Sigma AU Short Story - Residue

She chose the smallest table in the shop, the one pressed against the wall where no one could pass behind her. The chair creaked faintly under her weight as she lowered herself into it, careful with the bad leg, careful not to draw attention to the limp that had stiffened after a long shift at the warehouse. The place was brightly lit in that neutral, impersonal way most trade-city food counters were, white panels humming overhead, the air smelling faintly of oil and reheated bread.

A plastic cup of dark soda sweated against her palm. She held it loosely, claws curved around the rim while the straw rested between her teeth. The cold sweetness dulled the metallic taste that stress sometimes left in her mouth. It was cheap, filling, and required no conversation. That was enough.

She wore the same plain tank top she worked in, the fabric stretched over softened muscle and old scars that no clothing could truly hide. Hundreds of marks patterned her fur and scales alike. Punctures, healed tears, surgical seams, evidence of a body that had been kept functional long after it should have been allowed to rest. The smooth scales along her throat and chest caught the fluorescent light differently than her fur, a faint sheen that made her keep her chin tucked down. The dog tags were wrapped around her forearm, the metal edges pressing into her skin as her thumb rubbed over them in a slow, repetitive motion.

She kept her gaze lowered to the tabletop. Looking at people invited acknowledgment, and acknowledgment invited questions. Her hearing tracked everything anyway: the scrape of chairs, the hiss of the fryer, the layered hum of conversation folding over itself in uneven waves. It was loud without being chaotic, just enough to press against the edges of her senses. Her foot shifted under the table, rising onto her toes and lowering again in a subtle, rhythmic tiptoe that steadied her breathing.

No one paid her much attention. A few glances lingered on her height, on the thickness of her tail coiled beside the chair, on the scars that mapped her arms, but the city was used to strangeness. She was another laborer off shift, another body refueling before returning to company housing.

She drew from the straw again, eyes half-lidded, letting the sugar settle the faint tremor in her hands. The room existed at a tolerable distance. She focused on the weight of the cup, the texture of the plastic lid, the pressure of the dog tags against her skin. If she kept her attention small enough, contained enough, the rest of the world stayed manageable.

The door opened hard enough to strike the stopper with a sharp crack. The sound cut across the layered murmur of the shop and flattened it. Conversation faltered, then thinned into confused silence as two masked figures stepped inside. One moved toward the counter with quick, decisive strides. The other lingered near the entrance, turning just enough to block it.

Dozer did not look up immediately. Sudden noises were common in public places. Trays dropped. Chairs tipped. People argued. Her mind sorted for threat indicators without conscious direction, cataloguing tone, volume, proximity. It was only when a voice rose in a strained, commanding bark that her focus shifted.

The man at the counter shouted at the cashier to empty the register. His words were clipped, uneven. There was the scrape of something metallic against laminate, then the unmistakable click and slide of a handgun being chambered.

That sound did not belong to civilian life. It did not belong to a food shop.

Her hearing seized on it with unnatural clarity. The hum of the lights dulled. The rustle of clothing receded. The air felt heavier, denser, as if the room had been submerged.

She lifted her gaze.

The handgun was angled across the counter toward the cashier, muzzle steady despite the tremor in the man’s wrist. The second robber was shouting now, ordering everyone to the floor. A chair overturned somewhere to her left. Someone whimpered. The sound of a body kneeling too quickly against tile echoed sharply.

Her grip tightened imperceptibly around the plastic cup. Cold condensation slicked across her palm. Her breathing altered without her permission, pulling in too shallow and too fast.

The man near the door swept his gaze across the customers and pointed. “Down. All of you. Now.”

Several people obeyed immediately, sliding from chairs, pressing their hands flat to the floor. The movement created a ripple of scraping legs and muffled gasps.

Dozer remained seated. Not in defiance. Not in calculation. Her body had gone rigid.

