The mirror was cracked.
Hairline fractures spidered out from the center, distorting her reflection into jagged planes. Cold fluorescent light flickered above, humming low, throwing sharp angles across her face. A line of blood traced from her nostril. She didn't wipe it.
Kasmina blinked. Once. Ears ringing. Head heavy. Thought hard.
Somewhere under the headache, she remembered Juno —
The ready room two nights ago.
Juno sat backwards on a locker bench, legs swinging, hair damp from prep-sweat. Her boots were untied, helmet loose on the floor, and she looked too young to bleed in war.
"If you die on me, I swear," she said, tossing Kasmina a ration bar, "I'll burn a hole in the moon just to make you come back."
"That's a bad use of ordinance," Kasmina had replied, unwrapping the bar.
"So don't make me prove it."
Now, alone in the wreckage, Kasmina tasted ash and copper. She spat blood into the sink and whispered back:
"Still here."
The bathroom was silent — except for the dripping. Water splashed from shattered urinals. Porcelain shards glittered under broken tile. One unit had ruptured at the pipe. Another was simply gone, caved inward like a kicked ribcage. Scorch marks climbed the partitions — blackened vines twisted by speed and violence.
She felt a shiver climb up her spine and spat into the sink in front of her. The glob of saliva, mixed with blood, hissed as it hit the sink, water already running cold. Steam rose, slow and thin.
Her hands moved without urgency. Two fingers tapped on the communicator in her ear.
"Aleph-Null to all. Black Eden is neutralized — core operatives down, zero survivor signatures. Confirm Fafnir sync on other zones."
"Affirmative, Aleph-Null. Report for-"
She didn't listen for the rest, pulling comms out of her ear. Water slushed around her boots as she pushed the door open and stepped into the ruin beyond.
Light stuttered. Smoke lingered. Blood trailed between bodies — some crumpled, some torn, some curled in positions too wrong to be accidental. Most had weapons. None had used them in time.
She stepped over a collapsed shape, covered in soot, slumped against the wall. At the far end, the elevator doors kept dinging, trying to close, as the body got stuck between sensor rails.
She crouched, grabbed what was left of the belt, and pulled. The corpse scraped loose with a dry sound. She stepped in just before the doors closed.
As the doors silently closed behind her, elevator gave a swift mechanical hiss as it started to move, and she briefly looked into polished steel mirror, once again noticing trail of blood coming out of her nostril. She wiped it with a sleeve of her jacket, moment before elevator finally stopped. Doors opened with soft chime.
Kasmina turned, meeting eyes with a figure right outside. Clean-shaven, broad — guard type. He stared, confused.
"What the hell?" he asked. Not alarmed, just... confused. "Did you get stuck in the elevator?"
"Yeah. Got stuck. Thought it wouldn't open." She kept walking.
"Figures." He didn't press. Just turned back toward the bar, as music and light finally hit her. Without a rush, she walked to dresser and picked up her coat.
No one stopped her.
Outside, the cold bit sharper than before. Wind tunneled through the street, catching the edge of her coat. Snow swirled under the lights. A motorcade passed, headlights blurred. Music still thumped behind her, dull now. As she reached the curb, she pulled out her phone, tapping it twice.
"Hey," she said. Voice lighter now. Not forced — just practiced. "Cain. You home already? Yeah, friend will take me to your's, it will be all right."
A pause. City noise in the background.
"Yeah, okay, sure. I'm on my way." She ended the call. Then, softer — to no one: "Love you."
For the first time all evening, her voice cracked.
She smiled faintly, still holding the phone in both hands, fingers curled around its edges as if the warmth of the call could linger just a second longer, and only looked up when the car rolled into place beside the curb — matte black, low-slung, windows tinted, no insignia on the paneling and no attempt at subtlety beyond the absence of lights.
The passenger door unlocked with a short mechanical chirp.
She stepped in without hesitation, the quiet hiss of thermal seals closing behind her as the door latched shut, and for a moment the only sound was the soft whine of the air recycler kicking in.
The door sealed behind her with a soft pneumatic humm. Inside, the cabin lights were low, the dashboard aglow with soft blue. The driver didn't look back — just tapped the console once, shifting into motion.
