Demon Contract

The observation room carried the smell of metal and cold air, a sterile bite that clung to the back of the throat. There were no windows, only a reinforced wall of glass that looked down into the prep chamber, where Alyssa sat cross-legged on the edge of the resonance chair. She held her arms folded tight across her chest, jaw locked, her whole body vibrating with the refusal to flinch. Dr. Adisa moved around her with quiet precision, adjusting cables, calibrating the soul-discs that thrummed like tuning forks searching for the right note.

Max stood with his back to the glass, shoulders rigid, as if watching her directly would make it harder to keep still. Dan leaned against the far wall with his arms loose at his sides, but his eyes kept flicking between the monitors and Alyssa, restless despite the pose of calm. Victor paced in a slow, agitated circuit, the sound of his boots the only rhythm in the quiet.

"I'll say this now," Victor muttered, running a hand through his hair in frustration, "if she grows horns or starts breathing fire, I'm blaming you."

Max didn't respond, his silence drawing the words heavier into the air.

Victor pressed on, his voice edged with humour that didn't quite hide his concern. "Look, I woke up fanged and muscled with a tail. You think Alyssa's going to be thrilled if she comes out of that chair looking like a kaiju with eyeliner?"

Dan let out a small, nervous laugh. "She already kind of talks like one."

Victor smirked faintly, the expression gone as quickly as it came. "Yeah, but sarcasm doesn't stop bullets."

At that, Max finally turned from the wall of glass. His voice was low but steady. "She made her choice."

"That's what worries me," Victor said.

The quiet that followed didn't feel hostile, but it was weighted with something older — the kind of silence that belonged more to cemeteries than laboratories.

Dan pushed himself off the wall and drifted to the console. Monitors bloomed in violet, amber, and faint traces of gold, Alyssa's name etched in the corner. Her heartbeat pulsed steady across the speakers, a whisper that seemed too calm for what she was about to face. He tapped the edge of the screen as if to reassure himself it was real.

"She's not scared," he said softly.

"She should be," Victor muttered, though without much conviction.

Dan looked back at Max. "You think she's ready?"

Max's reply came after a pause. "I don't know if she's ready. But she's willing."

"There's a difference," Victor said, shaking his head.

Dan lingered on the monitors a moment longer, then asked, "You ever going to explain how this works? What you're actually doing to us?"

Max sat on the bench, elbows braced against his knees, the weariness plain in his shoulders. "I'm not doing anything to you. I just… open the door. Whatever steps through, that's up to you."

"So you can't control it?" Dan pressed.

Max shook his head. "No. It isn't something you choose. It's not a list of options. It's the soul pushing back, giving you what you need — or maybe just showing you what you already are."

Dan nodded slowly, considering. "I needed to heal. That makes sense."

Victor gave a short snort. "And I was already half-animal."

Dan's gaze returned to Max. "Then why fire?"

Max's silence stretched long enough to draw both their attention. His eyes settled on Alyssa in the chair, watching her talk quietly with Adisa.

"I didn't get fire," he said at last. "That was Aamon's. I stole it."

Dan blinked. "Then what did you get?"

Max's answer was quieter, the words carrying their own weight. "Soul Prison. The ability to hold things that should've killed me."

Victor let out a low whistle. "That's… not reassuring."

"No," Max agreed. "It isn't."

Dan leaned forward slightly. "But you said the soul gives what we need. So what did you need?"

The pause this time was heavier than silence, thick with memories unspoken.

Victor filled it for him. "To survive Aamon."

Max nodded once. "And maybe… to pay for it."

The room fell quiet again. Alyssa's heartbeat pulsed across the speakers, steady as ever, unfazed by the weight of their conversation.

"She's still a kid," Victor said eventually, his voice softer now.

Max didn't argue.

"She should be at school," Dan added, "not strapped into that chair."

"She was at school," Max said, his tone flat, final. "Then Jack died in front of her. Now she's trying to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Victor made a sound between a grunt and a sigh. "Doesn't mean she's ready to carry what we are."

Dan turned his head. "You think you're a monster?"

Victor gave a crooked half-smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I can carry it. Doesn't mean I want her to."

Max stood again, eyes fixed through the glass. Alyssa's expression was calm, focused, answering Adisa's questions with the patience of someone who had already made her decision.

"I'm not forcing them," he said. "But I'm not stopping them either."

Dan nodded once. "Fair enough."

Victor rubbed at his temples and exhaled through his teeth. "Just promise me, if she sprouts claws, you're the one explaining it to her."

