“This is all your fault!”

I heard him then. Not the little boy. No, this voice was older, deeper, and familiar. And it was angry.

Slowly, the darkness receded, and I was inside a strange room.

Disoriented and stumbling, I hit the edge of a table with my thigh. Smoke filled the large space, stinging my eyes. The lights overhead flickered dimly, and panels from the ceiling were missing, while others hung precariously. Computer screens were cracked, but the light within them still flickered. Small fires smoldered nearby. And I could also hear the siren of an alarm sounding off in the distance.

Beyond the smoke was a colossal metallic arch perched on an elevated platform.

The ARK.

I was in the lab, but it looked different, much older than the one I worked in.

“I told you to stay in bed.” The voice came again through the smoke.

“What happened?” I asked, and my voice sounded younger than I anticipated. There was no response, only sobbing. Through the clearing smoke, I saw his silhouette. I walked towards him. He was kneeling on the floor, cradling the bloodied body of a woman in his arms, a metal rod through her chest.

“Dad?”

“Stay away!” He yelled, pushing me back with a force that made my heart ache.

I jolted awake, my heart pounding in my chest as I scanned the dark room around me.

“You fainted,” came a low voice out of the corner to my right.

Sitting in a chair by the window, bathed in the dim strays of moonlight, was Kael.

“And it seems like you were having a nightmare.” He got up and walked over to the bed.

From one nightmare to another. Or maybe… I pinched my cheek hard, and it hurt a lot. Dammit, so I am awake.

That’s definitely going to leave a bruise.

“What are you doing?” Kael’s voice sounded confused. His expression must have matched his tone, but it was too dark in the room for me to see him clearly. He apparently had great vision.

“Just checking that I wasn’t still dreaming.”

Silence. Not much of a talker, unless he needed to know something, it appeared.

“Where am I?” I asked as I threw my legs over the edge and sat up.

“The Sagar’s house.” He answered, now standing right in front of me again.

“Oh, right, right. Sagar’s an old friend of mine I forgot to mention.” I answered sarcastically.

I didn’t see it, but I felt the eye roll from Kael.

“Tomlin Sagar, you saved his son from drowning.”

The memories from the last few hours came rushing in. Pushing the nightmare I had just awoken from to the far recesses of my mind, for now at least. I would have to return to it later, when I was alone and could figure out if it was more than just a dream.

That old lab looked like the one in the annex basement, though I had never been there before last night, at least, as far as I could remember. But as a scientist, I knew that memory was whatever we wanted it to be.