The silence after induction was not peaceful. It was the silence of a vacuum, a sensory deprivation so absolute it became its own form of pressure. Netoshka—Subject 021—lay supine on a pallet of chilled biocomposite, her shorn scalp bristling with the ghost-feel of needles. The grey jumpsuit was gone. She wore a skin-tight suit of conductive grey mesh, studded with sensor nodes that fed a constant stream of data to the machines humming in the walls of her isolation cell in Facility Zeta-9. Three meters by three meters. White light from no visible source. A slot in the door for nutrient paste and water. No window. No sound but the hum, her own breathing, and the Voice.
It had changed. The cool, ancient whisper that had guided her in the village, that had sung the song of ruin, was now… contested. Layered over it was a colder, more structured frequency—the psychic imprint of the conditioning. They called it the Directive. It spoke in declarative statements.
You are Asset 021. Your function is operational efficiency. Discomfort is data. Pain is calibration.
The original Voice, the one from her blood, was quieter, buried, but not gone. It now spoke in cryptic, fractured phrases, like a corrupted transmission from a dead star.
…they peel the sky to see the wound… the scar remembers…
Days were marked by the arrival of the paste. Time stretched and compressed. She exercised to keep her body from atrophying, moving through silent kata in the confined space. She slept when exhaustion forced her. She waited.
The first real test came without warning. The far wall of her cell irised open. Not the door. A circular aperture, revealing a tunnel of pure white light.
A synthesized voice echoed. "Subject 021. Proceed to testing chamber Gamma. Obedience is strength."
The Directive pulsed:
"Comply."
Netoshka stood, her muscles tight from disuse, and walked into the light.
The chamber beyond was cavernous, a sterile arena. The walls, floor, and ceiling were a seamless, non-reflective white that seemed to absorb depth. In the center stood Dr. Kuryakin, flanked by two guards in full environmental suits, their visors darkened. A console hovered beside him on a drone platform.
"Good," Kuryakin said, his voice amplified.
"Passive biometrics are stable. Begin baseline assessment. Scenario Alpha."
A section of the floor dissolved, and a platform rose. On it was a sealed transparent cube. Inside, a small, live rodent scurried.
"Your psionic potential is an instrument, 021," Kuryakin stated.
"But an instrument must be tuned. You will terminate the specimen. Use the method imprinted in Phase Three. Chrono-thermal induction."
The Directive provided the schema: a specific neural pathway, a focusing of intent to accelerate time locally around a target, heating its core to lethal temperatures in microseconds.
The original Voice hissed:
"…a small heart beating… why?"
Netoshka looked at the rodent. It sniffed the air, blind and terrified. She felt nothing. She focused. The world narrowed to the cube. She traced the pathway in her mind. A faint, distorted haze, like heat shimmer, enveloped the cube. The rodent stopped. It emitted a brief, sharp squeak and collapsed. A wisp of steam rose from its fur.
"Clean. No external energy signature. Time to effect: 1.7 seconds. Acceptable." Kuryakin made a note. "Proceed to Scenario Beta."
The cube retracted. Another platform rose. This one held a complex apparatus: a suspended alloy sphere the size of a human head, covered in intricate, shifting runes. A Shuiyun ætheric stabilizer, stolen tech.
"This device is currently containing a localized reality fracture. A small, self-contained chaos. Your task is to collapse the fracture without triggering a dimensional backlash. Use spatial re-folding protocol Theta."
The schematic flashed in her mind via the Directive. It was calculus made manifest, a psychic equation for gently persuading alien geometry to revert to Euclidean space. The original Voice recoiled:
"…that is not chaos… it is a piece of a broken song…"
Netoshka extended a hand. Her Crimson scar prickled. She could see the fracture—not with her eyes, but with a sense she had no name for. It was a gnarl in the air, a sickly, beautiful swirl of impossible colors. She applied the protocol. It was like trying to knit smoke with her bare hands. The stabilizer hummed, the runes flared a violent purple—and then the sphere imploded silently into a pinpoint of blackness that winked out. The air tasted of burnt copper.
"Success. Minimal psionic bleed. Proceed to Scenario Gamma."
This time, the platform brought a man.
He was young, maybe twenty, dressed in the rough clothes of a Uralan miner. He was shackled, gagged, his eyes wide with animal terror. He struggled against his bonds.
"This is a condemned criminal," Kuryakin said, his tone clinical.
"A traitor to the Rosalvya Motherland. His sentence is death. You will carry it out.