***

The monitoring chamber was quiet in a way that seemed deliberate, as though the air itself had been tuned to silence. No humming machines, no idle clicks of data relays — only the faint whisper of soulfield harmonics threading through the walls. Dozens of screens hovered in stacked verticals, their light casting pale reflections across steel and polished glass. Heat maps bled colour beside biometric graphs, aura matrices pulsed in spectral hues, and resonance overlays shimmered like slow-moving tides.

Dr. Helmut Grimm stood in the centre of it all, hands clasped neatly behind his back, his posture measured as though the weight of the room rested comfortably on his shoulders. The largest monitor displayed the prep chamber below: Alyssa seated in the resonance chair, Dr. Adisa adjusting stabilisers, Max and the others watching from behind the reinforced glass. Chloe lingered in the corner like a shadow without edges.

Grimm tilted his head slightly, studying the streams of light that curled across Alyssa's readings. His voice was soft when he spoke, meant for himself, though the two figures at his back heard every word.

"Two gold affinities," he murmured.

Omega shifted on the left, the motion subtle but enough to draw the eye. The man was massive, an Arabic mountain in immaculate white armour, its surface polished so clean it seemed to reject dust. His helmet rested on his hip, revealing a thick black beard streaked faintly with grey. His skin was sun-darkened, his frame so broad he seemed carved to fill space. When he spoke, it was with the slow certainty of someone who didn't often need to repeat himself.

"Gold?"

Grimm adjusted the display. With a flick of his hand, the overlays changed; three halos shimmered into view, spectral signatures drawn from resonance scans. Victor's halo gleamed in flickering silver, steady but restless, like metal catching light through branches. Dan's pulsed gold — warm, balanced, luminous in its stability. Max's burned the same gold but turbulent, its edges raw and jagged, a storm contained only because the vessel refused to break.

"Soul affinities," Grimm said, his tone even, almost pleasant. "Silver denotes physical resonance — the body reshaped, strength or form altered. Reliable. Predictable." He gestured toward Victor's display, which shivered in neat, repeating pulses. "Gold, however…" His eyes lingered on Dan's aura before shifting back to Max's fractured blaze. "Gold is soul manipulation. A rarity of bloodline once thought extinct."

Omega gave a low chuckle, deep and rough, like boulders rolling. "And now you've got two of them in the same room."

Alpha stepped forward from the shadows on the right. Where Omega embodied weight, she carried precision. Her armour was light, designed for movement, layered in plates meant for speed rather than brute force. Blades gleamed at her hips, thighs, across her back, their hilts catching the monitor light. Her black hair was tied tight except for a single white streak at the temple, a scar in colour as sharp as her eyes. Those eyes never left the screens, tracking data as if the patterns themselves were her prey.

"Or perhaps," she said, her voice clipped but even, "proximity to the anomaly catalysed a resonance. A variable that alters the system."

Grimm's mouth curved faintly. "Jaeger is the variable. Everything orbits him, whether they intend to or not."

On the main feed, Max's hand brushed Alyssa's wrist. Her vitals spiked. Her dormant halo, until now a dim pulse, flared once like a heart deciding to beat harder.

"She's beginning," Alpha observed. Her eyes flickered to Grimm. "What answers will her soul give?"

Grimm's gaze lingered on the girl in the chair. His expression didn't change, though something behind his eyes seemed to sharpen. "The kind we cannot predict."

Omega shifted again, folding his arms across his chest. His voice was low, cautious but edged with disdain. "Still think it's wise to let them walk out of here?"

Grimm smiled without warmth. "I never said they would walk out. But caging them now would waste the experiment. It is better to observe what they become before we decide whether they should continue existing."

Alpha glanced at him, unreadable. "You speak of them as variables."

"They are variables," Grimm said softly. His tone carried no cruelty, only a certainty that felt sharper than malice. "But not the kind one solves within an equation. They are the kind around which a new equation must be built."

On the monitor, Alyssa's halo brightened, the pulse steadying into something dense, compressed.

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Omega grunted, shaking his head. "Whatever she's turning into, I don't envy the world when she decides to move."

Grimm didn't look away from the glass. "Then pay attention," he murmured. "We may be watching the foundation of something that cannot be undone."

The harmonics shifted in the walls, faint as a breath. Alyssa's halo flared again.

And Grimm's eyes narrowed, not in surprise, but in interest — the curiosity of a surgeon watching a new wound open exactly where he expected.

***

The resonance chamber felt too large when left empty, its walls pulsing with faint amber light that traced through conduits like veins beneath skin. The air was dry and thin, stripped of warmth, every sound swallowed too quickly, as if the place had been built to dampen anything human. At its centre stood the awakening chair, its frame humming with a low, steady vibration, waiting for someone to step into it.

