She Was Just A Child (PART 2)

CHAPTER 48: FRACTURE POINT

The lights above her hummed endlessly, soft and cold, never dimming, never blinking. The room was sterile white. Padded corners. No sharp edges. A cage without bars.

Dian sat in the corner, knees pulled to her chest, arms hugging them tightly. The thin white blanket draped around her like a shroud, lifeless and heavy. Her bare feet pressed flat against the floor, her back to the corner, head bowed just enough that the smooth curve of her recently shaved scalp caught the light.

She hadn't spoken in... days? Hours? There was no time here. Not really. Just fluorescent silence and the echo of things she couldn't remember.

She knew something had been taken from her. She just didn't know what.

At first, it felt like sleep. Then like floating. Then like being buried.

Now it was just noise. Quiet on the outside. Screaming beneath the surface.

Voices that weren't hers. Images she didn't remember seeing. Faces with no names. A name with no face.

Her fingers twitched. She looked down at them as if they didn't belong to her. Pale. Cold. Slight tremor in the pinky that wouldn't go away. The nails were uneven. Chipped. Dried blood clung under one of them.

She tried to remember where it came from. No answer. Just silence. Just stillness.

Someone had been here earlier. A handler. They spoke gently. Too gently. As if she were a pet being prepared for a new cage.

They called her Fifteen.

She repeated it.

Not because she accepted it.

But because the last time she said anything else, it felt like a vice clamped around her brain. Like lightning in her spine.

So she said Fifteen. Over and over. Let it roll around in her mouth like marbles.

It didn't taste like her.

But it didn't hurt.

She didn't know what to make of that.

Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, a different name came to her.

Soft.

Strained.

Dian.

She tried whispering it once.

She blacked out for two hours after that.

When she woke, her head hurt worse than the surgery. Like someone had gone in with a scalpel and sliced off the part of her that dared to feel.

She didn't try again.

The blankness was safer. She could stay here. Float here.

Be nothing here.

And no one could hurt her if she wasn't real.

---

Far above the surface, König's boots crunched into frozen gravel as he stepped off the transport. Wind howled through the ravine like a screaming ghost, and the snow beneath his feet was littered with shattered pine needles and broken branches. The mountain pass was dead quiet. No lights. No sound. Just the biting wind and the heavy breath of the KorTac team closing in behind him.

Roze moved silently to his right, her rifle angled low, eyes scanning the treeline. Conor brought up the rear, hauling breaching equipment on his back with the ease of someone who could throw it like a football. Oni ghosted through the trees ahead, already clearing a path. Zero walked slightly behind König, patching into Echo-9's signal grid with a custom field rig.