I don't know how long I've been thinking.
Time is slippery here. Just the measured drip in the IV bag and the low hum of machines.
At some point, the sound shifts: footsteps, softer than boots. One of the med team steps in. He doesn't introduce himself. He just checks the line in my arm, his gloved fingers pressing into my skin as if testing whether I'm real.
"Time to take this out," he says.
I watch his hands work. The tape comes away with a muted rip. The needle slides free, leaving behind a small, perfect bead of red that he covers with fresh gauze and a strip of tape.
"Shower's free," he adds, nodding toward the adjoining room. "Might feel better after."
I consider it for a moment. Not because I need permission, but because agreeing feels like another kind of choice, and choices are better when they're mine.
"Fine," I say.
The shower room is all tile and steam. Hot water hits my shoulders and rolls down my spine, washing away the last traces of stale air and disinfectant. I stand there longer than necessary, letting the heat loosen the tension in my jaw.
When I finally turn toward the fogged mirror above the sink, I pause. It's not my face that holds me there.
It's my back.
The tattoo covers my entire back, a black-and-red storm frozen in skin. Jagged streaks of ink slash across my shoulder blades, thick black lines. Between them, splashes of deep red burst outward, sharp and uneven, like fresh blood caught in the flight.
It's chaos, but it's not random. The pieces are arranged with precision, each line and smear angled like it's part of a code. I have no memory of the needle, the pain, the choice. But some part of me knows this wasn't random.
Up close, I see faint textures in the ink—spots where it looks brushed on, other places where it's packed in solid, a weight under my skin.
It doesn't feel decorative — it feels like a warning to someone. Or a claim on me.
I stare long enough, I start to see shapes inside it: a fractured circle near my spine, something almost like wings broken apart, a smear that could be the tail of a number.
Enough to think.
I pull the shirt over my head, the cotton clinging to my damp skin, and tuck the metal tag into my bra.
Closer now.
Safer.
I don't look back at the mirror before I leave.
By the time I get back to my bed, the heat from the shower has faded, and exhaustion settles in its place. I let it take me.
Morning, or what passes for it here, comes with more footsteps. This time it's all four of them. I've started keeping track. Med team, I've decided to call them, 1, 2, 3, and 4. They move like they've done this together for years, each falling into place without speaking.
1 checks my vitals. 2 swaps out the bedding. 3 hands me a glass of water. 4 hovers like he's waiting for me to break the silence.
They try talking to me. I answer when they ask something directly, but I don't ask them anything back. It's not shyness. It's control. The less I ask, the less they choose to tell me.
When they're almost finished, 3, the one with the quiet voice, reaches into his bag and pulls out a book.
"You don't seem to know much about… Well, anything outside this place," he says, holding it out to me. "Figured this might help."
I take it without comment. The cover shows a map, lines and borders I don't recognize. The title is simple: Terra Luna.
He doesn't wait for thanks. None of them do. They leave in the same order they came, the door clicking shut behind them.
***
Over the next few days, the book stays with me. On the bed. In my lap. Sometimes closed, sometimes open to the same page for hours while I stare at it but read nothing.
When I do read, the facts build like quiet weight in my head.
World War 5. It's written like an inevitability - not if, but when it happened. The pages don't bother with the old kind of storytelling where the blame belongs to one man, one country, one spark. This war wasn't clean like that. It was a dozen fires burning at once, feeding each other until the whole sky turned black.
Somewhere along the way, Earth became Terra Luna.
Power, the book says, didn't vanish when the war ended. It was broken, scattered, scooped up again by the hands quick enough to grab what was left. What came out of that scramble weren't countries anymore, not in the way the word used to mean. They called them colonies now - six of them, each built around whatever resources they had managed to keep, each pretending they could hold steady while the rest of the planet burned slower than before.
The first pages linger on Nerava. On maps it looks like rolling green, wide valleys between slow, curving rivers. The book calls it the breadbasket of Terra Luna, but the description is colder than that: numbers, crop yields, export quotas. It doesn't tell I how it feels to stand in a place like that, with wind over the wheat and guards in the towers. Here, food isn't just survival. It's leverage. The colony's gates are open only to those who can pay in something Nerava values and they decide what that is.
Then there's Blackwater - the name feels heavy even before I see the pictures. Half-fortress, half-floating city, its walls rise from a poisoned sea, the stone slick with constant spray. Storms slam the docks day and night, and the salt air eats through metal as easily as it wears down bone. The book talks about oil rigs and deep-water mining platforms, about rare minerals pulled from trenches so deep light can't reach them. It doesn't say much about what swims in those depths, only that the crews who work there rarely come back unchanged.
