The worst part wasn't the restraints.
It was pretending they mattered.
Karmari lay still on the medical bed, the straps around her wrists and ankles tight enough to sting, but not tight enough to truly hold her if she wanted to break them.
The beeping of the heart monitor beside her had fallen into a steady rhythm. So perfect. So calm. So beautifully fake.
A reflection of what they wanted her to be.
Behind the glass wall, the observation room glowed dimly with cold white light. Shadows crossed every so often—coats, boots, equipment being moved around, data being exchanged.
Her body had been poked and scanned and tested so many times in the past hours that the IV needle in her arm felt like an afterthought.
Her mind, however, had not been touched.
Not the part that mattered.
She made sure of that.
The door to the observation room hissed shut.
She heard steps.
Familiar ones.
Arkan.
He never rushed.
Even his impatience walked in measured strides.
Karmari kept her eyes half-lidded, allowing the world to blur, her breathing slow and slightly shallow—like someone recovering but not fully aware.
"She's stable?"
His voice came through the intercom faintly distorted but unmistakable.
Miral answered, closer to the glass.
"Physically… yes. No internal damage, no major trauma. The worst she has is exhaustion and stress reaction."
"And neurologically?"
Miral hesitated.
Karmari could feel the weight of it even without seeing her face.
"That's… more complicated," Miral said at last.
"There is activity in regions of her cortex that should be quiet. Patterns I don't recognize. Spikes that don't correlate to any external stimulus."
"In plain words, Doctor."
Miral exhaled audibly.
"In plain words: it looks like she fought something… inside her own head."
Silence.
Karmari heard the faint movement of fabric as Arkan folded his arms.
"Is she compromised?"
"By what definition?" Miral shot back.
The brief sharpness in her tone pulled at the corner of Karmari's mouth. A ghost of a smile.
Arkan didn't react to it.
"Can she be a threat to the Gate Program?"
Miral's answer came slowly.
"She's a human weapon, Commander. She has always been a threat to something."
"That's not what I asked."
There was a coldness in his words that made the air feel tighter inside Karmari's lungs.
"Look," Miral said, clearly tired, "her vitals are fine. Her brain activity is… unusual, but not decaying. Whatever happened down there, in A0, didn't kill her. It might have changed her. But we don't have a baseline for what 'unchanged' even means anymore. Not for Generation Ten."
"And what about contamination from earlier generations?"
Miral's voice became almost sarcastic.
"You say that like trauma is contagious."
"Doctor."
A pause.
Karmari could picture Miral pinching the bridge of her nose as she answered.
"There are anomalies in her neural signature, yes. But no clear external presence. Whatever she brought back from down there… if anything… is blended into her. It's not something we can just cut out."
Arkan did not answer for several seconds.
When he spoke again, his tone had shifted—less sharp, more controlled. The voice of someone who'd made a decision.
"Release the restraints."
Miral blinked. "Now?"
"Yes. And remove the IV. If she can stand, I want her on her feet."
"You want to send her back into duty already?" Miral asked. "After all this?"
"Not back into duty," Arkan said. "Not yet. But I need to see whether I'm talking to my soldier…"
A beat.
"…or to something else."
The door to the isolation chamber hissed as it unsealed.
Cool air from the corridor outside slid in, carrying the faint smell of disinfectant and metal.
Miral stepped in first.
Her face looked tired up close—dark circles under her eyes, fine lines of worry etched between her brows. She carried a small tray with scissors and bandage material.
"Hey," Miral said softly. "If you can hear me, I'm going to take these off, okay?"
Karmari let her eyelids tremble, then blinked slowly as if waking for the first time.
"...Miral?"
The medic smiled, relief washing over her features.
"There you are."
She began cutting through the straps, one by one.
The moment the restraint around Karmari's right wrist loosened, she had to consciously stop herself from yanking her arm away like an animal freed from a trap.
Slow.
Steady.
Normal.
She flexed her fingers, feeling blood rush back through them.
"How long was I—"
"About eighteen hours," Miral said. "Give or take. You scared the hell out of everyone."
Karmari let out a low, dry laugh.
"I scared myself worse."
She sat up, feeling the weight of her body return in full.
Ribs aching. Muscles stiff.
Her head, though, felt… clearer than it should have.
