A Breath Between Heartbeats

The hum of the R&D sublevels was constant - airflow, pressure gates, the distant whir of drone treads against polished flooring.

Nova had grown used to the rhythm. It was the kind of background noise that became a comfort over time, like the tick of an old engine you didn't need to fix because you already knew its song.

A mug of synth-coffee steamed beside her datapad, untouched. Better than the coolant-y one from before. The light in the corridor was soft and even, tinted with that faint teal-ish hue they used in the lower labs to reduce eye strain and anxiety. Here, in this pocket of engineered calm, the world felt almost human.

She leaned against the frame of the lab door, one boot scuffing idly about as she waited for the calibration to finish. Another test sequence. Another patch fix. Another line of code dropped into a machine she no longer fully trusted.

She hadn't talked to anyone about the interface. Not about the voice. Not about the memory that wasn't hers. Not about how it felt like something had looked back at her from inside the system. How could she?

"You are almost finished."

Nova blinked the thought away. She was tired of asking questions she didn't have clearance to answer. But before more thoughts could organize, they were interrupted by a distant roar; growing stronger in strength.

Fast. Sharp. Frantic.

The rhythmic clatter of emergency treads and synthetic comms chirping in escalating urgency. She turned her head just as the corridor lit with overhead strobes - procession of medical transport approaching, flanked by two stabilization drones and a surgical escort team moving at a dead sprint.

They passed her lab door in a blur, and that's when she saw him. The body strapped to the gurney wasn't just wounded - it was ruined. Skin fused to ceramic shards. Breath shallow. Magnetic core exposed, sparking faintly against an open sternum. But what stopped her wasn't the gore.

It was the luminescant pattern etched beneath the exposed plating on his shoulder; a latticework of augmented connective tissue so specific, so elegant, it could only have come from one place. Herself.

"No!" she gasped, pushing through the door. "Wait, that's my - ! Those were never meant for field deployment! - "

She chased them down the hall, nearly colliding with the rear drone as she caught up. One of the medics glanced back. "We're taking him to the Fabrication Wing."

Nova looked again. The augment framework was definitely hers, but modified, overclocked, weaponized far beyond its original intent. Who had done this to him? And more urgently - had she done this to him, without ever knowing his name?

She ran beside the gurney now, close enough to see his face. He was mostly unconscious, with only brief, terrible bouts of cognition. His eyes flickered. One opened, just slightly. The iris lagged, like it had to remember how to focus. He looked at her.

"Kiera?" he rasped, weak as static.

Nova blinked. "No," she said quietly, voice catching. "Nova. Nova Cale."

His lips didn't move, but his breath hitched. Recognition or relief, she didn't know. Not too shortly after that, his head slumped, and the monitors spiked, just as they turned the corner into the Fabrication Wing.

This was Calyx's sanctum.

The lighting had changed; warmer, but still clinical - refracted through bio-gel panels designed to soothe cortical stress. There were no doors here. Only pressure fields and isolation bands.

But Calyx was already waiting.

She stood at the center of a circular surgical platform, feminine in silhouette, but so very obviously inhuman. Her posture was perfect. Movements delibrate. Her face was carved with smooth, symmetrical planes; too exact to be mistaken for natural beauty, too poised to be purely mechanical. She was sentient.

Her eyes were not traditional eyes. They were adjustable oscillators, multi-spectrum apertures that tracked micro-tremors and nerve latency like a musician reading sheet music. Calyx stood at the edge of the surgical dais as they presented his remains. With one hand pressed gently against Caelus Drae's shattered chest, she analyzed his body. Her fingers were long and meticulate. Not spiderlike, simply more precise. Crafted. Built to touch without error.

Nova watched from behind the transparent barrier, body tight with worry but eyes refusing to blink.

"He's cerrrrrtainly not stable," Calyx said, her voice whispy and poetic. "Internal temperature below survivable range. Multiple stress shears. The muscular lattice has collapsed in four quadrants."