Ashvara comes next, a scar of a colony built on scorched earth and volcanic veins. Its skyline is jagged, punched through with the silhouettes of forges, smokestacks, and the skeletal frames of half-built machines. Heat ripples in the air even in still images. The colony's lifeblood is energy: geothermal plants, massive refineries, weapons forged to feed the other colonies' defenses. The text says the people of Ashvara are tempered by fire. I think it means they burn or they break.
The section on Bloodfell feels different: sharper, harder. A military stronghold dug into the ribs of a red canyon. The cliffs are stained with iron ore and older, darker things. Its streets are narrow, its gates fortified, its people trained from birth to obey, endure, and fight. The book claims Bloodfell "stands ready to bleed so others don't have to." I don't believe it. Places like that don't bleed for anyone but themselves.
Lumeris almost feels like it belongs in another world entirely. Sunlit boulevards. Glass towers that catch the light until the whole skyline seems to glow. Its leaders speak in polished speeches about unity and progress, but between the lines, there's a different truth. Lumeris runs on surveillance, loyalty pledges, and the quiet removal of those who fall out of step. The book calls it the shining colony. All I can think is that nothing shines that bright without blinding someone.
The last is Sovareth. If the others are built to be seen, Sovareth is built to be forgotten. It sits on the tundra's edge, where winter swallows the land for months at a time and the cold can kill in minutes. Its mines dig into ancient ice, pulling out rare metals and stranger things the book doesn't fully explain. The images here are sparse: a black wall against white snow, a skyline half-lost in fog. The text says little, but the silences feel deliberate, like whoever wrote it was afraid of what too many words might reveal.
I close the book for a moment, letting the names turn over in my head. Six pieces of a broken world, all pretending they're whole. Six cages, each locked from the inside.
Then there's the page with the numbers. Population before. Population after. Billions cut down to millions, listed in neat, bloodless columns like someone's end-of-year report. A margin note calls it "controlled reduction". The words are tidy. Almost soft. The truth behind them isn't.
The thought lodges under my ribs like a splinter: Maybe I wasn't spared from controlled reduction. Maybe I was part of it.
I catch myself running my thumb over the page margins, feeling the faint press of the letters like maybe touch will tell me more than sight. It doesn't. The book keeps its distance. Facts without faces. Numbers without names.
The next section shifts. Maps again, but this time there are no colony borders, no neat colors filling the spaces. Only pale stretches labeled unclaimed territory, as though someone still pretends it's just waiting to be settled.
The photographs break that illusion fast: dense forests that choke out the sun, plains where the grass moves without wind, mountain peaks swallowed in storm clouds. Places untouched not because no one tried, but because no one came back.
The book calls what lives there anomalous fauna. It's a clinical phrase that tries to strip the teeth from what I see in the pictures. A shadow in a tree line that seems to stand on too many limbs. A thing half-human, but the joints twist wrong and the mouth stretches too wide. Another, all angles and wet stone skin, caught mid-leap before the camera blurs. Most of the images end at the waist.
The colonies pretend their walls and patrols keep these things out. They don't talk about the gaps, the routes through the wasteland that can't be sealed, the storms that tear down barricades, the mistakes in the patrol schedules. Things slip through. Things always slip through.
That's why Hunters exist.
They're not soldiers: soldiers wear colors, swear to colonies, follow orders. Hunters work for survival first, coin second, and colonies last. Some move alone, carrying everything they own on their backs, trading kills for ammo, food, or a bed to sleep in before moving on. Others work in crews, not bound by friendship but by skill, the kind of quiet understanding where one can take the shot while the other watches the tree line without speaking.
While most Hunters live and die on the fringes, there's an official channel: a contract with the government. The terms are simple: the government trains them, arms them, houses them in secure facilities like the Hunter Academy. In return, Hunters take assignments too dangerous for soldiers and too important to ignore: clearing a breach, tracking a threat, recovering what's been lost.
Contracts, it says, are the only time Hunters and colonies officially touch. A colony pays, sometimes in coin, sometimes in supplies, sometimes in information, and a Hunter delivers. The risk is always the same: the job might end with payment in hand.
There's one line in the margin, written smaller than the rest.
"No Hunter lives long enough to retire... Only long enough to become something worth hunting."
