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“I’m leaving Xan here. If you try anything, he’ll let me know immediately.”
She tapped a sequence on the android’s head, and the machine emitted a low chime. She paused, her gaze lingering on the large screen for a heartbeat, then stormed out. Yalaz shoved the rest of his gear into his pack and looked at me.
“I won’t back you up again, man. This is the last time.”
“Thanks.”
He hesitated at the door, eyes cast down.
“What does it feel like? Leaving someone you love?”
“I wasn’t one to leave.”
“Then being left behind? What does that feel like?”
My throat tightened. My body had been waiting for someone to ask this, every inch of me trembled at once.
“I thought it would never come. This moment… I thought it could never happen. I thought we would stay together as long as I exist.”
“So it was like breathing for you?”
My brow creased, but I nodded with a faint smile.
Yalaz chuckled. “Love really is a disgusting thing.”
As the door slid shut behind me, the tension finally left my shoulders.
It was going to be a long night.
I didn’t activate the device like before. It was useless in this form. It needed change. After all, I was the one who designed it, and if the team thought it was dangerous, I would be the one to fix it.
By dawn, when I began to see other employees entering the building, nothing remained of the device’s original form. Seeing this, Yalaz was genuinely surprised, leaning closer to examine it. I rarely saw him surprised by anything; he usually looked down on everything related to science, as if he already knew it all.
“Did you do this alone?”
I nodded. “I haven’t tested it yet. In theory, there shouldn’t be any issues, but in practice…”
“Will work.” He returned to reading the papers in his hand.
And I kept working on the device with everything I had. After nine days, it was ready to run.
Although I wanted to be alone for the first test, Coretta and Yalaz insisted on staying with me. Especially since my mental state had been up and down lately, they couldn’t leave me alone.
Maybe… I had some friends.
I watched the new monitor I had added to the device, excited but also fearful.
No, only a fearful wait.
Because my sixth sense, which had never failed me, was telling me not to do it. The dream I had seen last night seemed to be preparing me for this horror too, so my emotions were in disarray.
Mina had appeared in my dream last night.
It wasn’t a pleasant or wet dream; it was a strange, violent one. Mina was in brutal, horrific positions. Bloody, as if someone had blown her up, her internal organs exposed, her eyes bulging. She was on the edge of a cliff, floating in the air, and I was just watching her from afar. As she was being torn apart by an external force, I just stood there. Her blood spread across the entire sky, turning everything endless red.
And Raymond in the dream just… watched.
I had no idea why my stupid subconscious had shown me this. I woke up direfully, felt so sick I didn’t want to sleep again. The images refused to leave my mind regardless. Tinkering with the device again made me feel a little better, but the unease inside me didn’t fade away.
