For a long time, Michael didn’t understand what that meant. He only knew that when he refused to help, Shaw’s voice turned sharp and the room grew cold. When he obeyed, Shaw smiled again and called himson.
By fourteen, Michael could mimic a dozen faces perfectly. By sixteen, he could mimic at heartbeat. The scientists called him “useful.” They told him the others, which were his kind, were monsters. That his purpose was to find them and help the Lucent make the world safe again.
At first, he didn’t believe them. He remembered his mother's laughter and the promises she once made. But years of repetition, lectures, conditioning, isolation had turned the memories thin and brittle. He learned to nod when they saidevil, to repeat the phrases that made them proud.
By the time he was twenty, he could look anyone in the eye and tell them he was human.
And most of the time, he almost believed it.
Then, a few weeks ago, something inside him cracked.
He’d been sleeping in his quarters when a pulse ran through his chest, a shimmer of energy, old and familiar. It was the same feeling he’d known as a child when Gloriana reached for him in dreams. A connection. A call.
It broke everything the Lucent had built in him.
Voices overlapped in his mind:find them, destroy them.And in the same breathprotect them, remember who you are.
He woke shaking.
For days, he hid the tremor in his hands and told himself it was nothing. But the call kept growing stronger until he knew what it meant: someone like him was close. Several, maybe. That same night, they told him they may have a lead as there was a breach at a facility, and it was coincidently in the same direction he was being pulled in.
By the time he reached the forest and saw the manor through the trees, his thoughts were split clean down the middle. Part of him, the loyal part, repeated the Lucent’s orders:gain intelligence, identify targets, report back.
The other part whispered that these people were the ones he’d been waiting for.
Meeting Lucy destroyed what was left of his certainty.
The way she looked at him, without disgust, without pity, was disarming. It wasn’t kindness he understood; it was too genuine. And when Lucy connected with him, that spark of shared energy ripped through every layer of conditioning he had. Memories he thought erased came flooding back: Gloriana’s voice, the sound of rain the night they were taken, the promise that one day they would be free.
But the Lucent’s programming didn’t vanish. It sat in the back of his skull, steady and cold, reminding him what he was supposed to do.
Gain intel. Report. Deliver results.
He’d tried to resist it, but the compulsion was carved too deep.
Now, standing at the manor’s edge beside Damian, Michael tried to keep his hands from shaking.
They were laying the perimeter explosives, the final layer of defence. Damian moved ahead, checking each placement while Michael followed, marking coordinates on a small pad.
“This should slow anyone who tries to rush the wards,” Damian said, crouching to tighten a wire.
“Right,” Michael murmured, his voice thin.
He waited until Damian’s back was turned. Then he reached into his pocket, pulling out a small, folded scrap of paper. On it was information about Lucy and the others.
He hesitated.
They’ll be proud of me,he thought.They have to be.
He raised his hand slightly, pretending to stretch, and let the paper slip from his fingers. It fluttered once before vanishing into the grass.
A pulse of light flickered deep in the forest—quick, sharp, and unmistakable. A signal back. He’d been seen.
Michael swallowed hard and forced a smile when Damian looked over his shoulder.
“All good?” Damian asked.
“Yeah,” Michael said, voice steady. “All good.”