Her voice came from four places at once. Nova turned her head. The other Calyx units - three standing at control stations, one seated behind a fabricator arm, were perfectly synchronized. Hive-stitched consciousness was shared across all of them like memory through a relay. She was the only sentient one however, her clones merely extensions of her mind and Synthetic body.

"So... what are you saying?" Nova asked, too tense.

Calyx didn't respond immediately. Instead, she leaned closer to Caelus's exposed torso, eye modules flickering across various wavelength spectra.

"I'm saying he's beautifully broken," she said, almost reverently. "And if I repair him, it will be the most sophisticated restoration of augmented tissue in post-Accord history." She turned. "You brought me a masterpiece in pieces. I accept."

The table lowered into position. The lights above shifted to surgical white, pressed against a bioreactive filter. The other Calyx bodies moved like instruments brought to life; adjusting, syncing, configuring environmental tolerances.

One Calyx placed a nanite syringe against the side of Caelus's neck. A tiny hiss escaped. "Nociceptor disruption is underway." that Calyx said. "Pain transmission suspended."

Another waved a hand over his thigh with a flowerly gesture. Nano-sutures danced beneath the skin, knitting torn fiber back into cohesion. "Initiating cellular proliferation," said a third. "Stage one: muscular regrowth. Phase time: 11 minutes."

Caelus twitched. His lips parted in reflex. His brain registered the tearing of his own cells becoming whole again... but the pain never arrived.

Calyx watched his readouts calmly. "He would be screaming if not for the disruption to his pain receptors. His cells are now multiplying and dividing quicker than theyre consuming energy. Rapid regeneration is... traumatic. We prefer not to remind them."

From the back of the chamber, the fourth Calyx oversaw the fabrication unit. Augments were being printed in real-time, designed from scratch to replace the internal structures lost in the blast. Nova stepped closer to the barrier.

"You're designing new ones?"

"No," Calyx said. "I'm designing better ones. What he had was... crude. Optimized for destruction, not recovery."

She glanced at Nova - not unkind, but clinical. "If he survives, it will not be because of what he was. It will be because of what I've made him."

Nova didn't respond. Not with words. She just watched - hoping this wasn't the last time she'd see him breathe.

Calyx's four bodies continued to work in a flurry of controlled elegance, each tireslessly a reflection of the same unified thought. But the one closest to Nova was smiling now, or at least doing the best approximation of a smile that a synthetic face could manage without appearing either predatory or in pain.

"I do love a man in pieces," Calyx said brightly, delicately lifting a severed augmentation spindle as if it were a fine tea cup. "So much potential. So little coordination."

Nova blinked. "Is that... supposed to be comforting?"

One of the other Calyxes, the one at the far fabrication station, turned just slightly. "She finds humans respond better when confused."

"More pliable," added the one at the medical console.

"More fun," said the first, tossing the spindle into a recycling hopper with a musical ping.

Nova crossed her arms, unsure whether to be impressed or concerned. "You're a battlefield medic operative, sure. But what else? Surely you dont need multiple bodies just for that?"

"I'm the best battlefield medic," Calyx replied with a curtsey too precise to be organic. "Also the worst baker, third-best linguist, and a disgraceful tap dancer. But healing? Healing I do exceptionally."

She turned back to Caelus's partially reconstructed frame, her voice lowering into something reverent.

"You see, this man was built to break. Violent and surgical, these elite operatives are mostly the same. 'Damage Dealers' to put it bluntly. But this..." she traced a finger across the edge of his exposed sternum, where nanite scaffolding had begun weaving itself into new armor-like ridges, "...this will make him last."

Calyx wasn't just healing Caelus.

She was remaking him.

The augment schematics floated in the air, cast from her internal frame projectors - lines of geometric force-distribution matrices and overcharged shielding nodes. The designs were massive, layered in a way Nova had never seen before. There were heat venting arrays, staggered kinetic buffers, threat-magnetizers, and - Nova narrowed her eyes - a redirection array.

