My body knows what to do.
Step forward. Close the space. Eliminate threat. Everything in me lines up. The old framework snaps into place like it was never broken.
Threat in front. Neutralize. It is not clean. The structure buckles.
Memory pushes up through it. Raw. Fractured. Cutting through the directives that used to guide me without question.
Sand. Blood. The sound of something breaking that was not bone. A hand gripping my arm. Yanking me back as I tried to go forward. Heat on my back. Impact that should have been mine. Not mine.
Him.
The image fractures.
I shove it down.
Unreliable. Corrupted. He left me.
Abandoned.
Alone.
That is what I know.
That is what holds.
I take another step. He does not retreat. Does not raise his weapon. Does not lower it. He stands. Watching. Waiting.
My jaw tightens. My chest burns with every breath. The wound pulls tight. Wrong under the strain. The pain does not matter.
The pain is nothing. The surge crawls up my spine.
“You left me,” I say.
It comes out low. Controlled. A fact. Not a plea.
He does not flinch. Does not deny. Does not try to soften it.
He meets my eyes. There is no anger in his. Only something that twists the air between us tighter.
“I did not,” he says.
The answer is simple. Wrong. The memory fights. Static. Noise. Splintered fragments.
“You were not there.”
My voice cracks on the last word. Not from weakness. From something deeper. From the part of me that cannot reconcile what I remember with what I am seeing now.
His chest rises once. Slow. Measured.
“I was there,” he says. “I was trying to get to you.”
The words are wrong. Incorrect. He was not there. I was alone.
Standing alone. Protecting.
I was taken.
I was—memory shifts.
