The sky over Sigma City was bruised with chemical orange and heavy smog, night pressing down hard through sheets of industrial haze. Zoey’s Mantis sat hunched near the corner of 92nd and Grainer, humming in idle as rain slicked across its matte hull. She crouched nearby, one prosthetic hand pressed against the pavement. Fresh boot prints, distorted by weight and urgency, dragged through the alley's grime.
She didn’t need her HUD to confirm it. The angle of the step, the narrow offset in the heel impact, the short contact time. Same as before. Same way she’d moved during that first encounter, the one neither she nor Etrius had seen coming.
But this time, Etrius wasn’t here.
Zoey stood, her motion fluid despite the bulk of her frame. Her exploration suit clung tight to her limbs. Reinforced plates clicked into place as she locked her stance, scanning the alley’s depth.
And there - movement. A flash of armor like wet obsidian, a lean silhouette vaulting over a fire escape’s railing with fluid motion. Even at this distance, Zoey recognized that gait. Fast. Efficient. Silent. They didn’t run like someone escaping, she ran like someone who’d already planned every step of the route ten times over.
But this time, something was off.
Zoey surged forward, her weight driving down into the pavement with every step. Her legs absorbed the strain, letting her close the distance fast, faster than before. She crashed through the alley’s narrowing bounds, knocking over a stack of shipping bins and crushing a security drone underfoot without slowing.
The figure turned sharply at the next intersection, darting into a narrow stairwell leading up. Not down, up. Rooftop route. High ground.
Zoey climbed after her, claws out on both prosthetic hands now, finding grip in the rain-slick concrete. Her own breath came fast, not from exertion, but something deeper. Tension. Instinct.
The figure's shape emerged again, cresting the rooftop lip three floors above. She stumbled, barely, but it was there. A skip in the ankle recovery. Slower than before.
Zoey pushed harder.
By the time she reached the rooftop, they were already across to the next building, but the motion wasn’t clean. There was a delay at the edge, a moment of hesitation before they leapt. A small miscalculation in trajectory, and when they landed, their shoulder clipped a rusted vent hood. Their body twisted sideways, crumpling into a roll.
Zoey didn’t wait. She vaulted cleanly, landed hard. Boots cracked rooftop tiles as she surged after them.
Fifty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
The figure scrambled, up now but favoring their right leg. Their gait was tight, chest heaving in visible panic. The figure's rifle, once so precisely slung now bounced awkwardly against their back. Something was wrong with their left arm. It hung lower, unresponsive.
Zoey didn’t pull her weapon. Didn’t need to. The figure was already slowing.
A gust of wind whipped past as Zoey caught up.
“Stop!” Zoey shouted, voice amplified just enough to carry.
They flinched but didn’t answer. The figure skidded toward the far end of the rooftop, legs threatening to collapse beneath them. At the edge, they dropped to one knee, as if bracing to leap again, but no strength came. Their legs gave out. They toppled to the side, sliding hard across the wet rooftop surface before slamming into an old HVAC unit.
Zoey was at them in seconds.
They didn’t move. Their breathing was erratic now, uneven and shallow. The left side of their torso rose slower than the right. Blood darkened the edge of their armor under the ribs. There’d been no firefight, no skirmish. This had happened mid-run. A pulled muscle? A cracked rib? Zoey didn’t know. But it was bad.
Her instincts told her to finish it, restrain them, interrogate, extract intel. But something else took hold. They didn’t raise their rifle. Didn’t fight. Didn’t speak.
Zoey knelt slowly, cautious but without aggression, towering over the figure's crumpled form. The person didn’t resist. Their face was still hidden behind the opaque, faceted visor, cracked now along the temple.
Zoey leaned in. “You’re hurt.”
No response.
She paused, then eased down onto the rooftop. The wind screamed around the high-rise edge, but Zoey didn’t move again. Just sat. Waited.
Minutes passed.
Then, the figure's trembling fingers reached up to the edge of her helmet, slow, unsteady.
A hiss of released pressure, then a twist. The helmet came free.
Zoey’s breath caught in her throat, not in shock, but recognition.
The face beneath was a hyena's. Mottled fur, dull eyes, jawline marred by old scars. No longer a rumor. No longer just a ghost.
Her expression wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t even guarded. It was broken.
She looked at Zoey, breathing wet and shallow, then turned her face away, as if ashamed.
Zoey stayed silent. Then finally spoke, voice low, weighted, not unkind.
“I know what happened to you. It happened to me and my partner. And anyone else who is like this.”
She didn’t say “transhuman.” She didn’t say “project.” She didn’t have to.
The hyena's hands clenched once, then opened. Her body shook.
And then - she began to cry.
No noise. Just sobbing, shoulders quivering violently, mouth parted in raw, silent pain. She curled slightly inward. The edge of her cracked visor rolled away from Zoey’s foot. She didn’t reach for it.
Zoey didn’t touch her. Just sat. Close enough to be there. Not close enough to scare her.
