The townhome is quiet.
The particular quiet of a space occupied by one person who doesn’t generate ambient noise—no music, no television, no humming or muttering or the involuntary sounds that most humans produce to fill the silence that their psychology finds uncomfortable. I don’t find silence uncomfortable. Silence is the void’s native language, and the void and I have been cohabitating long enough that its preferences have becomemine, or mine have become its, and the distinction stopped mattering years ago.
The space itself is small. Efficient. A Savage Knot standard-issue residential unit allocated to long-term occupants who have earned—through survival, through utility, through the particular brand of institutional value that Victoria Sinclair provides to an Academy that officially doesn’t acknowledge her existence—the privilege of private quarters rather than communal housing. Two floors. Narrow. The first floor holds a kitchen area and a sitting room with the vinyl player and the shelf of records and the window that Hawk opens when we smoke and closes when we don’t. The second floor holds the bedroom, the bathroom, and the closet that contains considerably more tactical equipment than clothing.
The walls are bare. Not intentionally bare—not the curated minimalism of someone who has made an aesthetic decision about negative space. Bare because decorating requires the assumption that you’ll be here long enough to enjoy the decoration, and that assumption requires a category of optimism that I lost access to somewhere around year three of my residency.
Year three was Vivian.
Year three was the knife and the blood and the particular sound a body makes when it stops being a person and becomes a problem.
I don’t regret it.
I’ve searched for the regret. Looked for it in the places where guilt is supposed to live—the 3 a.m. spaces, the silent moments, the gaps between waking and sleeping where the subconscious supposedly delivers the emotional invoices that the conscious mind refuses to open during business hours.
Nothing.
She tried to destroy me because I was Omega and she was not and the biological lottery that assigned our designations was, in her estimation, a personal insult that required a personal response.
I regret the circumstances.
The designation that made me a target.
The jealousy it produced in a sister who should have been an ally.
The downfall that was built from nothing more than biology and the particular cruelty of a world that converts biological difference into hierarchical ammunition.
I regret all of that.
But the killing itself?
No.
The killing was the only honest thing that happened between us.
I walk downstairs to the kitchen.
The staircase is narrow—steep, wooden, producing a familiar sequence of creaks under my weight that I’ve memorized so thoroughly that I could navigate it blindfolded and identify my position by sound alone. Third step from the bottom: higher pitch, slight lateral give. Fifth step: silence, the wood compressed by years of use into a density that absorbs rather than broadcasts. I catalog these things the way other people catalog furniture arrangements. The acoustic signature of my environment is a security system that doesn’t require electricity.
The kitchen is small—a galley layout with wooden counters and open shelving and the kind of appliances that function reliably without inspiring affection. I open the refrigerator and take out the wine.
White is my default. Has been since Hawk introduced me to wine at all—a process that involved him arriving at my door with two bottles, one white and one red, and the declarationthat “no Omega of mine is going to face the void without at least developing a palate.” The white was crisp, clean, cold—a Sauvignon Blanc that tasted like green apples and the particular mineral sharpness of something grown in soil that doesn’t forgive. I liked it immediately. It matched the cold I carry. Compatible temperatures.
But Hawk’s been introducing me to red.
Slowly, strategically, with the patient methodology of a man who understands that my palate—like the rest of me—doesn’t accept new things without a period of evaluation and the specific kind of trust that develops when something proves, over time, that it won’t hurt you. The variations have helped. A Pinot Noir first—light, approachable, the gateway red. Then a Merlot—softer, rounder, with a depth that my tongue recognized as complexity rather than assault. Now a Malbec sits on the counter—dark, almost black in the glass, carrying the heavy, ripe fruit and the tannic structure that requires your mouth to work for the pleasure.
I pour a glass. The wine moves like liquid garnet in the low light of the kitchen—thick, viscous, catching the amber glow from the single pendant lamp that serves as the room’s primary illumination.
I take a sip. The tannins grip my tongue with a firmness that I’ve learned to appreciate rather than resist.
Meow!
I pout.
The expression is involuntary—one of the few that the void permits without authorization, a muscular response so deeply embedded in my facial circuitry that it bypasses the emotional embargo entirely and arrives on my lips before the conscious mind can intercept it. My lower lip extends. My brow softens by a fraction that would be imperceptible to anyone who isn’t Hawkand is, to him, apparently the most endearing thing my face produces.
I turn slowly toward the windowsill.
