Chapter Text
What does it mean to be a Supe. Does it matter if you're born with a gift? Is it cheating if you're given one. For only God makes Angels, and Men… Create monsters when they play God…
Vought Tower
May 1986
It's been 7 days since I arrived at Vought Tower. Everyone has shown me kindness for the most part, whether it is genuine I can't say. America is different. Like the world here is coated in lead paint, pretty and bright, so you won't see it coming when it poisons you.
I've kept to myself mostly, only because Mr. Edgar advised I should refrain from speaking too much until I find my place here. My English is not very good yet, but I can understand enough.
I'm told I am of value, that I'm to join 'Payback' team as a symbol of strength, or a trinket to flaunt. My first mission is today with their leader, to prove that I belong, to see if he's willing to accept me despite what I am.
I take a deep breath sitting up from my bed, the Supe suit designed for me draped on the back of a chair.
Charcoal-gray armored spandex with white roses embroidered across the chest, their stems weaving downward in elegant, interlacing patterns until they spill into a modest flared skirt. Even the knee-high boots are threaded with the same pale vines.
I rise and trail my fingers over the fabric. The material is cool, engineered, expensive. Every stitch deliberate. Vought never does anything without calculation.
This is all ridiculous to me but, it outweighs my want to belong somewhere. For my existence to mean something.
I pull on the suit wearing it as a second skin to my own. Reaching down I slip on the boots to complete the look. I raise my gaze to meet my reflection in the small quarters I was given as my sanctuary. My hair is long, dark brown almost black, my eyes shine peridot green, and my skin is fair from my prior circumstances.
I practice a smile.
It looks wrong.
I exhale slowly and whisper the name they have given me.
“Little Girl"
It's awful, I know, but Vought chose it so I could. How you say. Win over the hearts of America, make myself marketable. Whatever that means.
If I am accepted into Payback, I will be the youngest Supe to ever join them.
And the smallest.
I square my shoulders.
Let them underestimate me.
I leave my quarters and step into the corridor, boots echoing faintly against polished marble. The tower hums with distant activity, phones ringing, heels clicking, the machinery of heroism grinding forward.
I walk toward the main hall to meet the leader of Payback.
To meet the man who decides whether I am a decoration or a weapon.
The main hall is wide like a cathedral, drowned in morning light.
Glass stretches from floor to ceiling, the skyline of New York glittering beyond it like a promise. Or a threat.
He stands with his back to me, broad shoulders outlined against the sun. Hands clasped behind him. Still as a statue.
Waiting.
Before I can announce myself, his head tilts slightly.
He senses me. He turns.
His gaze lands on me and drags upward, boots, skirt, embroidered roses winding over charcoal fabric, up to my face. The corner of his mouth lifts in a slow, satisfied smirk.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says. His voice is smooth, amused. “You must be the fresh meat.”
His eyes hold mine now, assessing.
“Little Girl, right?”
I nod once, small and controlled.
I step forward because retreat would look like intimidation.
His boots echo once as he closes the distance instead.
Up close, he smells faintly of aftershave and gunpowder. His eyes roam again, lingering on the white roses stitched over my chest.
“I gotta say,” he murmurs, lifting a hand, brushing two fingers over the embroidery, “I like this look.”
His touch is slow. Proprietary.
“Very… unique.”
My pulse spikes. I slap his hand away before I can stop myself.
The sound cracks in the open hall.
His eyebrows lift and his smile widens.
“Feisty too,” he says, stepping in, reducing the space between us to nothing. “I like that in a woman.”
My jaw tightens.
“Don’t touch me,” I snap.
The accent slips out, soft consonants, rounded vowels. Unmistakably Russian.
The shift in him is immediate.
His smirk vanishes.
It is like watching a curtain drop.
His shoulders square. His jaw locks. The humor drains from his eyes, replaced by something sharp and ugly.
“What did you say?” he asks quietly.
Not confused. Dangerous.
His stare burns into me as if trying to peel back my skin.
“You’re Russian,” he states flatly.
Not a question.
An accusation.