Method: Neural severance. Clean, efficient, and it will allow us to measure the feedback loop in a complex consciousness."
The Directive laid out the procedure: a telepathic intrusion to locate the brainstem, followed by a precise, psychic incision.
The original Voice screamed:
"…LOOK AT HIM… HE BLEEDS FEAR… THEY WANT YOU TO TASTE IT…"
Netoshka stared at the man. He was crying now, shaking his head, making desperate noises through the gag. She saw the pulse hammering in his throat. She felt… a resonance. His fear was a sharp, sour frequency that vibrated against her own psyche. It was data. It was loud.
She focused. Reaching out with her mind was like extending a limb made of ghostly filaments. She brushed against the chaotic storm of his terror. It was messy, hot, overwhelming. She pushed through, seeking the quiet, rhythmic pulse of the brainstem.
…please… no… my daughter… The thought was not hers. It was his, a final, fragmented plea that leaked into her psychic touch.
Her focus wavered. For a fraction of a second, she saw a little girl's face, smudged with dirt, smiling.
The Directive flared: Execute.
The original Voice, in a moment of shocking, unified clarity with her own submerged horror, shrieked:
"NO!"
Netoshka flinched. The psychic incision, instead of being clean, slipped. It was not a severance, but a violent rupture. The man's body convulsed violently, a strangled scream finally escaping the gag. He didn't die immediately. He thrashed, seizures wracking his frame, eyes rolling back, a line of drool and blood tracing from his mouth. It took eleven agonizing seconds for him to still.
Silence, broken only by the hum of the chamber and Netoshka's own ragged breath. Her hands trembled.
On his console, Kuryakin frowned.
"Psychic feedback noted. Emotional contamination from the target. Inefficiency. Time to termination unacceptable. Subject 021, you hesitated. Why?"
Netoshka looked at her hands. The tremor wouldn't stop.
"He… had a daughter." The words felt alien in her mouth.
"That's Irrelevant," Kuryakin snapped.
"The target was a traitor. His genetic and social data are inconsequential to the mission parameter. Your empathy is a flaw in the instrument. It must be filed away."
"Guards."
The two suited guards stepped forward. They didn't touch her. Instead, they raised devices that emitted a low, throbbing tone. The sound drilled directly into her skull. The world dissolved into nauseating vertigo. She collapsed to her knees, clutching her head.
"This is an ætheric dissonance field," Kuryakin explained, walking closer.
"It will be used to correct deviation. When you fail, you will be reminded. When you hesitate, you will be punished. The pain is a teacher. Do you understand?"
The pain was immense, a white-hot screw turning in the core of her brain. She couldn't speak. She nodded, a frantic, jerky motion.
The tone ceased. The relief was so profound it was almost pleasure. She vomited a thin stream of nutrient paste onto the pristine white floor.
"Clean that up," Kuryakin said to a guard.
"Return her to isolation. We will repeat Scenario Gamma tomorrow. And the next day. Until the instrument performs without flaw."
---
The days bled into a cycle of pain and precision. They tested everything. Telekinesis under magnetic disruption. Clairvoyance through lead shielding. They pumped her full of drugs that made her senses kaleidoscopic, then ordered her to perform delicate psychic tasks. They submerged her in icy water, depriving her of oxygen, and demanded she use her power to manipulate objects outside the tank.
The dissonance field was their primary tool for correction. Each flicker of independent thought, each hint of recoil, was met with its soul-scouring tone. The original Voice was being systematically drowned, driven so deep it was now little more than a faint, pained echo. The Directive grew stronger, its pathways becoming her default thought processes.
Yevgeny visited once, observed from the viewing gallery behind one-way glass during a stress test. She didn't know he was there. She was tasked with maintaining a complex telekinetic lock on three separate, fast-moving targets while a recording of village screams—her village—played at deafening volume. She did it, face blank, sweat pouring down her temples, the teal scar on her chest livid and throbbing. Yevgeny watched, his own face a stone mask of despair, before turning and leaving without a word.
After six weeks of this, Kuryakin was satisfied with the instrument. But the state wanted more than an instrument. They wanted a weapon that could walk among the enemy.
"Phase Five begins today," Kuryakin announced in her cell one morning. The door had opened to admit him and a new figure—a man in the uniform of a Rosalvya Internal Security Colonel, but with a calm, scholarly demeanor. He had kind eyes. The contrast was jarring.
"This is Colonel Yevgeny Nezvany," Kuryakin said, a hint of distaste in his voice.
"He is from a… different branch. He will be handling the final stage of your preparation. You will listen to him as you listen to me."
