Seven years ago – Slums of Sector 5
The room that can be compared to a tomb.
Boards nailed over the window slats choked out the last whispers of daylight, leaving only the furnace's dying glow spilling in the gaps of the door.
Shadows pooled in the corners like spilled ink, thickening where the plaster bulged with rot.
The tainted air clung to the back of her throat—mildew, rust and something rotting, something that had seeped into the floorboards long before the girl had been dragged inside.
In the far corner, a small shadow curled tighter into itself.
Knees jammed against ribs.
Chin dug into collarbone.
A fist shoved between teeth—not to stifle a scream, but to silence the breath that might betray her.
The girl was just about eight years old. Maybe or if the girl knew how to count.
And time meant nothing here.
Nothing to the girl who was never even given a name.
The girl knew hunger.
But never noticed it as it was something constant to her.
Knew the way cold settled into bones like a second skin.
Knew the metallic taste of biting through her own wrist to escape the ropes.
But most of all, she knew pain.
Not as a stranger that came and went, but as a constant thing.
A hand always around her throat.
On her back, there is a bruise in the shape of a boots.
Her ribs pressed sharp against skin stretched too thin, each breath a shuddering effort.
The tattered remains of a shirt hung off her frame, the fabric stiff with grime and dried sweat.
Bruises mottled her arms in ugly blooms—some fresh and purpling, others faded to sickly yellow.
A particularly dark one wrapped around her throat like a collar.
She didn't whimper.
Didn't cry.
Because she learned that noise brought attention.
Attention from the man.
And there it was again.
The familiar groaning of the floorboards.
A thud—something heavy hitting the floor.
Then a voice, raw and shattered:
"PLEASE! No more! Pl…ease"
As the girl heard of the familiar begging, her fingers dug into her knees unnoticed.
She knew that voice.
The neighbor woman.
The one who'd once slipped a small plate of food through the door when the man wasn't looking.
The one who'd whispered, "...hide and…don't move," when the girl had flinched at her touch.
Boots stomping overhead made her snap to reality.
The laughter, low and rolling, like a dog's growl.
And then another thud.
A wet crack.
The girl pressed her hands over her ears.
It didn't help.
The furnace coughed in the hallway, its weak glow flickering under the door.
For a heartbeat, the light caught the scars on her wrists—jagged, uneven lines where she'd tried to gnaw through the ropes herself.
Her ankles were worse.
The skin there had split and healed, split and healed, until the scars looked like twisted vines.
"Stop—STOP! I'LL DO ANYTHING—!"
A scream.
Then next a sob.
And finally–silence.
The girl didn't move.
The man would come back soon.
He always did.
And when he did, he'd be in a worse mood than before.
She knew the rhythm of it now: the shouting, the thuds, the terrible quiet after.
Then the creak of the floor as he tried to mask his excitement, his breath still ragged with whatever he'd done upstairs.
But this time—
The stomping stopped.
A beat of stillness.
The girl's lungs locked.
Then—
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Closer and closer.
The doorknob rattled.
A key scraped in the lock.
The girl's body moved before her mind could catch up—flattening herself against the wall, making herself small, smaller, as if she could dissolve into the rot and the shadows.
The door swung open.
Light from the hallway spilled in, carving the man's silhouette across the floor.
He stood there for a long moment, his breath loud in the quiet.
Then he stepped inside, his boots leaving dark prints on the warped wood.
"There you are," he said.
His low grumbling voice was almost gentle.
That was the worst part.
***
The days bled together in a haze of hunger and pain.
Each morning peeled away the same as the last–the sour stench of mildew in her nose, the rough floorboards biting into her thighs as she curled tighter into her corner.
The plaster behind her back had grown soft from her constant pressing, the wall absorbing her shape like dough.
She never wondered or prayed when it might end.
As for the thought never occurred to her.
The concept of endings required beginnings, and she knew neither.
Only the rhythm of it, the man's boots against the floor, the woman's choked whispers through the opening on the door, the way pain lived in her joints like a second pulse.
These moments weren't hope - they were simply variations of the ache.