Before I can step back, his hand clamps around my throat and I am slammed against the marble wall. The impact knocks the breath from me. My boots scrape uselessly against polished stone as my feet lift from the ground.
His grip tightens.
Strong. Too strong.
“Do you know what I do to Russians, sweetheart?” he murmurs.
His voice is low now, almost intimate.
Which makes it worse.
Below us, the city continues to sparkle in the sunlight—bright, patriotic, oblivious.
I feel the pressure building in my throat. The instinct to react. To let something bloom.
My eyes lock onto his.
And for the first time since I arrived in America…
I lose control…
The pressure on my throat steals air.
But something else steals my fear.
It begins as a tremor at the base of my spine. A tingling, sharp, electric. It climbs vertebra by vertebra until it settles behind my sternum.
Then it ignites.
Warmth seeps outward from beneath my skin. Not heat like fire.
Something heavier.
Denser.
My vision sharpens. The marble wall behind him fractures into crystalline detail. I can hear the hum inside the building, the wiring, the elevators, the pulse of machines.
My green eyes begin to glow eerily.
The air around us shifts.
And then the silence shatters.
Alarms erupt through Vought Tower, deep, mechanical, not the theatrical kind used for drills. These are the ones I heard only once before in testing.
A monotone recording floods the hall, stripped of emotion:
“Nuclear threat imminent"
The words echo through the marble chamber like a funeral bell.
Somewhere far below, I hear shouting. Running. Panic.
Soldier Boy’s eyes snap from mine to the ceiling, then back to me.
He feels it now, the radiation bleeding from my skin, washing over him in invisible waves.
His grip loosens. Just slightly.
Shock flickers across his face as he stares into my glowing eyes.
The alarms scream louder.
He releases me abruptly.
I fall, boots hitting marble hard before my knees follow. The impact jars through my bones. I drag in a ragged breath as air scorches my lungs on the way down.
“What the hell is going on?” he demands, turning in a slow circle, jaw tight as the tower descends into chaos.
Security shutters begin sliding over sections of glass. Red emergency lights flicker to life, staining the white roses on my suit a violent crimson.
His gaze drops to me.
Realization. Then fury.
“It’s you,” he snarls.
He hauls me up by the front of my suit, slamming me back against the wall. His hand wraps around my throat again, tighter this time, pulling me close.
“You’re the threat that triggered the alarms, aren’t you?”
The warmth inside me pulses harder, reacting to fear, reacting to him.
“Let. Go.” My voice vibrates unnaturally, each word carrying a faint, invisible shockwave.
The radiation slams into him like a physical force. His teeth grit, muscles tightening against the pressure.
“Not a chance,” he growls. “You’re gonna tell me exactly what you’re capable of.”
The glow intensifies. The air distorts around us in shimmering waves. Tiny fractures spider through the marble at my back.
The alarms continue their merciless chant:
“Nuclear threat imminent”
Fear spikes. Anger follows.
My power surges, cresting toward something catastrophic…
And then—
A sharp sting pierces my shoulder.
Small and precise.
I turn my head slowly.
Mr. Edgar stands several yards away, perfectly composed amid the chaos. In his steady hands: a tranquilizer rifle.
Our eyes meet.
The warmth inside me falters.
The radiation recedes like a tide being pulled back into a dark ocean. The glow in my vision dims. The tremor collapses inward, folding into my chest.
My knees weaken.
Soldier Boy’s grip is the only thing keeping me upright now.
The world blurs at the edges.
The alarms grow distant.
My last clear image is Soldier Boy staring at me uneasy.
Then everything goes dark.
(Soldier Boy)
One second she’s glowing like a goddamn reactor core, the next all that heat just… folds back into her like it was never there. The green light dies in her eyes, leaving them half-lidded and glassy as the tranquilizer takes hold.
For a beat, the only sound is the tower screaming.
“Nuclear threat imminent”
Red lights flash across the marble hall, bathing everything in pulses of blood-colored light. Security shutters grind over the windows, sealing out the Manhattan skyline inch by inch.
I keep one hand locked around the front of her suit, holding her upright while I stare at Stan Edgar across the room.
Calm son of a bitch.