"Broda's having a full collapse," said a voice from the back seat. "Apparently ignoring direct debrief instructions is cause for national concern."
Doctor Helen Armitage sat behind the driver, coat folded open, tablet already resting on her knee. Her voice was calm, even faintly amused.
Kasmina slid into the seat opposite, letting her head fall back against the rest, her breathing shallow and even. She didn't take off her coat.
"I don't report to Broda," she said quietly, closing her eyes for a moment.
"Mm," Helen nodded, flicking through biosigns already syncing to her screen. "So I told him. He didn't take it well. Only you and Beta made it relatively unscathed, Gamma and Delta will be recouperating for couple more weeks."
The car rolled forward, silent except for the rumble of wet asphalt under the tires. Outside, the street lights painted fast-blurring stripes across the window.
The headache was blooming behind her right eye again, low and slow.
"You jumped straight into deployment without neural buffering. You were still suppressing trace elements from the last cycle — and you skipped oral load-balancing completely."
Kasmina didn't respond.
Helen tapped something on the tablet in her lap. Numbers lit up.
"We coordinated five strikes last night."
Helen paused for a moment.
"Yours left the deepest crater. You ran hot for twenty minutes, and you stayed above safe biotic saturation for nearly five. Your synaptic latency was down twelve percent, and your anterior gland pool was already partially depleted when you made contact. That's not just fatigue. That's risk of system collapse."
"I didn't collapse."
"You bled," Helen said. "You're bleeding now."
Kasmina touched her nose absently. Just a trace. But it was there. Kasmina didn't respond.
Helen didn't look away.
"You're not built for this kind of load anymore. And you know it."
Kasmina wasn't thinking about blood or metrics. She was thinking about Cain — the last time she saw him. That fancy restaurant he booked, how absent-minded he was... Then summon came. Top clearance, red alert. She just left him there.
Kasmina sighed.
"Are you even listening to me?" Helen's voice didn't rise, but it pulled her back — low, firm, sharp enough to cut through the fog behind her eyes.
"Yeah," Kasmina said, quiet. "Sorry."
Helen didn't look up from the tablet. She tapped a page aside, swiped through another. Her voice lost its edge as she continued — not softer, but steadier, more direct.
"If you keep this pace, your endocrine buffers won't reset properly. That means degradation across the board — lower regenerative response, slower onset control in cold-start conditions, delayed recovery, and elevated risk of neuromotor failure. Permanent failure, Kas. Not temporary loss. Not bruising. I'm not quoting theories. I'm quoting the last three scans."
Kasmina exhaled — slowly, trying to mask the shake in her breath. She looked out the window again, but didn't see anything this time. Just blur.
"I understand, Doctor."
"Do you?" Helen leaned back, hands still folded around the tablet, posture calm — but her eyes didn't move from Kasmina. "Because I keep saying this, and you keep walking out the door like you're bulletproof."
The car veered into a tunnel. Sodium lights glinted overhead, casting sharp, ribbed shadows down the curve of the passage, where water ran in thin rivulets from last week's melt. Their reflections warped across the window — brief, broken flashes of gold and black.
"What exactly do you think is going to change?" Kasmina asked, her voice too even to be entirely casual. "Empire has no shortage of monsters. We both know that. There's always another one waiting in the wings."
Helen didn't reply. Not immediately.
Then: "Fafnir Aleph-Null," she said, and the formality in her tone wasn't anger, it was warning — "I am officially forbidding further biotic overextension outside of supervised parameters. Next overload, next uncontrolled release, and you may not come back from it. The last time you did this, you left a hole in a skyscraper. That wasn't heroic. That was the limit snapping."
Kasmina opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked down at her gloves, at the faint brown smear near the cuff. Not dried yet.
"It was an emergency," she said at last. "I didn't have a choice."
Helen didn't flinch. "Exactly," she said. "You couldn't choose. Because you pushed past the point where choosing was still possible."
Kasmina didn't answer. The silence stretched, but Helen didn't press. Outside, the city passed in cold ribbons of light, tunnel walls slick with melt and old exhaust.
The car surfaced from the underpass. Snow fell heavier now — no longer drifting, but steady and wet, sliding in sheets across the windshield where the wipers didn't reach. Light bled across the pavement. Everything else blurred.
