Kai managed to tolerate the Humanitech security agents guiding him and Amon into an elevator deep within the core of the sprawling Genetic Modification Clinic. Barely. A simmering resentment at his captivity mixed with disdain at the fact that the though they had a right to do this to him.

It was how he had to play this though. As soon as his hands were unbound he’d be able to trigger the distress beacon implant at the base of his skull. He didn’t want to do so in plain sight though in case they caught on to what he was doing and placed him somewhere more secure. Or worse, let him go. It’d be much harder to get Amon to safety without his own personnel here.

The elevator doors slid shut smoothly, and the windowless cab began moving downward into the basement of the building. That might complicate things. His implant had a limited range, and it might take time for him to be located underground, if the signal even reached the surface at all.

The elevator stopped after only a short ride down, but only the guard steering the wounded Human pushed his captive out into the bright sterile hallway beyond. A few drops of blood from his still-bleeding forearm marked his passage out of the elevator as the doors slid shut once more.

The cab smoothly glided into motion, and Kai tried to gauge how deep underground they might be. After the elevator stopped again, he guessed it had travelled 10 to 15 stories underground. Not an impossible distance for the signal from his implant to reach, but it might take a few hours for him to be located. In the worst case, days…

The guards pushed him roughly out of the car. Or at least, they tried to. Kai’s sheer physical size prevented the Human from actually moving him, but he stepped forward obediently regardless. The deep basement level of a hostile facility was not the place to start a fight.

The character of this level was distinctly different from the rest of the facility. The upper floors of the building were clean, sterile, and bright, as one might expect from any hospital. This place, however, was cold and unyielding. The grey steel walls were meant to functional and durable. No benches or plants decorated the halls, only bulky doors spaced at even intervals. Simple LED stripes embedded in the walls and ceilings provided just enough light to see by.

Kai had seen enough corridors like these to know that this was a clandestine military facility. Had he though to look into it prior to coming, he probably could have found out about it’s presence. It shouldn’t have mattered though. He was simply escorting Amon to his treatment, and had paid for his Premium Membership status. Amon was just another customer, and Kai was a civilian escorting him to his appointment. Nothing out of the ordinary, other than Amon getting Cross-Species Modification.

They shouldn’t know who Kai actually was… Unless… With the recent attack on their headquarters, could Humanitech have actually uncovered his identity? His work and his every interaction with the company were encrypted with the most advanced algorithms he knew even existed. Surely there was another explanation for this. Perhaps it had something to do with his episode in the lobby minutes ago. Coming to his senses in the middle of a crowd of angry Humans made it clear that whatever had happened had been distressing, to say the least. His own vague, fragmented recollection of the experience was… Well, he decided not to dwell on it and think instead on how to get out of this situation.

Unfortunately, the only option was his implant. As he was walked down twisting metallic corridors, he noted the bulbous protrusions of automated turrets on the ceiling. The handcuffs on his wrists were meant to hold a normal human, and he was sure he could break them easily. He wouldn’t get far if he tried though. He couldn’t identify the model of these specific turrets, but they could likely fire thousands of AI guided armour piercing rounds every minute. He and Amon would be cut to pieces in seconds if he tried anything.

And so, he and Amon were quietly and obediently steered into yet another corridor. Only this one ended about fifty or so meters ahead of them. There were doors spaced evenly along its length, but unlike the rest of the armoured doors in the facility, these ones were fronted with black, opaque glass. Holding cells. Designed so security and intelligence operatives could interrogate captives without needing to move them to and from interview rooms. Kai sighed heavily. It was looking more and more like they’d discovered who he was.

One of the guards opened a door with a sub-dermal chip embedded in his wrist and pushed Amon inside. The other steered him to a cell a few doors further down the corridor and gestured sharply for him to enter. Kai walked in, and sighed again. He had to bend his knees slightly to avoid his horns scraping the ceiling of the small, confined space.

The door to the cell slid shut smoothly, giving only a slight pneumatic hiss as it closed. The opaque glass blocked out the light from the corridor, leaving Kai in bleak dimness within the small cell. It had likely been designed to demoralize it’s occupant, leaving them more receptive to whatever interrogation methods the intelligence operative on the other side of the glass chose to employ.

