The rain slicked down Gene's hoodie as she slipped through the hostel's warped front door, the city pressing at her back like a living thing. Neon signs bled against the wet pavement outside, casting everything in sickly reds and yellows.
Inside, the air turned immediately dense and warm with the smell of mildew, cigarettes, and cheap cleaner that didn't quite mask anything. This place wasn't meant to be clean. It was meant to be forgotten. Perfect.
The man behind the desk barely glanced up. He wore headphones and typed something that wasn't her name into a battered tablet. Gene gave him a fake one anyway, Lena Holt, soft-spoken, rehearsed. No ID is required; it is just a scan of her wristband.
She'd long since fried the original chip and replaced it with a counterfeit. Still, her pulse jumped when the scanner lit green. Her eyes swept the lobby: two exits, three cameras, none newer than a decade.
A vending machine flickered in the corner, and a stairwell reeked of something old and wet. She kept her hood up.
The room was smaller than she'd expected, barely wide enough to stretch her arms out. The walls were stained beige, the floor a patchwork of cracked linoleum tiles, and the only light came from a wall sconce that buzzed faintly, casting everything in a jaundiced yellow glow. Gene didn't waste time.
She turned the lock, slid the deadbolt, then dragged the creaky chair from the corner and wedged it tight beneath the knob. Her pack hit the bed with a soft thud, and she stood there a moment, letting the silence thicken.
Outside, the city never slept, especially not this version of Seattle. The soundscape was a constant low hum of vertical railcars gliding on elevated tracks, drones blinking overhead with their mechanical whir, and the tinny, echoing snippets of synthetic music from street vendors' hologram stalls.
Neon advertisements flickered through the rain-streaked alley outside her door, painting the room with brief flashes of blue and red. Somewhere below, a protest chant rose and fell before dissolving into static over a loudspeaker. The world outside was alive and loud and watching. But this room was still. Too still.
She pulled the recorder from the pocket of her coat and sat cross-legged on the floor, the thin mattress barely cushioning her spine. With a quick flick of her thumb, the red light blinked to life.
"Log... I don't know. I'm not labeling these anymore."
Her voice came out brittle, tired from too many sleepless nights.
"I don't know who I am outside of them. I don't know if I've ever been anyone else."
Beyond the thin walls, the city stirred and growled, distant hums of vertical traffic lanes, the buzz of neon, the wet rush of Seattle rain pouring down on a metal world.
"Maisie believed in the cause. She believed we were saving people." Gene's throat tightened.
"But she never got her hands dirty. Not once. That part always fell to me."
A pause. Her fingernail scraped nervously against the plastic edge of the recorder.
"She didn't know the full extent. Jack made sure of that. We fed her sanitized versions, intel, targets, mission blurbs stripped of what came after."
There was another beat of silence.
"I told myself it was better that way. That if I carried it, she wouldn't have to."
Her voice dipped lower.
"And I did. Every name. Every face."
Gene swallowed hard.
"Igor."
The name settled in the room like smoke.
"Number Eight."
A whisper.
Footsteps outside. Gene flinched and clicked off the recorder. She moved silently to the door and listened.
Nothing. Just an old pipe clanking on the wall.
But the unease lingered, pressing in like a second skin.
She waited a full minute in silence, breath shallow, ear pressed lightly to the cold door. No footsteps. No shadows beneath the frame. Just the occasional groan of old plumbing and the faint, rhythmic patter of rain on the alley-facing wall.
Still, Gene didn't relax. She backed away slowly, every muscle taut, and sat on the edge of the narrow bed without taking her eyes off the door.
Her fingers hovered near the knife handle she kept tucked in her boot. Just in case. Her brain kept spinning, replaying the sound, ordinary, probably, but what if it wasn't? What if Jack had already found her? Or Selene?
She whispered under her breath, bitter and breathless, "I should've run farther."
But she couldn't, not yet.
There was still one person she had to find first.
Igor.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
The rain hadn't let up. It slid in sheets across the windshield of the stolen transit car Gene now drove with tense, gloved hands, the wipers struggling to keep up. Seattle's skyline loomed like a jagged scar in the distance, cold steel, and artificial light, pulsing with quiet surveillance.
Every turn felt like a risk. Every stoplight was a trap. She stuck to side streets, zig-zagging through back alleys, avoiding drones and checkpoint gates.
The meeting place was an old warehouse near the Sound, long abandoned by the corporations and quietly reclaimed by the fringe resistance.
