The rain hadn't stopped in three days.
It ran down the walls of Sublevel 4A like the city itself was bleeding from somewhere up above. Pipes groaned behind concrete. Rusted conduit dripped onto exposed steel flooring, pooling under crates and trash that hadn’t been moved in months. The smell was rot, metal, and mildew.
Red heard the knock before she saw the shadow.
Three firm raps. No urgency. No rhythm. Just presence.
She didn’t move at first. Just sat on the cot, one hand wrapped around the neck of a half-empty bottle, the other resting on her left knee, still stiff from the rooftop fall three weeks ago. Her visor sat on the edge of the workbench, cracked, unsalvaged.
Another knock.
She stood slowly. Her armor creaked where she'd left it half-disassembled on the wall cradle, open like a broken ribcage. The shoulder panel hung by a single bolt. Her sidearm was still holstered, but she didn’t reach for it.
Instead, she walked to the door and stared at it. One breath. Then another.
She opened it.
Zoey stood there, soaked. Her suit glistened from the rain, black plates reflecting the dim LED flicker from the hallway panel. Her horns dripped, tail hanging low and still. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to.
Red stepped back. Not an invitation, just a surrender to inevitability.
Zoey entered like she’d done it before. She moved without ceremony, scanning the room with the kind of cold familiarity that said she’d been thinking about this place long after she left it. She didn’t take off her armor. She didn’t sit.
Red leaned against the edge of the workbench, the bottle still in her hand.
"You didn't have to come back," she said, voice low, raspy from disuse and sleep deprivation.
Zoey shrugged. Water beaded off her shoulders. "I know. I wasn’t planning to."
"Then why?"
Zoey exhaled slowly through her nose. Her gold eyes scanned the room again, at the scattered parts, the piled gear, the mildew-stained blanket. "Because I saw myself in you. And it pissed me off."
Red snorted, a sharp exhale more contempt than humor. "What, you think this is a fucking mirror exercise? You want to talk about how broken we both are?"
Zoey stepped forward. Her boots hit the floor like decisions, deliberate, slow, grounded. "I think you’re suffocating in your own decay and pretending it’s strength."
Red straightened, eyes narrowing. Her grip tightened around the bottle. "You sit there in your high-end armor with your artificial limbs and act like you’ve got a fucking clue-"
"I do."
Red stepped toward her now. “You don’t know what it’s like. To wake up not knowing who you are. To have everything scrubbed clean; memories, identity, meaning. And to find out years later you were just a blueprint. A draft copy.”
"I don’t know what that’s like," Zoey said flatly. "You're right."
Red paused, caught off guard by the agreement.
Zoey stepped closer, her voice like a pressure seal breaking, controlled, but not calm.
"I don’t know what it’s like to forget what they did to me. I know what it’s like to remember every fucking second."
Red blinked. Her fingers slipped slightly against the glass.
Zoey didn’t let up.
"I remember the lights in the testing rooms. The smell of oxidized metal when they opened me up. I remember the exact pitch of the bone saw they used. I remember screaming and nobody writing anything down. Just letting me do it because it didn’t matter."
She paced once, slow and heavy. Red didn’t follow her.
"I remember being restrained in a water tank for thirty-seven hours with a pulse monitor glued to my sternum while they tested my nerve threshold. I remember getting catheterized while awake. I remember being told I was lucky because I was still 'fully cognitive.' Like being awake made it better."
Zoey stopped. Her jaw tensed. Her right hand flexed, carbon plates sliding over metal ligaments with a dry whirr.
"You want to talk about body horror? Fine. I wasn’t born with this tail. Or these teeth. Or any of the things that got shoved into me like upgrades on a fucking racecar. It all happened while I screamed."
Red's mouth opened slightly, but no words came out.
Zoey’s voice lowered, and this time it cracked, not from weakness, but from the weight of memory.
"And after years and years and years of dealing with this shit, I walked into a manufacturing plant and put both my arms in an assembly line roller designed for cutting wood."
The bottle slipped from Red’s hand. It hit the floor and rolled. She didn’t notice.
"I wanted it to be quick. It wasn’t. I passed out from the pain and woke up with both arms gone and a caseworker asking me which 'industrial prosthetic package' I wanted to sign up for."
Silence. Just the buzz of the hallway light. The drip of a broken faucet.