It took nearly ten minutes before her breathing started to steady. Then she spoke - barely. Her voice was dry, grainy, unused. A whisper broken by pain.
“Help me… home. Name...Red.”
Zoey met her gaze. Those blue eyes, wide and wet and hollow, begged not for rescue, but for mercy.
She nodded once.
Without a word, Zoey reached forward and gently slid her arms beneath Red’s injured frame, lifting her with practiced strength. The rain had soaked into her own armor, cold and persistent, but Zoey didn’t care.
Red didn’t flinch this time. Her head rested against Zoey’s shoulder, trembling.
Zoey adjusted her grip and started walking.
The city fell away behind them as Zoey descended the fire escape, Red held against her chest like she weighed nothing. Her armor creaked with each movement, soaked now to the plating beneath from the steady, unrelenting rain. Her boots echoed dull thuds on rusted metal, but she kept her pace slow. Red’s breath was ragged against her shoulder. Shallow, but still there.
Zoey didn’t ask where home was. She didn’t need to.
Red’s weak hand, shaking, pointed once as they reached the street. Down an alley. Across a tram line. Into the understructure.
Most wouldn’t have followed those directions. Even Zoey knew this sector, Sublevel 4A, was unlisted, its power drawn from illegal siphons and its surveillance dead by deliberate design. You didn’t live here unless you had something to hide.
They passed shuttered doors and steel mesh fences, graffiti sprayed in languages older than Sigma’s founding. She stepped over a pair of disconnected conduit tubes, ducked under a low-hanging pipe. No one stopped them. No one watched.
Eventually, Red’s hand motioned again - barely. A side door with peeling black paint, three locks rusted over and a handle wrapped in red electrical tape.
Zoey shifted her stance, balancing Red in one arm, then pressed the door open with her shoulder.
It clicked.
The interior was dark. Cold. No lights came on. Just a faint LED glow from a charging cradle along the far wall, where an armor panel hung open mid-maintenance.
Zoey stepped inside. She could feel the isolation. It wasn’t just the silence, it was the density of it. The kind you could only build over years of never being seen.
She carried Red across the small room, past a dry sink, a cot with a frayed blanket, and a floor scattered with old cleaning rags. No photos. No screensavers. No personal smell, not even cooking residue.
It was the sort of place you lived in only because you had nowhere else to go.
Zoey lowered Red gently onto the cot. The frame sagged slightly but held. Red exhaled a strained noise. Not quite pain, not quite relief. Her face twitched once.
“I’m gonna take the rest of your armor off,” Zoey said quietly. “You’ll suffocate in it otherwise.”
Red didn’t resist. Didn’t answer. Her eyes closed.
Zoey worked methodically. Unlocking gauntlet seals, easing chest plates loose, unstrapping the damaged thigh guards. Red’s left shoulder was dislocated. There were deep bruises under the ribcage, possibly broken. Internal bleeding wasn’t certain, but it was a risk. She’d need to stabilize soon. Zoey didn’t have a medkit, but she did have precision fingers and a history of trauma work learned under worse conditions.
Her prosthetic hands moved with practiced calm, unclipping the final strap beneath Red’s breastplate. She peeled it away.
Underneath was bare fur, matted with sweat and blood. Scars patterned across her abdomen, old, surgical, poorly healed. Zoey didn’t stare. She’d seen the same ones in her own mirror before. Different patterns. Same intent.
When Red was fully out of the suit, Zoey pulled the blanket up over her and sat down on the floor beside the cot.
She didn’t speak.
Red turned her head after several minutes, eyes open but unfocused. Her lips parted slightly.
“Why… help?” Her voice was sandpaper, almost inaudible. Speaking clearly cost her more than blood loss.
Zoey looked up at her. “Because we’re the same.”
Red blinked slowly.
Zoey shrugged one massive shoulder, one mechanical and precise. “Not in species. Not even in trauma, exactly. But I know what it’s like to wake up in a body you didn’t choose. I know what it means to remember pain but not the reasons. I know what it’s like to be erased and told you owe your life to the ones who ruined it.”
Red said nothing. But her pupils trembled.
“I’m not here for revenge,” Zoey continued, her voice low and even. “I just wanted to know who you were. And now I do.”
She leaned back against the wall, arms resting over her knees, dragon tail curling around her boots. Her horns cast faint shadows in the dim red light from the armor cradle. Rain still pattered against the windowless roof.
Red’s breathing softened, just slightly.
Then, as Zoey moved to stand, Red reached out weakly.
“Don’t… go.”
The voice cracked, nearly broken from disuse, but unmistakable.
Zoey froze, then nodded. She sat back down beside the cot. She didn’t touch Red. Didn’t try to comfort her in the way civilians did. That wasn’t how people like them worked.
Instead, she just watched over her. Sat still. Didn’t speak again.
Red shifted once under the blanket, her breathing shallow but even.
She was asleep within minutes.
Zoey stayed up the entire night. No drugs. No distractions. Just silence. Watching her chest rise and fall. Making sure the woman who’d once been a ghost, the one the world had tried to forget, didn’t sleep alone.