Like something had rearranged the furniture inside.
Miral disconnected the IV line and removed the needle gently.
"How much do you remember?" she asked.
Karmari looked at her.
The real question wasn't how much she remembered.
It was which memories she was allowed to admit to.
Bits of the white room flashed inside her mind.
The text on the walls.
The blue light.
The voice.
I am what they failed to remove from you.
Pretend to sleep.
And beneath all of it, like a new name carved into an old heart—
Mikel.
Karmari swallowed.
"Enough," she said at last. "Too much. Not enough. I don't know."
Miral studied her.
"That's honest enough for me."
The speakers crackled.
"Unit 10-Karmari," came Arkan's voice, clipped and firm. "If you are conscious, step to the line."
A yellow line glowed faintly across the floor, a border between the bed and the rest of the room.
Karmari slid off the mattress.
Her bare feet met the cold floor.
Her muscles complained, but they obeyed.
She walked to the line and stopped.
Beyond the glass, Arkan stood with his hands behind his back, his posture a precise intersection of authority and exhaustion.
He never looked like he slept.
He looked like someone who negotiated with fatigue and won on technicalities.
Their eyes met.
"Commander," she said.
"Karmari."
The familiarity of the exchange should have been comforting.
It wasn't.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
It wasn't a polite question.
It was an evaluation.
"Like I was run over by a shuttle," she said dryly. "Twice."
One corner of his mouth moved half a millimeter.
Might have been amusement.
"I'll take that as 'functional'," Arkan said.
"Depends what you want me to do," she replied.
"Walk. Talk. Think." His gaze fixed on her face. "Not necessarily in that order."
She held his stare.
The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of things neither of them wanted to put into words.
Finally, he said:
"What is the last thing you remember from Sector A0?"
Her entire nervous system wanted to answer with the truth.
The man in the corridor.The writing on the walls.The word "Mikel" carved into her skull.
Instead, she let the truth pass through a filter.
"We went down into the city," she said slowly. "Found an underground facility. Old equipment. Signs of previous experiments."
"Previous generations," Arkan said.
"Yes," she answered. "One of them was still alive. Barely."
Miral flinched slightly.
Arkan's expression did not change.
"And after that?" he asked.
"Old systems came online," Karmari said. "Alarms. Structural collapse. We retreated. Somewhere between the lower chamber and the service shaft… I lost consciousness."
Lies, she told herself.
Not full lies.
Just… omissions.
He watched her carefully.
"And before you blacked out—did you experience any… external intelligences?"
The question was too precise.
Too pointed.
She tilted her head.
"You mean like something speaking to me? Controlling me?"
"Anything," Arkan said, "that could be interpreted as non-human agency."
She thought of the blue light.
Of the way his voice had woven itself through her thoughts.
I am the part they failed to isolate.
I was part of the experiment.
If she told them, they would treat it as contamination.
As infection.
And then they would try to cut it out.
She didn't know if that was even possible.
But she knew they would try.
"No voices, sir," she said evenly. "Only noise."
His gaze hardened very slightly.
"Noise?"
"Alarms," she said. "Metal. Collapsing structures. My own blood in my ears."
A long pause.
"Very well," Arkan said. "Medically, Doctor Miral?"
Miral straightened.
"I recommend observation," she said. "But she's not a danger to herself or the unit right now. Physically she's fit. Mentally… she needs rest."
"We all need rest," Arkan replied. "We're not going to get it."
He stepped closer to the glass.
"Karmari."
"Sir?"
"In three hours, I want you in the debrief room with the rest of your squad. Sector A0 is now classified at the highest level. You will not speak of it to anyone outside the team and assigned staff. Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"If you experience… abnormalities," he added, "you report them to Miral immediately."
In her mind, another voice chuckled softly.
If you experience abnormalities, don't tell them everything.
She pushed that down and nodded.
"Understood."
"Good."
He turned away.
Murmured something to the others.
The door to the observation room opened and closed.
He was gone.
They moved her to a regular recovery room after that, smaller and less oppressive than the isolation chamber—but only just.
Miral insisted she be given water and a nutrient pack. Karmari didn't argue. Her body devoured both like it had been starving for days.
Maybe it had.
Once Miral had finished checking her over, she lingered by the door.