"You're building him to... take hits?" Nova asked.

"To invite them," Calyx replied cheerfully. "The Ascendents always think in terms of output. Firepower. Alpha strike. But that's not what a field needs. A field needs weight. A center. Someone the chaos clings to."

A fourth Calyx chimed in, scanning muscle regeneration progress: "Aggro profile optimization at 74%. Projected enemy prioritization high."

Nova raised an eyebrow. "You're making him a threat magnet?"

Calyx grinned. "Well. If you're going to be the last thing standing, you might as well be interesting."

The restoration wasn't gentle.

Despite the nociceptor disruptors keeping Caelus's nerves from screaming, the strain on his system was enormous. The nanites themselves operated like hive-minded surgeons, crawling through his blood, replicating healthy tissue at impossible speed. Every micron of his body was being rewritten. Bones thickened. Augment ports rebalanced. Nerve channels expanded to allow faster shielding reflexes.

But none of it looked painful. Calyx's precision saw to that.

"You know," she said, flipping a scalpel between her fingers like a conductor's baton, "you could have brought me someone boring. A broken Purist. A crushed Sovereign. But no - you bring me a legend with a blown-out frame and enough internal trauma to make a priest cry. This is a treat."

Nova stared at the projection. "He'll be able to walk?"

Calyx spun on a heel. "He'll be able to carry cities."

Nova stepped out into the corridor and let the door seal behind her. The silence crept in like a subtle pressure - clean, quiet, and sterile. She leaned back against the warm bio-gel paneling and exhaled hard, finally releasing a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding since his body came careening through hall like a dying prophecy. Her hands shook, just slightly. Adrenaline, she told herself. Nothing more.

The corridor smelled faintly of ionizing mist from the operations. Somewhere nearby, a ventilation duct clicked with soft acknowledgement.

"Caelus Drae," came the voice behind her.

Nova turned. One of the Calyxes - impossible for her to tell which one - with a faintly pearlescent facial plating and a ribbon of cobalt threading through her synthetic hair, had snuck in beside her, arms folded, expression unreadable.

"Tier Three Elite. Ascendent field operative: Sentinel Class. Solo combatant. Full threat capabilities, responsive shielding, forward-pressure control. One Hunnnnndred percent mission completion. Unbroken." She gave a theatrical little shrug, like reading off a menu. "And yet... there he lies. Cracked open like cheap circuitry and bleeding out onto my floor."

Calyx paced with slow, effortless grace, boots making no sound. She traced a circle in the air with one gloved finger as if writing invisible glyphs.

"I don't believe in coincidence. I believe in orchestration. And this? This feels... discordant."

Nova raised an eyebrow. "You're saying he was set up?"

Calyx spun to face her with the loose-limbed twirl of someone who had once studied ballet for the express purpose of making war seem graceful. "Oh no, my dear. I'm saying someone knew he might not come back, and sent him anyway. And that means one of two things: our operators are being used like chess pieces..." She paused, grinning faintly. "...or more like sacrificial runes."

Nova swallowed. The weight of Calyx's gaze made her feel both seen and scanned. She looked away, then back again. "You seem pretty confident in your intel."

"Please. I'm a war-clinic with legs and a broadband uplink. I read between everything." Calyx's head tilted, like a bird hearing something behind the walls. "Who's his handler?" she asked softly.

Nova hesitated. "I... I don't know. I didn't even know his name before today."

"Mmm. Tragic. But useful."

Calyx began walking again, slow, gliding steps down the hall, speaking over her shoulder like someone narrating a play only she had seen to the end. "I know who probably knows. And I think it's time we paid him a visit."

Nova blinked. "Who?"

Calyx stopped. Turned, and smiled like the moon shining down on a battlefield.

"My good friend... Maxim Cutter."