I let the moment harden into something useful. My breathing evens. My expression resets into that pleasant little smile that makes professionals reconsider their career paths.
“Relax, Doctor,” I murmur. “If I wanted to end this little science project, I wouldn’t need your help.”
She blanches.
I take a towel, wipe the gel from my stomach like I’m erasing a mistake, and tug my shirt down. I don’t wait for permission to leave. The sonographer steps back instinctively as I pass, like she’s realised the thing on her table wasn’t prey.
Halfway down the corridor, something shifts deep inside me – a flutter, or a muscle twitch, or something worse. Enough to stop me for a heartbeat I pretend I didn’t lose. Enough to make my hand close into a fist until half-moons bloom in my palm. It’s growing, I think. Or pretending to. Hard to tell what parts of me are real these days.
Callaway says my name behind me, quiet and pleading.
I don’t answer.
If they want to study me like a specimen, they should remember the first rule of cutting things open: sometimes the subject learns how the tools work. And sometimes, it sharpens itself while you’re not looking.
PUNISHED FOR INITIATIVE
Angel - Camylio
Nightshade
Seytan intervenes too late.
That’s the first mistake.
The second is assuming this is still about obedience.
The lights sharpen without warning, focus snapping inward like a lens closing. The room contracts perceptibly – not physically, but intentionally. Attention narrows. Priority reassigned.
I don’t look up. I don’t need to.
“Enough,” Seytan says.
Not the system voice. Hers.
Authority rides the word like a given, like gravity. It’s used to being obeyed.
Across the room, bodies tense. Not in fear – recognition. Snow’s shoulders lock. Bones stills completely. Hatchet widens his stance, pain accepted, not resisted. Honey swallows hard but doesn’t move. Ghost’s smile fades into something colder, sharper.
I remain seated.
“You’ve made your point,” Seytan continues. “This phase has exceeded its utility.”
Utility.
She still thinks we’re a malfunction.
They dragged me in here…sometime ago. Hard to say when, but I remember flashes – hands on my arms, the scrape of the floor, the others already in position when my vision swam into focus. I clocked it even then, half-conscious: the set of Snow’s shoulders, the stillness Bones had settled into, the way Hatchet stood like pain was an old companion. They’ve been here longer. Much longer. I was late to this stage. Probably due to my lack of compliance, my refusal to let Kayla’s name die on my lips, no matter how hard they tried to make me forget her.
As if I could.
The rest I piece together from what my body won’t quite do now – the copper at the back of my throat, the dried blood stiffening my sleeve, the sluggish drag in my limbs. Whatever happened between being upright and being placed here, was enough to keep me breathing and not enough to wake me.
Enough to make a point.
“You’re starving,” she says, almost kindly. “You’re injured. You’re exhausted. You don’t need to prove anything further.”
Snow exhales slowly through his nose. I can see the calculation tugging at him: how long until collapse, whose collapse comes first, whether relief now is worth the cost later.