"You're sure you're all right?" Miral asked.
Karmari's lips twisted slightly.
"I'm sure I'm not," she said. "But I'm good enough to stand."
"That's not the same thing."
"It's closest we'll get."
Miral sighed.
Her gaze softened.
"Listen, Karmari… if you remember anything strange, or you feel like there are… gaps, shifts, pieces that don't belong—"
"Then I'm precisely like every soldier they ever made," Karmari finished for her.
Miral chuckled, but there was no humor in it.
"Just… don't play strong alone," she said. "We're already outnumbered by everything in this world. No need to add your own head to the enemy's list."
Karmari's eyes flicked up to meet hers.
"That almost sounded like you care."
Miral smirked.
"Don't spread it around. I've got a reputation."
When the door closed behind her, the room fell into a quieter kind of silence.
Karmari tilted her head back against the pillow.
Closed her eyes.
Immediately, something stirred.
Not outside.
Inside.
You lied to him.
The voice was fainter than before, like someone standing in the next room.
"Had to," she thought back, cautiously.
She wasn't sure if she was really speaking to him or just to the wound he'd left.
You're learning.
A flicker of blue light traced across the darkness behind her eyelids.
"You shouldn't be here," she thought. "If they detect—"
They already tried to detect me, the presence replied. They failed.
"Who are you, really?" she asked. "Not in riddles. Not in half-answers. I have your name. I have fragments. But I don't know what you are now."
The answer came slowly.
As if he'd been waiting a long time to be asked that question properly.
Once, I was a child in a tube, just like you. Then I became data. Then a mistake. Then a threat. Now…
He paused.
Now I am what remains when you try to delete a human and keep only the parts that obey.
She opened her eyes.
The room was empty.
White walls.
A screen on the far wall showed static status information.
Heart rate.
Temperature.
Normal. Normal. Normal.
Nothing on that screen mentioned the extra presence sitting quietly somewhere in her neural architecture.
"You're… inside my head," she said under her breath.
Not exactly, he replied. Think of me as someone sitting in the corridor outside your room, talking to you through the door.
"You're in the system," she realized.
Yes.
"The same system that runs the Gate infrastructure."
Yes.
She swallowed.
"And we were in the same experiment."
Yes.
For several heartbeats, she didn't speak.
Then she asked the question that had been burning the longest:
"Did we… know each other? Before?"
Silence.
Then—
You once told me you'd never forget my face.
Her throat tightened.
"And did I?"
Yes.
The answer hurt in ways she was not prepared for.
"Why?"
Because forgetting was the only way they could make you stand up again.
She didn't realize she was crying until the tears cooled on her cheeks.
Three hours later, she stood outside the debrief room door.
Her reflection in the dark glass looked almost the same as always.
Same short black hair.
Same sharp jawline.
Same cold eyes.
But something was wrong in the expression.
Not in what was visible.
In what was missing.
She inhaled slowly.
The door slid open with a hydraulic sigh.
Inside, the rest of her squad already waited.
Feyrn sat closest to the door, arms crossed, posture solid as a wall.
Lyndra leaned back in her chair near the far end of the table, one leg crossed over the other, fingers tapping faintly on the polished surface with sniper patience.
Rivan was slouched in his seat with his boots half-pulled under him, playing absently with a small data chip between his fingers.
Siren occupied a seat near the corner of the room, back to the wall, as if always ready to vanish through it.
Idris sat in the middle, chair angled slightly, hands folded on the table, eyes on the doorway even before it opened.
They all looked up.
The first to move was Rivan.
He let out a low whistle.
"Look who crawled back out of the grave."
"Missed me that much?" Karmari said.
"Please," he snorted. "I was just wondering who they'd make wear your jacket when you didn't."
Feyrn's heavy gaze moved slowly from her face to her shoulders, her hands, her stance.
He said nothing.
He didn't need to.
He was measuring.
Lyndra raised a brow.
"You look less dead than they said you were."
"How dead did they say?" Karmari asked.
"Very," Lyndra replied.
Siren didn't speak.
But her eyes watched.
Carefully.
Karmari's gaze finally settled on Idris.
There was something in his eyes that didn't quite fit with the others.
Relief.
And worry.
