Chương 84: 83: The Girl In Blue

The office hummed with its usual symphony of keyboards, quiet conversations and the distant thrum of Apis-fed machinery. Shamira Bekele sat at her immaculate desk, Gerald the succulent catching the fluorescent light beside a chipped mug that read WORLD'S OKAYEST RECEPTIONIST. She opened the bottom drawer. Files. Personal effects. A framed photograph of her mother, taken years before the Syndicate recruited her. She placed it carefully into a cardboard box.

"Hey, Shami." She looked up. Lucy from logistics leaned against the cubicle wall, coffee in hand.

"What's with the box?"

"Taking a few days off," Shamira said with a sheepish smile.

"Thought I'd tidy up." Lucy frowned.

"You never tidy up. You're the only person here whose desk could survive a bomb."

"Maybe I'm turning over a new leaf."

"You're lying."

"Would I lie to you?"

"Yes." Shamira laughed softly and kept packing. Another file. A succulent care guide she'd printed years ago. Gerald's adoption certificate, filled out as a joke and kept because it always made her smile. Lucy lingered.

"Shami... you okay?"

"Perfect. Never better." The lie came easily. Lucy eventually nodded.

"Alright. But if you leave without saying goodbye, I'll hunt you down."

"I'd expect nothing less." Lucy wandered back to logistics. Shamira resumed packing while the office carried on around her. A fax machine clattered. Someone laughed too loudly. A chair squeaked. The blast door hissed open. She barely looked up. Just another trainee. Her eyes caught the newcomer. A young woman. Early twenties, perhaps. Hair that wasn't dyed but naturally blue. Bloodshot eyes threaded with tiny silver fractures like cracked porcelain.

Heavy violet crescents rested beneath them, the kind born from sleepless nights. Round gold-rimmed glasses reflected the fluorescent lights. She wore a knee-length cornflower-blue dress stained with old grime, faint daisies still visible along the hem. Her skin looked pale, almost delicate. A worn leather satchel rested on one shoulder. The satchel itself was ordinary. What protruded from it wasn't. A sleek black prosthetic leg, its embedded white lights still blinking faintly like a dying heartbeat.

It looked expensive enough to cost more than most Steppers earned in a year, yet the satchel strap barely sagged beneath its weight. Shamira's hand stopped on a folder. Who is this girl? She wasn't dressed like a trainee, and she certainly didn't carry herself like one. Everyone else moved with purpose. This girl walked as though she had nowhere left to be. Her tired eyes drifted across the office before settling on Shamira. She smiled. It never reached her eyes.

She approached the desk with an unhurried confidence that made Shamira's instincts prickle.

"Hi." The voice was soft.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for someone."

"Who?"

"A wolf." Shamira blinked.

"A... wolf?"

"Large. Black. Blue tufts of fur." The girl lightly tapped the desk.

"Quite difficult to miss." Shamira studied her. Most people used euphemisms. Specimens. Projects. Experimental material. This girl had simply said wolf. She glanced aside.

"Thornburgh?" The girl tilted her head.

"Thornburgh?"

"One of the wolf-based projects." Shamira shrugged.

"Moves around a lot. Lots of copies left today. They've been deploying them more aggressively lately." The girl became perfectly still.

"Copies..." Shamira looked up again. The girl's expression had changed. Something flickered behind those exhausted eyes, something hungry and cold.

"How do you not know about the false-twin chambers?" Shamira asked, raising an eyebrow. The girl paused before smiling again, softer this time. The office had grown quieter. The chatter faded. Keyboards slowed. Shamira realised she hadn't heard the fax machine in a while.

"Somnolence," the girl said. The word drifted through the office like a half-remembered lullaby. Shamira turned back to her packing, fingers fumbling with a stack of folders. Her eyelids grew impossibly heavy. Around her, the office folded in on itself. Receptionists slumped across desks. One slid sideways onto the floor with a dull thud while another sighed faintly before collapsing against her monitor. Her hands trembled.

"No..." She lurched to her feet, knocking over her chair, only for her knees to strike the floor moments later. The cardboard box tipped, spilling her mother's photograph and Gerald the succulent across the tiles. Something was wrong. Pale blue wisps rose from every unconscious body, drifting like mist before flowing toward the satchel hanging from the girl's shoulder, the same satchel with the prosthetic leg protruding from its opening. Dreams. The realisation struck like a punch. She's taking their dreams.

