The girl's breath came out in faint, stuttering clouds as she stumbled along the cliff side, dragging one leg behind her. Her once-white uniform was now soaked through with blood, mud and oil blending into a sickly sheen. Every blink made her vision blur and every step she took left another red smear against the snow.
She had been running for hours, or maybe days. Time had stopped making sense since she escaped outside the facility.
She had escaped with her friends and sister, the only people who had known her name before the experiments took it away. They had made it all the way to the outer gate. They were supposed to reach the safe zone. She remembered her sister's hand gripping hers, hard enough to bruise, and the shouting behind them. Then she heard the flashes of gunfire and the sound of her sister's voice screaming her name but then... nothing.
Now she was alone. She was the only one left.
The man leading them — tall, broad, with a permanent sneer stitched across his face — stopped in front of her. The patch on his chest read Sheiad. He looked down at her with that kind of cruelty that didn't come from hate, just boredom.
"Well, look at you. Experiment 09-C. Our little ghost in the machine."
Her body tensed.
Sheiad crouched down, close enough for her to smell the alcohol on his breath.
"You made quite the mess in there. Two squads gone, systems fried, one sector offline for six hours. You should be proud. The higher labs are going to love you."
Her teeth clenched. "I'm not going back."
He chuckled, glancing at his men.
"You will. You always do. You're the most successful one we've had in years. The higher facility's already waiting for you. You refuse…"
He lifted his rifle slightly, pressing the barrel to her forehead. "…then you die right here."
For a moment, her breathing stopped. Then softly, she clapped her hands together. The sound was almost pathetic against the howling wind but within seconds, every earpiece and communicator on the soldiers flickered with static. The channel went dead. Their systems cut off.
"What the—"
Sheiad turned, slapping his earpiece.
"Hey say something. Say something!"
No response.
Then he looked back at her, just as she started to smile through the blood. His answer was a single gunshot.
The bullet tore through her shoulder, spinning her onto the ground. Her scream was swallowed by the rain. Sheiad laughed as smoke rose from his Combat Flux rifle.
"You think you're clever, huh? What's the point of jamming comms when you're bleeding out in the dirt? You're not a Combat Fluxer. You're a glorified hacker. A broken tool. Nothing more."
She coughed, forcing herself up onto her elbow.
"I'd rather die fighting… than go back to being yours."
Her hand sparked faintly. She pushed herself forward, staggering into a charge. The next bullet struck her leg. She fell hard, a choked gasp escaping her lips.
The soldiers roared with laughter. Sheiad grabbed her by the hair and lifted her face just high enough to meet his eyes. He crouched again, pressed his pistol against her cheek, and smiled.
"I gave you a chance and you wasted it."
He hit her with the pistol until the side of her face was painted red. Then he stood, straightening his coat.
"But who said we have to kill you now? We can take you back right after we have satisfied ourselves. Don't you agree, men?"
The laughter grew louder. Boots circled her like vultures. One of them unhooked a knife, twirling it lazily. Then a voice interrupted.
"By the Goddesses, you men are disgusting."
Every head turned.
From the fog at the edge of the ruined street, a man walked forward. He was tall, dressed in a long black coat, dark turtleneck and gloves. His face was hidden behind a smooth white mask with no features. Black hair hung over one side. His steps were too slow, like he was too bored to hurry. He yawned, covering his mouth lazily.
"I mean, I'm a bad person, sure. I've killed people. Probably not a role model. But there's levels to this shit. And you guys? You're even worse."
One of the soldiers barked something in Russian. The masked man tilted his head.
"English, please. I don't speak whatever that was. Russian? You were speaking in Russian from the beginning so I don't know what you're saying."
The soldier aimed and fired.
The bullet cut through the snow but halfway to its mark, the masked man raised his hand and caught it between two fingers. The metal crushed with a faint click.
"Ah. That was rude."
The squad opened fire but the man moved once. The sound that followed wasn't gunfire. Blood sprayed across the snow. All six bodies fell before anyone even understood what had happened. In the masked man's hand now was a black sword, its edges rippling like smoke and dripping with blood.
The squad leader, Sheiad, stumbled backward, his face twisted in panic. His pistol slipped from his fingers.
"You—"
He turned to run.
There was a flash and then his scream split the rain. He fell forward, dragging himself through the mud, both legs gone at the knee. The masked man looked down at him.
"You know, I really did give you a moment to think."
Sheiad clawed at the ground.
"W-who are you?!"
The man tilted his head slightly, and even through the faceless mask, Sheiad could feel the smile behind it.
"I am bored."
He stabbed his forehead.
He stepped past the dead man and knelt beside the girl, whose eyes fluttered weakly. She looked up at the blank mask and the silhouette of the blade in his hand.
"If you want revenge, I can get you as much of it as you want."
She blinked up at him through swollen lashes, half-dazed. Her mouth worked around the words before she could make them correct or clever.
"Who are you?"
He made a small show of thinking, tilting his head as if trying on names like coats.
"Oh you can speak English. You can call me Nihris, Leader of The Ophaniels."
"The Opha— who?"
"Don't worry about the title. I'm looking for people who can be more than what they were made to be. You fit the list."
She tried to laugh but it came out as a choke.
"You want… me? I'm nothing. I'm—"
The word "experiment" tasted like acid in her mouth. She had been labeled, catalogued, dissected and rebuilt.
"I'm not... I'm not a weapon."