Zoey didn’t move.
Red turned her back, facing the wall now. She clenched her fists against the workbench, shoulders rising and falling like a storm trying to stay inside.
"You did it to yourself," she muttered, voice thin.
"I did. Because I didn’t want to be what they made."
Zoey stepped closer again, not aggressive, just steady.
"You think I came out of that stronger? I came out of that hollow. Angry. Violent. Addicted. I did jobs just to feel something. I broke a man’s spine because he looked at me wrong. I snorted cleaning solvent once because I thought it would burn the memories out of my sinuses."
She paused. Let it sit.
"I didn’t heal. I survived and made myself stronger. There’s a difference."
Red didn’t turn around.
Zoey took one more step. Her voice, for the first time, softened, not gentle, but human.
"You know that tiger I hang out with? Etrius. Big, quiet, scary as hell. I'd be dead without him. Not hypothetically. Not emotionally. Dead. He didn’t fix me. He just didn’t leave."
Red stayed silent.
Zoey looked around the room again. At the stains, the wires, the unopened ration packs on the shelf.
"And I know you can’t keep drinking and killing for the rest of your life. You’re not numb. You’re rotting. You think no one sees it, but I do, because I lived it."
Red finally turned, her eyes bloodshot and rimmed with exhaustion.
Zoey looked her dead in the face.
"I try not to wallow in my misery. You're drowning in yours. And you're too selfish to recognize you're running out of air to breathe."
That was the break.
Red’s voice dropped, guttural. “Fuck you.”
Zoey didn't flinch. “No. Fuck you. For thinking you invented pain. For pretending your scars make you more real than anyone else."
Red stepped forward, eyes wide now. "I didn’t ask you to come here!"
"And I didn’t ask to live through any of this," Zoey said. "But I did. And now I’m here. And so are you. And I’m telling you - you don’t get to spit in the face of the only person who knows exactly what kind of hole you’re trying to die in."
Red didn’t move at first. She stared at Zoey like she was trying to process a threat that hadn’t followed the usual script. Her breathing was uneven now, her throat tight.
Then: “I’m not your fucking project.”
Zoey’s response was immediate. “I don’t want a project.”
Red stepped closer, boots scraping against the concrete. “I’m not your reflection. I’m not your redemption story. Don’t think you’re here to fix me.”
Zoey’s lip curled, not in amusement, but contempt. “I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to tell you that you’re not the only one bleeding.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know enough.”
“Bullshit.”
Zoey stepped forward, closing the gap until they were almost chest to chest, her huge frame casting Red’s into shadow. Her voice didn’t rise, but it landed like a hammer. “You want to know the difference between us? You think pain gives you permission to rot. I let mine turn me into something mean enough to crawl back.”
Red’s mouth opened, words half-formed. Her fists clenched.
Zoey wasn’t done.
“I’ve been raped. I’ve been dissected. I’ve had men in lab coats argue about the shape of my genitals while I was chained to a fucking table. I’ve been told I was lucky to still be conscious. I’ve been force-fed hormones until I puked blood. I’ve been drugged, tortured, and paraded in front of generals as proof that monsters can smile.”
Red flinched.
“And you want to stand there and pretend like you’re the only one who had something stolen?” Zoey’s voice broke, not with weakness, but with fury that had lived too long without air. “I remember every name they called me. Every scar they opened just to test if it would heal the same twice.”
Silence.
Red’s voice, when it came, was quieter. Like a flare dying mid-air. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to hear it,” Zoey snapped. “Because someone needed to say it to me, and they didn’t. So I drowned for years thinking I was the only freak with a past too ugly to name. And it nearly killed me.”
Red looked away. Her throat worked in silence. She wanted to scream, wanted to punch, wanted to make the noise inside her body match the pressure building in her chest. But none of it came out.
“I know what you’re doing,” Zoey said. Her tone shifted now. Not soft, but precise. “You think if you stay angry enough, if you keep drinking and killing and walling yourself off, no one can hurt you again. That if you become a bigger monster than they ever made, then maybe it’ll balance out.”
Zoey’s jaw locked. She exhaled slow through her nose.
“It doesn’t. And I know that from experience. It doesn't heal you. It doesn't protect you. It just makes you the monster you've always believed yourself to be.”
