The chamber stank of ozone and antiseptic. CTI called it the *synchronization lab,* but Aya thought it looked more like an execution hall.
Cables drooped from the ceiling like dissected veins, pulsing faint blue. At the center sat the Overdive cradle—no chair this time, but a metal frame wide enough to hold her body supine, straps waiting like shackles.
Hyde stood beside the console, immaculate as ever, tablet in one hand. His gaze never lingered on Aya as a person. Only her telemetry.
"You will hold continuous dive for one hour under limiter regulation," he announced. "Target scenarios escalate in sequence. The purpose is endurance, not victory. If pain interferes, breathe through it. Do not resist correction spikes."
Aya's throat locked. *Correction spikes.* She remembered the agony last mission—nerve endings seared with white fire, muscles clamped until she could barely scream. That had been seconds. Now Hyde demanded sixty minutes.
Gabrielle's voice snapped across the room before Aya could speak. "She's not a machine, Hyde. No soldier could withstand that."
"She is not 'no soldier,'" Hyde returned coolly. "She is unique. If she survives, humanity inherits endurance through her. If she collapses, then we have wasted the world's only anomaly. Choose which outcome you prefer, Captain."
Gabrielle strode forward. Every muscle spoke restraint on the edge of violence. "You torture her again and call it science. What happens when the limiter fries her nervous system? When she comes out broken beyond repair?"
Hyde's gaze flicked from his tablet to Aya, impersonal. "Then we measure the threshold learned. Even failure carries value."
Aya sat stiffly on the cradle's edge, caught between both voices. She wanted to cry out, to beg Gabrielle to drag her away—but she saw too clearly in Hyde's sharp eyes what disobedience would bring: expulsion, erasure, perhaps termination. CTI existed only because Aya existed; if she failed, they would rather dissect her than release her.
She whispered, "It's all right."
Gabrielle spun, incredulous. "Aya—"
"It's not all right," Aya corrected softly, "but it's what I have to do."
Gabrielle crouched, meeting Aya's eyes level. "No. What you *have* to do is survive. Not for Hyde. For yourself—for Eve, for—" Her voice faltered. "For me. Don't let him chain out what little of you is left."
Aya's eyes blurred. "What if that part's already gone?"
She lay back before Gabrielle could stop her. Straps hissed tight around her wrists and ankles. Cold metal bit skin through the thin CTI uniform. The cradle flexed, raising her spinestraight, as the lattice of cables flared alive.
The limiter inside her skull vibrated. A coded hum. A leash tightening.
Hyde's voice followed, clinical. "Begin sequence."
---
### The First Trials
Light detonated across her vision. Aya's spirit tore loose without her consent, catapulted sideways into a waiting soldier on the training field outside.
No babel, no twisted streets—Hyde had pre‑staged live soldiers against live monsters. A controlled pit of slaughter. Aya gasped into a body already sprinting, boots crunching rubble, rifle blazing.
But unlike before, she didn't decide where to aim.
Her limbs jerked like marionette strings. The limiter sharpened every motion, overriding instinct. She tried to resist—only a breath, a twitch—but static screamed against her nerves.
Her host soldier's thoughts bled through: *What's happening—I can't stop—she's in me, God, not again not now—*
Aya begged silently: *I'm sorry.*
Bullets ripped exactly where Hyde dictated. Every kill surgical, efficient. Aya's body moved faster than thought, faster than fear.
But the host's mind clawed inside her skull, horror rising: *Get out of me get out of me I'm dying!*
Aya sobbed and tried to withdraw—but the limiter surged, locking her deeper. Hyde's voice coated the panic: *Synchronization optimal. Continue, Brea.*
Tears leaked into someone else's eyes. Her trigger finger burned, yet wouldn't stop.
At thirty minutes, her teeth ached from clenching. At forty, her lungs convulsed under command rhythm. At fifty, hallucinations smeared vision—faces flickering in every shadow, mouths shaping her name.
At fifty‑seven, she cracked.
Aya dove mid‑sequence, ripping into another soldier without Hyde's directive. Agony spiked like barbed wire slicing her skull. She screamed through the host's body, flipping the rifle against the Twisted with feral defiance. *Her choice.*
Hyde snapped. *Deviation detected. Correction.*
The limiter detonated inside her. Aya convulsed so violently the host collapsed flat in the mud. Electricity razored through bone. She thought her heart stopped—then restarted like a broken clock.
Gabrielle's shout carried distant over comms: "Hyde, she's burning alive—cut the sequence!"
Hyde's reply: cold iron. *Not while she breathes.*
---
### The Fracture
Somewhere beyond the searing, Aya felt it again—that whisper.
Not Hyde. Not Gabrielle.
A child's laugh. A hand brushing her cheek. A face blurred in red light—her own, but younger.
*Eve.*
She forced her eyes open. The battlefield shimmered like glass. In every reflection of rifle stock, in puddles of ichor, she saw the flicker of Eve's silhouette—arms outstretched, lips almost shaping *sister.*
Aya croaked aloud though her lungs bled: "I see you. I—I know you're there!"
Hyde's command roared: *Ignore hallucination.*
Gabrielle countered: "Hold on to it, Aya—if it keeps you human, hold it!"
Aya clung. Even as the limiter screamed, even as nerves fried, she clung to the fragile image. Eve beckoning, Eve alive. It hurt more than the static. But it hurt *honest.*
And somehow, the limiter flickered. For three seconds, Aya's arms moved free—her aim shifted, her stride her own. She wasn't efficient; she was Aya again.
She killed the last creature not by Hyde's directive, but by will.
Then darkness speared her down.
---
### Aftermath
When awareness returned, she was back on the cradle inside the lab. Sweat soaked her uniform. Straps had cut welts into her wrists. She wanted to vomit but nothing came.
Gabrielle hovered at her side, face carved from fury and fear. Hyde stood farther, reviewing data without expression.
"Fifty‑nine minutes," Hyde announced, as though reciting weather. "Above target. Neural variance contained. Outlier deviation noted, but corrected."
Aya croaked through cracked lips, "I… wasn't corrected."
Hyde lifted his cold eyes. "You *were owned* by the limiter. That outburst proved its necessity. Without it, you would have collapsed. With it, you endured."
Gabrielle cut in, seething. "She endured because she fought it. Not because of you."
Hyde ignored her. His gaze remained on Aya like a scalpel above flesh. "…Next trial begins tomorrow."
Aya's chest caved. Tomorrow. Another hour of chains and screams. Another step toward not knowing who she was.
Hyde turned, already finished with her humanity. Gabrielle reached, pressing Aya's bloodied hand into her own grip.
Aya held back a sob. "I saw her," she whispered. "In the glass, in the blood. She was there."
Gabrielle squeezed fiercely. "Then hold onto that. Not Hyde, not his leash. Hold her."
Aya shut her hollow eyes. Chains still rattled inside her skull, humming with Hyde's control. But in the after‑burn, she clung to that whisper, that shadow of Eve, like the only thread left tying her to anything human.
And in the reflection of the steel console, Aya swore the glass smiled back—not with Hyde's cold victory, nor her own broken face, but with the fragile, fleeting apparition of her sister.
---