"You're late," he said, but his voice was softer than the words.
"I had to fight the bed," she answered. "Hardest enemy so far."
"Did you win?"
"Jury's still out."
She took the empty seat across from Idris.
The room felt smaller than it should have.
The door opened again.
Arkan walked in, carrying a slate.
His expression said nothing.
His eyes said everything.
"Sit," he said, even though they already were.
He placed the slate on the table and tapped it once.
The lights dimmed.
A holo-display rose from the center of the table, showing a rough 3D model of the dead city above A0, then peeling back layers to display the tunnels and chambers beneath.
"We're here to consolidate what happened in Sector A0," Arkan said. "And to establish what it means going forward. This briefing is classified under highest internal protocol. Nothing leaves this room."
He glanced around.
"Understood?"
Nods.
Murmurs.
Karmari felt a faint electric tickle in the back of her skull.
They don't even know what they stepped on, Mikel whispered.
She kept her face blank.
Arkan gestured to the holo.
"Initial scans of A0 listed it as a failed subterranean research block. The official archive marks it as abandoned after structural collapse and catastrophic system failure."
"Archived by who?" Rivan asked.
"Gate Program Central," Arkan replied.
"So the same people who dragged us all into this," Rivan muttered.
Lyndra shot him a warning look.
Arkan ignored it.
"As you now know," he continued, "those records were incomplete. A0 remained partially functional. Systems persisted. Subjects persisted."
His gaze rested on Karmari momentarily as he said that word.
"Subjects," she repeated quietly.
Not "people."
Not "soldiers."
"Subjects."
Idris cleared his throat.
"The man we found," he said. "He was one of them."
"Yes," Arkan said.
"He'd been kept alive far beyond natural limits."
"Why?" Karmari asked.
"To watch," Mikel murmured in the back of her mind.
Arkan's answer was colder:
"Because the program needed data."
Rivan tossed the chip in his hand up and down.
"So we're walking around on top of layers of dead experiments," he said. "Good to know."
Siren finally spoke.
Her voice was quiet, but it cut cleanly through the room.
"And the Gate?" she asked. "How much of what we are now… is built over their bones?"
No one answered immediately.
Arkan's jaw tightened.
"The Gate allowed survival," he said at last. "Without it, there would be nothing left."
"Without it, there might not have been a war in the first place," Lyndra countered.
"That's not a confirmed causality," Arkan replied sharply.
"It doesn't have to be," she said. "We all know it."
Silence.
Karmari felt pressure building behind her eyes.
As if the room itself resented being full of this much unspoken truth.
Arkan tapped the slate again.
A new image appeared.
This time it wasn't the city or the tunnels.
It was the inside of her helmet camera from the mission.
Her own field of vision played across the display, jittering with each step.
The descent.
The broken machinery.
The chamber of drawings.
The word.
MIKEL
Karmari's heart jolted.
She thought, for one horrible second, that Arkan was about to say the name aloud.
He didn't.
He froze the frame right before it centered on the writing.
Zoomed out.
The image blurred, then cleared.
Just enough to show something there—
But not enough to make out the letters.
"These markings," Arkan said, "are from earlier phases of the Program. We don't yet know what they refer to. You will not attempt to research them independently."
Too late, Karmari thought.
Her hands tightened under the table.
Her nails dug into her palms, grounding her to the present.
They won't say my name, Mikel whispered. They can't. I watched them erase it from every file.
"Question," Rivan said. "Why send us there in the first place? A0 was supposedly locked. Somebody up there decided to open a grave and toss us in. Why?"
Arkan's eyes flicked to him.
"For once, Holt, you've asked something useful."
"Mark your calendars," Rivan muttered.
Arkan continued.
"A0 reactivated itself," he said. "It began emitting a specific energy pattern—one very close to Gate resonance, but not identical."
"You mean it woke up," Feyrn said.
"Yes," Arkan answered. "Something down there turned itself on. Or was turned on."
"And you think it's related to…" Idris gestured vaguely. "Earlier subjects."
"That is the working hypothesis," Arkan said.
Karmari felt Mikel stir within the circuitry of her thoughts.
They felt me breathing through their cables, he said. They thought it was a glitch.
She resisted the urge to rub her forehead.
