in two-minute increments."

Elias ran where they put him.

He let his foot strike carry more heel than he liked so the numbers would feel human.

The cuff tightened. The machine drank his breath and converted it to clean decimals. Step one.

Step two. Sweat along the hairline, but not down his back.

Step three. He pretended to need the rail for one beat and then didn’t. He gave them exactly enough.

"Terminate test," Dr. Orhan decided. "He’ll hold a low-lactate profile at high work. We’re not here for his cardio."

They went back to steel. Coil at thigh. Another at shoulder. "Stay still," the speaker reminded. The creature obliged before he could ask it to.

Stillness suited it. Stillness meant thinking.

The doors slid for the next room—fluoroscopy, old school, useful. A wall unit powered, raised a peculiar ozone note. The tech positioned his arm with practiced care. "Don’t lock the elbow," she coached. "Breathe."

Light flickered at the corners of his eyes.

The image on the monitor rendered bone, joint, the neat assembly he’d treated a hundred times in others.

He watched his own humerus resolve and felt nothing.

The tech adjusted angle. "Ligamentous integrity looks good," she observed to the room. "Start nerve conduction after bloods."

Bloods. Fine.

They sat him in a chair with arms wide enough to keep his shoulders open. Tourniquet. Vein.

The needle slid in like it knew the route already. He didn’t look away because he never looked away from needles.

The first tube filled. The second. The third. Citrate. EDTA.

He identified the caps without needing to see them. With the fourth draw, the vacuum stuttered. A thread of fibrin had formed along the bevel, too fast.

The phlebotomist frowned, swapped the needle with a neat single-handed technique, flushed the line with saline. "Try again."

Elias let the creature stay small.

If he let it stretch, the next tube would clot mid-fill.

If he let it stretch, the puncture would close before the needle left.

Both were truths better kept for later. He breathed and gave them their crimson cylinders.

"CBC, CMP, ESR, CRP, panel A and B," Dr. Orhan listed for the lab runner. "Hormone panel flagged priority."

The runner vanished with the tray.

The cuff at his arm squeezed again for a blood pressure they could have taken from the monitor.

The tech touched his wrist with two fingers anyway, old habit, checking the count against the machine because some people still trusted hands.

"Heart rate’s low," she observed, no judgment in it. "Athlete low."

"Noted," Dr. Orhan returned.

Nerve conduction next. Gel. Electrodes at wrist and elbow, the cold round mouths of them settling on skin. "You’ll feel a tap," the tech warned. "Then more."

The first stimulus jumped the muscles in his thumb, an involuntary twitch.

He didn’t argue with the instinct to pull away; he let it ride and then stilled. The tech chased velocity up the median, then the ulnar, then the radial.

She marked distances with a grease pencil like a cartographer drawing a coastline.

"Conduction normal to slightly elevated," she told the glass. "No demyelination pattern."

"Expected," Dr. Davis murmured at last, voice calm as weather. "He was always the least... demonstrative."

Dr. Orhan didn’t answer him. "Bone density," she instructed. "Then endocrine sampling."

DEXA hummed through his pelvis and spine.

On the monitor, his skeleton painted itself in whites and grays. The numbers that came out would say denser than average, not remarkable enough to make anyone shout in surprise.