Two years. Two years of suffocating silence and involuntary compliance.
Elma was thirty months old, a milestone that, for D-66, marked a protracted tour in the most ineffective, humiliating biological unit ever conceived.
Physically, the change was immense. She could walk now—a clumsy, short-legged waddle that she was forcing into a stride.
She could grip, hold, climb, and fall with only minor risk of permanent damage.
Crucially, the musculature around her mouth and tongue—the articulators that had been her prison—were finally developing enough to obey the complex commands she'd been screaming internally for over two years.
Her mind was a war engine, calculating trajectory, velocity, and pressure. Her mouth was a lump of soft clay.
Lord Valerius Altheris had been absent on a long military campaign, bringing a brief, quiet grace period.
Christa's influence was everywhere—strict tutors, rigid schedules, and a nursery filled with tools designed to train the mind, not the body.
Elma sat on the floor of the nursery, stacking a pyramid of polished, heavy wooden blocks.
She was practicing the crucial art of manipulation, observing how gravity and friction interacted with her small hands. She was silent, utterly absorbed in the task.
Christa sat a little ways off in a cushioned reading chair, turning the pages of an illustrated primer.
She seemed calmer in Valerius's absence, but the soft-edged worry around her eyes never fully disappeared. She watched her silent daughter with a quiet, patient devotion.
"Look, Elma," Christa murmured, pointing to a picture. "The little bird. Say 'bird'."
Elma glanced at the picture. A common sparrow. Insignificant. She returned to her blocks. She knew the word. She knew a thousand words.
But translating the phonemes into the soft, uncooperative structure of a toddler's mouth always resulted in a frustratingly slurred, useless grunt. It felt like trying to fire a cannon with a piece of wet string.
"Say 'Mama,' darling," Christa tried again, her voice gentle, without expectation. "Can you try 'Mama' for me?"
Elma sighed internally, the sound escaping as a faint, impatient puff of air. She finished the top layer of her block pyramid, admiring the geometric precision.
She had to break the silence. She needed the world to acknowledge her existence beyond the mere object of a political alliance. More importantly, she needed to test the new boundaries of her voice box.
She lowered the perfect pyramid with a soft thump.
She poured her entire focus—the brutal, uncompromising discipline of D-66—into the single, simple syllable.
She visualized the tongue placement, the vocal cord tension, the expulsion of breath. It had to be precise. It had to be legible.
Her small face tightened with effort. She opened her mouth.
The sound that emerged was slightly slurred, but perfectly recognizable. It broke the two-year silence, echoing against the perfectly sculpted cornices of the room of "peace."
"Kri... sta."
Christa's head snapped up. She froze, the primer sliding from her lap to the floor, forgotten. Her breath hitched. The exhaustion and worry vanished instantly, replaced by a pure, blinding shock.
Christa continued to stare at Elma, the tears she had held back now cresting and spilling over, tracking wet paths down her cheeks. They weren't tears of sorrow, however; they were radiant.
"Kri... sta," Elma repeated, watching her mother's reaction with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing a chemical reaction.
It was enough.
Christa broke the silent tableau. With a small, choked sound that was half sob, half laugh, she sprang forward. She seized the child, lifting her high over her head.
"You did it! You spoke! My precious, strong girl!" Christa cried, and then, completely abandoning decorum, she began to spin.
The momentum was stunning, dizzying. The corniced ceiling flashing past her eyes in a blur of pale, sickening blue.
Her survival instincts flared—the world rotating meant disorientation, vulnerability, an opening for attack.
She stiffened instantly, her small spine rigid, her hands instinctively clutching air. Christa was a whirlwind of silk and relief, her buoyant, unrestrained laughter echoing the opposite of Valerius's calculated boom. She spun and spun, tears streaming down her face.
The overwhelming joy radiating from her mother collided in Elma's small chest. It was a pressure valve failing.
And then, she lost control.
A sound escaped her—not a planned word, not a calculated sigh, but a short, utterly unreserved burst of vocal noise. It was warm, high-pitched, and entirely involuntary.
A small laugh.
Elma, suddenly feeling exposed by the involuntary noise, clamped her jaw shut.
Christa's head snapped down, her eyes wide with challenge and love. She laughed even harder, holding Elma suspended above the polished floor.
Seeing the effect, Elma's internal mechanism failed once more.
The spinning motion had triggered some primitive, chaotic reflex in her developing brain, bypassing her conscious will entirely.
Her diaphragm contracted violently, forcing air up through her vocal cords in a rhythmic, high-pitched stutter.
Stop, she commanded. Seal the airway. Stabilize.
But her body was a traitor.
Another laugh burst from her—louder, sharper, utterly disregarding her orders. It was a terrifying biological override.
The more Christa laughed, the more Elma's mirror neurons fired in unauthorized sympathy, locking her into a feedback loop she couldn't break.
Christa was soaring with delight, while Elma was fighting a losing war against her own lungs.
Her tiny, reedy giggles spilled out like blood from a wound—messy, unstoppable, and horrifyingly involuntary.
Christa lowered Elma gently back to the floor, panting, her face shining. The moment of raucous abandon faded, leaving the room vibrating with shared breath.
"Say it again, my heart," Christa whispered, her eyes shining. "Say 'Christa' again."
Elma immediately returned her focus to the floor. The moment was over. She shook her head once, sharply, and held out the wooden block—a substitution, a return to silence.
Christa took the block, her smile soft and knowing.
"A gift, then. Thank you, Elma."
Now, a month later, Elma knew with chilling certainty that she was being held on a new, silk-smooth leash. Christa didn't need to physically command her. Christa had simply found the frequency.
She can make me laugh.
She can make me cry.
It was the ultimate betrayal of her identity as D-66. The veteran consciousness, forged to resist interrogation and torture, now found herself manipulated by the soft, useless words of a noblewoman.
When Christa murmured, "Look at my beautiful big girl taking a bath now, aren't you brave?" Elma went rigid. The word brave was a hook sunk into her programming. It was a challenge, a validation. It forced compliance.
She might hate the warm water, the scented soap, and the indignity of being scrubbed like an object, but she endured the ritual because she could not permit herself to be defined as lacking bravery.
When she fell and scraped her knee on the marble floor—a clumsy, inexcusable error—Christa would rush to her. Christa never scolded, never demanded silence.
Instead, she would simply look at Elma with wide, pained eyes and whisper, "Oh, my poor darling, you must be so sad."
And just like that, the pressure in Elma's chest would build, forcing a whimper, a genuine, wet tear.
The sympathetic suggestion was a hypnotic command, twisting her internal controls until the raw emotion was expressed externally.
Christa had mastered her—not with threats of pain, but with the threat of emotional invalidation, with the promise of love, and with the devastating power of simple words.
She had been disarmed not by a superior force, but by a sympathetic frequency that resonated in her hull.