Alyssa stood over it, arms folded, jaw tight. She tapped her foot without rhythm, her body caught between restlessness and control. For all her bravado in front of the others, her eyes betrayed something else — not fear exactly, but the pressure of expectation, like she was standing at the edge of a jump she'd already decided to make.

Chloe sat across the room on the edge of a narrow bunk, her knees pulled close to her chest. She hadn't said much since they came in. Her silence wasn't avoidance; it was the kind that came when words felt too fragile, too breakable for what needed to be said. She clutched Jack's paper crane in both hands, the folded wings bent slightly from overuse.

Alyssa glanced back at her, then at the chair again. "Looks like a dentist's chair built for demons," she muttered, her voice sharp to cover the edge underneath.

Chloe gave the faintest smile. "You going first?"

Alyssa exhaled through her nose, shook her head once, then finally let herself sit down beside Chloe. For a long moment she didn't speak. When she did, the words came out quieter than she expected.

"I have to," she said. "I can't keep standing around doing nothing. Every time something happens, I feel like I'm just… watching it. Like I'm waiting for the next monster to take something else away." She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. "If I don't change, if I don't do something, I think I'll break. Maybe I already have."

Chloe's gaze softened. "I know the feeling."

Alyssa leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "You remember when Jack used to try folding those paper cranes?"

Chloe's lips twitched. "They always looked like bats that flew into a wall."

"He swore he'd make a thousand of them," Alyssa said. "Said if he did, he'd get a wish." Her voice caught briefly, then steadied. "And he gave you the last one."

Chloe opened her hand. The small blue crane rested in her palm, bent at one wingtip but still intact. She stared at it for a long time before whispering, "I didn't even get to say goodbye."

Alyssa looked at the floor. Her voice was rough when she answered. "None of us did."

Silence stretched between them, not uncomfortable, but heavy with the weight of memory neither wanted to set down.

Chloe finally asked, almost afraid of the words, "Alyssa… what if this changes you?"

Alyssa turned her head, met her eyes, then shrugged slightly. "I want it to."

"No, I mean really changes you. What if you're not you anymore?"

For a moment Alyssa didn't answer. When she did, her voice was steady. "Do you think I'm still me now? Because I don't. Not since that night. Not since Jack. Not since Liz fell. I don't even remember what normal is supposed to feel like. I'm done pretending I can go back."

Chloe's grip on the paper crane tightened until the crease cut her skin. "I'm scared," she admitted.

"Me too," Alyssa said, her tone softer now. "But I'd rather be scared with something to fight back with than wait to get hit again." She leaned her shoulder gently into Chloe's. "Whatever happens, you still have me. That doesn't change."

Chloe blinked fast, swallowing hard. "Promise you'll still be you?"

Alyssa's jaw worked as if the answer mattered more than anything else she'd ever said. Her eyes stayed locked on her sister's.

"I'll still be your sister," she whispered. "Even if I come out glowing."

The hum of the chair filled the pause that followed, patient and expectant.

***

Dr. Adisa returned with her sleeves rolled and her equipment case already open, moving with the efficiency of someone who had repeated these steps too many times to waste motion. She checked Alyssa's vitals on the monitor, adjusted the stabiliser rings, and murmured numbers under her breath as though reciting a language no one else in the room spoke.

"Vitals steady," she said at last, not looking up. "Resonance is holding."

Alyssa peeled off her jacket, folded it across the back of the chair, and sat down without hesitation. Her movements were sharp with determination rather than bravado; she wasn't putting on a performance for the others, she was simply past the point of doubting her own choice. The restraints shimmered faintly as they locked around her arms and ankles.

Max stepped closer, stopping just beyond the chair's halo of light. His voice came low, measured, but carrying a weight he couldn't hide. "You're certain about this?"

Alyssa lifted her chin, eyes steady on him. "I'm tired of feeling like glass. I'd rather see what happens than keep pretending I can't crack."

Her mouth tightened, the words snapping sharper. "If it screws me up, fine. At least it'll be my screw-up — not the world's."

Max inhaled, then reached for the connection he still didn't understand, the tether between his soul and theirs. The moment he touched her presence, the air thickened. Her soul was not a flame or a current or a fracture. It was compressed density — grief, anger, and stubborn control folded into something that resisted being broken. He felt it pressing back, as if the world itself leaned toward her.

He whispered, not for her alone but for the resonance itself: "Light the fuse."