Eight hours later
Red Vorten woke up to silence.
Her first sensation was pain, not sharp, but thick. A full-body ache, as if the bones beneath her fur had shifted overnight. Her chest tightened as she inhaled, her ribs resisting the motion. The cot beneath her creaked slightly, unfamiliar in its warmth.
She wasn’t used to warmth.
She opened her eyes. The lights hadn’t changed. Still red. Low. The kind she could sleep under without triggering migraines. The armor cradle across the room blinked once. Still powered. Still waiting. Still alone.
But the floor was empty. The fox was gone.
Red didn’t move yet. Her breath came slow as her brain crawled back online. She replayed the events, not as memories, but impressions. The rooftop. The fall. A massive red-and-black figure with horns and a tail. A voice low and calm and not trying to hurt her.
And those eyes, gold, slitted, not human. But not hostile.
She turned her head, wincing as her neck caught at the base. Her left shoulder hadn’t reset. It was out, probably since she’d clipped the vent casing on the jump.
She sat up slowly, the blanket sliding off. Her muscles trembled from the effort. Her entire left arm was slack, unresponsive, her fingers curled against her thigh like dead weight.
With a sharp breath through her nose, Red stood, staggering once. Her balance was off. Blood loss, most likely. She moved toward the far wall, where a small steel cabinet sat half-buried behind a pile of cleaning supplies. Her bare feet were nearly silent on the cold concrete.
Inside the cabinet were her tools. Her kind of medicine.
She crouched, knees popping as she moved. Pulled out a pair of folded compression wraps, a hypo-injector, and a worn field medpack. No labels. Just her handwriting scratched into duct tape.
“Coag – Sleep – Fire – Regen”
She selected the one marked Regen. Shook the vial once. The fluid shimmered dark green under the low light. Not military-issue. She’d made it herself, scavenged from prewar military facilities. The injection always burned like hell going in, but it worked.
Red sat back against the wall, took the hypo, jammed it into her thigh, and fired.
She hissed sharply. Jaw clenched.
The warmth spread up her leg first, then flooded through her hip and lower back. Her breathing accelerated, then slowed. Dull aches sharpened, just enough to feel where she was torn. The right ribs, cracked. Left shoulder, dislocated but intact. Pelvic tension, as always, a low throb she’d long since stopped trying to fix.
She leaned forward and braced her bad arm between her knees. Her breathing steadied.
Then, without ceremony, she snapped the shoulder back in.
A single wet pop echoed against the bare walls. Red gasped but didn’t scream. She exhaled sharply through her nose, the pain bright and focused for just a second. Then gone.
She flexed the arm. Movement returned. Good enough.
She stripped out of the rest of what she’d worn under the armor, lightweight synthetic compression layers, soaked now with blood and sweat, and dropped them into a pile. Naked, she walked across the small room and poured herself a cup of tap water from the metal sink. It came out in bursts. Brown first, then clear. She drank half, then poured the rest over her face.
Still trembling, she leaned both hands on the edge of the sink and stared at herself in the small mirror bolted above it.
A spotted hyena face stared back. Cream fur stained at the jaw. One eye bloodshot. Her lips cracked. Nothing expressive. Just a vessel.
But something had changed.
She pressed a palm to her chest, feeling the faint, dull pulse of her own heartbeat. She wasn’t shaking from injury. She was shaking from memory.
The fox had stayed.
Red hadn’t known anyone could do that.
No one had ever stayed before. No one had ever looked at her like that, recognizing her, not as an enemy or a curiosity, but as someone who’d survived the same thing.
And she’d said it.
“I know what happened to you. It happened to me and my partner. And anyone else who is like this.”
Anyone else who is like this.
Red had thought she was alone.
Even after the war. Even after the files. Even after discovering her own designation and undoing the threads of Project Zvezda-14. There had never been a single name. No other model. No photograph. No known survivors. Just clinical language: Subject unviable, released. Observation terminated.
She’d assumed it meant she was the only one left.
But that fox was not a hallucination. Not a delusion. She’d felt the arms that carried her. Heard the tone of someone who understood what kind of cage you had to claw your way out of.
Red turned away from the mirror. Her breathing had gone shallow again. She stumbled back to the cot and sat heavily.
Her body still ached. The regen compound had started dulling the pain in her ribs, but she needed more rest. Another six hours, minimum.
She looked at the cot. Then at the spot on the floor next to it where the fox had sat. The concrete was stained with water and hydraulic fluid, an outline, almost. One that hadn’t moved all night.
Red curled her knees to her chest beneath the blanket. Her breath was steadier now. Her muscles still felt foreign, but less raw.
She needed to know who the fox was.
What else was out there.
If she wasn’t the only ghost left.
But not now. Not yet.
For now, she let her eyes close.
And for the first time in years, Red fell asleep not with a weapon in her hand, but with a single, strange thought:
She wasn’t alone anymore.
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