She ended the call and looked at Sam, who'd been monitoring financial data throughout the conversations. "Anything useful?"

"Meridian Services has processed payments for forty-three different organizations over the past eighteen months," Sam said. He still wasn't looking up from his tablets. "Most appear legitimate on surface examination. But if I assume they're all fronts for this same organization, the pattern becomes clear. They've been building a distribution network across the eastern quadrant for over a year. Medical facilities, research stations, refugee assistance programs—all of it creating infrastructure for moving people and materials without attracting attention."

"How big?"

"Big enough that shutting it down would require coordinated action from multiple government agencies across multiple planets." Sam finally looked up, his expression was grim. "We stumbled into something way larger than a single criminal organization, Sophie. This is industrial scale."

Sophie absorbed that information, filed it away alongside everything else she was trying to process. "Then we need to be smarter about how we approach this. Because we're not going to dismantle an operation that size through direct confrontation."

Her personal comm buzzed. Kelvin, using the secure channel. She answered.

"Sophie, I've been thinking about our situation," Kelvin said without preamble. "These people are smart, but they made one mistake. They let me know they exist. That means I can start looking for them in ways they might not anticipate."

"What are you thinking?"

"The infiltration took sophistication, but it still required physical access points to establish initial presence in our network. Someone physically accessed Eclipse systems at some point in the past eight days. If I can find the access point, I can potentially trace back to whoever established it."

"How long would that take?"

"Hours, maybe days. They're good at covering tracks. I'm suspecting they have a stupidly good technopath in their ranks whom I can't wait to meet by the way," Kelvin paused. "But I'm better. Anyways, I just need you to know I'm working on it."

"Keep me updated. And Kelvin? Be careful. If they realize you're actively hunting them, they might decide you're more trouble than you're worth."

"I'm always careful."

The call ended. Sophie stood at her kitchen counter, looking out at the city below, trying to find angles that didn't exist.

---

At Settlement Gamma-Nine, Noah stood in the medical facility's triage area, watching people die in real-time while his team implemented quarantine protocols around him.

The isolation had taken twenty minutes to establish properly. Sealing the triage area, setting up decontamination checkpoints, coordinating alongside exhausted medical staff who'd been dealing with this crisis since the treatments were administered ninety minutes ago.

Ninety minutes. Noah kept coming back to that number. Ninety minutes since his team had delivered the compounds. Ninety minutes since he'd signed off on the transfer and left, satisfied that Eclipse had completed another successful contract.

Nineteen people were dead now. The count had increased by one while Noah was on the call with Sophie, a woman in her forties whose veins had glowed that sickly yellow-green for twenty-three minutes before the hemorrhaging started. The medical staff had tried to stabilize her, but whatever the compound did to human physiology, it overwhelmed conventional treatment.

Noah had watched her die. Watched the light fade from her eyes while blood seeped from her nose and ears and mouth. Watched medical personnel pull a sheet over her body and move on to the next patient because there were forty others still alive and suffering.

Marcus stood near the entrance to the isolation zone, watching Noah and clearly waiting for orders. Reyna coordinated alongside medical staff, her voice remained calm and professional despite the horror surrounding them. Chen monitored biometric data, his sensory abilities letting him track physiological changes in patients that conventional equipment couldn't detect as precisely.

'We could extract them,' Noah thought. His mind ran through options automatically, cataloging possibilities and outcomes the way he'd been trained. 'Use Domain Travel to pull the team out instantly. Get them away from this facility and whatever legal liability we're accumulating by staying.'

But that solved nothing. The facility would still exist. The patients would still die. And Eclipse would have abandoned a crisis they'd directly caused, which would look exactly as bad as the organization threatening them claimed it would.

'We could destroy the remaining compounds. Prevent them from being used on anyone else.'

Except the facility coordinator had said they'd already administered treatments to forty patients. The damage was done. Destroying unused compounds would just be destroying evidence that might help Eclipse prove they were manipulated.

'We could document everything. Record the patients, the symptoms, the deaths. Build a case that shows this organization is conducting illegal human experimentation.'

But documentation required time and cooperation from facility staff who were currently overwhelmed trying to save lives. And even having documentation meant Eclipse would still have to explain why they delivered the compounds in the first place, why they stayed to watch people die, why they didn't immediately report to authorities.

Every option ended in walls. Every path forward required choices that would hurt Eclipse either legally or morally, usually both.

Noah approached Chen, who was studying a portable monitor showing biometric data from the nearest patient. "What are you seeing?"

"Cellular activity is off the charts," Chen replied. His voice carried the clinical detachment he used when processing sensory information that would overwhelm most people. "The compound is forcing metabolic changes at a rate human biology isn't designed to handle. Some patients are adapting—their cells are successfully incorporating the changes. Others are rejecting the process, which is causing systemic failure."

"Can you predict which patients will survive?"

"Not reliably. The difference seems to be related to baseline physiology and possibly genetic factors I can't detect through sensory abilities alone." Chen gestured at the monitor. "But I can tell you when a patient is about to hemorrhage. The cellular activity spikes roughly twenty minutes before bleeding starts. That yellow-green glow you're seeing is bioluminescence—a side effect of the metabolic acceleration."