High above, Grimm's chamber bloomed in alarms. The monitors spiked into unreadable static, overlays stuttering as though the system itself refused to process what Alyssa was becoming.

Grimm didn't flinch. His voice was low, clinical, almost reverent. "Compression. Mass-density resonance. Not energy at all."

Omega braced against the shuddering floor. "Feels like the whole damn building's about to fold in on itself."

Alpha's eyes never left the screens. Her tone was precise, clipped, but edged with something colder. "She isn't radiating power. She's dragging the world toward her."

Grimm's lips curved faintly, the barest hint of satisfaction. "Weight made flesh."

Then the feed flared white and cut out, leaving only the shaking of steel around them. The chamber convulsed.

First came silence, a collapse so sudden it felt like sound had been ripped out of the world. Then pressure rolled outward, shaking every surface as though gravity itself had lost its footing. Alyssa arched against the restraints and cried out — not from terror, but release, the kind of sound dragged from years of weight finally given voice.

The monitors sparked and exploded into static. The restraints snapped apart with a metallic scream, flung outward like shrapnel. The floor split open, jagged cracks racing across the chamber in spiderwebs.

The walls groaned. Light strips burst overhead. A deep, rolling tremor shook the entire facility, heavy enough to throw Victor against the wall and stagger Dan to his knees.

Somewhere below, alarms blared — shrill, overlapping, every tone screaming at once. The klaxons reverberated through the steel, echoing like the Institute itself had decided they were all about to die.

Dr. Adisa's composure faltered. She swore, her hands flying over the control pads with an urgency that betrayed panic before she mastered it again. "Containment fields dropping—this isn't energy discharge, it's gravitational collapse—" She caught herself, drew a breath, steadied her voice. "Stabilise. Just hold steady. It'll pass. It has to pass."

Victor clung to the wall. "Has to?"

The quake built, threatening to tear the room apart. Dust rained from the ceiling. The chair beneath Alyssa shrieked and split down the middle, collapsing in two jagged halves.

Then everything stopped.

Not slowly. Not fading. Stopped.

The alarms cut off mid-scream, leaving silence so sudden it made Max's ears ring. The lights steadied. Dust hung suspended in the air for a heartbeat, as if gravity itself had forgotten how to work, then drifted down in one slow fall.

Alyssa stood in the wreckage, barefoot at the centre of a shallow crater. The cracked floor bowed under her, but she was unshaken, her shoulders squared, her breath steady. Her hair lifted faintly in the warped air around her before snapping downward again, pulled flat by her own gravitational field.

Max staggered back, fire smothered inside his chest, as though the weight of her presence had pressed the flame itself into silence.

Alyssa opened her eyes. They were no longer brown but a crystalline blue, steady and unyielding. She looked at her hand, flexed her fingers slowly, and spoke in a voice that carried like tectonic truth.

"I'm not breaking anymore."

Dan's words came out hushed, reverent despite himself. "She's not fire like Max. She controls density."

Dr. Adisa pressed a hand to the glass, the faintest tremor still in her fingers, though her tone was clinical again. "Core density nearly four hundred percent above baseline. Subject stable. Grounded."

Alyssa let out a long breath that eased her shoulders at last. A tired smirk tugged at her lips.

"I've been drowning in weight since the night Jack died," she said, her eyes sweeping the cracked floor, the broken chair, the silent monitors.

"Looks like it finally caught up with me."

The Institute had shaken like a faultline, but Alyssa stood in its centre, immovable.

***

The chamber still carried the scars of Alyssa's awakening. The cracked floor yawned in shallow fractures, the air faintly warped as though gravity itself hadn't fully let go. Alyssa stood off to the side, breathing steady now, but the weight of her presence still bent the tiles beneath her boots.

Chloe hovered at the edge of the wreckage. She clutched Liz's necklace so hard the chain had carved deep crescents into her skin. She hadn't flinched through Alyssa's quake, hadn't made a sound when the alarms screamed, but now, looking at the ruined chair, she felt the pull of inevitability.

Max turned toward her, his voice low, rough. "You don't have to."

Her grip on the necklace trembled, but she didn't let go. "I'm not doing it because she did. I'm doing it because I'm done watching."

Victor tried to summon a quip, but the quake had stripped his humour down to bare nerves. His voice cracked in spite of him. "You saw what that did to the room. You really want to roll those dice?"

Chloe's eyes flicked up to him, hollow but unwavering. "Yes."

Her voice was too soft to sound defiant, but it carried the kind of finality that turned arguments to dust.