"We'll do a full neurometric workup when we're back," Helen said eventually. "Stims are masking the worst of it, but you're out of margin. One more surge like that, and you'll crash mid-action. Not poetic. Just ugly."
Kasmina stared through the glass. Then, calmly:
"Can it wait?"
Helen looked up from the tablet. "What for?"
"I have to check on something," Kasmina said. Not vague to deflect — just vague enough to end the question.
Helen studied her a second longer than necessary, but whatever she thought, she didn't say. She changed the destination with a flick of her wrist. The guidance node pulsed once.
"Tomorrow, then," she said. "No excuses. I want full panels and a new baseline. If you start twitching mid-shift, I'm filing a restraint order."
Kasmina smiled faintly, but it didn't reach her eyes.
The car slowed. A side street veered off between shuttered storefronts and half-scrubbed graffiti. One of the posts still had a scanner tag — broken, blinking. Nobody fixed them anymore.
"You good?"
Kasmina was already reaching for the door.
"I'm fine."
Helen didn't argue. She tapped the lock, and the door slid open with a whisper of air.
Kasmina stepped out. The wind caught her coat. Snow hissed beneath her boots. She didn't look back.
The car waited half a beat. Then it pulled away, fading into the wash of slush and light.
She stood still until it vanished. Then turned, crossed the street, and disappeared down the slope toward the lower platforms — where the buildings grew older, and the air never quite stopped tasting like rust.
Cain sat in the apartment's stillness, slouched in his chair, one leg drawn up under the other, the mask resting heavy across his lap. His fingers traced the gouge down its cheek — not thoughtfully, just habit. The polymer shell was scorched, pitted where something had tried to burn its way through. One lens was cracked. Still functional, MERIT had assured him, but the fracture remained.
Across the room, the wall screen played quietly. He hadn't turned it on — it had done that itself, rebooting after a signal interruption, resuming the last state it remembered. Now it hummed low, casting soft blue across the furniture, bleeding through the curtains.
On screen, a woman sat behind a desk framed in silver trim. Flag behind her, crisp military lines, perfect lighting, the Empire's crest polished above her shoulder. Cain didn't recognize her face, but he knew her role — another mouthpiece, one of many. He knew the speech was a response to something — some skirmish, some attack. But the details never mattered. Only the fallout did.
"Dear citizens," she began, her voice too even, too practiced. "For seven years now, the Krosa Empire has worked tirelessly to heal the wounds left behind by the chaos of war. Under our stewardship, cities have flourished, peace has returned, and the great biospheres are recovering from decades of unchecked damage."
Cain shifted, not reacting — not visibly — but something in his jaw flexed.
He glanced down at the mask again. The lens glowed softly, scrolling slow telemetry. MERIT was running passive network parsing — pulling data from the broadcast header, cross-referencing speech cadence against known propaganda routines. Line by line, sentence by sentence. It logged everything.
"We are grateful for your continued faith," the woman said. "But not all share your dedication. There are those who reject progress. Who reject unity. Who threaten the peace we've rebuilt. These elements—"
She paused, but only for effect.
"—will be dealt with. Our peacekeepers are already en route to containment zones along the disputed corridors. Action will be swift and final."
Cain reached forward and switched the screen off. Not abruptly. Not out of anger. Just... enough.
The speaker was talking about rebels. Purges. Unity. But Cain hadn't seen a single headline about an actual event. Just noise. Just motion in the water to keep people swimming in place.
Silence rolled back into the room. The kind that lingered after certain types of lies.
He looked back at the mask. MERIT had finished processing the segment — one corner of the lens flashed, then dimmed.
METRIC RHETORIC LEVEL: 83%
PRIMARY MODALITY: ASSURANCE THROUGH FEAR
RECOMMENDED ACTION: NONE
COMMENTARY AVAILABLE
Cain didn't open the commentary. He didn't need it.
He leaned back, stretching once, bones cracking faintly at the shoulder. Somewhere outside, a siren passed — low, distant. The hour was late.
For a few moments, he just stared at the mask. At the cracks, the soot, the blood no solvent had quite removed. Then, wordless, he reached for the cloth beside him and started cleaning the lens again, slow and even, as if it mattered.
As if anything did.