Just like the pods... Something inside that satchel was feeding. Her vision swam. Every muscle weighed a thousand pounds. Her cheek pressed against the cold floor and refused to lift. She remained awake. Deep within her body, a tiny emerald spore pulsed. Rhizome's lingering gift kept her conscious, barely. The girl walked past. Shamira saw only cornflower-blue fabric, worn leather and the prosthetic leg gently swaying against the satchel. Footsteps stopped. The girl crouched.

Blue hair framed silver-fractured eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses.

"You're still awake." Genuine surprise coloured the soft voice. Shamira tried to answer. Nothing emerged.

"Huh." The girl tilted her head.

"That's impressive. Most people can't resist. Even without... whatever you've got in you." Instead of touching Shamira, she picked Gerald from the scattered belongings.

"Sorry about this." She carefully placed the succulent back onto the desk before leaving. Footsteps echoed down the corridor.... Shamira's thoughts finally caught up. The false-twin chambers. Cold spread through her chest. She's going to destroy every copy. The footsteps continued, calm and unhurried. She remembered answering, 'Lots.' She remembered the girl's smile. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Her heart hammered. She tried to move.

Nothing obeyed. Rhizome's spores kept her mind alive while the rest of her body remained buried beneath crushing exhaustion. All she could do was stare at the empty doorway. THWACK. The sound echoed faintly through the walls. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. Her brow furrowed. What...? THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK-THWACK-THWACK. Rhythmic. Deliberate. Something was being beaten apart piece by piece. The chambers. Her stomach dropped. She wasn't using explosives. She was dismantling them one by one. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.

The relentless impacts blurred together until Shamira lost count. Silence followed. One breath. BOOOOOOOMMMM! The facility lurched violently. Glass exploded. Alarms wailed. Dust cascaded from the ceiling as the blast door crumpled inward beneath the shockwave. Through twisted metal and smoke she saw three, perhaps four, Steppers sprinting toward the explosion, rifles raised.

"Onomatopoeia." A strange mechanical trill drifted through the corridor.

"Brrrrrrrrrrrr..." It sounded vaguely like automatic rifle fire, yet hollow, playful... wrong. The Steppers staggered. One grabbed his chest. Another collapsed mid-stride. A third spun wildly, clutching at a wound that didn't exist. Blood did. Crimson poured through their Apis suits in thick streams. The armour never reacted. No dispersal systems activated. No emergency seals engaged. Their technology simply watched while its wearers bled onto the floor. Shamira's thoughts raced. The suits run on Apis...

Why didn't they respond? How did she...? Is she... the goddess of Apis? Can she command it? Is that how she harvested their dreams? One by one the Steppers collapsed into widening pools of blood. No muzzle flashes. No visible projectiles. Only that impossible buzzing echoing through the ruined corridor. She made a sound, and wounds appeared. The sound was the weapon. The sound was the bullet. Realisation sent ice through Shamira's veins. She hadn't shot them.

She'd made them believe they'd been shot, and reality had simply obeyed. Her vision swam as exhaustion dragged at her consciousness, yet one question refused to disappear. What kind of power creates wounds from sound? What kind of person uses it without hesitation? The girl stepped over the fallen Steppers without a glance. Her cornflower-blue dress swayed gently with each step, gold-rimmed glasses catching the corridor lights while the prosthetic leg hanging from her satchel pulsed with a calm white rhythm.

She never looked back. Shamira closed her eyes. Footsteps. Growing closer. She's coming back. She forced her breathing to slow, every muscle limp, praying the pounding of her heart wouldn't betray her. The footsteps stopped. A shadow settled across her face. Fabric rustled softly. She caught the faint scent of wildflowers carried on a warm summer breeze, impossibly clean, impossibly hopeful. It made what followed feel strangely... perverse. A hand brushed her collar. Her pulse lurched. One button. Another.

The girl calmly opened the top of Shamira's uniform, turning her slightly from side to side as though inspecting a specimen. Her fingers wandered across Shamira's neck and shoulders, studying the intricate Ethiopian geometric tattoos etched into her skin. She's looking at the tattoos. A quiet hum escaped the girl.

"Cool tattoos." Silence lingered.

"I wonder what Butter would think of this." The name meant nothing, yet the wistfulness behind it sounded like someone speaking to the dead. Her hand withdrew.

"Facsimile." The single word drifted through the corridor before the footsteps faded once more. Metal creaked as the blast door opened and closed behind her. Shamira counted several long seconds before risking one eye. Empty. A shaky breath escaped her. Her shirt still hung open, revealing the fine Ethiopian patterns across her collarbones and shoulders. Something clicked. When the girl had leaned forward, Shamira had glimpsed beneath the torn neckline of her dress. There had been tattoos there too. Fresh ones.