Her eyes tracked the gun, noting the distance, the angle, the alignment between muzzle and target. Her mind supplied measurements with clinical precision. The cashier’s chest was fully exposed. The robber’s stance was unstable. The tile beneath his boots would offer little traction if forced laterally.

She tried to lower her gaze again, to shrink inward, to become unremarkable. Her leg refused to move. Her muscles felt caught between commands.

“Hey,” the robber at the door barked, taking a step toward her table. “You. Get down.”

The word struck like a physical impact. Get down. The phrase slid along pathways that had once been reinforced daily.

Her vision narrowed. The edges of the room dimmed. The fluorescent light seemed to pulse once, then settle.

A memory intruded without form: urban rubble, heat, the distant drone of aircraft. A rifle placed into hands too small for its grip. Orders delivered in a tone that left no room for interpretation.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. The spinal implant suppressed the pain of the sudden tension but could not mute the cascade of adrenaline. Something  flickered at the edge of her awareness. She felt it like static behind her eyes.

The robber advanced another step. The handgun at the counter shifted slightly as the first man glanced over his shoulder, irritated by the delay.

Dozer’s fingers loosened from the cup. It remained upright on the table, untouched.

She could not process the present moment as a civilian incident. Her body refused that framing. The sound of the weapon, the shouted command, the angle of approach; all of it overlaid too cleanly with training she had never chosen.

Her breathing hitched once, shallow and sharp. The room constricted further, vision collapsing inward until only a narrow corridor of focus remained: the handgun, the distance, the line of fire.

The static intensified. Then her thoughts stopped arranging themselves into language. Sound compressed into a low, distant pressure. The fluorescent lights smeared into pale bands. The robber’s mouth was still moving, but the words no longer reached her as language. They arrived as fragments of tone and velocity. Her pulse surged hard enough to make the edges of her vision flicker.

Her breathing stopped feeling voluntary. Her shoulders rolled back a fraction. The rigidity in her limbs reorganized into something else, something efficient and unhesitating. The tremor that had started in her hands disappeared entirely.

There was a sensation of falling without motion, a vertical drop inside her own skull. The room folded inward, then snapped into absolute black.

Light returned in a violent rush. Her arm was extended. Her fingers were wrapped around cold metal, grip correct, trigger discipline flawless. The handgun’s weight was perfectly balanced in her palm. Her stance was stable, feet set shoulder-width apart, tail adjusted for counterbalance without conscious effort.

The shop was silent. A body lay several feet in front of her.

The first robber was on his back against the tile, mask twisted sideways. A single dark hole marked the center of his forehead. The bullet had entered cleanly, precisely between his eyes. There was no wild spray, no shattered glass, no overturned tables. The cashier was crouched behind the counter, eyes wide, hands over their head. Other customers were frozen in half-kneels or pressed flat to the floor.

The second robber was gone. The smell of discharged gunpowder hung faintly in the air.

Dozer did not move.

Her hearing returned in shards. Someone’s breath hitching. The hum of the lights. A soft, disbelieving whisper from somewhere behind her.

Her arm felt distant, as if it belonged to someone standing just behind her spine. She stared at the handgun in her grasp without recognition. The metal was warm now. Her finger rested along the frame, not the trigger.

She tried to find the moment before this one. There was nothing. No lunge.  No struggle. No decision. Just a blank seam in time where she had ceased to exist.

Her gaze lowered to the body again. The precision of the shot registered first. Centered. Immediate incapacitation. Executed without collateral damage.

Her hand was steady. That steadiness unsettled her more than the corpse. A murmur rippled through the room. Someone whispered, “She-” and stopped.

The distance between her and the world widened violently. The pressure in her ears spiked. The static returned, thinner now but insistent. The pathways that had taken over were receding, sealing themselves back into dormant circuitry and muscle memory.

She became aware of her breathing again. It came in sharp, uneven pulls. The handgun felt heavier by the second. Her fingers loosened. The weapon slipped from her grasp and struck the tile with a flat, jarring clatter that echoed too loudly in the quiet.