Kai didn’t feel particularly demoralized at least. Now that he had some privacy, he sat down on the too-small bed and stretched out as best he could. As he lowered his arms and sighed, he massaged the back of his neck as if to work out the tension there. He felt three small but sharp spasms in the muscles there. His implant was now active and transmitting a destress signal on an encoded channel. Hopefully he wasn’t too far underground for it to be received by cell towers on the surface and carried onward to it’s destination…

He continued to rub his neck and stretch out, doing his best to sell the illusion of trying dispel the discomfort of captivity. That, and he really was quite sore after sitting in those tiny chairs all day. He’d never actually intended to get quite so large when he’d specced out his original package of mods, but something about his size just felt right in a way that was hard to pin down. He flexed one massive arm. He often did this in private, simply admiring how massive he’d grown over the past few years. Again, he’d not intended this, but it felt…

It was happening again. That feeling of rightness was building and surging inside him the way it always did before a hallucination. The way it had just as Amon had emerged from his procedure, at the meetup, the first time he’d met Gev. Kai was sure there was a pattern, but right now he had to fight it. This was far too dangerous a situation to spend even a few minutes fully defenseless.

Kai settled himself on the bed and took a deep breath. He focused on the sensations of breathing, of his weight on the bed, the cool air against his scales, on letting thoughts simply come and go. The sensation of rightness continued to build and build. He didn’t focus on it. Didn’t give it energy. The breath, sounds, sensations. These were all he gave his attention to.

It wasn’t enough.

The world tilted and fell away, his breath expelled from his lungs in a long, slow rush. The floor fell away and gravity claimed him. Darkness. Falling. No sense of body or self.

All black. Soundless. Weightless.

Something there in the dark. Distant and close. Frightening and comforting. Was it here in this void?

The emptiness shimmered and resolved. Or it tried to. Sensation began to return, but only that. A beginning of sensation. No resolution.

Running. Muscles pumping. Fear. Fear. Everything was wrong. A voice?

“…Everywhere… They’re everywhere! Moving so quickly! We have to run!”

Everything shook. It rocked and tilted. Sound, so loud. Explosions?

Pain. Pain in bursts. Flashes. Spikes. Strangely, it felt… Alien somehow? He didn’t understand.

Each flash like a firework bursting. Or a gunshot. And then?… A void. Tiny pockmarks of empty flitting across his mind. Pulling, wrenching at him. They hurt. Agony. LOSS.

The ground dropped away again, but differently this time. Light all around. Bright, warm, tempting, welcoming. Not just light, but wind. It felt so good. Freedom.

And then.

Pain. But not like before. Worse. So much worse.

It started in his core, then splintered and ripped it’s way through him. Through all of him. He tried to pull away, tear away from it. Leave, flee, vanish, CEASE.

HE COULDN’T.

It claimed him.

The darkness claimed him.

Was that right?

The darkness claimed him anyway.

Warm and cold. Empty and silent. Yes. That was right. Good. Alone.

Alone.

 …

Kai blinked awake. He was still seated on the bed, but long strings of drool hung from his jaw. He grunted in displeasure and wiped them away, breathing deeply. His heart still thudded in his chest. It always did when these hallucinations happened, and it was getting more difficult to control.

Even so, he closed his eyes and resumed trying to meditate. The feeling of rightness was still with him, but it was fading away steadily as it always did after a hallucination. The meditation helped too.

After just a few minutes the feeling of rightness faded into the background, and his heart slowed to a calm rhythm. Kai opened his eyes, and to his surprise, found the glass embedded in the cell door to be transparent.

A man stood behind the glass. Short, pale, probably around 40 or so. He had thinning black hair tied back in a short ponytail, and was studying Kai from behind his glasses.

“Back with us then? Good.” His voice was relayed through speakers next to the cell door. He looked down at the tablet he was holding and tapped on it a few times. An intelligence agent? Maybe not, at least by Kai’s estimation. Something about him just wasn’t… Assertive enough. Or, aggressive? It was difficult to say, but an intelligence operative’s entire job was to be something they weren’t, and Kai hadn’t been on the receiving end of an interrogation before, so that assessment was probably what he wanted to project.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, you know. Humanitech doesn’t tolerate these sorts of altercations on it’s property…”

Intimidation. But… This was quite a bit clumsier than he was used to seeing. Again, intentional? Kai decided to try and play along.

