Someonecame hereknowing I’d already been targeted once. Knowing Tugun walked away. This wasn’t a warning.
This was a message.
Voltar doesn’t say anything. Just scans the room with quiet fury, hands resting on the twin knives strapped to his hips. His movements are precise. Measured.
Not like before.
Not performative.
This is the soldier part of him. The deadly one. The part he only brings out when things cross a line.
I wander deeper into the apartment. My studio chair is scorched. The holoframe of me and Jacey at our cosmetology graduation is shattered, the edges of her face gone in the blast. The kitchen looks like someone tried to cook a grenade and serve it on fine china.
But what breaks me?
What guts me like a fish?
My bedroom.
My bedroom is a graveyard of melted fabric and scorched dreams. The walls are black with soot, and the bed is half-incinerated, the synth-fill smelling like a chemical fire. My eyes dart to the corner. I lunge for the heavy, scuffed fire-safe I’ve kept tucked under the nightstand for years.
The metal is hot—scorching enough to make my palms hiss—but I don't care. I punch the manual code with shaking fingers. The heavy door groans open, releasing a puff of trapped, cool air that smells like the life I had ten minutes ago. There, nestled inside the reinforced walls, is the photo album. The edges of the leather cover are warped from the external heat transfer, but the faces inside are still clear.
I pick it up with trembling hands.
Charred at the edges. Melted corners.
But still there.
Still intact.
Voltar kneels next to it, shielding arm extended over the page like a roof. “My defense net caught most of the blast. Blew inward, not outward.”
I pick it up with trembling hands.
Flip it open.
A picture of me at five years old. Missing a tooth. Holding a plastic hairbrush like a sword.
My mother, blurry in the background.
I run my fingers over the image, and they come away gray.
I sink to the floor, album clutched against my chest like a lifeline. Like if I hold it tight enough, none of this is real.
I feel Voltar lower himself beside me. He doesn’t touch me this time.
Just watches.
“They want to erase you,” he says after a long silence.
I look up.
His face is still. Like carved rock.
Not angry. Not wounded.
Ready.
