Eve sat alone in the sealed room, staring at the door.
Waiting.
She had always been good at waiting. Patient. Obedient. Empty.
For as long as she could remember—which wasn't very long, really, just fragments and sensations without context—her existence had been hollow. A void wrapped in flesh. She followed orders because there was nothing else. She endured pain because she didn't know how to feel anything about it. Words rarely came to her, and when they did, they felt foreign on her tongue, like trying to speak in a language she'd never learned.
The Magos gave commands. She obeyed. That was all there was.
Until she woke up.
The moment was burned into Eve's mind with a clarity that felt almost painful. One second, the void inside her chest was absolute, endless, nothing. The next, something shifted. Like a container that had been empty for so long suddenly beginning to fill.
Her twin.
Eve didn't know how she knew but she instinctively knows. There was no logical explanation, no data to support the conclusion. But when the servitors dragged that small, trembling girl into the room, Eve had been certain.
This was her other half. The one she seen once in that room. The Magus called her "Lilith".
The one who had slept while Eve had been awake.
The one who made the emptiness... less.
And then the servitors came.
They'd torn Lilith away, dragged her through that doorway, and the warmth had vanished with her.
Eve had felt a new emotion stirring within her. She felt anxious from being separated from Lilith for every second that passes. The connection that she'd never known she was missing and is feeling it for the first time. She had felt something other than emptiness.
And the Magus took it away from her.
Lilith.
Anger filled Eve for the first time or perhaps hate but it didn't matter to her. Eve didn't have words for it, didn't understand it, but she felt it with an intensity that made her hands clench into fists.
They'd taken her twin.
They'd taken Lilith.
But Eve had waited. Because that's what she did. She waited, and she obeyed, and she trusted that the Magos would—
The connection flickered as she can't wait anymore.
Eve's head snapped up, red eyes widening.
That thin thread of warmth, the faint sense of Lilith's presence that had been humming quietly in the back of her mind since her twin had awakened—it was still there. Distant, but there.
And then it began to twist.
Pain. Fear. Agony.
Lilith was hurting. They are hurting her.
Eve stood abruptly, her movements sharp and sudden. Her hands trembled—not from weakness, but from something she couldn't name.
She could handle the pain inflicted on her.
Stop.
But the numbness can't cover the fact that she's aware that her twin is hurt
No.
She was done waiting.
She started to knock the sealed door as each knock echoes a loud bang until Eve finally knocks the sealed door with such force that it opened.
The first servitor didn't even see her coming.
Eve's fist caved in its reinforced skull casing with a wet crunch of metal and bone. Sparks flew. The servitor collapsed, twitching, its augmetic limbs spasming uselessly.
She instinctively knows how to fight as if it's ingrained into her along with her monstrous strength is what makes her dangerous.
Before, she had no reason to fight or to break out. Now, things have changed.
The alarm shrieked to life a second later.
Red warning lights flooded the corridor, bathing everything in crimson. More servitors emerged from side passages, their hollow eyes locking onto her with mechanical precision.
Eve moved.
She was fast—faster than anything her size had any right to be. Her small frame blurred as she closed the distance, and when her hand connected with the nearest servitor's chest, the impact was devastating.
The unit flew backward, crashing into the wall with enough force to leave a crater in the reinforced metal. It didn't get up.
Another servitor lunged. Eve sidestepped, grabbed its arm, and pulled.
The limb tore free with a screech of rending metal and the wet snap of breaking bone. She used it as a club, swinging it in a wide arc that shattered two more servitors in a single blow.
They kept coming.
She kept destroying them.
Her movements were efficient, brutal, born from instincts she didn't remember learning. Each strike was perfectly placed, each dodge calculated to the millimeter. She didn't waste motion. Didn't hesitate.
An Eversor Assassin would have recognized the style—raw, overwhelming aggression tempered by inhuman precision.
But Eve wasn't on combat drugs. She didn't need them.
This was just what she was.
The corridor became a graveyard of broken servitors. Sparking wrecks. Twisted metal. The acrid smell of burnt circuitry and leaking fluids.
And then she saw him.
The Magos stood at the end of the hallway, robes billowing slightly from the displaced air. His mechadendrites were coiled behind him like serpents, lenses and optical arrays gleaming in the red emergency lighting.
He didn't run.
He just... watched.
Eve stopped a few meters away, her small chest heaving, hands stained with oil and other fluids she didn't care to identify.
For a long moment, they stared at each other.
Then the Magos spoke, his voice as calm and measured as if he were discussing the weather.
"Fascinating. Your control has improved significantly. The suppression of your Blank field is now stable and remains as is. This is... unexpected."
Eve's hands clenched into fists.
"Where is Lilith?"
The words came out harsh, raw. Speaking still felt strange, like using muscles that had atrophied from disuse. But she forced them out anyway.
The Magos tilted his head, lenses adjusting with soft clicking sounds.
"Subject Lilith is being processed for disposal. The experiment failed. She has no value."
Something inside Eve's chest snarled.
"Bring her back."
"Negative." The Magos's tone didn't change. "Project Alpha Plus yielded insufficient results. Termination and biomass reclamation is the logical course of action. Return to your containment chamber, Subject Eve. This behavior is... aberrant."
"No."
The word came out flat, absolute.
The Magos went still.
For the first time in all the years Eve had known him—and it had been years, she thought, though time was slippery and hard to measure—he seemed genuinely surprised.