The pressure in her skull was sharpening, like the edge of an idea trying to cut through.
"What happens now?" Siren asked.
"Now," Arkan said, "we continue with our assigned operations topside while internal teams handle deeper analysis of A0. You are not currently scheduled to return there."
Relief.
Disappointment.
Both slid under Karmari's ribs at once.
You will go back, Mikel said calmly. They built you for that.
"What about the people who ordered this mission?" Lyndra asked. "Whoever decided to point us at that hole—are they going to tell us what they're really after?"
Arkan's jaw flexed.
"That is above my clearance," he said. "Which means it is above yours."
There it was.
The ceiling of every conversation with authority.
Karmari glanced at Idris.
His fingers were laced tightly together.
He looked like he was holding words between them, afraid if he opened his hands, they would spill out.
"Karmari," Arkan said suddenly.
Every gaze shifted to her.
"Yes, sir."
"You were the last to lose consciousness. Your implant recorded abnormal activity before shutdown. Did you experience anything that did not come from the environment?"
The room tilted.
For an instant, it felt like she was back in the white sphere, the walls watching, the system demanding confession.
Her tongue felt thick.
"I remember… the alarms," she said slowly. "The facility changing. Doors locking. The ground shaking."
"Nothing else?" Arkan asked.
Her pulse skittered.
"You're hunting for something specific," she said.
"I'm hunting for any hint of external influence," he replied. "Something that might have… touched your mind."
She stared back at him.
If she admitted to Mikel, they would try to pull him out like a foreign object.
If they failed…
They would switch tactics.
From extraction—
To destruction.
Her fingers curled tighter.
"No, sir," she said. "If I was touched by anything, it didn't leave fingerprints."
A muscle jumped in Arkan's cheek.
He studied her.
Too long.
Then he nodded.
"Very well," he said. "Until further notice, your unit remains operational. You will undergo regular checks with Doctor Miral. You will report any unusual phenomena immediately. Dismissed."
Chairs scraped.
Boots thudded.
The squad began to rise.
"Except you, Karmari," Arkan added.
She froze halfway out of her seat.
"Everyone else—out," he said.
They hesitated.
Idris looked back at her.
She offered a faint shrug: It's fine.
They filed out one by one.
Siren.
Lyndra.
Feyrn.
Rivan.
Idris was last.
The door closed behind him with a whispering sigh.
Karmari sat back down.
Arkan did not sit.
He remained standing at the far end of the table, hands braced on the metal edge.
For a moment, he said nothing.
Then:
"You're lying to me."
The words were not angry.
Just… tired.
Karmari took a slow breath.
"About what, exactly?"
"You saw something," he said. "Felt something. In A0. In the isolation unit. You are holding it back because you think it will be used against you."
She did not confirm.
She did not deny.
"That's a very specific accusation for a man who just told everyone this was above his clearance," she said.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
"I have been with this Program longer than any of you have been alive," Arkan said quietly. "I know the signs when an experiment refuses to stay within its designated parameters."
She met his gaze.
"What am I to you?" she asked.
"A soldier," he answered immediately.
Then added, more softly:
"And a mirror."
She wasn't sure she liked that.
"A mirror of what?"
"Of how far we're willing to go," he said. "And how far we've already gone."
He straightened.
"If you trust me," he said, "you tell me everything. If you don't, you keep pretending."
"And if I do trust you," she said, "what do you do with the truth?"
His eyes darkened.
"Whatever I can," he said. "To keep you alive."
Inside her head, Mikel murmured:
He's not lying.
That surprised her more than anything Arkan said.
"Do I have your word," she asked slowly, "that if I tell you something… you won't hand me over to be opened like a broken machine?"
Arkan hesitated.
That alone was an answer.
"I have limits, Karmari," he said. "All humans do. Even those of us who signed away most of them. But within those limits… yes. You have my word."
Karmari looked down at her hands.
At the faint tremor in her fingers.
At the scars of old injections and new.
"You can't fight them," Mikel whispered. Not yet. Not from the outside.
She inhaled.
Exhaled.
"When I blacked out," she began, "I didn't just lose power. I was… taken somewhere. Not physically. Mentally. A containment space. A… digital isolation field."
Arkan didn't move.
His face did.
Barely.