I sit with that one. I don't know if it's meant as a warning or a truth carved into the world. Either way, it doesn't feel foreign to me.
I shut the book, but the images stay behind my eyes: the empty lands, the shapes in the dark, the people who walk toward them anyway.
***
On the forth fourth day, the younger guard makes his move. He's the kind that stands too close without realizing it, the kind whose attention shifts when he's bored. I've seen his eyes stray over the room, only to circle back to me like he's checking a box on some unspoken list.
The others know better. They keep their distance, their curiosity tucked behind routine.the younger guard hasn't learned that yet.
Or maybe he thinks I'm harmless.
Today, he decides to test it. The clipboard slips from his hands. It's not the clumsy drop of someone startled: it's deliberate, early in the arc of his reach, designed to fall near me. It hits my knee with a flat tap. Not hard. Just enough to register.
He crouches to retrieve it. Slow. Measured. His hand crosses into my space. Into reach.
And that's when I move. My fingers close around his collar. The fabric is stiff, pressed, still warm from his body. I don't pull him forward. I don't cut off his air. I just hold.
The reaction is instant, not in his face, but in the rhythm under my palm. His pulse stutters, skips, tries to recover. His breath catches in his throat, a quiet, trapped sound.
I don't need to look at him to know his eyes have widened. I can feel the tension run down through his shoulders, into his spine.
The point isn't to hurt him. It's to let him feel, for the smallest fraction of a moment, that I could. And then I let go.
Not because he fought free. Because I decided he could have it back.
My hand smooths the front of my shirt, pressing away the wrinkle his collar left against my palm. It's an act so small it almost doesn't exist, but it erases him from me. It erases the moment from the air.
He mutters something about an "accident." Bends his head. Steps back. His face is flushed in a way that isn't about temperature, it's about exposure.
He's been seen.
I doubt the lesson will stay with him. But someone else's might.
Because Kael is there.
I didn't hear him come in, but he's in the doorway now, leaning against the frame like he belongs there. His eyes are on me: steady, unblinking.
Not on the younger guard. On me.
He saw the clipboard drop. He saw my hand on the younger guard collar. He saw the release. And he didn't stop it.
Didn't bark the younger guard name.Didn't interfere.
Which means he wanted to see it play out.
The younger guard is gone before I look away from Kael. Dismissed with a quiet word I don't catch.
Kael stays.
"You've got control," he says at last.
I don't answer. The silence between us is a thing I want to keep.
"That's rare," he adds, stepping inside. His boots press slow against the tile, each step deliberate enough that I can hear the weight in it.
"Most people pretend they have control," he says. "They tell themselves they'd react the right way when it mattered." Another step. "You don't pretend. You just… do."
The words settle between us without leaning toward praise or warning. Just a fact, laid out to see if I'll flinch. I don't. He pulls a chair from under the table opposite mine and sits.The scrape of the legs against the floor echoes longer than it should.
"You still don't know your name?" he asks. I keep my gaze on him. Unmoving. The seconds stretch until I can almost hear them tick.
"I'll take that as a yes," he says finally.His elbows come to rest on the table, closing the distance between us without crossing it.
"Names are anchors," he says. "Without one, you're just… the ghost."
The ghost. It's not an insult. Not a compliment. Just something I might be.
My head tilts, a fraction, the smallest acknowledgement that I heard.
"You don't want to give me yours?" he asks. "Fine." A pause. Not long. Just enough to make the air tighten. "But I'm giving you one."
The sound shifts before I even hear the word, the shape of it forming in the stillness.
"Anna." It lands between us.
I don't know yet if it belongs to me. It doesn't feel foreign. But it doesn't feel entirely new either.
"Until you tell me different," he says, "that's who you are."
He pushes back from the table, rises, and holds my gaze for a moment longer before he turns toward the door.
The scrape of the chair legs says he's about to walk away.
Decision was made.
"Kael," it's the first time I've said his name out loud.
It makes him stop mid-step. He doesn't turn just tilts his head slightly, like he's listening for the shape of my next words.
"I'm in," I say.
Heavy.
Certain.
But before he can move, I add, "But I have a question."
That gets him to turn.
Full.
Steady.
Waiting.
I lean forward, elbows on the table, my eyes locked to his. It's not curiosity that drives me, it's calculation."I need to know what you are," I say. "Are you a government dog or a Hunter?"
Something in the air shifts.Not much... A small tightening, like an invisible wire just got pulled taut.