The first page was a standard medical intake form. Name, age, rank, physical baseline - the routine documentation that every Echelon member underwent annually. Heart rate, blood pressure, height, weight. All normal. All unremarkable. The numbers of a healthy man in his early thirties with above-average fitness and no chronic conditions.
The second page was different.
The header read ANOMALOUS TISSUE REPORT - RIGHT HAND, FOREARM, PARTIAL UPPER ARM. Beneath it, in the clean, precise handwriting of a medical professional who had been trained to be objective and was struggling, the entries began.
Secondary cardiac rhythm detected.
Raizen read the line twice. The words made individual sense but together they described something that shouldn't exist. A second heartbeat. Not Eiden's - a separate rhythm, independent, running at its own rate and its own pattern, originating from the darkened tissue of the right hand and pulsing outward through the altered skin. Two hearts in one body, and one of them wasn't his.
Heartbeat pattern: Unknown
Raizen frowned. Pattern unknown? Does that mean that this "second hearbeat" doesn't even work normally? Is it beating at random intervals? He squinted and turned the page.
Tissue composition: Unknown. Sample analysis inconclusive. Cellular structure does not match any known biological material. Resembles dermal tissue in form but not in function. Tissue appears to generate its own metabolic energy independent of host circulatory system.
The hand wasn't skin. It was something else wearing skin's shape, trying to become skin, feeding itself, sustaining itself through mechanisms that the Echelon's medical team couldn't identify or categorize.
Spread rate: 0.003mm/hour. Consistent across all measurement periods. No observed acceleration or deceleration. Progression follows vascular pathways.
It was growing. Slowly, measurably, with a patience that suggested it had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. Every day, every hour, the dark tissue extended a fraction further up Eiden's arm, following the veins, tracing the body's own map.
Surgical intervention (attempt 1): Excision of 2cmยฒ affected tissue, right hand dorsal surface. Result: Full regrowth within 72 hours. Excised tissue dissolved upon separation from host.
They'd tried to cut it off. It grew back. The removed piece dissolved - ceased to exist, as if it couldn't survive without the body it was attached to but would not allow the body to survive without it either.
Surgical intervention (attempt 2): Excision of larger sample, 5cmยฒ, with cauterization of surrounding tissue. Result: Accelerated regrowth. Spread rate temporarily increased to 0.008mm/hour for 96 hours before returning to baseline.
They'd tried harder. It grew back faster. The surgery didn't just fail - it provoked a response, as if the tissue had registered the removal as a threat and accelerated its expansion in retaliation.
Pain response: None reported by subject. Subject reports full sensation in affected area but no discomfort associated with tissue alteration or spread.
It didn't hurt. Eiden could feel his hand, could feel the dark skin, could feel everything happening to him - and none of it registered as pain. The thing colonizing his body had made itself comfortable enough that the body didn't even recognize it as a problem.
Recovery rate: Unknown.
Long-term prognosis: Unknown.
Mortality probability: Undetermined.
Not "low." Not "manageable." Not "improbable."
Undetermined. The Echelon's medical team, the most advanced team of advanced researchers in the known world, had looked at what was happening to Eiden's hand and concluded that they could not determine whether or not it would kill him, or how fast. Not because they thought it wouldn't. Because they didn't understand what it was well enough to make a prediction in either direction.
Then the last line.
Raizen's eyes reached it, and his hands went still.
Eon Resonance: Negative.
Not low. Not weak. Not atypical.
Negative?
The hand didn't respond to Eon. It fought it. Every test the medical team had run, every diagnostic, every attempt to channel healing Eon into the affected tissue - the hand had rejected it. Actively, measurably, the way a body rejects a transplant. The dark tissue treated Eon as a hostile substance and repelled it on contact.
Eiden's hand wasn't a new kind of Eon. It was Eon's opposite. Eon's enemy. Something that existed in direct, fundamental opposition to the energy that every human being on the planet used and the Echelon had spent decades studying.
Orโฆ It was just a different kind of Eon. A different frequency, that canceled out the known ones. It could have been an error.
But Eiden knew all of this. He'd read this file. He'd sat with this information, and now was about to go back to the Echelon's inner chamber tomorrow, and told them he was studying something new. That staff โ whatever it is, is something fundamentally opposite to known Eon frequencies, and that was the cause of this strange tissue.
An alarm shrieked.
The sound Raizen from his thoughts completely - a high, repeating tone that bounced off the metal walls and filled every corner of the corridor. Red light pulsed from strips along the ceiling, the dead glass panels on the walls flickering to life with symbols and text that scrolled too fast to read.
But he caught one word.
Departure.
The cargo door. Raizen could hear it - a low hydraulic hum beneath the alarm, the heavy mechanism of the aircraft's rear ramp beginning to close.
He grabbed the scanner from his waistband. Held it over the open folder, hands shaking, and pressed the activation. The device hummed with a really high noise, the scanning beam sweeping across the pages in a thin line of blue light. He waited for the confirmation pulse, got it, and scanned again - every page, both sides, moving as fast as his hands could flip the sheets while the alarm screamed, the red light pulsed and the hydraulic hum grew louder.
Done. He shoved the folder back into the drawer, pushed the drawer shut, and ran back.
The cargo door was closing. The wide rectangular opening at the aircraft's rear was shrinking, the heavy metal panel descending from above in a slow, inexorable arc. Through the narrowing gap, Raizen could see the platform - the warm yellow light from the hall, the unconscious guards, the night sky beyond.
The gap was a meter wide. Then half a meter. Then -