Max stepped forward, his chest still tight from the silence Alyssa's awakening had pressed into him. "If you're sure—"

"I'm tired of being the one who disappears when it matters."

The words cut through the chamber like a confession.

Dr. Adisa hesitated, her composure rattled from the alarms still settling into silence. She forced herself to nod, her voice brisk but fraying at the edges. "Stabilisers first. One at a time. No sudden surges."

But Chloe had already crossed into the fractured circle, bare feet scuffing against the cracked floor. She slipped the necklace into her pocket and straightened her shoulders. Her arms didn't shake. Not yet.

Max reached again for the tether — that strange link between his soul and theirs — and pressed into her presence.

And suddenly, there was nothing.

Her soul wasn't dense like Alyssa's. It wasn't fiery or violent. It was absence. A hollow depth that seemed to fall away the harder he reached, like leaning over a frozen lake and finding the water beneath had no bottom.

The monitors flickered and spat grey static. The light in the chamber dimmed without fading, as though the world itself couldn't decide whether she was present.

"Chloe?" Alyssa's voice cracked, sharp with fear.

Chloe's outline blurred. Her arms flickered, stretching like afterimages against the steel. The air wavered around her, echoing her breath twice, then three times — her voice scattering before it left her lips.

Dan's palms smacked against the glass. "She's slipping out of phase!"

"Hold her resonance!" Adisa barked, her clinical calm rupturing into panic. Her hands flew across the control pad. "She has no anchor—she's falling through—"

Chloe gasped as her chest tightened, breath ripped out of rhythm. Her hand disappeared to the elbow, swallowed by the bulkhead, her other arm ghosting into translucence. Her stomach lurched as though she were plunging down an elevator shaft while the rest of her body stayed nailed in place. A coldness threaded through her veins, not temperature but vacancy, like even her blood couldn't decide whether to flow or evaporate. Her heartbeat staggered, echoing in strange, broken rhythms that didn't feel like her own.

She tried to pull herself free, but the harder she strained, the less of her remained. Her body wasn't resisting — it was letting go.

Her thoughts frayed into fragments. I'm fading. I'm slipping. I'm nothing. Maybe I've always been nothing.

Alyssa lunged forward, her new weight pounding cracks deeper into the floor. She reached for her sister's shoulder — but her hand passed through as if Chloe were made of smoke.

"Chloe!"

The name echoed twice, once from Alyssa's mouth and again from the warped air itself.

Chloe's vision fractured. The chamber spun in overlapping layers — solid one moment, transparent the next. She saw her friends both near and impossibly far away, as though she were already half-buried in some other dimension. Terror coiled in her throat.

"I feel like—" her doubled voice rattled against the walls— "like I'm everywhere and nowhere."

Her chest heaved. She wasn't vanishing into some vast beyond. She was falling into erasure.

Max forced his hands out, grasping at the tether with sheer will, his voice hoarse with strain. "No! You're not gone. You're here. Anchor yourself — remember who you are!"

Her halo flared into sight. Not red, not gold, not silver. Grey. Soft, unstable, bleeding at the edges like a memory refusing to stay.

Chloe's mind screamed with the same thought, over and over. I don't want to disappear. Not again. Not when Liz is still down here. Not when Jack is gone. Not when Alyssa still needs me.

Her hands clenched, though half-transparent. I am still me.

She forced one step backward.

Her foot struck the cracked floor. Solid. Real.

With a jolt, her body snapped back into focus. Her chest convulsed, dragging air into lungs that hadn't realised they'd been starving. The doubled echo of her voice cut off. The grey halo flickered but held.

Dust curled at her ankles. Her shadow twitched faintly under her feet, pale and uncertain, but it was hers.

Alyssa seized her shoulders, relief breaking through the stern weight of her new gravity. "You're here. You didn't fade."

Chloe blinked, tears stinging her vision. She looked at her trembling hands, at the pale shimmer of her halo, and for the first time spoke without shaking.

"I can phase." She drew another breath, steady now. "But I don't have to disappear."

Max lowered his hands, chest burning with the strain of holding the tether. His voice softened, stripped raw. "You anchored yourself. That wasn't me. That was you."

Chloe's gaze lifted to him, then to Alyssa, then down to her own feet planted on cracked steel. The fear was still there, but beneath it was something harder. A decision.

"I'm not fading again," she said quietly. "Even if I slip through the cracks. I know where I stand."

The chamber stilled, not with silence but with a new, careful presence. Alyssa heavy as stone. Chloe light as breath.

Far above, in the observation tower, Grimm's monitors blinked red and stayed red.