"You're an escape artist. You did what so few could. You got out. That tells me three things. You have endurance, you are cunning, and you have survival instincts. Those things are rarer than any forged blade."
"So what, you give me a sword and we go off to topple a government?"
"In time. Toppling governments takes infrastructure, names and a body of influence. It's not immediate but I can get you what matters first. If you want to collapse a government, you need to be more than an angry, bleeding ghost. You need leverage, narrative, arms, and people who will believe you exist."
"And in exchange?"
"Loyalty. Not blind obedience nor servitude. Loyalty with borders. You stay with me, you aid the Ophaniels when called upon, you don't walk away with our plans mid-scheme, and you don't betray us to the people who made you. In return, you get the freedom to live as you like. Almost anything you want, short of becoming some public oath-sworn tyrant of your own."
She spat into the snow. "Free to live?"
The idea was so foreign it felt obscene. Freedom had always been a whispered rumor. To her, it we q story they told the subjects to keep them compliant.
"You will be free if you obey, huh? And how do I know you won't just sell me back for a reward? Or use me until I shatter and toss me aside?"
He made a small noise of irritation. It felt we if he had been asked the same question too many times.
"Because I can do both. I can take you to the facility and kill them all. I can make your escape visible. I can build your legend. Or I can put you into the deepest of shadows, sell you or kill you. But neither of those options interests me. Chaos is an art form. I prefer participants, not broken tools. If you help me make a storm, I'll make the world remember you. Is that worth a measure of faith?"
She stared at him, trying to read the emptiness of that face. There was a kernel of truth in the offer. She could feel it. The juxtaposition he had scared her more than his violence. People like him didn't do charity.
"Why do you do this? Why me? Why Russia? Why destroy things at all if you can just… not?"
"Because I'm bored. The world is an enormous, stale performance, and people need to feel the edges again. Someone gave me the power to move the board and the pieces were never entertaining until someone invented the rule that they could bleed. See, I like chaos. Also, there's something delicious about teaching a research facility that godless laboratories are meat, too."
Her jaw tightened around a sob she didn't let out. Revenge had never been a clean thing in her head it was a hot, pulsing, empty place someone else could fill. This masked man — Nihris — offered the shape back. She could either fade into snow and silence, or she could step onto a stage where she would be seen and feared. She had nothing left to lose except herself. Except, she realized, she did have something. She had the memory, witnesses and the names of the ones who had died next to her. She remembered her sister's last squeeze on her hand and her voice over the cracks of gunfire.
"What do I have to give you now before we go to the facility? Do I sign anything in my blood?"
Nihris's voice softened in a way that made the mask feel less mechanical and more intimate.
"Loyalty, only that. I can make you a name. If I help you tear down their gates, you must let the world remember who did it. You will have to accept being seen. I can help you hide."
For the first time since she'd been catalogued and reduced, she felt... relieved?
"So I become the monster so I can hunt monsters."
"That's one way to say it."
She weighed the offer against the memory of her sister and the dying faces of their friends. The burning of a facility was a sound and a sight and something that would ripple across news and rumor. She wanted names to break into the hands of civilians and into the mouths of politicians. She wanted the people who did this to court the exact same terror they had casually doled out. The heat behind that desire swelled, and she nodded.
"All right. I'm with you."
Nihris made a small sound that might have been approval.
"Good. Welcome to the Ophaniels."
He reached out, and from his gloved hand a dark, viscous vein of darkness uncoiled and wrapped around her shoulders. It was cold when it touched her skin, and she flinched reflexively. Then it was like being dipped in hot oil and released, pouring into her muscles. The sting of bullets eased as the blackness pulled from her flesh. One by one, the shards of metal were cradled by the void and expelled.
She stared at her hands as the last fleck of metal slid free and fell away. For a moment she couldn't speak. Her lungs worked as if the cold were finally gone from them. The ache in her bones dimmed from a screaming roar to a distant throb. She touched where the hole in her leg had been. It was nothing more than a wet darkening of the cloth and warmth under her palm.
"W-what did you—"
"A gift. Call it maintenance. I can heal."
Nihris stepped to the side and grinned one of the black snowmobiles. He held it like it was waiting to be ridden.
"You need to move now. If you want them to remember you, they'll have to find you first. That facility will not see this coming. Get on."
She hesitated. Out here, she could hide but his power was intoxicating. Her sister's last hand squeezed her memory. She put her fingers into Nihris's offered palm and let him pull her up.
"Hold on tight."
She wrapped her arms around his waist because there was nothing else to hold. The fabric of his coat was warm and solid beneath her hands. For a second, she forgot to breathe, not from fear but from the odd, dangerous comfort of being pressed against someone who had just killed seven men to save her.
Nihris turned the throttle. The machine cut into the snow at an incredibly fast pace.
She clutched him harder. The wind screamed and the world emptied to white. Somewhere in that whiteness, the old life — the labs, the names, the screams — had been compressed into something that could last forever or burn out in a single, glorious blaze. She had chosen the blaze.
As the snow unspooled around them and the ruined facility receded, Nihris's voice came back, detached and low, the tone of a man revealing the next item on a list.
"First stop," he said. "We'll see what kind of story we can make out of this."
She, still half-dazed, watched the blank horizon eat up the path behind them. For the first time in a long while the future looked like a thing she could touch — or break. The bite of cold was less; the burn of resolve grew. She pressed down on the rail and let the speed drown the doubt.