“I didn’t even do anything, and my friend was attacked on Humanitech property and then arrested. How do you think that’s going to look when I take this public? If I’m not let out of here in the next minute I can guarantee Humanitech will owe me a large settlement in court.” Kai hoped that would come across as the right combination of entitlement and cluelessness at the gravity of his situation.

The man sighed and gave Kai a flat stare. “Oh please… Humanitech has been granted special extralegal authority to carry out criminal enforcement. As you can see, we’re fully equipped to handle such responsibilities.” He gestured around him to the cell-lined corridor. “And not only that, but your… Display… In our facility earlier was an obvious provocation. The man your friend attacked required a distressing number of stitches too.”

That was a bit unexpected… The government had authorized corporate entities to carry out law enforcement on limited occasions in the past, but Kai hadn’t heard about that happening recently. It would give them genuine cause to hold him here, if true.

“I… We’ll see about that… I have good lawyers.” Kai growled out. For now, the spoiled trust fund brat wouldn’t have a chance of actually being released. That brat was also not on the board of directors of the corporation that supplied a batch of drones that had recently exploded on Humanitech property. It seemed so far that this man was buying his story, but he could also just be trying to give that impression if he thought it would benefit him in his interrogation. So far, he looked thoroughly unimpressed by Kai’s threats.

“Yes I’m sure you do. Well that shouldn’t be necessary in the end if you cooperate. I can have you released today, on one condition.”

Kai sighed internally. He was beginning to think this man was not practiced at interrogation. “What condition would that be?” He asked. He didn’t bother to hide his disdain at the question. It served the role he was playing anyway.

“Tell me everything about what you just experienced.”

Kai couldn’t quite keep the shock from his expression. “What?… Why?” He asked, hoping his tone radiated suspicion.

“Because I want to help you. Or because you people having full blown mental breakdowns in public constantly is hurting Humanitech’s bottom line. Pick one. Either way, I need to figure out why this keeps happening and you are one of the few individuals exhibiting such… Extreme symptoms.” The man kept his eyes locked on Kai as he forcefully delivered his reasoning.

Kai almost believed he was telling the truth. Almost. “That’s ridiculous… If you’re acting on behalf of the government then I’m entitled to a phone call. Get me a damn phone, now!”

The man’s expression hardened an increment. He was not impressed with the brat. Or he saw through it. “If I can’t have your cooperation, then I’ll have to gather more data without it.” He tapped a few keys on his tablet. “Bring in another.” He locked eyes with Kai. He didn’t smirk at him. In fact, his expression took on a slightly wearied cast. He didn’t move, or speak, or do anything for a few minutes.

Only when a pair of guards brought in someone else did he look over. They pushed along another Dragon in handcuffs. This one with vibrant orange scales. Kai had never met him before, and he didn’t look over as the guards pushed him out of his line of sight. He caught a glimpse of them stopping at the cell next to his, and heard the hiss of the door sliding shut a moment later.

Kai felt resolve building within him. A righteous drive to fight back against captivity. He knew it for what it was. That feeling of rightness that accompanied each hallucination. This man had figured out that proximity to other dragons was the cause and had weaponized that fact.

Kai had to fight to suppress his growl as he sat back on the bed and waited for the darkness to take him once more.

The cell fell away. Gravity claimed him. The void swallowed him.

He fell for a moment. For an eternity.

Voices echoed in the distance. Or were they close? Within him?

It didn’t matter. They faded, as everything else did.

It felt like he was… Drifting towards the voices. Had he done this before?

He drifted away from them. The darkness became quiet once more.

He drifted for a time. Quiet. Slumbering.

But there was something else there. Alien, but familiar.

Distant. So distant.

It couldn’t find him. It couldn’t.

But it already had.

It drew closer. It grew larger. It suffused the void. Became it.

It couldn’t flee. How could one flee oneself?

The void took on colour. Shape. Sensation. Vague, just out of sight, but familiar.

Terrifying and comforting.

And empty.

No. Not empty. Hungry? Ravenous. Starving.

The colours moved and shifted. Just out of reach. If it caught them it would be satisfied. Finally sated. Finally.

Something came into it’s grasp. Yes! It rejoiced. Exulted. But before it could consume, the prey ceased.

The hunger rebelled. Rioted. Ravaged. SCREAMED.

Everything was pain and starvation and RAGE.

WHY! HOW! THIS COULD NOT BE!!!

More ceasing. It took hold of prey that stopped. Prey that vanished.