The man doesn’t even blink.
In one smooth motion, he lowers the tranquilizer rifle, adjusts the cuff of his suit jacket, and steps closer like the entire building isn’t in the middle of a nuclear panic.
“What,” I say, my voice low and dangerous, “the hell did you just put on my team?”
Edgar’s expression doesn’t shift.
“She is precisely what Vought needs.”
I bark out a humorless laugh, glancing down at the unconscious girl in my grip.
Her head hangs forward, dark hair spilling across the embroidered roses on her suit. She looks small again. Harmless.
Bullshit.
“She just triggered a nuclear threat alarm in the middle of Vought tower,” I snap. “That ain’t ‘what Vought needs.’ That’s a walking dirty bomb.”
The words hang there.
Even saying them out loud makes my jaw tighten. Because now I get it.
The tests. The secrecy. The way they kept her hidden for a week instead of trotting her out in front of cameras like every other new Supe.
They weren’t introducing a teammate.
They were containing a weapon.
Edgar stops a few feet away, hands folded behind his back, perfectly measured.
“Her abilities are still developing,” he says. “Today was intended to gauge how she responded to external stressors.”
My eyes narrow.
“External stressors?”
I look down at the bruise already darkening around her throat where my hand had been.
Then back at him.
“You set this up.”
Edgar doesn’t answer right away, which is answer enough.
A bitter laugh tears out of me.
“You wanted to see how I would react to meeting her.”
“We needed to know if you could handle her,” he says evenly.
Handle her?
Like she’s a missile silo.
And I have to be able to control her if she launches.
The alarms finally cut out mid-loop, plunging the hall into a heavy, unnatural silence. Only the emergency lights continue to pulse.
I look back at the girl.
Little Girl.
Christ, even the name pisses me off now.
She doesn’t look like a threat. She looks like some scared kid dressed up in a billion-dollar lie.
But I felt it.
The radiation rolling off her skin.
The heat.
The way the air bent around her.
For the first time in a long damn while, something actually felt dangerous.
And Vought handed it to me with a smile.
I shove her unconscious body into Edgar’s waiting security detail as they rush into the hall.
“Keep her the hell away from my team until I know what she does,” I say coldly.
Then I step closer to Edgar, towering over him.
“If she goes off in the field and takes out half of Manhattan, I’m not cleaning up your mess.”
Edgar meets my stare without flinching.
“No,” he says. “You’ll be leading it.”
For a moment, I just stare at him.
Then I look toward the sealed windows, toward the city hidden behind steel shutters.
A nuclear girl on my team.
A Russian one.
And Vought wants me to put her in front of cameras and call it patriotism.
A slow grin pulls at my mouth, humorless and mean.
Hell.
Maybe this is gonna be interesting after all.
Consciousness returns in fragments.
First, the sound.
A steady electronic beep… beep… beep, slow and indifferent, somewhere to my left.
Then the cold.
It seeps into my spine through the metal beneath me, hard and unforgiving. My limbs feel heavy, submerged in wet cement, every muscle slow to obey.
Then pain.
A dull ache throbs behind my eyes. My throat burns where Soldier Boy’s hand had crushed the breath from me. My shoulder stings where the tranquilizer pierced skin.
I force my eyes open.
The world swims in white light.
For several disorienting seconds, all I can see are blurred shapes—glass walls, silver instruments, the ghostly outlines of machines. Voices murmur somewhere beyond the haze, low and clinical.
A lab.
Panic spikes through the sedation.
I try to sit up as leather restraints bite instantly into my wrists. Another across my chest. One at my waist. My ankles.
Every point of my body is strapped to a narrow steel examination table bolted into the center of the room.
My breath catches.
No, no—
The movement sends a wave of nausea through me. The room tilts, fluorescent lights smearing into long white scars across my vision.
“Easy, Yelena.”
The male voice is calm, practiced.
I turn my head toward the sound.
A scientist in a white coat stands beside a rolling tray of syringes and monitoring equipment, penlight reflecting in the thick lenses of his glasses. Behind him, two more technicians watch glowing screens lined with graphs, radiation spikes, and biometric readings.
