Cowards.
Or people I trusted.
I curl tighter, and this time when Roja moves, he sits beside me fully, back against the wall, shoulder brushing mine.
“We’re not done,” he says.
“No. We’re just getting started.”
Bravado is easy to give lip service to. But the grim reality of my situation soon presses in. My face is everywhere now.
I don’t mean that in the poetic sense—I mean literally. On every screen, every corner vid-loop, every damn projection billboard that hasn’t been bricked by protestors or blacked out by the grid riots. It's my face. My eyes. That clip from two weeks ago, walking out of the casino, caught on a grainy aerial shot with Roja close behind. Paused. Enlarged. Repeated like a war chant.
The headlines are worse.
“Companion-Turned-Assassin Linked to High-Profile Leak”
“Fugitive Human Identified in Cleric Scandal Fallout”
“Terrorist? Or Symbol of Resistance?”
They can’t agree on what I am. Some want me buried. Some want me canonized. Most want me gone.
Roja thinks it’s strategic. “They don’t know how to spin you, so they’re throwing every angle at the wall. One’ll stick eventually.”
But what happens when they all stick?
I pace the length of the warehouse, boots thudding against cracked cement, my own breath sounding too loud in the wide-open air. The cold bites my arms, even through my sleeves. The metal beams overhead groan again, like the building’s tired of holding itself up.
I glance at the wristpad I’ve shut off five times already. Turn it back on. Bad habit. Same result.
My face.
The old registry photo. Straight hair, stiff shoulders, dead eyes. Taken the first day I was tagged as a “low-utility ward.” Back when I thought they were just words. Designations. Not sentences.
Now it’s being used like evidence. Like prophecy.
“You good?” Roja asks from the far corner. He’s kneeling by the emergency rations, checking packs with methodical fingers.
I snort. “Define good.”
“Not twitching.”
“Then yeah. Golden.”
He nods, doesn’t push. That’s one of the things I’ve learned about him—he only asks what he’s ready to hear.
I stop by the rusted bay door. There’s a crack near the top that lets in a spear of light. Dust dances in it, lazy and soft. The kind of light that would’ve been pretty if I wasn’t stuck here like a ghost in someone else’s story.
“I used to think if I got my name back, it’d mean something,” I say quietly. “That reclaiming it would make me real again.”
He looks up. Waits.
“But now they’ve got it. All of it. My history, my face, my voice. And I feel less real than I ever did.”
He stands, walks toward me slow. “You’re real to me.”
“That’s not enough.”
