The suffocating smell of caustic green gas vanished.
Elias didn't wake up slowly. Consciousness snapped back into his skull with the violence of a severed cable whipping against steel. He dragged a desperate breath into his lungs, expecting the chemical burn of Oliver's nerve agent, but the air hitting his throat was entirely different. It tasted of dry ash and burning pitch.
He pushed his hands flat against the ground. His palms scraped over coarse, loose gravel and deep, smooth veins of dark glass.
He was no longer lying on the pristine white ceramic tiles of the high-security wing. The heavy polycarbonate dome he had burned his core to create was gone.