On one monitor, my skeleton pulses in spectral green.
Like I am already something dead being studied.
“You experienced an uncontrolled reactive surge,” the man says, jotting notes onto a clipboard. “The sedative is preventing another escalation.”
My pulse pounds harder.
My skin prickles with the memory of warmth. The alarms.
"Nuclear threat imminent"
I swallow against the pain in my throat.
“What… did you do to me?” My voice comes out rough, barely more than a whisper.
The scientist doesn’t look surprised by the question.
“Nothing,” he says. “We are only monitoring your condition.”
A lie so smooth it almost sounds kind.
I tug weakly against the restraints again, the leather creaking. The motion sends pins and needles down my arms.
A second figure steps into view beyond the glass partition.
Mr. Edgar.
Hands folded behind his back, expression unreadable as always.
Watching the data on the screens.
Not me.
The machines around me hum louder. I can feel sensors adhered to my skin—at my temples, collarbone, wrists. Something cold is pressed against the center of my sternum where the warmth had bloomed before.
A radiation monitor.
Tracking the thing inside me.
My gaze drifts to the observation glass.
On the other side, men in suits speak in hushed voices, pointing toward the readings as if discussing stock performance.
I am not a person in this room.
I am an event waiting to happen.
Fear crawls up my throat, sharper than the restraints.
The tingling starts again.
Small. Barely there.
At the center of my chest.
Immediately, one of the monitors shrills.
A yellow warning light begins to blink.
The scientist’s head snaps toward the screen.
“Radiation levels rising,” one of the technicians says.
My breathing quickens.
“I… I not doing anything,” I whisper.
But that isn’t true.
I am afraid.
And fear feeds it.
Warmth slips beneath my skin, faint but unmistakable, threading through my ribs like liquid sunlight poisoned at its source.
The restraint over my chest begins to heat. Smoke curls where the leather touches fabric.
The scientists freeze.
Behind the glass, Edgar does not move.
He simply watches.
“I need to increase the sedative,” the scientist says, already reaching for another syringe from the metal tray.
Panic slams through me.
I pull against the restraints hard enough for the leather to bite into my wrists, my pulse thundering in my ears. Fear ripples through my chest, threatening to wake the thing inside me again.
Before the needle touches skin, another voice cuts cleanly through the monitors’ frantic beeping.
Low. Controlled. Absolute.
“Will that interfere with what needs to be done?”
Mr. Edgar.
The scientist stills and looks past me toward the observation glass.
“The sedative will reduce the subject’s physical responses to near zero,” he says carefully. “She’ll remain conscious, but… largely unresponsive. However, sir, the dosage—”
“Administer it,” Edgar says.
Sharp enough to end the conversation.
The syringe slides into my arm.
The burn is immediate.
Cold liquid rushes into my bloodstream, spreading with horrifying speed. The tingling in my chest gutters out like a flame starved of oxygen. The dangerous warmth beneath my skin cools, retreating deeper and deeper until I can no longer feel where it ends and I begin.
The room dims around the edges.
My eyes flutter, struggling to stay fixed on the scientist’s blurred face above me.
My limbs grow heavier by the second.
Not numb. Defeated.
As if my body has simply surrendered before I had the chance to command it.
“Subject’s vitals are stabilizing.”
“Radiation levels falling.”
“Reactive waves suppressed.”
The voices overlap into a distant, shapeless chorus.
Clinical. Satisfied.
I hate how pleased they sound.
Footsteps approach, measured and deliberate.
Mr. Edgar steps into view at the side of the table, his shadow falling across my face. He studies me the way a jeweler studies a diamond under harsh light, searching for flaws, value, weaknesses.
I force myself to glare at him.
It is the only rebellion I have left.
The corner of his mouth lifts.
Not a smile. Something colder.
“Can you understand me?” he asks.
My mind screams yes.
My mouth does nothing.
My body lies still, traitorous and leaden.
Edgar’s gaze shifts briefly to one of the technicians, who gestures toward the monitor displaying my heart rate—still elevated, still betraying me.
“I’d say that’s a yes,” he says dryly. “Though you won’t remember much of this.”
