The laboratory was unnervingly quiet the following morning.
Ren stood at the primary diagnostic station, his eyes tracing the fluctuating waveforms on the monitor. The captured fragment of the entity, now suspended in the high-containment lens, displayed a steady, rhythmic pulse. It was no longer the chaotic, thrashing thing they had dragged from the foundation stones; it had settled into a low, mournful vibration that seemed to synchronise with the beating of Ren's own heart.
Fang sat at the secondary terminal, his hands moving rapidly across the haptic interface. He was cross-referencing the entity's current output with the historical data recorded in the institute's central vault. The silence between them was not the easy, comfortable silence of partners, but the thick, charged silence of men who were beginning to grasp the magnitude of their own culpability.