She didn't know the word for mother.
She didn't imagine the man could be anything but what he was.
The voices slithered under the door like smoke.
She knew their shapes before their meanings—the jagged edge of the man's laughter, the wet rasp of the woman's crying.
Words meant nothing here.
No one had ever bent close to show her how sounds curled into meaning, how a mouth could shape more than screams.
Yet some things repeated:
A gasp of "No—" like a knee hitting floorboards.
The shuddering "Please" that always came before the thuds.
And "Help"—the word that tasted like blood because she'd bitten her tongue raw screaming it that time, before she learned no one was listening.
Silence became her first language.
She learned its grammar through split lips and trembling limbs - that cries just got unanswered into the damp air, that whimpers only made the man's hands squeeze tighter.
Voice after voice had died in her throat, until her vocal cords grew as numb as her fingertips.
Stillness became her armor.
When she stopped flinching, the blows came less often.
When she stopped struggling, the ropes bit less deep.
She perfected the art of vanishing while still breathing, her body becoming just another shadow in the corner, her pulse slowing to near nothing.
And when even that wasn't enough, she discovered how to dissolve her presence, and most of all, her mind.
She'd stare at the water stain on the ceiling until it bled into the shape of a cloud she'd seen through the gaps of the boarded window.
She'd count the heartbeats between screams until she doesn't know how to count more than ten.
The pain would float outside her like something happening to another person, in another room, in another world that wasn't quite real.
Reality was a door she could close.
And so she did.
***
The woman came sometimes, when she couldn't feel the man's presence.
She would slip inside, a ghost in the half-light, and press a crust of hardened bread into the girl's hands.
Her fingers were always cold.
Her eyes never quite met the girl's.
The girl never wondered why she came.
A question required the expectation of an answer, and she expected nothing.
The bread was simply there, like the dampness in the air, like the ache in her bones.
A fact.
A condition.
Nor did she question the woman's face—a landscape of bruises in varying stages of decay.
A swollen lip, a yellowing eye, a cheek blooming purple.
It was not unusual.
It was simply… a face.
The only one she knew besides the man's.
It was the shape of the world, and the world was a painful place.
The bread was given.
The face was bruised.
She ate in silence, and the woman left quietly, and the silence between them was the only language they shared.
Curiosity was a luxury she could not afford.
It had not been stolen from her, not in a single, violent act.
It had simply starved, withering away in the silence, until its absence was as natural as the hunger in her belly.
To wonder why was to invite a sharper, more intricate kind of pain.
To imagine a before or an after was to acknowledge the crushing weight of the now.
So she let it go.
It was a conscious surrender, a discipline honed in the dark.
She learned to pour her consciousness out like water onto the dusty floor, to watch her own thoughts dissipate into nothing.
The goal was not peace—a concept as foreign as comfort—but a profound and hollow neutrality.
A blank slate.
A room with no echoes.
A mind with no questions could not be disappointed.
A heart with no expectations could not be broken.
It was the purest form of survival she knew—until the day it shattered.
It did not end with a whisper, but with a roar that tore through the very foundations of Sector 5.
The event that would scorch the world she once knew to ashes.
***
Mags' attention snapped back into focus with the cold weight of the shotgun in her hands.
The stench of the sewers—stagnant water, rust, and the coppery tang of fresh blood—filled her lungs.
The distant drip, drip, drip of water was the only sound, a metronome counting the seconds of this impossible standoff.
Her finger rested on the trigger, the pressure a hair's breadth from catastrophe.
But it did not move.
Her gaze, usually a flat, calculating thing that assessed threats and exits with machine-like precision, was now locked on the scene before her.
Not on the tactical advantage, not on the kill zone.
On the people in front of her.
Vega, the Red Dog scout, was on his knees.
Not in surrender, but in exhaustion and pain, his body a canvas of burns and blood.
His arms were spread, a hollow, broken parody of surrender, his eyes holding not fear, but a grim, final resignation.
He was waiting for the shot.
And Pen, her own teammate, stood rigid a few feet away, her monofilament wires coiled but not yet striking.