The words strike harder than the sedative.
He means to take even this from me.
He leans forward, bracing both hands against the steel edge of the table beside my head. His face hovers inches from mine, every line of it sharpened by the fluorescent light.
His voice lowers intimate and threatening.
“But I want you to keep one piece of information, Yelena.”
His eyes lock onto mine with terrifying certainty.
“You are going to be exceptional.”
The room tilts.
My vision tunnels.
I try to hold onto the hatred, onto the fear, onto the sound of his voice—but the sedative rolls through me in heavy waves, drowning thought after thought before I can keep them.
My eyelids sag.
The last thing I see is Edgar’s expression shifting into that familiar, bloodless smirk.
“You’re exactly what we need,” he says quietly.
Darkness closes over me again.
This time, it feels less like sleep, and more like being put away.
(Soldier Boy)
The lab doors slam open hard enough to rattle the reinforced glass.
Every tech in the room freezes.
I don’t.
My boots hammer across the polished floor, the taste of stale anger still sitting in the back of my throat, red emergency lights still flashing slow and ugly from the earlier lockdown.
Through the observation glass, I catch a glimpse of her on a steel table. She looks small under all that wiring and chrome. Strapped down, sedated, glowing monitors charting every twitch in her pulse like Wall Street numbers.
My eyes lock on Edgar.
“You’re gonna brief me,” I say, voice low and carrying enough weight to silence the room. “Right now.”
No one moves.
Not the technicians. Not the guards. Not the clipboard jockeys pretending not to listen.
Edgar turns from the observation window with that same dead-eyed calm I’m starting to hate.
“There are classified components to her development,” he says.
I bark out a single humorless laugh.
“Funny thing about classified, Stan—she almost turned your tower into Hiroshima with better wallpaper.”
The room goes still.
One of the scientists visibly swallows.
I step closer, planting both hands on the nearest workstation, leaning in until the metal groans beneath my weight.
“She’s on my team. She goes into the field with my men. So, unless you want me dragging the truth out of one of your lab coats, you’re gonna start talking.”
For the first time, Edgar actually considers me.
Then he gives a single nod to the lead researcher.
The man hesitates before sliding a thick black dossier across the stainless steel desk.
Stamped in red:
EYES ONLY — VOUGHT / DEFENSE OVERSIGHT
I snatch it up.
The first page hits like a fist.
Recon photos.
Black-and-white satellite images.
Burned forests. Ruined apartment blocks. A ferris wheel frozen in silhouette.
Pripyat.
The date stamped in the corner reads May 1986.
Just days after Chernobyl.
“What the hell is this?” I mutter, flipping the page.
More photos.
A black-ops recovery team in hazmat gear moving through the outskirts of the exclusion zone.
Dead soldiers.
Vehicles warped from heat.
And at the center of one grainy image—
A girl standing barefoot in the ash.
Unaffected.
Watching the camera.
Even in monochrome, her eyes glow pale.
A knot pulls tight in my gut.
The lead scientist clears his throat.
“She was recovered during a covert reconnaissance operation near Pripyat shortly after the reactor failure.”
“Recovered?” I snap, eyes still on the page. “You make her sound like a warhead.”
No one answers. Which is answer enough.
I turn another page.
Soviet schematics. Medical diagrams. Embryonic growth chambers. Gene sequencing maps. Radiological exposure protocols.
Then the header jumps off the paper:
STATE PROGRAM: ZVEZDA SUBJECT 01 SOVIET SUPER-SOLDIER INITIATIVE
I go still.
The scientist speaks carefully, like every syllable might get him killed.
“She was not born in the traditional sense. She was genetically cultivated in a Soviet laboratory under direct government supervision.”
I lift my eyes slowly.
“Say that again.”
He shifts under my stare.
“She was engineered to be the Soviet equivalent of you.”
Silence.
Even the machines behind the glass seem quieter.
I look back at the file.
Fetal development accelerated in an artificial chamber.
Compound V analogs.
Bone density augmentation.
Cellular regeneration.
And then the final line.
Uranium-235 Integration Successful.
I stare at it for a long second.
