The high-frequency alarm hit the pressurized room like a physical blow, a rhythmic, electronic shriek that vibrated the ballistic glass.

On the wall monitors, the perimeter map of the island facility suddenly erupted in a chaotic bloom of scarlet.

Killian was off the black sand beach and at the primary airlock in three seconds, a blur of dark wind and sudden, volcanic heat.

His chest heaving, his chestnut hair plastered to his forehead by the lake spray, his light brown eyes already igniting into a blinding, molten amber.

"Leon! Report!" Killian roared into his comms, his claws elongating with a series of metallic clicks.

"Sir... the grid was bypassed," Leon's voice crackled through the speakers, sounding breathless, fractured. "Something moved through the laser wall faster than the processor could log the displacement."

The airlock didn't hiss open. It didn't move.

Yet, in the center of the transparent room, standing five feet from Claire's bed, a shadow began to solidify from the cold, clinical greys of the pre-dawn light.

Adrian stood there, his long charcoal coat entirely dry, his gold-rimmed glasses catching a sharp, white glint from the emergency strobe.

He was holding a small, silver-cased medical kit, his expression a mask of bored, aristocratic disdain as he looked at the pulsing red sensors on the ceiling.

"Your security is harsh," Adrian murmured, his voice a cool, filtered rasp that carried effortlessly over the alarm. 

Killian slammed his massive fist against the reinforced glass of the airlock, the impact sending a spiderweb of fractures through the mortar.

"Get... out," Killian growled, his voice a subsonic vibration that made the specimen jars in the medical bay rattle.

"I'm here to fix the leak you were too busy howling at the moon to notice," Adrian countered, his blue-gray eyes turning a dark, bruised obsidian as they locked onto Claire.

Claire sat up, her right wrist clutched against her chest, the violet thorns beneath her skin glowing with a frantic, rhythmic intensity.

She looked at Adrian, her green eyes wide and fractured with the residue of the dream—the memory of the previous Alpha's extraction.

"You... came for me" Claire whispered, her voice a thin, dry thread.

Adrian ignored the Alpha's roars outside. He opened the silver kit, revealing a single glass syringe filled with a pulsating, luminescent blue liquid.

"A Laurent archival suppressant," Adrian explained, his movements liquid and bloodless as he stepped toward her. "Metabolized ice. It won't cure the mark, but it will...I think, freeze it a little bit."

Killian's roar gradually subsided. "How do you know it won't hurt her."

Adrian stopped. He turned his head exactly three inches, his lip curling into a microscopic, cold smile.

"The Alpha wants to talk about hurting while his anchor is being rewired for a parasite," Adrian said, his tone dripping with clinical pity.

"You don't have another option, Killian. The Suture is currently using Claire's nervous system as a wide-band transmitter."

Adrian knelt beside the bed, his skin radiating a dead, winter chill that seemed to dampen the violet glow of the thorns.

"It's two-way surveillance, Claire," Adrian whispered, his voice dropping into an intimate, lethal register.

"Orpheus is reading your memory. He's... he's feeling your pulse. But a bridge works in both directions."

Claire stared at the blue syringe. "You're saying... I can track him back?"

"In theory, yes," Adrian noted, his nostrils flaring as he mapped the scent of cedar and ash on her sweater. "If you can stabilize your own frequency—if you can stop being the victim of the hallucination and start being the... the observer."

He held the needle up to the light, the blue liquid vibrating with a high-frequency hum.

"You use the ice to build a wall. Then, you look through the window."

Outside the glass, Killian stood perfectly still by the airlock control, his hands locked behind his back, his amber eyes fixed on Claire with a raw, unadulterated fear of loss.

He looked like a king watching his kingdom being gambled away on a laboratory theory.

Claire looked from the needle to the massive silhouette of the man.

"I'll try," Claire said, her voice dropping into the lethal, quiet register of a strategist.

Adrian didn't blink. He reached out and grabbed her right forearm, his touch a frozen vice that made the violet thorns hiss.

"This will hurt," Adrian murmured, his blue-gray eyes searching hers for a fracture. 

"I'm hurting this whole time," Claire replied, her chin tilting up. "It won't get worse."

Adrian drove the needle into her vein.

The blue liquid hit her system like a tidal wave of liquid nitrogen.

Claire's back arched, her mouth opening in a silent scream as the violet lines on her wrist turned a dull, frozen grey.

The world of the island—the red sirens, the broken glass, the sound of the lake—receded into a distant, muffled static.

The room vanished.

Claire was standing in a white corridor that smelled of formalin and rotting flowers.

She heard the rhythmic clink-clink-clink of a surgeon's instruments.

She turned her head, her psychological defenses forming a cold, crystalline lens.

"I see you," Claire whispered, the words echoing in the void.