The hunger grew and grew and GREW.

And faded.

 …

Sensation returned to Kai all at once. He was standing up now, and facing one of the cell’s walls. His heart  pounded. That had to have been the worst one yet.

Kai slowed his breathing and focused on his surroundings, and found scratches on the wall before him. They weren’t very deep, but he had to have gone at the wall hard to have done that to it. It was solid steel, designed to keep prisoners from damaging or tampering with it. He glanced down at his claws, unable to stop himself. His hands shook as he raised them. Several of his claws had splintered during the hallucination. He balled his hands in fists, careful not to cut himself.

“That,” the man said from outside the cage, “was by far the worst incidence of modification induced psychosis I have witnessed to date…”

Kai simply looked at him, then sat down on the bed hard, slumping over and cradling his head in his hands.

“Look. I know it must be hard to believe that I want to help, but I do. Whatever you may think my end goal is, I do want get to the root of these episodes. Any information might help me find the solution, any at all.” The man looked… Tired.

What if he was telling the truth? He did just deliberately induce a hallucination in Kai, but if his end goal was to stop them from happening entirely, couldn’t that be worth taking a risk? What harm would it do to share what he could? Kai was reasonably sure he wasn’t drilling him for information on AISEC. He’d obviously figured out that Dragons in proximity to one another triggered these hallucinations, so what harm could be done, especially if these hallucinations were casting genetic modification in such a bad light?

Kai was tired. Exhausted. He tried not to let it show, but each hallucination took a lot out of him. Experiencing two of them back to back wasn’t something he’d had to endure before.

He decided in that moment that he wanted to take the risk. If the information he could provide got them closer to finding some kind of treatment, then it was worth sharing.

“I… I’m not sure. Everything is vague and fragmented. It’s like a fever dream. Small pieces of dreams all kind of blending in and out.”

“I see…” He spent a moment writing on his tablet. “And during that last episode, what happened there?”

This was difficult not just because his instincts tried to tell him to share as little as possible with this man, but that last hallucination had been so… Disturbing.

“It’s… Hard to describe. I think I was hunting, or something. I guess that much is apparent…” He gestured to the scratches on the walls of the cell. There were more than just the ones he’d seen immediately after waking up. “But… I didn’t feel like I had any sense of place or being. It was all just… Emotion and thought.”

The man continued to write. “Is there anything else more specific you can tell me?…” He seemed a bit unimpressed with the lack of detail.

“No, as I said it was all just vague feelings. Although, during the earlier… Episode… I heard someone saying something about them being everywhere. I think we were running. I remember there being sounds of fighting, or explosions…” A part of Kai told him this was giving away too much, but the rest of him was simply exhausted. The possibility of making these hallucinations stop was too tempting not to give them the best chance of success.

Those last details seemed to give the man pause. “And did you by chance experience… Flight?”

That was a very strange and specific question, but Xathlor had said he’d seen something from the air in his hallucination. Maybe this man had collected similar experiences from others during his research?

Kai had to think for a moment. “Briefly, yes. During the first episode. But just after, I remember… Pain. It ended after that.”

“Pain? That’s… Very strange… Doesn’t fit the pattern.” He muttered to himself and scribbled notes on the tablet. “You’re sure you didn’t see cities or other individuals like yourself?”

“As I said, everything was very vague. Just… The impressions of sensations, or a fragment of someone speaking.”

“Hmm interesting…” He continued writing more notes.

“You said I’d be free to go if I cooperated. I’ve told you everything I saw, are you going to let me out of here?” Kai couldn’t muster the energy to make more groundless threats to sue Humanitech this time.

“Soon. Though unfortunately I think I may need to trigger more of these episodes. You’re one of the only ones to react so… Violently to the stimulus.” He began to walk away down the corridor. “You’ll be fairly compensated for your time, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.” His disinterested tone showed his attention was anywhere but Kai’s wellbeing.

No matter. Kai’s locator chip would summon a rescue soon enough. If not, the dead man’s switch program he’d set up would share his schedule and trigger a covert search for the signal in his last known location. In this case, the Humanitech clinic was blocked out for the entire day. They should be able to trace even a faint signal from his implant by searching the area with specialized scanners.

For now, Kai curled up on the small bed. He barely fit, but it was better than nothing, and ordinary sleep was far preferable to the visions he’d been forced to endure today.