Chapter 100: E7009

The recovery operation ran for three full days, every scanning technology Imperial resources could provide deployed against the Pit’s impenetrable depths, and still, nothing. No signal. No signature. No trace of Ren at all, as though the chasm had simply, completely erased every trace of his existence the moment he’d fallen into it.

“We can’t send anyone down,” the lead engineer reported, voice heavy with the weight of delivering news nobody present wanted to hear. “Every historical record confirms it. Nothing that enters the Pit has ever returned, not equipment, not drones, not the handful of desperate search parties who tried centuries ago before the Empire finally sealed proper records warning against it.”

Reven stood at the chasm’s jagged edge, staring down into darkness that offered absolutely nothing back, grief and fury and a desperate, impossible hope all warring within him in equal, agonizing measure. “There has to be something,” he said, voice raw and cracked from days without proper rest. “Some way to at least recover—”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t properly voice the word body, couldn’t accept that this was genuinely, permanently where his search for Ren actually ended.

Yegard stood beside him, equally hollow, equally shattered, the fierce military composure that had carried him through every previous crisis entirely absent now, replaced by something broken and raw that made him look, for the first time since Reven had known him, genuinely lost.

“We have to go back,” Yegard said finally, voice barely audible. “The children. Milo. Finn. They need us, and we’re accomplishing nothing standing here.”

Reven felt something in his chest tear further at the reminder, old grief compounding with fresh, desperate guilt. “How do I tell them,” he asked, voice breaking entirely now. “How do I explain this to Finn. To Milo. To Liora and Dorian, who’ll never even properly know—”

He couldn’t finish that sentence either, overwhelming grief finally crashing through whatever careful control he’d been maintaining, and Yegard pulled him into a fierce, desperate embrace, both men finally, properly breaking in the privacy of the Pit’s terrible, indifferent silence.

“I don’t know,” Yegard admitted, voice equally broken. “I don’t know how we survive this either. But we have to. For them.”

They returned to the palace three days later, the journey back feeling considerably longer and more hollow than any previous flight, and the household’s grief, once properly confirmed, settled over the entire private wing like something physical, suffocating and impossible to properly navigate. Alouis, still carrying devastating guilt over the failed protection mission, had barely spoken since her own desperate, failed attempt to reach Ren before he fell, and Milo, upon learning the truth, had retreated into something cold and shattered that no amount of gentle coaxing could properly reach.

“It’s my fault,” Milo said finally, three days after their return, voice flat and empty in a way that terrified Reven considerably more than open grief might have. “I should have gone with him. I could have protected him.”

“This isn’t your fault,” Reven said, though his own voice carried little conviction given his own overwhelming guilt. “None of this is anyone’s fault except whoever planned this entire, terrible trap.”

Milo said nothing further, simply retreating back into his own room, and Reven found himself, standing alone in the corridor outside, uncertain how to properly hold together a family that felt, with every passing hour, considerably more fractured than he knew how to repair.

Finn, mercifully too young to fully process the permanence of what had happened, kept asking when Ren would return, and each time, Reven found the question considerably harder to properly answer, old grief tearing fresh wounds with every innocent, hopeful inquiry.

Deep within the hidden facility carved into rock and shadow, Ren’s still, lifeless body floated suspended in a vast, glowing containment tank, pale light catching against skin gone cold and unmoving, violet eyes closed forever against whatever horror this place actually intended for him.

The figure who’d ordered his retrieval stood before the tank now, studying their prize with the same cold, clinical satisfaction that had characterized every step of their patient, three-year plan.

“The classification signature remains perfectly preserved,” a technician reported, monitoring a dense array of readings projected along the tank’s curved surface. “Death hasn’t degraded the underlying resonance pattern at all. If anything, it’s stabilized considerably, now that the biological complications of consciousness and will no longer interfere with it.”

“As I theorized,” the figure said, something deeply satisfied in their tone. “A living key proved too unpredictable, too willful, too resistant to proper control. But a vessel, properly prepared, properly reconstructed without the inconvenient burden of independent thought and resistance, that’s an entirely different, considerably more useful proposition.”

The technician hesitated slightly before continuing. “The reconstruction process itself remains theoretical, sir. We’ve never successfully attempted anything this extensive.”

“Then we’ll be the first,” the figure said simply, unbothered by the uncertainty. “Begin preliminary preparations. I want full neural mapping completed within the week, and I want the integration framework ready to properly test the moment that mapping concludes.”

A second technician stepped forward, carrying a small, precise instrument, and the figure gestured toward Ren’s still form with casual, terrible authority.

“And mark him properly,” they added. “He’s no longer Ren. No longer Rafayal Miller, or whatever borrowed name he carried through that pathetic, resistant life. From this point forward, he’s simply an asset, a tool in progress, and tools require proper designation.”

The technician approached the tank carefully, the precision instrument activating with a faint, mechanical hum, and pressed it gently against the back of Ren’s neck, dark, precise lettering burning itself permanently into pale, unmoving skin.

E7009.

“The ninth attempt,” the figure observed, studying the fresh marking with something almost philosophical in their expression. “Though the first with genuine, viable potential. The others were simply practice, building toward understanding exactly what kind of vessel this project actually required.” They turned from the tank finally, already moving toward the facility’s deeper chambers. “Begin the reconstruction protocols immediately. We’ve waited considerably longer than I’d prefer for a specimen this promising. I don’t intend to waste a single additional hour.”

The chamber’s ambient lighting dimmed as the figure departed, leaving Ren’s still, silent form floating alone in the tank’s pale, sterile glow, the number burned into his neck the only mark distinguishing him now from whatever terrible purpose this place intended to make of him, far beyond the reach of anyone who’d ever loved him, far beyond any hope his grieving family currently held of ever properly bringing him home.