8 Years later.
The heavy pneumatic seal of the door hissed as it engaged, a sound like a tired lung finally letting out its last breath. Violet didn't even bother to turn on the primary overhead lights. She knew the layout of this coffin-sized space by heart, not because she loved it, but because the walls had spent the last eight years inching closer to her.
She was twenty now. The frail, trembling girl had been replaced by something harder, though perhaps no less broken. The Academy had stretched her, "refined" her. She wasn't tall by the standards of the VALOR units that paced the upper districts, but she had grown into herself. Her violet hair, once a choppy mess of uneven cuts, had grown long, spilling over her shoulders like a bruised silk shroud.
She slouched onto her bed, the springs groaning in a metallic protest. The mattress was thin, standard-issue, smelling of industrial detergent and the faint, lingering scent of the previous ten "Citizens" who had occupied this cell. She collapsed, her body heavy with the exhaustion of a soul that had been processed through a machine.
The room was a masterclass in congestion. To her left was a desk, a bolted-down slab of polymer that served as her workstation, her dining table, and her altar. A standard-issue lamp flickered there, its bulb humming at a frequency that made the back of her teeth ache. Piled beneath its sickly yellow light were the tools of her trade: textbooks on Empirical Structural Modules, Recursive Coding for V.E.N.E.E.R. Interfaces, and a stack of thin, red-covered pamphlets titled The Joy of Utility and The Collective Breath.
But hidden behind the sterile wall of propaganda, tucked into the shadows where the lamp's light died, were the things that made her a criminal.
The first was a book. Its cover was a deep, unsettling shade of crimson, looking like dried blood under the dim light. Its title was stamped in black, cracked ink: THE RED EYE. It was a book about a book, a meta-textual nightmare that was classified as a Grade-A Info-Hazard. It belonged to her late mother; it was said to be supernatural. It was a magnet for tragedy. Her father had been caught because of its presence; the very act of owning it seemed to thin the veil between reality and something much more ancient. To Violet, the book felt warm to the touch, as if it had a pulse of its own. She hadn't read it, but she was soon planning to.
Beside it sat the radio. An old, boxy thing of copper and wire, a relic of a time when the Empire didn't own the airwaves.
Violet rolled onto her side, staring at the space beside her pillow. She began to speak. Her voice wasn't as sharp. It was soft, airy—a wishful murmur that floated in the cramped room.
"Hi, Dad," she whispered. "I graduated from F.A.R.K.S. today."
She paused, as if listening for a ghost to answer.
"Yeah. Top of the class in structural energetics. You'd be proud, right? Or maybe you'd be mad that I played their game so well. No one bullied me today. No one even looked at me. I'm a ghost, Dad. Just like you wanted."
She closed her eyes, a faint, bitter smile touching her lips. "Don't say that. It's not your fault. I know you did what you had to. Anyway... I can finally be free today. At least, that's what the SAGE unit said when she handed me the certificate. She said I was 'unfettered from my debt.' I thought I could just... walk away. Find a corner of the district and disappear."
She opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling where the water pipes hummed like a subterranean choir.
"But they trapped me again. A month, Dad. They gave me one month to enroll in a 'Service Program.' If I don't choose, they choose for me. And you know what they chose for 4-882-B."
Her eyes flickered toward the windowless wall, as if she could see through miles of rock and metal to the sky above. "The Lunar Mining Site Kolvos 12."
She shivered, pulling her knees up to her chest. The apartment felt smaller than it had five minutes ago.
"I visited the lady down in the 3rd District yesterday. The one who gave me the job after I became a Orphan. Remember? The restaurant? It was nice, Dad. I got to eat real food. Not the nutrient paste. Actual soup with things floating in it that weren't synthetic. She told me a lot of fugitives are dying in the cold outside the perimeter fences. They run for the border and just... freeze."
She reached out, her fingers grazing the cold casing of the radio. "I'm fine, really. I just... I sometimes think what would have happened if they had killed me too, that day in the plaza. If the Sentinel had just bumped its arm a few inches to the left. Would I have been happy? At least I wouldn't have died alone. I would have been with you."
The silence that followed was suffocating. It wasn't the silence of peace; it was the silence of a vacuum.
"I don't want to die alone, Dad," she said, her voice cracking for the first time. "But there's no one. No one left."
"Dad? Why am I the only one speaking?"
She waited. A distant Mag-Lev train rumbled, vibrating the floorboards. Violet scoffed, a jagged, self-deprecating sound.
"I'm going insane. I'm talking to a wall in a room."
She sat up abruptly and reached for the radio. She didn't turn it to the broadcast bands—there was nothing but Leng propaganda there anyway. Instead, she pressed a heavy, mechanical button on the side. A tape began to whir. The sound of static filled the room first, a white-noise ocean that seemed to push back the walls. Then, a voice broke through.
It was her father. His voice was warm, flavored with the rasp.
"...your mother actually was very beautiful, Violet," the recording said. Her father sounded exaggerated, playful, his tone dancing with a light that Violet hadn't seen in years. "...but of course, I was more beautiful. That's why she fell in love with me. It was purely aesthetic."
A younger, higher-pitched version of Violet's own voice erupted in a fit of giggles on the tape. The sound was so bright it felt violent in the dull room.
"No, really!" He continued, laughing. "You and your mother are basically the same person. Aside from her hair, you look exactly like her. You've got her eyes—those 'I'm-about-to-do-something-dangerous' eyes. But instead of her brown hair, you've inherited my violet hair. A tragedy, I know. You got the lucky genes."
Violet listened, her head bowed. She had played this tape a thousand times.
On the tape, the young Violet asked a question that was lost to a burst of static, and then her father spoke again, his voice dropping to a softer, more serious register. "Now, don't be sad, I am here for you, aren't I? I'll love you always."
The recording hit the end of the reel and began to loop; the mechanical click-hiss of the tape reset, filling the room. Violet didn't turn it off. Letting it play in the background
She stood up, moving like a sleepwalker toward the corner of the room that served as the "sanitation block." Everything was congested. The shower was a narrow tube of corrugated metal, and the sink sat directly above the toilet.
She stripped off the gray Academy jumpsuit, letting it fall in a heap on the floor. She stepped into the shower, the cold metal biting at her heels. When she turned the dial, the water came out in a lukewarm, thin spray that smelled faintly of chlorine and old iron.
She stood there, letting the water run over her long, violet hair.
The radio continued to play in the other room. Her father's laughter looped over and over, a fragment of a dead world playing for a girl who was waiting for her own to end.
She washed herself with the grit-filled soap, scrubbing until her skin was red.
"I'm coming, Dad," she whispered into the steam. "I just don't know where I'm going yet."