Then another.
A laugh escapes me, disbelieving and ugly.
“You’re telling me the Reds grew themselves a little radioactive version of me?”
Edgar answers this time.
“Yes.”
The word lands flat.
Controlled.
Like he’s discussing quarterly profits instead of the end of the goddamn world.
My jaw clenches so hard it aches.
I flip another page.
Incident report:
CHERNOBYL REACTOR EVENT — LIKELY CATALYTIC LINK TO SUBJECT 01
I read it twice. Then a third time.
Then it lands.
The reactor. The meltdown.
The radiation spike that poisoned half of Europe.
It wasn’t just a failure.
It was her.
“She caused Chernobyl,” I say.
No one corrects me. No one dares.
The scientist nods once.
“Her powers destabilized during a containment breach inside the Soviet facility adjacent to Reactor Four. The resulting surge is believed to have triggered the chain reaction.”
Jesus Christ.
I look through the glass again.
At the girl lying still beneath restraints and monitors.
A girl. A weapon.
Mass destruction with a heartbeat.
And suddenly every instinct in me starts screaming.
Not fear. Recognition.
Because I know exactly what it means to be built by men in suits, wrapped in propaganda, and pointed at the enemy.
The only difference is they stuffed her full of uranium.
I close the file with a sharp snap.
“And you people thought putting that on Payback was a good idea?”
Edgar steps beside me, looking through the glass at her sleeping form.
His reflection in the reinforced pane looks almost ghostly.
“Not good,” he says.
“Necessary.”
I stare at her. At the stillness.
At the impossible danger hidden inside something so small.
Then I turn to Edgar, rage simmering low and hot.
“If she goes critical again,” I say, “It'll poison all of North America.”
Edgar’s expression never changes.
“Then make sure she doesn’t.”
And just like that, I understood.
This was never about adding a new member to Payback.
This was about handing me a Soviet-made weapon and seeing whether America’s greatest hero could keep his hand on her leash.
The lab smells like antiseptic, ozone, and something burnt underneath it all.
Not smoke. Memory.
I stand in the observation room with the black dossier still tucked under one arm, staring through reinforced glass at the girl strapped to the table below.
Sedated and Silent.
The rise and fall of her chest is the only thing making her look human.
Banks of monitors continue to pulse with green waveforms. Radiation readouts crawl across black screens. Brain activity blooms in jagged spikes, mapped in glowing lines that look more like seismic data than thought.
Edgar stands beside the lead technician, watching the feeds with that same graveyard-calm expression.
“What now?” I ask, voice rough with irritation. “You gonna keep her doped up forever?”
Edgar doesn’t look at me.
“No,” he says. “That would be inefficient.”
The lead scientist adjusts his glasses and gestures toward a speaker system mounted above the chamber.
“We’ve been integrating a layered verbal conditioning response,” he explains.
I look at him.
Blank.
He swallows.
“A controlled phrase architecture,” he tries again. “A trigger.”
That gets my attention.
My eyes narrow on Edgar.
“You’re building a sleeper agent.”
Edgar finally turns to face me.
“We are ensuring operational reliability.”
Corporate words for something rotten.
I glance back through the glass at her still form.
Even unconscious, there’s tension in her face, something in the set of her brow that suggests some buried part of her is still fighting in the dark.
“And where exactly do I fit into this?” I ask.
The technician taps a key.
A waveform comes to life across the monitor.
An audio playback.
My voice.
Distorted just enough by the speakers to make my skin crawl.
For a second, I only stare at it.
Then my jaw tightens.
“You used me.”
Edgar’s expression never changes.
“She responded most strongly to your presence,” he says. “Stress, fear, escalation—her power threshold rose exponentially in direct response to your voice profile.”
A sharp, humorless laugh escapes me.
“So now my voice is the leash.”
The technician visibly winces.
Edgar doesn’t.
“A command key,” he corrects.
Same damn thing.
The technician presses another key, and the speakers crackle softly in the chamber below.
Then my recorded voice fills the room.
Low.
Controlled.
“Little Girl. Sleep.”
The response is immediate.
Her elevated brain activity drops.
