Aya dreamed of water.
It was warm and endless, tinted gold by a sun she could not see. She floated on her back, hair spreading across the rippling surface like threads of light. For the first time in years, the silence soothed rather than suffocated.
Eve's laughter carried over the waves.
Aya tilted her head. There—her younger sister splashed at the shallows, hair catching sunlight, eyes bright with the innocence Aya remembered from long ago.
"Come play!" Eve's voice chimed pure, untouched by war.
Aya reached out.
But her fingers brushed water that turned black. The warmth chilled. The horizon split. The waves shattered like glass—and beneath lay the pulsating walls of the Babel chamber. Eve's voice warped into static.
"Aya…"
Aya lurched upright with a strangled cry.
Sweat chilled her skin, soaking the thin fabric of hospital clothes. The CTI infirmary stretched quiet around her, bathed in the dim glow of machines. A monitor beeped slowly with her heart's ragged pace.
Her head throbbed. Her throat was raw.
A dream. She repeated the word like prayer, convincing herself. Yet the memory of the water lingers—was it truly a dream, or a fragment of something once real?
She pressed her palms over her face. Hands shook until she nearly clawed herself raw.
For hours, maybe, she sat like that. Alone.
Images replayed mercilessly:
- The mirage of Eve inside the heart.
- The soldier whose body she had borrowed seconds before he fell into the abyss.
- The private's whisper: *Please don't use me again.*
Her breath stuttered.
Did she kill him? Did she abandon him? Both? Neither?
Aya shifted onto cold tile, curling against the bedframe as tremors seized her. Every face of every soldier she had overdived into spun behind her lids. She remembered not only their screams but their lives—glimpses detaching from her own soul: a mother's rough lullaby, an engagement ring tucked into rucksack lining, the ache in shattered knees.
It came in shards. It stacked, multiplied. Aya felt as though she carried dozens of lives within, and they pressed against her ribcage, demanding release she could not give.
Her whisper rasped: "I'm… sorry."
No one answered.
The infirmary door remained closed. No Gabrielle to steady her. No Kyle with quiet watchfulness. Not even Hyde's clinical saw‑blade voice. Just silence broken by her own gasps.
Aya dragged herself to her feet, pacing. The walls betrayed her—sterile white melting in her vision to fleshy red, pulse threading under the paint. She blinked, shook her head, blinked again. The vision remained.
*The Babel is inside me,* she thought. The realization lodged like ice in her marrow. *It's in my blood. In my mind.*
Her reflection in the window caught her off‑guard.
Not herself. Not even the soldier she had inhabited last. No—when her eyes met those in the glass, they were not human at all. Elongated pupils, swirling veins under fragile skin, mouth curling into a grin she did not make.
Aya stumbled back, breath ragged. "No—no, I'm—"
The reflection whispered, lips twitching independent of her own: **"Tool."**
She covered her ears. Slid down the wall. Dug nails into her thighs to anchor herself to the real.
The word rang again from memory—Hyde's voice. Always Hyde's voice.
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she was nothing human anymore, just a sharpened edge owned by someone else. Overdive didn't merely use her—it reshaped her. Stole from her. Made her more Babel than woman.
Her mind blurred. For a moment she wasn't in the infirmary anymore, but back inside the collapsing chamber. The heart thundered. The silhouette pressed its hand to the glass once more—Eve, fragile, reaching.
Aya staggered forward on bare feet, half‑believing she could reach that phantom through white tile. She held her hand up. For one instant, her palm met the cool window's surface, like another membrane.
Her voice cracked. "Eve… was it you?"
The lights flickered.
Aya closed her eyes tight.
When she opened them, the reflection was simply her own. Hollow eyes ringed with sleepless bruises, hair limp and tangled, skin pale with fear.
She crumpled onto the bed, fisted the sheets, buried her face. She wanted to scream but no air emerged. Only aching silence.
Night hours dragged. Shadows stretched across the sterile floor, alive in her mind like crawling fingers. Sleep never returned. Only fragments of memory drifted: the weight of a wedding dress she once wore, Kyle's eyes across the aisle. Gunfire. Blood.
Everything that had mattered devoured.
Aya whispered again into the dark: "Am I saving the world… or killing it with my hands?"
Silence answered.
But somewhere, far within, she swore she still heard that child's giggle—the tender one that had echoed before the heart collapsed.
It made her chest ache with longing, and terror, and shame all at once.
Aya Brea did not sleep the rest of that night.
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