Cobalt blue. Exact copies of Shamira's. Every line. Every dot. Every interlocking diamond reproduced with impossible precision. She copied them... just by looking. Shamira slowly buttoned her shirt, hands trembling. The satchel. The prosthetic leg. The impossible control over Apis. The false-twin chambers. The answer arrived all at once. Every calamity had begun with a single word. Somnolence. Facsimile. Onomatopoeia. Shamira's fading thoughts lurched. Were they... ability words? Was she an escaped Abomination?

Something that fed on Apis the way Korhess did? She didn't know. She only knew someone had to stop her. Immediately. Darkness finally swallowed Shamira whole, but one certainty remained. She was going to find them all. — Katherine moved through the corridors like a ghost wearing a girl's skin. The word Clandestine hummed in the back of her mind, a constant whisper that kept her unseen. Guards walked past without a second glance. Cameras recorded empty hallways. HUDs registered nothing.

She was present, yet unperceived, a footnote reality had decided to skip. She released the word every few seconds, letting it breathe. Each use cost her something. She could feel dream-stuff replacing flesh, but she'd already made peace with that. I need to be smart about this. End the main points first. The pods. The command centre. The power sources. Minutes of wandering had taught her everything. The false-twin chambers. Apis extraction. The hierarchy of Steppers, Operatives and Talons. The Abominations.

An entire facility sustained by stolen dreams. She'd discovered something else. The Cobalt Nonagon could absorb them. It happened by accident at first. Passing a sleeping Stepper, she watched pale blue light drift from their body like mist, flowing into the satchel as naturally as water finding a river. The Nonagon pulsed, stronger... hungrier. Now she did it deliberately. Every dreamer she passed fed it.

Memories, hopes, fragments of joy vanished into the impossible construct until it felt like she carried an ocean beneath one arm. Butter had once said the Nonagon could power a solar system for eons. She needed more. She took more. Whether the victims awoke broken, empty or never awoke at all no longer mattered to her. She'd spent years trapped in a pod. She'd lost her best friend, the person she'd been falling in love with, the one who'd shown her freedom only for a wolf with blue tufts of fur to steal it away.

They can die for all I care. Be paralysed forever. I don't care. Butter would've hated those thoughts. Butter is dead. Katherine kept walking. Power sources fell one after another. The Nonagon devoured Apis itself, feeding on the dreams sustaining the complex. Its strength swelled inside the satchel until it felt ready to burst. Pain exploded through her skull. Her left eye collapsed. She staggered, clutching her face as blood slipped between her fingers. Vision fractured into shards of cobalt and crimson.

Her iris split. The silver fractures finally gave way, breaking apart like shattered glass until four smaller irises formed a slow-spinning diamond. Blood streamed down her cheek. Understanding arrived almost instantly. The Nonagon was becoming more efficient. It was rewriting her. Four spaces opened inside her consciousness. Four abilities, permanently prepared, requiring no words or gestures.

At the first hint of danger, the Nonagon would activate whichever one she needed before she even realised she was threatened. A broken laugh escaped her. She was becoming something else. She didn't care. She chose immediately. Onomatopoeia. Sound becoming wounds. Herculean. Strength enough to lift mountains. Ellipsis. The omission that let her slip between moments. Understatement. A reduction that equalised stronger opponents.

Gods would strike with only the force someone of equal strength could inflict upon her, while weaker enemies remained unchanged. It offered no increase to her own power, only balance. The Nonagon pulsed approvingly inside the satchel. Eager. Katherine smiled, the expression devoid of warmth. Blood vanished beneath the back of her hand. She kept walking. The facility had no idea what was coming.... Several corridors later she found a shattered display case.

Tempered glass glittered across the floor, one large shard reflecting her face. She crouched and lifted it carefully. The girl staring back barely resembled Katherine. Her eyes had become luminous grey, brilliant cobalt limbal rings circling dark pupils that seemed impossibly deep. The left eye held its four rotating irises, each moving independently. Cobalt tattoos traced elegant Ethiopian geometric patterns across her collarbones and shoulders, shimmering softly beneath the torn neckline of her dress.

She touched them.

"I wish you could see this, Sugarbear." A faint smile found her lips.

"You'd probably say 'Oh my,' tell me I looked like a superhero... or a cyborg... or a really fashionable villain. You'd think the tattoos were pretty. You'd probably ask for matching ones." Her fingertips lingered on the glowing lines.