Her heart rate slows.
The tension in her muscles bleeds away.
Every spike on the radiation graph smooths into a near-perfect line.
I stare through the glass as her body sinks deeper into programmed stillness.
Jesus.
The scientist, encouraged now, switches to another file.
“Secondary phrase package,” he says.
Another version of my voice rolls through the chamber.
Sharper this time.
Harder.
Weaponized.
“Little Girl. Burn bright.”
The reaction is instant and worse.
Her fingers twitch against the restraints.
Green light flickers beneath her eyelids.
The radiation monitors shriek from yellow into orange warning bands.
The bruises around her throat I inflicted begin to vanish before my eyes, the tissue returning to its original paleness in seconds.
Heat ripples across the reinforced glass.
Not enough to breach it.
Enough to remind everyone in the room the power within her.
The scientist quickly kills the audio.
The readings begin to fall.
The green beneath her skin fades to a ghostly shimmer.
Silence settles over the room.
For once, I don’t have a smartass line ready.
I just stare at the speaker.
At the idea that my own voice can make her either a sleeping angel or a walking reactor.
All depending on which words get spoken.
“That’s sick,” I mutter.
The words leave before I can stop them.
Edgar folds his hands behind his back.
“It is effective.”
I turn on him.
“You’re carving commands into her head.”
“I’m giving her structure.”
“No,” I snap, looking through the glass again, “you’re taking away whatever part of her’s still a person.”
Edgar’s gaze shifts to her, utterly unmoved.
“She was engineered by the Soviets to be a state weapon,” he says evenly. “We are simply refining what they started.”
Edgar’s gaze shifts to her, unmoved.
That one hits harder than I’d like.
Because he’s not wrong.
I know exactly what it means to have your image, your power, your very identity built into something useful for men like him.
Flags.
Propaganda.
Violence sold with a smile.
The realization settles in my gut like lead.
They’re not just controlling her.
They’re using me as the switch.
I stare through the reinforced glass at the unconscious girl, her face lit by the last faint ghost-green shimmer fading beneath her skin.
And for the first time since Edgar handed me that file, the anger in my chest changes shape.
It stops being rage.
Becomes something colder.
Sharper.
Resolve.
Because if Vought thinks they can force this responsibility onto me—
They’d better pray they never give me a reason to turn the switch on them.
Warmth.
It fills everything.
My mind.
My body.
The spaces between thought.
It spreads through me in slow, golden waves, softening every sharp edge inside me until I can no longer tell where fear ends and I begin.
Is this what it feels like…to belong?
There is no lab here.
No restraints.
No cold steel table pressing against my spine.
Only warmth.
A presence drifts through the dark like sunlight through closed eyelids.
A voice.
Low.
Familiar.
It pours into my mind like warm honey, coating every corner where fear and doubt once lived. I cannot make out the words—not truly—but I feel what they mean.
Safety, like being held close in one's arms.
The terrible tension inside my chest loosens.
For the first time in what feels like forever, the thing inside me is quiet.
Then it changes.
The same voice tears through the dark.
Sharp now.
Violent.
It cracks across my mind like lightning splitting a winter sky.
Fear detonates inside me.
Horrid memories flash in fractured bursts—
White Soviet walls. Men in masks scrambling in desperation. Blinding lights flashing down long hallways.
Sirens blare over tormented screams.
No…
The warmth inside me convulses.
Then tears free.
Heat rips out of my body in violent waves, spilling through the dreamscape in blinding pulses of green and white. It builds and builds, impossible to contain, each surge stronger than the last.
Unstoppable.
I feel myself unraveling with it.
A sun forced into human skin.
The voice vanishes as suddenly as it came.
Silence crashes in behind it.
The heat recoils just as violently, folding back into me in reverse—a flower forced shut mid-bloom, petals dragged inward against their nature.
Painful and wrong.
The dark returns.
Empty now.
Cold.
As I drift back into dreamless unconsciousness, the absence settles over me like frost.
And somewhere in the numb dark, a thought rises—not fully mine, yet impossible to resist.
I want the warmth.
I want the voice.
Come back.
Please.