Several people flinched. Dozer took a step back. Then another. Her heel caught slightly against the floor as the limp reasserted itself, the adrenaline receding just enough for imbalance to return. She looked from the gun to the body and then to the faces staring at her.

Not gratitude. Not anger. Shock. She did not know what they had seen. She did not know what she had done. The absence in her memory yawned wider than the space between them.

She turned and ran.

The bell above the door jangled violently as she shoved it open. Cold evening air struck her face and throat, sharp and grounding, but it did not slow her. The street outside was washed in sodium light, long shadows stretching between delivery trucks and stacked cargo crates. A few pedestrians paused at the sudden movement, turning their heads as she cleared the threshold at a speed that did not match the limp they had glimpsed inside.

Her body moved on instinct, but not the lethal precision from moments earlier. This was flight, not engagement. Her stride was uneven, the injured leg lagging half a fraction behind the other. The spinal implant suppressed the flare of pain that should have followed the abrupt acceleration, allowing her to push forward without feedback from muscle or joint. Her breath came in ragged pulls that burned her throat.

She did not look back.

Her mind kept trying to reach across the blackout and retrieve something: an image, a sound, a decision, but each attempt met the same blank wall. There was the robber shouting. There was the metallic slide of the handgun. Then nothing. Then the body on the tile.

Her hands felt contaminated despite the absence of blood. She flexed her fingers as she ran, as if expecting residue to cling to them. They were steady now only because exhaustion was beginning to overtake adrenaline.

She cut down a narrow service lane between buildings, boots striking damp pavement. The city noises resumed around her in distorted fragments: a distant forklift reversing, the murmur of traffic along the canal road, the echo of her own footfalls ricocheting off concrete. Every sharp sound made her shoulders jerk. Her enhanced hearing, still keyed too high, dragged in too much detail.

When the company housing block came into view, she slowed only enough to avoid drawing attention from the security camera mounted above the entry. She forced her breathing into something quieter, something less animal. The keypad accepted her code with a soft beep. The door clicked open.

The interior stairwell smelled faintly of detergent and old paint. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in a narrower, more oppressive way than the food shop had. She climbed quickly, gripping the railing harder than necessary. The injured leg trembled as the adrenaline fully ebbed, but the implant muted the ache into a distant pressure.

The hallway outside her unit was empty.

She unlocked the door, slipped inside, and closed it with controlled care. The click of the latch sounded too loud in the small space.

Her room was unchanged from how she had left it. Narrow bed. Footlocker beneath it. A small desk with stacked receipts and a cheap lamp. The stuffed bear sat propped against the pillow, slightly flattened from years of being held too tightly. The ordinariness of the scene pressed against her ribs.

She locked the door. Then she slid down it.

Her back hit the wood first, then her hips, then she folded fully onto the floor. The dog tags shifted against her forearm, the chain dragging across her skin with a metallic rasp. She brought her other hand up and gripped them hard enough for the edges to dig in.

Her breathing fractured. The control she had forced over it dissolved into uneven gasps that scraped her throat raw. She tried again to access the missing time, to force her mind to reconstruct the sequence.

The robber had stepped toward her. The gun had shifted. There should have been motion, struggle, resistance. There was only darkness.

Her eyes moved to her hands. They looked like they always did, scarred, fur patterned with old punctures and healed tears, claws neatly trimmed for warehouse work. They did not look like the hands of someone who had just executed a man at close range.

Her stomach twisted violently. She pressed her forehead to her knees, shoulders curling inward as if she could compress herself small enough to disappear from whatever part of her had taken control.

She did not know whether she had chosen.

She did not know what interpreted the raised weapon as combat engagement.

She did not know if the absence of memory meant she had been spared the act, or erased from it.

A small sob escaped her before she could stop it, thin and broken. She clamped a hand over her mouth, eyes darting toward the thin wall that separated her from her roommates’ rooms. She could not afford questions. She could not afford attention.

