Every bone in her body was being shattered, every muscle torn apart, every blood vessel burned to ash, then reassembled—only to be shattered again, torn again, burned again.
She counted the muffled thuds outside.
One, two, three... Every sound meant another person had died. She did not know how much longer she could hold on.
But she remembered the names of those nineteen people: Emily, Old John, Lily... She could not die. She had to live for them.
Kyle could no longer feel pain inside the energy pod.
It was not that it did not hurt. The pain had simply reached such an extreme that his nerves had gone completely numb. He knew only that his body was breaking apart, burning, and reforming, but he could no longer feel it.
He merely kept his eyes closed and thought of that face.
That exhausted, melancholy face that had finally told him, "Live."
He was still alive. Was that person still alive too?
He did not know, but he wanted to survive and go find him.
The muffled thuds next door grew more and more frequent.
The tenth. The twentieth. The thirtieth...
No one knew how much time had passed.
Seven days.
Or seventy years.
When the liquid in the energy pod finally drained away and the hatch opened, Isaac took three seconds to realize that he was still alive.
He looked down at his hand.
This hand no longer looked the way it had three days ago.
Pale blue patterns bulged across his skin, like blood vessels, like incantations, or like some living thing crawling beneath his flesh. The patterns emitted a faint blue glow, glaring beneath the pure white lights.
He clenched his fist.
Power.
He could feel that inhuman power surging through his body, like a river that had