"I hope you're watching. Wherever you are." The smile faded.

"I'm going to find that wolf."

"I'm going to kill it."

"And I'm going to figure out how to bring you back." She slipped the glass shard into her satchel as a reminder of who she'd been... and who she was becoming. The Nonagon pulsed once. Her new eyes scanned the darkness ahead. Somewhere inside the facility, the wolf waited.... She felt something. A presence. It felt like standing on a beach and sensing the ocean before seeing it. An invisible pressure rolled through reality itself, vast, ancient and impossibly heavy.

Something was moving through the facility with such purpose that Katherine's bones ached. She froze. What is that? The presence drew nearer. She couldn't see it or hear it, yet every instinct screamed for her to run. The air grew heavier, her skin prickled, and a whisper brushed the edge of her mind. Her head slowly turned. A young man floated silently in the corridor. Katherine's breath caught. He was beautiful the way lightning was beautiful, terrifying, perfect, impossible to ignore.

His skin wasn't merely pale but fractured white, as though reflecting a light that didn't exist. Wild white hair framed a face carved from fury, while luminous violet eyes burned beneath bloodshot veins that cracked through the amethyst like spreading fractures. He was shirtless, lean and powerfully built, every muscle defined with unnatural precision. Matte-black nail polish gleamed across his fingers, each hand heavy with sapphire and diamond rings.

Sapphire-studded grills flashed between clenched teeth whenever his lips parted. Sleek black headphones etched with faint clockwork filigree rested around his neck, while a matte-black electric guitar with luminous violet strings hung across his back as naturally as another limb. Elegant chess-piece earrings swayed gently from his ears. He looked impossibly fashionable. He also looked like he wanted to kill the world. For a heartbeat, Katherine simply stared, captivated. Fear arrived a moment later.

Recognition struck. Jade antler earrings. Korhess. The same craftsman. Different design. Her chest tightened. He looked like Butter. If Butter had grown into a handsome rockstar.

"Clock!" The name escaped before she realised she'd spoken. He moved. Reality streaked. Her back slammed into the corridor wall hard enough to fracture stone. Cold fingers wrapped around her throat, lifting her effortlessly as her vision blurred. Clock stared into her eyes. Long enough to become unsettling.

"I can't read your mind." His voice rumbled with restrained violence.

"Something's blocking it." His grip tightened.

"What are you?" She clawed weakly at his wrist.

"And how are you strong enough to even carry-" His eyes dropped to the satchel. Butter's prosthetic leg hung from it, its tiny white lights still pulsing like the echo of a heartbeat. Everything stopped. His gaze climbed from the leg to Katherine's face, lingering on her luminous grey eyes with their cobalt limbal rings before settling on the glowing geometric tattoos peeking above her torn dress.

"What's with the eye?" he demanded.

"And the tattoos?" His grip hardened.

"Are you an Abomination?"

"Human," she rasped.

"I'm... human."

"Your eyes disagree."

"It's changing me," she choked.

"I don't fully understand it, but I'm still human." His expression remained unreadable.

"How did you get this?" His voice fractured.

"Did you kill her?" The Nonagon stirred. Ellipsis waited to free her. She stopped it. If Butter had called Clock strong... She didn't want to discover how strong. His grip should've crushed her instantly. Understatement quietly equalised the force, reducing it to something survivable, though still agonising.

"I loved your sister," she forced out between gasps. Silence.

"She says'Oh my' all the time..." No response.

"She likes saying 'unfathomable.'" Nothing.

"She loves gummy worms." His fingers twitched.

"She once went to a dog twerking competition." Another flicker.

"She's vegetarian." His eyes narrowed.

"You have to clench your cheeks to use the Bowl Technique. Or you'll poop yourself." He frowned.

"Or... pee yourself," Katherine wheezed.

"I don't remember which." He stared.

"What if you're lying?" he asked.

"What if you downloaded her memories?" Katherine's trembling hand slipped into the satchel.

"She gave me this." She pulled out a crinkled packet of cookies. Butter's favourite. Clock's eyes locked onto them. The corridor fell silent.

"She... gave you those?" Katherine nodded.

"She wanted me to try them." His grip loosened. She collapsed to the floor, coughing violently, hands clutching her bruised throat while he remained frozen, staring at the packet. Something inside him broke.

"She was always too trusting," he whispered.

"Giving snacks to strangers..." His voice cracked. His eyes finally returned to Katherine. This time he truly looked at her. The fury remained. Grief outweighed it. He saw the truth. She had loved Butter too.