Chapter 35:

/ New Dawn /

Parallel in Two

…

Thunder crackled in the night sky as Arufa slumped over, comatose. The wires on her body shut down—she lost the glow which had followed her through it all.

“…Oh.”

Ghiles, trying to swallow his fear, hoisted her up in his arms. He looked in her half-open eyes—empty. She was brain-dead.

“No, no… Arufa, you…” he stammered, shaking her in the pouring rain. “You can’t just leave me here…!”

No response, not even a twitch. She had no consciousness with which to hear his pleas.

“Arufa, please…!”

But she wasn’t there.

Out of options, Ghiles began to trek through the downpour one step at a time, gently cradling the subject’s body. Her matted silver hair trailed on and on into the mud behind her, a path away from the abandoned laboratory…

…

[Abandoned Laboratory. Floor B7, near the broken Transversal.]

[Dr. White laid bleeding on the tile.]

[Minutes passed, and floodwaters dripped from the crumbling floors above. A loud crash rang out as the elevator slammed into its base, followed then by a small thud as Marsia’s upper half landed with it.]

[White didn’t react.]

[Hours passed, and the thunderstorm calmed down. The sirens continued blaring through distorted speakers, damaged by water and useless to the people left behind. Her skin began to bloat.]

[White didn’t react.]

[Days passed, and she had begun to rot. The ceiling above her caved in, crushing Locri’s body nearby. NEW blood splattered next to her—without her eyes, she could not see it.]

[White didn’t react.]

[Weeks passed, and moss lined the walls. The sirens eventually stopped as the emergency power supply ran thin. No civil engineer had expected a month-long outage—only the soft hum of electricity reached her ears.]

[White didn’t react.]

[Months passed, and now her teeth and nails had fallen out. With her flesh beginning to melt into a dark sludge, her bones were NEWly exposed to the quiet laboratory.]

[White didn’t react.]

[Years went by, nearly three halves of a decade. She was a skeleton now, her bones only vaguely maintaining her general structure. Everyone and everything she’d ever been, reduced to approximately two-hundred and six fragments of a human being.]

[White didn’t react.]

[And then, no heavier than a whisper.]

“…Lab’s… off the power grid…”

[A voice.]

“…Eugh. El olor de la muerte…”

[Two voices.]

[Her bones rattled as they crossed the rubble. Lichen scattered the floor wherever they walked, softening their footsteps.]

[Unknown hands grabbed at her slimy lab coat and fished out her ID card. What a blessing to be alive, she did not say. How terrible a curse to waste away in a laboratory with your own creation, never again to see the light of DAWN.]

[White didn’t react.]

[And then.]

“Holy shit, look in here. The lights are still on.”

“Your eyes are playing tricks on you, Niko. There’s no way anything’s– …oh my God. How long have they been…?”

“Don’t ask me.”

[White didn’t react.]

[But…]

[ever so quietly said,]

[deep into the hatch below the Transversal,]

[those words.]

“…The New Dawn Experiment…?”

[And somewhere in the deepest pits of hell, Dr. Ari White cackled like the maniac she was.]