Her expression was a mask of conflicted tension, her eyes darting from Mags to the wounded Dogs and back again.
Logic screamed one thing.
The mission objectives were clear.
Luckily, the enemy was cornered.
This should be just a clean sweep up.
Yet her finger would not obey.
A cold, unfamiliar sensation, sharp and needle-like, pricked the back of her mind.
It wasn't fear.
It wasn't hesitation born of weakness.
It was akin to recognition.
It reminded her of something.
Something that she has long forgotten.
Forgotten? How?
She suddenly flinched for a little bit.
Pen beside her noticed that suddenly something was clearly wrong with her.
Even Vega noticed something too but never bothered to fight as if he did, he felt everything that he set up to save those behind him would be over in just a split second of wrong decision.
Mags refocused her eyes in front of her.
The way Vega positioned himself, not to fight, but to shield the wounded behind him.
The raw, animal desperation in his posture.
It was a language she had never been taught but understood in her bones.
It was a reflection of a feeling she once felt during that time.
She was not looking at an enemy.
She was looking at a cornered animal protecting its own.
And in that fractured second, the shotgun in her hands felt less like a tool.
The roles had blurred, and the familiar, comforting pair of hunter and prey had collapsed into something incomprehensible.
Her breath caught a tiny, almost imperceptible hitch in her otherwise silent composure.
The world had narrowed to the space between her finger and the trigger.
Yet her finger would not move.
She had solved such violence a hundred times before without a flicker of thought.
But now… nothing.
Then a sound.
Not from her throat, but from the hollowed-out place inside her that had once been a voice.
It was less a word and more a tremor given shape, a single, sharp exhalation of recognition that seemed to vibrate in the damp air around them.
"You."
Vega's bloodied face went rigid.
His mind, sharp even in ruin, scrambled over the word.
A threat?
A curse?
It carried no tone, no clear intent, and that ambiguity was more terrifying than a shouted death sentence.
His gaze darted from the unwavering barrel of her shotgun to her eyes, searching for the meaning she had not spoken.
Beside Mags, Pen felt the shift.
She didn't understand the silent exchange, but she understood the dangerous stalemate.
Her own grip tightened on her monofilament launcher, her eyes locked on Vega, waiting for a twitch, a sign.
But she was also waiting for Mags.
The question hung, unvoiced, in the tense space between them: What are you doing? And what the hell do we do now?
Then, as if to slice through the weight of it, her voice cut through the dripping dark, a sharp, practical blade severing the strange thread between Mags and Vega.
"Hands. Show them. Now."
Her command was flat, stripped of all emotion, but the tension in her stance betrayed the calculation raging beneath.
Her monofilament wires were coiled and ready, her finger resting lightly on the launcher's trigger.
She watched Vega's every twitch, the way his muscles coiled even in defeat.
She would not give him an opening.
She would not let his desperation become their funeral dirge.
Yet, her aim was not to execute.
She saw the wounded scouts gasping behind him, the way Vega's own body was a tapestry of fresh burns and blood.
To gun them down now felt less like a battle and more like a slaughter.
And Pen, for all her sharp edges, had never been a butcher.
She was giving them a chance to surrender.
A thin one, balanced on the razor's edge of her patience and Mags' unsettling stillness.
It was the most mercy this sewer had ever seen, and it was colder than the concrete beneath their feet.
Vega moved with a slow, deliberate agony, every muscle screaming as he lowered himself to the grimy sewer floor.
He would not give them the satisfaction of seeing him flinch, even as the fire in his ribs and the deep ache of his burns threatened to swallow his vision in white-hot sparks.
The field salve and pain-reliever shot were a pathetic defense against the damage he'd taken; they were a thin blanket thrown over a raging inferno.
He grit his teeth, the sound loud in his own skull, as Pen closed in.
Her search was clinical and efficient.
Her hands patted down his jacket, his vest, finding the hidden pouches and empty holsters.
She was thorough, leaving him no dignity, but he offered no resistance.
His pride was a luxury he'd lost back in the burning warehouse.
