The jalshagar coils tighter, not feral, just… heavy.
“They left us in them for days at a time,” I say. “Sometimes weeks. Sensory deprivation. No light. No sound. No human voices. Then they’d pull us out and throw us into combat simulations until our nervous systems collapsed.”
Her fingers curl into fists.
“They punished us for mercy,” I add. “If you hesitated. If you tried to help another Reaper instead of finishing the objective. If you refused to kill a civilian proxy target.”
My mouth tastes like metal.
“They’d reset the simulation and do it again. And again. And again. Until you stopped making the choice they didn’t want you to make.”
Silence.
Thick.
Electric.
“I was twelve the first time they put me in a restraint harness and forced me to watch myself kill a man in a simulation over and over until I stopped throwing up,” I say. “They told me it was for my own good. That empathy was a bug they were fixing.”
My voice never shakes.
I don’t let it.
Kimberly’s hands do.
They tremble visibly in her lap.
“That’s not destiny,” she says quietly. “That’s systemic cruelty.”
The word lands inside my chest like a fracture line opening up.
Systemic cruelty.
Not necessary evil.
Not unfortunate side effect.
Not tragic inevitability.
Cruelty.
Something in me gives way.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just a quiet, internal collapse of a structure I didn’t realize I was still leaning on.
I swallow hard.
Her eyes meet mine.
“You’re not broken,” she adds, her voice rough. “You were tortured into being useful.”
My breath stutters.
Just once.