She crawled the short distance to the bed and pulled herself up onto it without turning on the light. The room remained dim, lit only by the thin spill of streetlight through the curtain. She curled on her side, tail drawn close to her body, dog tags trapped between her palm and her chest.

Her body began to shake in delayed response. Not the efficient tremor of adrenaline, but something looser and more fragile. Tears slid down her face and soaked into the pillowcase without sound.

In the darkness of her room, she tried to reconcile the civilian she was attempting to become with the weapon that had resurfaced without consent. The gap between them felt unbridgeable.

The shaking did not stop when the tears did. It settled into her muscles as a faint, persistent tremor, like residual current in damaged wiring. She lay there in the dim room and listened to her own breathing until it evened out into something shallow but consistent. Outside the door, the hallway remained quiet. No pounding fists. No voices demanding explanation. The world had not yet caught up to her.

After a long while she forced herself upright. The movement felt mechanical, joints bending in practiced sequence. She crossed the small room and turned on the shower without switching on the overhead light. Steam filled the space quickly, softening the edges of the tile and mirror. She stepped under the spray fully clothed for a moment before stripping the fabric away and dropping it in a heap on the floor.

The water ran hot across fur and scales alike. She braced both hands against the wall and bowed her head, letting it strike the back of her neck and roll forward along her throat. There had been no blood on her hands. She knew that. She had checked.

Soap lathered between her fingers as she worked it over her palms, under her claws, across the backs of her knuckles where scars layered over scars. She scrubbed until the skin beneath the fur felt raw despite the implant muting the sting. She pressed her thumb into the center of her palm as if searching for the recoil she did not remember feeling.

The blank space in her mind remained intact.

She tried to reconstruct it clinically. The robber had been at the counter. The weapon had been angled toward the cashier. The second man had approached her table. There would have been a shift in stance. A transfer of balance. A moment when the handgun was no longer fully controlled.

She should remember the transfer.

She should remember the grip changing hands.

She should remember the trigger break.

Instead there was only that internal drop, the vertical fall into silence.

The shower fogged the mirror completely. She was grateful for it. She did not want to see her own face while trying to piece together the possibility that her implants were still capable of autonomous engagement. The cognitive chip had been damaged in the bombing decades ago, leaving her with fragments of sensation and unpredictable lapses. She had assumed the worst of it was behind her. The thought that dormant combat routines could still seize her body without warning hollowed out her chest.

She shut off the water and stood dripping in the quiet bathroom. The dog tags, which she had hung carefully over the shower rod, caught her eye. The metal reflected a warped, silver distortion of her face. She wrapped the chain back around her forearm and pressed the tags into her skin until the edges left shallow impressions. The physical pressure anchored her in a way nothing else did.

Back in the bedroom, she sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at the closed footlocker beneath it. The FAMAS inside had not been touched in years. She had locked it away as a boundary between who she had been forced to become and who she was trying to build. Tonight that boundary felt thinner than she had believed.

If the shop had security cameras, the footage would exist somewhere. It would show her moving. It would show the precise sequence her memory refused to supply. It would show whether she had acted with hesitation or with the seamless efficiency of a trained operative. The thought of strangers studying that footage made her throat tighten.

She lay back again without changing the sheets. The room was cooling now that the shower steam had dissipated. Her body felt exhausted, but sleep did not approach. Each time she closed her eyes, the moment of return replayed instead of the missing violence: her arm extended, the handgun steady, the body already down.

She turned onto her side and drew the stuffed bear against her chest, burying her face into worn fabric that smelled faintly of detergent and old cotton. The contrast between the softness in her arms and the image in her mind was almost unbearable.

She did not know whether she had saved anyone.

She did not know whether the implant had calculated threat and executed accordingly.

She only knew that she had stood in the center of a civilian space with a perfect shot placed between a man’s eyes, and she had no memory of choosing to do it.

In the quiet of her room, the question that remained was not whether she had been capable. It was whether she would be able to stop it from happening again.