Noah filed that information away. "Keep monitoring. If you can give us twenty-minute warning before hemorrhaging, we might be able to prepare better treatment protocols."

"That assumes treatment is possible," Chen said quietly. "So far, nothing the medical staff has tried has prevented hemorrhaging once it starts."

A scream cut through the triage area. Noah turned to see a man in his early thirties, veins blazing bright yellow-green, his back arching off the bed. The glow was more intense than Noah had seen yet, pulsing in rhythm alongside his heartbeat, and the man's screaming carried a quality that went beyond pain.

Terror. Absolute, primal terror of something happening inside his body that he couldn't control or understand.

The medical staff rushed toward him but stopped three meters away. Their training was warring against self-preservation instincts. Because the man's skin was changing. Not just flushing or discoloring. Actually changing, the surface taking on a texture that looked wrong, too smooth, almost metallic.

"Chen," Noah said sharply. "What's happening?"

"His cellular structure is reorganizing. Successfully, I think. The metabolic acceleration hasn't killed him, which means his body is adapting to the changes." Chen's voice carried wonder mixed alongside horror. "He's going through an awakening. An artificial one, forced by the compound, but the process is working."

The man stopped screaming. His body relaxed, settling back onto the bed, breathing hard but no longer panicked. The yellow-green glow began fading, replaced by something else.

His hands were glowing now. Not yellow-green but red, deep red that looked like heated metal. The temperature in the immediate area increased noticeably, heat radiating from his body in waves that made the air shimmer.

"Thermal manipulation," Chen said. "He's generating heat. A lot of heat."

The man sat up slowly. His movements were uncoordinated like he was relearning how his body worked. His eyes were open but unfocused, awareness present but not fully engaged with his surroundings. Blood still ran from his nose and ears, residual damage from the transformation his body had just survived, but he was alive.

He was also dangerous.

A nurse approached cautiously, hands raised in a calming gesture. "Sir, I need you to stay calm. You've just gone through significant physiological changes and—"

The man's head turned toward her. His expression showed confusion, fear, pain all mixed together. His hand reached out, maybe seeking help, maybe just an unconscious gesture.

His glowing red hand closed around the nurse's forearm.

She screamed. The smell of burning flesh hit Noah's senses immediately, protein cooking at temperatures that carbonized tissue on contact. The nurse tried to pull away but the man's grip was locked, his fingers digging into her arm while his heat-generating ability burned through skin, muscle, reaching bone.

Marcus moved before Noah could give orders, crossing the distance in three strides. He grabbed the man's wrist, trying to break the grip, and jerked back immediately with a curse. "He's burning hot. I can't hold him."

The man was screaming now too, his voice mixing with the nurse's. He wasn't attacking deliberately—Noah could see that clearly. He didn't even understand what was happening. But his newly awakened ability was active and uncontrolled, heat pouring from his hands at levels that would kill the nurse in seconds.

Noah acted immediately. He moved forward, grabbed the man's shoulders, and channeled Entropy Touch through the contact points.

Decay spread across the man's skin, gray corruption eating into tissue. The man's grip loosened reflexively as his nervous system registered damage it couldn't process. Noah pulled him away from the nurse, threw him back onto the bed, his hands still glowing with entropy energy.

The nurse collapsed, her arm blackened and ruined where the man had gripped her. Medical staff rushed to her immediately, but Noah could see the damage clearly. Third-degree burns minimum, possibly fourth-degree where the heat had reached deepest. She'd need extensive treatment, probably surgical intervention, possibly amputation if the tissue death was too severe.

Not all healers could regenerate a dead tissue especially one of this kind.

The man lay on the bed, breathing hard, his hands still glowing red but the intensity fading. Entropy had damaged him but not fatally—just enough to break his concentration, disrupt the heat generation. Blood ran from his mouth now, added to the streams from his nose and ears.

He was crying. Sobbing. Completely overwhelmed by what had just happened to him, what he'd just done, what he'd become.

"Shit just got worse," Marcus said quietly. His eyes were fixed on Noah.

The rest of the team was looking at Noah too, waiting for direction, waiting for him to make sense of a situation that had gone from medical crisis to active threat in the span of thirty seconds.

Noah stared at the man on the bed, at the nurse being treated for severe burns, at the forty other patients who might go through similar transformations as the compound finished its work.

'I have no idea what to do here.'

The thought was stark, honest, and terrifying in its completeness. For the first time since founding Eclipse, since leaving the EDF, since stepping into leadership roles that demanded he have answers—Noah had nothing.

No plan. No solution. No clever application of his abilities that would fix this.

Just a medical facility full of dying people, some of whom might survive long enough to become threats they couldn't contain. And a digitized voice somewhere in Eclipse's compromised systems, watching everything, waiting to see if Noah would continue playing along or force them to destroy Eclipse completely.

The yellow-green glow intensified on another patient across the room. Twenty minutes until hemorrhaging. Or awakening. Or both.

Noah stood in the isolation zone, surrounded by suffering he'd delivered, and finally understood what it meant to be completely out of his depth.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.