Calm had returned, but it brought me no comfort.
I was curled up in a corner of the room, my head buried between my knees, my breathing ragged, my body shaking. My hands, still smeared with blood, clutched at my arms as if hoping to hold back what was threatening to collapse.
Every beat of my heart echoed in my chest like the cracked bell of a ruined cathedral. Deaf. Deep. Unceasing.
I didn't know what to do. Worse still, I didn't even know what I'd done.
Memories of what had happened... blurred, scattered, like shards of broken glass on a black floor. I tried to pick them up, to understand, but each image lacerated me a little more. The scientist's death... I couldn't trace it. My mind refused to show it to me.
There was this block. An invisible barrier between what I was and what I was becoming.
I could feel my thoughts faltering. The room around me seemed to breathe, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. The air had taken on an acrid smell - a mixture of blood, sweat, and fluids I couldn't even name. But beyond that, there was something else. A sweet, almost sugary scent. An anomaly in this stench of death.
It came from the corpse.
Timidly, I looked up, almost reluctantly. As if part of me still hoped to see him standing. That it was all just a feverish delirium. A hallucination caused by the Infusion.
But it wasn't.
He was there. Lying there. Broken.
His head hung down, held in place by a flap of distended skin. His neck formed a grotesque angle with his dislocated shoulders, as if his own body had been twisted by the will of a cruel god. He was bathed in a pool of scarlet, his blood drawing crazy arabesques around him.
I wanted to look away, but a movement caught my eye.
Above his chest... a glow.
Faint. Trembling.
A trail of light, like a flame suspended in the air, undulated gently, with no apparent purpose. It wavered, oscillating between a golden and emerald hue, as if hesitant too, unsure of its place in this world.
And yet... she seemed to be waiting for me.
I stared at her. Fascinated. Terrified.
My heart began to pound again, faster. The pain of the previous moment mingled with a painful curiosity. An almost animal hunger.
My instinct was to go for it. To grab it.
What's going on?!
My inner voice struggled, but my body... my body had already decided.
As if drawn by a magnet, I crawled towards the light. My arms tightened in spite of myself. My knees slipped on the cold, sticky ground. My vision blurred, my muscles went numb. I was no longer in control of anything.
Every second seemed distorted, infinite and elusive. The air became denser. Almost liquid.
Eventually, I reached the top of him.
He was worse than I remembered. A human carcass. An emptied shell.
And in this mess of flesh and blood, the glow persisted. Unbroken.
I wanted to scream. To vomit. To scream. But nothing came out.
And then my fingers began to move. On their own.
They approached the light, slowly, as if carried by an unknown force. They touched something.
It was neither hot nor cold. Neither solid nor liquid. It wasn't really there. And yet... it was real.
The fruit.
It had no stable form. It pulsed, like a heart. It changed texture, density, color. Sometimes smooth and clear as crystal. Sometimes rough and dark like volcanic rock.
And I felt a hunger.
Brutal. Wild.
It rose from my chest, up my throat, made my jaws tremble. It wasn't the hunger of a body. It was the hunger of a soul.
I grabbed the fruit.
It throbbed between my fingers, vibrating as if aware of me. As if it had always been waiting for me.
An inner voice whispered to me to eat it. To absorb it. That it was mine.
But something inside me still hesitated.
Then, a sound. Dry. Mechanical.
A click.
The door.
A distant voice.
Another, louder. Closer.
"Stay behind me. Get the restraint unit ready."
Footsteps.
The guards.
Panic swept over me. My breath stopped short. My gaze darted between the door and the fruit.
I couldn't leave it there. Not visible. Not for them. Not in their hands.
Then something... happened.
I don't know what.
My mind leapt. An impulse. A thought. And my arm, as if moved by a primitive will, suddenly closed on the glow.
And it disappeared.
Just... gone.
But I could still feel it. Inside me.
A strange warmth now vibrated in my chest. Slow. Deep. Like a foreign heart beating inside mine.
Had I... absorbed the fruit?
Not quite.
It was there, but not fused. Like... put away. Put away. I knew it was there. Accessible. Present somewhere in my body.
Instinctively, I knew it wasn't time yet. That devouring him would be a painful step. Perhaps even dangerous.
But he was safe.
A "space". An inner place. An inventory?
I didn't have time to think further.
The door opened with a metallic bang.
I turned, my back to the corpse. I dropped my shoulders, shaking them. My body bent slightly, wobbling, as if still exhausted from the Infusion.
Two men in uniform entered. Their footsteps froze at the sight. I didn't even look at them. My hands, full of blood, fell inertly to either side of my body.
Silence.
They'd seen nothing.
And me... I'd just stolen a soul.