The descent into the Babel felt endless. Each corridor devoured light and echoed her footfalls in whispers that weren't quite her own. Aya pressed forward, deeper into the flesh‑lined hall, her rifle heavy in her trembling hands. The air thickened with each step until it felt less like breath and more like drowning in blood‑scent.
The soldiers who had escorted her this far had pulled back. None followed through the second threshold. She didn't blame them. She wasn't sure she would follow herself, if not for the silhouette burned into her skull—the girl she swore was Eve, curled within the tower's heart.
Aya whispered into the suffocating dark: *"If it really is you… why here?"*
The Babel answered with silence at first, then with a wet convulsion under her boots. The hallway pulsed, veins throbbing red, drawing her onward as if the tower itself recognized her trespass.
She found the chamber without realizing she had arrived.
It opened like the inside of a colossal ribcage, walls glistening and curving upward like fangs of bone. In the center, suspended by cords of slick tissue, floated the **heart.** Black and swollen, it expanded and contracted as though trying to birth something. With every beat, a wave of living sound rolled across Aya's skin, making her teeth ache.
Her chest tightened. The room itself was breathing with her, but out of rhythm.
She raised her rifle. Hands shook so violently she feared she'd drop it.
And then she saw it again—the shape inside the heart.
Human. Curled. Hair like strands of pale silk floating in amniotic dark.
Aya stumbled forward a step. Her lips parted. *"Eve…"*
For one terrible moment, the silhouette moved. Not random spasm—no. It turned, slow and sinuous, facing her. Though blurred behind the layers of pulsing membrane, Aya could almost see the delicate slope of a jaw, the faint glow of eyes that might once have mirrored hers.
Her knees weakened. A memory cracked open unbidden—
A church. Bells tolling. A girl's laughter, light as bells themselves. Fingers intertwined, warm and sure. A promise whispered against the veil of a wedding gown.
Then screaming. Fire. Gunshots that shattered eternity.
Aya doubled over, clutching her skull. "Stop. Please stop…"
The chamber obeyed only with a deeper pulse, the walls stretching and retracting, dripping strands of viscous ichor. From their folds, figures squirmed free—Twisted, slick with afterbirth, limbs curled wrong, eyes gem‑bright with hunger.
Aya forced the rifle up and fired. Each shot tore one down, black ichor staining the bone‑white floor. Yet for every creature she killed, two more spilled from the walls, shrieking at once like children and carrion birds.
She fought like drowning, switching bodies instinctively. One soldier at the perimeter, another deeper inside—the Overdive ripped her consciousness from body to body, flesh to flesh. Each time she dropped into someone else, their terror and memories hissed across her mind. A wedding band pocketed. A lullaby hummed to a newborn long gone. Dreams of a college that would never re‑open.
She was made of grief.
Aya staggered as she killed, the guilt gnawing with every trigger pulled. The Twisted disintegrated under her rage, but more poured forth. Was this a battle, or merely the tower laughing at her futility?
Finally the chamber fell still. Her last bullet echoed into silence.
And the heart pulsed harder.
Aya turned her gaze back to its core. Eve's silhouette pressed forward until her face was disturbingly near the membrane. Her lips moved soundlessly. Aya swore she recognized the word: *Sister.*
Aya's rifle slipped from her grip, clattering to the gore‑slick floor.
"I can't," she whispered hoarsely. "I can't kill you." Her chest heaved, every breath razored. "If you're real… if you're still in there… then what have I been fighting?"
> *"Illusion."*
Hyde's voice cut through her skull like a blade. Cold, clinical, as though he were perched within her mind.
> *"Aya. Fire. Now. That shape is the tower's trick. Nothing more. If you hesitate, the mission is over."*
Aya folded in on herself. "No. I know her. I felt her—"
> *"Hallucinations drawn from your trauma. Don't degrade yourself with sentiment."*
Gabrielle's voice, distant through the comms, pierced next: *"Aya—wait. Don't listen, think first. We can regroup—"*
Kyle's silence was worse. He said nothing, but she felt him there, listening, measuring.
Aya turned back to the heart. Eve's image stared back. For a moment, she thought she saw tears leaking from the shadow's eyes—tears that merged into the ichor running down the membrane.
Aya screamed and pressed her palms against her temples. The thought burned: *If I shoot, I kill her. If I don't, I doom everyone else.*
Her vision blurred. Faces of every soldier she'd used flashed before her, layered over Eve's: men and women bound into her survival, forgotten except by her haunted dreams. Their pleas mingled into a single chorus: "Don't use me again. Don't kill me again."
Aya fell to her knees. The rifle lay inches away. She couldn't move.
The heart throbbed louder, louder, until it filled the chamber like thunder. Fluid poured and drained, the smell of iron choking her. The silhouette within leaned closer, whispering what Aya couldn't hear but still knew: *Eve.*
Aya clasped her hands together like prayer, eyes streaming.
*"I don't know what's real anymore. Please… someone tell me. Am I saving anyone… or am I destroying everything I love?"*
For the first time since the Babel rose, Aya wanted nothing more than to run.
But there was nowhere to run.
The walls convulsed. The chamber shook as the cords binding the heart grew taut, veins stretching, ready to burst. The tower screamed—not with mouths, not with lungs, but with its own living architecture, the sound vibrating through Aya's bones until she gagged on fear.
She reached for the rifle. Her fingers brushed the grip.
She froze.
Because in the stillness between each monstrous beat of the heart, she heard another sound. Soft. Gentle.
A child's giggle.
It echoed through the chamber with impossible tenderness, carried not by the Babel but by the hollow in her own memory. A sound untouched by horror, yet placed exactly here to break her apart.
Aya's vision swam. "Eve…"
Her finger hovered over the trigger.
The chamber waited.
So did the shadow in the heart.
So did Hyde, and Gabrielle, and Kyle.
And Aya Brea, caught between guilt and survival, love and duty, trembled so fiercely she thought her body might break before the bullet ever left the barrel.
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