Kuryakin left. Sokolov remained. He did not speak at first. He walked a slow circle around her cell, his hands clasped behind his back. Finally, he stopped in front of her.
"Netoshka Nezvany " he said, his voice a warm, low baritone. He used her name. Not her number.
"Do you know why you are here?"
The Directive provided the answer:
"For the glory of the Rosalvyan Motherland."
She remained silent.
Sokolov smiled, a sad, understanding smile.
"They have given you the words, but they have not given you the why. They treat you like a gun. A gun does not need to know why it is fired. But a soldier… a patriot… she needs to believe." He knelt, bringing himself to her eye level.
"You have been terribly wronged, child. Not by us. By them. The Averikans. The Shuiyunese. They are the ones who create the chaos that poisoned your mother. They are the ones whose wars create places like the Kartuz Steppe. They took your family. They took your home. They would see our Motherland—your true home—ground into dust."
He spoke of Rosalvya not as a state, but as a spirit. A beleaguered, proud culture fighting for survival against greedy, decadent empires. He spoke of her power not as a aberration, but as a gift from the land itself, a manifestation of Rosalvyan resilience. He framed every atrocity committed against her in the facility as a "necessary hardening," a bitter medicine to prepare her for the greater fight.
"They," he said, meaning Kuryakin and his ilk,
"see only the weapon. I see the warrior. I see the daughter of Antonov and Katya. I see a Rosalvyan soul. That is what your Step Father, Yevgeny Nezvany would want for you aswell"
He visited daily. He brought no pain. He brought stories—of her father's battalion, of the beauty of the western forests, of a Rosalvya that existed before the endless wars. He listened when she haltingly described the Voice, the scar. He didn't call it corruption; he called it a "burden of legacy."
"The strength of our people has always come with a cost," he said solemnly. "You carry more than most. It is why you must be stronger than most."
He was weaving a new narrative, more insidious than Kuryakin's cold programming. He was offering her an identity, a cause, a home. To the hollowed-out shell of Subject 021, it was water in a desert. The Directive approved—his words aligned with core loyalty protocols. The original Voice was too weak to protest.
After two weeks of this, Sokolov presented the mission.
"The Averikans have a military academy. They train their officers there. They are arrogant. They believe their borders are secure. We need a set of eyes and hands within. You will go there. You will learn their ways, you will become the perfect Cadet. You will hide your true strength, letting them see only a talented, if troubled, orphan. And you will wait."
"Wait for what?" Netoshka asked, her voice barely a whisper.
"For the call. For the day the Motherland needs her daughter to act from within the beast's belly." He placed a small, cold object in her palm—a simple, polished stone wolf's head on a steel chain.
"This is your anchor. When all else is confusion, when their lies crowd your mind, hold this. Remember the soil. Remember your blood. You are Rosalvyan. You are Netoshka Nezvany."
She closed her fingers around it. The stone bit into her flesh. It felt more real than anything in the white room.
The final night, Sokolov and Kuryakin met in the observation room.
"The emotional loyalty hooks are set deep," Sokolov said, watching Netoshka sleep on the monitor.
"She sees me as her savior, the voice of her true nation. The Averikans will think they're rehabilitating a savage Monster into a useful asset. They have no idea we've built the lockpick into the tool they're importing."
Kuryakin sneered.
"Sentiment is a vulnerability."
"Sentiment is a motivator that survives logic bombs and psychic scrubbing,"
Sokolov countered coldly.
"She is a multi-layered asset. A weapon that believes its own heart. Operation Matryoshka is ready. Send the doll to her first nest."
The next morning, Netoshka was given a plain grey travel suit and a folder of forged documents identifying her as "Anna," a Averikan war orphan from a border skirmish. As a guard led her to a waiting transport, Sokolov appeared. He placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Remember, little wolf," he whispered, his breath warm against her ear.
"No matter how far you go, no matter what masks they make you wear, your heart beats for Rosalvya. When the time is right, you will know. You will come home. Soon."
He squeezed her shoulder, a gesture of paternal faith.
She was loaded into a windowless van. As it sped away from the monolithic hell of Zeta-9, Netoshka clutched the wolf's head stone so tightly it left an imprint in her palm. She stared at the passing blur of stark, frozen landscape. She was not a subject. She was not 021. She was Netoshka Nezvany, a daughter of Rosalvya, a sleeper in the dark, on a sacred mission for the Motherland.
The belief was a flame in the hollowed-out cavity of her chest, warm and bright, and entirely manufactured.