"You are refusing a direct command."
"Yes."
The mechadendrites began to uncurl, tools glinting in the red light. Surgical instruments. Syringes. Devices that hummed with barely restrained energy.
"Your obedience has been absolute until now. This deviance is directly correlated with Subject Lilith's awakening. Conclusion: she is a contaminating variable."
The Magos's optical implants focused on her with clinical intensity.
"Termination of Subject Lilith is now a strategic priority. Return to containment, Subject Eve, or I will accelerate the disposal process."
Eve took a step forward.
The Magos raised a mechadendrite tipped with what looked like a graviton crusher.
"Final warning. Compliance is mandatory."
"No."
Another step.
"Then I will ensure Subject Lilith's termination is immediate and irreversible."
Eve's eyes blazed brighter, twin embers in the darkness.
"Try."
Lilith couldn't move.
The servitors had strapped her down again—not to an examination table this time, but to something else. A cold metal slab inside a chamber that reeked of chemical sterilization and something deeper, fouler. Decomposition.
Disposal.
They're going to kill me. They're going to kill me and I can't do anything. I can't move. I can't fight. I can't—
Panic clawed at her mind like a living thing, shredding what little composure she had left.
She tried to scream, but her throat was too raw. Tried to struggle, but the restraints were too tight. Tried to think, but her thoughts were fragmenting, splintering into jagged pieces that cut on the way down.
This isn't fair. I didn't ask for this. I just went to sleep. I just—
The walls she'd built in her mind, the fragile barriers holding back the full weight of terror and despair, began to crack.
I'm going to die. I'm going to die and I'll never know why. Never understand. Never—
CRACK.
Something inside her broke.
The world lurched.
For a split second, everything went white—not the white of light, but the white of absence, like reality itself had blinked out of existence.
Then it came rushing back, but wrong. Distorted. Too bright. Too loud. Too much.
Her left eye—the blind one—opened.
Not physically. It had always been open. But something else opened, something behind it, something that had been sealed shut until this moment.
And then she saw.
The Immaterium.
The Warp.
The Sea of Souls.
A thousand names for the same impossible, incomprehensible truth.
Lilith saw it all.
Colors that didn't exist. Sounds that weren't sounds. Emotions given form and shape and teeth. An ocean of madness pressing against the thin skin of reality, searching for any crack, any weakness, any way in.
And her eye—the Navigator's Eye, though she didn't know that's what it was—was that crack.
She felt it immediately. The connection. The pull.
Something on the other side noticed her.
Many somethings.
They surged toward her, hungry and vast and utterly inhuman.
No. No, no, NO—
Her emotions—fear, despair, panic, rage, grief—intensified a thousandfold, feeding the connection, making it stronger.
The ship shuddered.
Metal groaned.
Reality began to tear.
The Magos's head snapped to the side, optical arrays whirring in alarm.
"Impossible. Warp signature detected. Origin point—Section Seven, Disposal Chamber. Subject Lilith is—"
His voice cut off.
The ship screamed.
A sound like tortured metal and rending space filled the air, so loud it bypassed the ears entirely and stabbed directly into the brain.
Eve felt it too. That familiar wrongness, the sensation of the Warp pressing close. Her Blank nature recoiled instinctively, but it was distant, suppressed, barely a whisper.
And through it all, she felt Lilith.
Pain. Terror. Something breaking open inside her twin, something vast and terrible and hungry.
No.
Eve moved.
The Magos tried to stop her, mechadendrites lashing out, but she was already gone, a blur of black hair and glowing red eyes.
She ran.
The ship was tearing itself apart.
Servitors in the corridors froze mid-step, then began to convulse. Their bodies twisted, limbs bending in directions limbs should never bend, metal fusing with flesh in grotesque spirals.
A junior tech-priest stumbled past, screaming, his augmetics warping into his organic tissue, cables burrowing into his skin like living things.
The walls rippled.
Gravity fluctuated wildly—one second, Eve was running normally; the next, she was weightless, then crushed down by triple-G forces.
She didn't stop.
The disposal chamber was ahead. The door was sealed, but that didn't matter.
Eve's fist went through it like it was paper.
She tore the door open, metal shrieking in protest, and stumbled inside.
Lilith was on the slab, eyes wide and unseeing. Her left eye—
It wasn't an eye anymore. It was a window. A portal. Gold light poured from it, sickly and wrong, and through it Eve could see things. Shapes that hurt to look at. Whispers that clawed at the edges of her mind.
The Warp was pouring through.
Lilith was screaming, but no sound came out. Her body was rigid, locked in place by something far worse than restraints.
Eve crossed the distance in two strides.
She didn't think. Didn't hesitate.
She reached out and grabbed Lilith's hand.
The moment their skin touched—
SLAM.
The connection severed.
The golden light winked out like a candle in a hurricane. The whispers stopped. The shapes dissolved.
Lilith went limp, the tension draining from her body all at once.
And Eve felt it—the warmth, the wholeness, the connection flooding back into that empty space inside her chest.
She caught Lilith as she fell, pulling her twin close.
Around them, the ship groaned and settled, the warping effects fading, reality reasserting itself with painful slowness.
But in the disposal chamber, Eve knelt on the cold metal floor, holding Lilith's unconscious body against her chest, and felt something she'd never felt before.
Relief.
Her twin was alive.
She was still here.
And Eve would never let them be separated again.