"They tried to erase conflicting data from my mind," she said. "Memories. Identity markers. Something they called 'unauthorized cognitive residue.'"
His jaw clenched.
"How much did they remove?"
She met his eyes again.
"They failed."
For the first time since she'd known him, Arkan Valros looked shocked.
It lasted less than a second.
Then it was gone.
"Failed how?" he asked.
"Something inside the system interfered," she said. "Something—or someone—embedded in the architecture. It called itself… a part of the experiment. It knew the Gate Program. It knew A0. It knew me. Or thought it did."
"And it gave you its name?" Arkan asked.
Her chest tightened.
"Yes."
"And the name?" he pressed.
Inside her skull, Mikel's presence resonated like a warning.
Be careful.
She thought of all the layers of access.
Of how fast a name could be hunted down and erased again.
Of how some things only survived because they were unspeakable.
She shook her head.
"Not yet," she said. "I'm not sure if giving you that name helps you… or kills him."
"Him," Arkan repeated.
"So you believe this presence is… human?"
"He was," she said. "Once."
"And now?"
She thought of the blue light.
The warmth.
The voice that hadn't felt like a machine pretending to be human, but like a human forced to pretend to be a machine.
"Now he's what's left," she said. "After you try to turn a child into data and fail to delete all of him."
A long breath escaped Arkan's lungs.
"Do you trust him?" he asked.
Karmari's answer surprised her.
"Yes," she said.
"Why?"
"Because he's the only one who told me the truth," she said. "That I wasn't born once. I was made twice."
Arkan looked away.
For a moment, his face was unguarded.
Haunted.
"You were taken from the streets," he said quietly. "That much you always knew."
"Yes," she said.
"What you were not told," he continued, "is that you were not taken at random."
She frowned.
"What does that mean?"
He sighed.
"Some of the earlier subjects… those who survived partial Gate exposure… left behind residual patterns. Echoes. The engineers called them 'ghost signatures.'"
Her skin prickled.
Ghost.
He went on.
"They couldn't stabilize those early subjects. Their bodies failed. Their minds shattered. But traces of their adaptations—the ways their neural maps tried to survive—remained stored."
"Stored where?" she asked, though she already guessed.
"In the system," he said. "In the Gate infrastructure. In the buried cores below facilities like A0."
Her heart pounded louder.
"And someone decided," she said slowly, "to reuse those traces."
"Yes."
"In us."
"Yes."
She felt suddenly lightheaded.
"So I'm not just me," she said. "I'm… part of someone else."
"Not exactly," Arkan said. "But you were printed—let's say—over a substrate that wasn't entirely blank."
Substrate.
Like a hard drive.
Or like a grave.
"And this… presence you met…" he said. "It's one of those early subjects."
She nodded once.
"Then the Program may have a bigger problem than we thought," Arkan said.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because if he can interfere with neural isolation protocols," Arkan said slowly, "he might be able to do more than talk."
He looked back at her.
"If he learns to move," he said, "he could use you as a bridge."
Her pulse skipped.
"And what if that's not a problem?" she asked.
"What if it is the only way to fix what the Gate broke?"
Arkan held her gaze for a long time.
When he spoke again, his voice was so soft she barely heard it.
"Then we'll have to decide," he said, "whether we're ready to betray the people who built us… in order to save what's left of what we used to be."
When Karmari left the debrief room, the corridor felt narrower than before.
Her thoughts were louder.
Her footsteps echoed.
Idris was waiting halfway down the hall, leaning casually against the wall, doing a carefully rehearsed impression of someone who just happened to be there.
"How'd it go?" he asked.
She snorted.
"About as well as you'd expect when the Program starts asking whether your brain is still yours."
He studied her face.
"Is it?" he asked quietly.
She hesitated.
"Yes," she said.
Then added, under her breath:
"Mostly."
He smiled faintly.
"Good enough," he said. "Come on. Rivan's taking bets on how long before they send us back into hell. You should at least get your share before we die."
She rolled her eyes.
But she walked with him.
In her head—
Mikel watched.
Silent.
Not gone.
And somewhere far below the base, deep in the dead circuits of A0 and beyond, something else stirred.
The Gate had left more than monsters on the other side.
It had left echoes.
And some echoes had begun to think again.