Rust crawled across the sides of the building, the entrance shielded by a half-collapsed loading dock and a stack of broken pallets. She parked half a block away and approached on foot.
Gene rapped three times on the side door, paused, and then knocked twice more. The ancient intercom crackled before a voice rasped out, "Name?"
She hesitated. "Sparrow."
A mechanical click. The door opened a crack.
Inside, the smell hit her first, old blood and antiseptic, stale metal and mold. The hallway was dim and narrow, lit by string lights zip-tied to exposed piping.
A figure limped forward to greet her. The contact was barely standing, young, face bruised, bandages across their midsection and shoulder. Gene caught them before they collapsed.
"Sorry," she mumbled, her voice tight as she eased their arm over her shoulder. "I've got you, just… don't hate me yet."
"You made it," the rebel rasped, coughing wetly. "Didn't think you would."
Gene knelt beside him, checking the bandages. "You shouldn't be here. You need medical..."
"No time," he wheezed. "They're onto us. Your name came up."
Her jaw tensed. "Whose list?"
He didn't answer. Just reached into his coat and pulled out a data shard. "Take it. Encryption's tangled, but I ripped it from one of their internal nodes before they found me."
She took it, slipping it into her coat pocket. "Who's behind it? Jack?"
The rebel's eyes fluttered half-shut. "Not Jack. Someone above him. Someone worse."
The rebel let out a breath through gritted teeth as they sank into the chair, one hand clamped to their side. Blood had already seeped through the gauze, sticky and dark.
"You shouldn't have come back," they rasped, voice rough and papery. "If they find you..."
"They won't." Gene crouched in front of them, pulling open the half-zipped duffel where she'd stashed a stolen medical kit. Her fingers were steady, but her eyes kept flicking toward the door. "I covered my tracks. The hostel's off-grid. Cash only. No facial net."
The rebel snorted softly, then winced. "You always did know how to vanish. Guess you learned from the best."
Gene didn't answer right away. She pulled on gloves, peeled away the blood-soaked bandage, and hissed under her breath. The wound was deep but clean, likely a bullet graze, judging from the searing along the edges. She reached for the antiseptic.
"You're lucky," she muttered. "Could've clipped your kidney."
"Luck's not real." The rebel's head lolled back. "Only choices."
Gene paused mid-swipe. That hit closer than it should have. She pressed the gauze harder than necessary.
The rebel groaned. "Damn. Still mad at me?"
"I'm mad at all of us," she said, quieter this time. "You, me… Jack."
They blinked blearily. "Jack's dead to me. Thought he was dead to you, too."
Gene didn't respond. The sound of rain pattered steadily on the metal-framed skylight, a dull rhythm like a ticking clock. Her hands moved automatically: clean, disinfect, wrap, muscle memory from having to dress many wounds.
"You saw what they did to Subject Eight?" the rebel asked suddenly.
Gene's hands stilled.
"…Yeah." She swallowed, her throat dry. "That's why I left."
The rebel turned their face toward her. "That's why you left. Others stayed. Some still believe."
"They won't for long."
"Unless Selene has her way."
Gene's head snapped up. "You know that name too?"
The rebel gave her a grim, pained smile. "Everyone who survives long enough does."
The rebel drifted into an exhausted silence, head tilted back against the pitted wall. Gene watched them for a beat longer, her expression unreadable. Then she stood slowly, peeling off the gloves and tossing them into a dented waste bin.
The room felt smaller now. Dimmer. The single bulb buzzed overhead, flickering like it was on the edge of giving up. She closed the closet-turned-makeshift infirmary door behind her with a soft click, stepping into the narrow hallway beyond.
Her boots made no sound on the worn tile. The hostel's walls were stained with the ghosts of water damage, cracks like veins running under the chipped paint. Distant laughter echoed from the communal kitchen.
The faint hiss of someone's shower running. Normal sounds. Normal lives.
Gene wasn't part of that world anymore if she ever had been.
She slipped back into her room and double-locked the door, dragging the chair under the handle again, just in case. The moment it was secure, her back hit the wall, and she slid down until she was crouched on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees.
Selene Marrow.
The name had followed her across years and continents. First whispered in restricted labs. Then printed in redacted files. Now, bleeding from the mouth of a man nearly dying in a backroom closet.
It was like chasing the shadow of something that knew she was following.
Gene pulled her audio recorder from her coat pocket. The plastic was warm from body heat, slightly cracked along one edge. She stared at it for a moment before thumbing the switch.
A soft click. Then static.
"I thought I was done recording these," she whispered into the silence.