Then her fingers found the obvious weight on his left thigh.
She unbuckled the sheath with a practiced tug, and the serrated knife came free.
In the dim glow of the lumen strips, the curved, jagged edge gleamed with a wicked light, each tooth looking hungry.
A low, appreciative whistle cut through the drip and hum of the tunnels.
It was so out of place it made Vega flinch.
"This seems well-loved," Pen remarked, turning the blade over in her hand.
The steel was pristine, the edge honed to a murderous sharpness, a stark contrast to his own battered state.
Vega let out a sharp, pained snort. "Of course."
The two words were heavy with unspoken meaning.
It was his tool.
His life.
The one thing, besides the people he led, that he bothered to take care of.
Pen's search did not end with the serrated blade.
It became a grim, methodical unveiling.
From a sheath sewn into the inside of his jacket sleeve, she pulled a slender stiletto, its needle-like point designed for slipping between ribs.
From a hidden compartment in his boot, a compact push-dagger, its T-grip fitting perfectly in a clenched fist.
A small, wicked karambit followed, curled like a talon, from a pouch at the small of his back.
One by one, they landed on the wet concrete with soft, metallic clinks.
A butterfly knife, its handles worn smooth from countless flourishes, joined the growing pile.
Then another flat throwing knife from a forearm sheath.
Mags watched, her expression unreadable, as Pen pulled a sixth blade—a heavy, utilitarian shiv honed from a piece of industrial strut—from a concealed pocket on Vega's belt.
It was less a magician's sleight of hand and more an archaeologist unearthing the arsenal of a man who expected to be disarmed and still needed to kill.
It was only when Pen stepped back, gesturing to the small armory now gleaming on the floor, that Mags became aware of the unwavering pressure of her own finger on the trigger.
The stock was still pressed hard against her shoulder, the barrel still aimed at Vega's chest.
She had not moved an inch.
A sharp grunt escaped Vega's lips as Pen wrenched his arms behind his back.
The monofilament thread, thin and nearly invisible, bit deep into his wrists as she tied it off with a vicious knot.
It was a material that would slice to the bone at the slightest struggle.
As she worked, Pen's gaze flickered upward. She saw Mags' arms slowly lower, the barrel of the shotgun tilting away from Vega's head to point at the grimy floor.
The movement was small, but in the language of violence they both spoke, it was a shout.
"We need to report this to base," Pen said, her voice low but firm, cutting through the tense silence.
Her eyes then drifted past Vega to the other wounded Red Dogs.
They weren't combatants anymore; they were casualties.
She met Mags' look, her own expression hard but not cruel. "...I, for one, have no desire to kill when it serves no purpose."
Mags held her gaze for a long moment, her dark eyes unreadable.
Then, her stare dropped to the damp concrete between her boots.
The silence stretched, filled only by the labored breathing of the wounded.
She wasn't just acknowledging Pen's words; she was wrestling with them.
This mercy, this deviation from a clean, tactical end, was a complication.
It was a risk.
And in the quiet of her own mind, she searched for the answer to a question she'd never had to ask before: was sparing an enemy a sign of strength, or a fatal weakness?
Mags, in the end, gave a single, shallow nod.
It was not an agreement born of conviction, but a surrender to the strange and inconvenient turn their mission had taken.
The shotgun's weight felt different in her hands now—heavier, less like a tool and more like a question she couldn't answer.
Pen finished the last knot and stood, her boots scraping against the wet concrete. "Right. Let's move."
The order hung in the stagnant air, a fragile command over an impossible situation.
They were Steel Talons, deep in hostile territory, and their only viable path forward was now cluttered with the very enemies they were sent to dismantle.
Vega remained on his knees, his head bowed, but his mind was racing, calculating the angles of this unexpected survival.
The two Talon women turned their attention to the other wounded, their movements efficient but slowed by the burden of this choice.
And in the oppressive silence of the sewer, beneath the groaning weight of the city above, the three factions—hunter, prey, and the wounded—began a slow, painful procession into an uncertain truce, leaving only the echo of dripping water and the ghost of a shot that was never fired.