The storm outside hadn't let up.
Thunder crawled across the Gotham sky like a wounded beast, echoing through the broken glass of the hideout's upper floor. A repurposed tenement lost in the heart of Gotham's industrial dead zone—it had become their fragile sanctuary, however temporary.
Evelyn sat against the wall, her fingers trembling as she stitched a gash in Draven's side. Blood still trickled, but the worst had clotted.
"Hold still," she muttered.
"I've been stabbed, shot, mauled… that needle's the real torture."
"You're a terrible patient."
Draven winced, smirked, and let her continue. But as the silence stretched, something changed in her eyes. She wasn't just focused—she was somewhere else. Far.
He saw it—the glaze, the distance. The ghosts.
"…Evelyn?"
She looked up, her voice barely audible. "Can I tell you something? And you not see me… differently?"
He nodded once. Slowly.
"I wasn't always this," she said. "Not the hacker. Not the fighter. Before all of this… I was just a girl. Scared. Alone. Hooked to wires."
Draven stayed silent. He let her speak.
"When I was nine, I lived at the Redbird Orphanage. Everyone thought it was just for troubled kids. But it wasn't. They were testing us—early Halcyon neuro-scans, psychological manipulation. They said I had a 'gift.' That I could process patterns—predict behavior faster than the machines could. I didn't understand it then. But they wanted to break me. Make me theirs."
Lightning flared across the skyline. Her voice trembled now.
"One night, the fire alarms went off. Kids were screaming. Locked in their rooms. I tried to open the doors, but… they were sealed. So I ran. I lived. They died."
Her eyes watered, but no tears fell.
"GCPD found me in the alley the next morning. Cold. Burned. They asked no questions. Just took me straight to a 'private care program.' Halcyon, again. They cleaned me up, fed me lies, gave me a new name, a new identity. And when I got older… they made me part of the machine."
Draven spoke, voice low. "And you broke out."
"I ran the moment I found out what they were doing. They used our trauma. Catalogued it. Refined it into systems they could deploy to test pain tolerance, fear response, and emotional manipulation across the city. They were turning human suffering into science."
She pulled up her sleeve.
A barcode, barely faded, marked her forearm.
"E7-HART. I wasn't even a name to them."
Draven stood. Sat beside her. Gently ran his gloved fingers across the faded brand.
"You are now," he said.
Their eyes met. A fragile bond forged in ruin, shared between two people molded by violence—one from fire, one from war. In this broken world, they were slowly finding something neither had expected: someone who understood.
And for Draven, that realization… terrified him.
Elsewhere – Below the Ashes
The ruins of Black Hollow still smoked.
Among the rubble, beneath concrete and twisted steel, moved shadows. Ten figures in sleek, faceless masks stood in a circle, awaiting instruction. In the center stood a man with silver hair and blood-red gloves. His eyes, ice-blue behind a white and crimson mask, radiated clinical madness.
Dr. Elric Vale.
Codename: Cicero.
Once Halcyon's chief behavioral architect. Now its rogue ghost—building his own empire of broken minds.
"The vaults were compromised," he said flatly, holding up a scorched data core. "But the Echo Registry still exists. Somewhere out there, she's alive."
One of his agents stepped forward. "Subject Evelyn?"
"Yes," Cicero whispered, almost fondly. "The girl with the 'chaos lens.' Her neurological profile was unlike anything Halcyon ever processed. Predictive empathy, impulse decoding, sentiment mapping. She was our Mona Lisa… until she ran."
He turned toward the black glass of his portable neural interface. On the screen: Evelyn's face, flickering with old data overlays. Brainwave signatures. Emotional response timelines.
"We lost her once," Cicero muttered. "We won't again."
A pause.
"And Draven… he's the knight, yes? Let's see how righteous he stays… once I paint the past in blood."
Back at the Hideout
Later that night, Evelyn stirred from uneasy sleep. Sweat clung to her skin. A nightmare. Fire. Screams. A familiar red mask in the flames.
Draven sat beside her. Quiet. Alert.
"You okay?" he asked.
She nodded. "Just… echoes."
He handed her a warm cloth, then, without hesitation, sat beside her again.
"I won't let them take you," he said quietly.
"They already did," she whispered. "They took all of us."
Draven stared into her eyes.
"Then we take it back."
And as the city groaned beneath the storm, Draven knew something had changed. Not just in the war.
In him.
He'd spent so long being Gotham's fury. Its reckoning. But now…
He cared again. And that made everything far more dangerous.
Especially for those who dared to hurt her.