Red turned her back again. She took one step toward the bench, then stopped.
Zoey’s voice dropped.
“You think I’m standing here because I want to be some noble example of recovery? No. You want that, go talk to Etrius. I came here to tell you that if you don’t start climbing out of this grave, you’ll die in it. And no one will even know your real name.”
Red’s voice was sharp. Defensive. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you don’t care.”
Red spun. “Of course I don’t fucking care! Why should I?”
“Because someone stayed,” Zoey said, low. “I’m staying.”
The words landed like shrapnel. Red staggered half a step, her mouth open, but she had no response. Her breathing went shallow. Her voice dropped to something raw and quiet.
“Don’t make me feel something. I can’t do that again.”
Zoey stared at her, unmoving. “Too late. You think I'm unobservant? I can see your throat clenching, your breathing, your eyes darting around the room trying their hardest to avoid mine.”
Red’s eyes narrowed. All that pressure had to go somewhere. She took the nearest thing - a heavy wrench - and hurled it against the wall. The crash echoed hard against concrete.
“Get out.”
Zoey didn’t move.
“I said get out!”
Nothing.
“I didn’t ask you to come. I didn’t ask for any of this!”
Zoey’s face hardened. Her voice went cold.
“And I didn’t ask to be tortured into someone else’s body. But here we are.”
Red stepped toward her, rage masking the cracks forming underneath. “You think I’m some kind of pity case for you to fix?”
“I think you’re an arrogant, selfish coward who thinks suffering makes her special.”
That hit.
Red stared at her, lips parted like she might throw another word, another punch, anything.
But nothing came.
Just silence. Then a whisper that barely passed her teeth:
“Go.”
Zoey didn’t argue. She didn’t posture. She turned.
As she reached the door, she paused. One hand on the frame.
"When you’re done backstabbing the only person who gives a shit, you know where to find me."
And then she left. The door slammed shut. The silence hit harder than the shouting.
Red stood motionless in the center of the room, staring at the door like it might open again, like maybe Zoey would turn around and say one last thing. But it didn’t. It was just a door now. Closed. Final.
She exhaled once, sharp through her nose, and turned away, but her legs didn’t move right. The joints buckled a little, just enough to make her stumble against the workbench.
Her hands braced against the edge. Her head dropped.
She felt like a piece of equipment left running with nothing to do. Engine hot. No function. Just noise in her skull and pressure behind her ribs.
For a few seconds, she stayed there, thinking she might scream. Or break something else. Or cry.
She did none of those.
She slid down the wall instead, until her back hit cold steel and her ass hit concrete. One leg stretched out. The other stayed bent, knee tucked toward her chest like it might keep the pieces in.
The room didn’t change.
Same cracked cot. Same dry tools. Same reek of sweat and oil. But it felt different now. Smaller. Like Zoey had dragged all the oxygen out with her.
Red looked at the spot on the floor where Zoey had stood. A faint mark of mud from her boots. A smear of grease. She could still hear her voice, like an echo under her skin:
“You’re too selfish to recognize you’re running out of air to breathe.”
Red’s jaw clenched. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, trying to ground herself. The weight in her chest didn’t budge.
Her eyes flicked toward the bottle on the floor. It had rolled under the cot. Still intact. Still reachable.
She didn’t move.
Didn’t grab it.
Instead, she leaned her head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. A crack ran through one of the old support tiles. She followed it with her eyes like a trail map, just to keep her brain from sliding apart.
Minutes passed. Maybe more.
The guilt didn’t come all at once. It wasn’t cinematic. It just settled. Heavy. Oily. The way old blood smells when it dries on fabric.
Red blinked once. Her throat felt thick.
She hadn’t meant it. Not all of it. Maybe not any of it.
She drew in a shaky breath and whispered into the stale air, so soft it wasn’t even sound.
"...I didn’t mean it."
It didn’t change anything.
But the words hung there. Floating.
She stared at her own hands for a while, scars across the knuckles, fingers twitching like they wanted to punch something and didn’t know what.
Then she looked again at the door.
Still closed. Zoey was gone.
And Red was still here. Alone. Again.
But the silence wasn’t quite the same anymore. It knew.
She had said too much, and not enough.
So she stayed there, on the floor, back against cold steel, staring into nothing. And for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel numb.
She felt wrong. That was worse.
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