Hydranomaly

Chapter 24: A Mother's Love (Part I)

And just like that... I was back there.

That sterile tomb of discipline and despair. The choking scent of antiseptic. The cold glare of overhead lights that never blinked, never faded, never gave you rest. The facility hadn't aged a day in my memory, nor had the pain. That place-more prison than training ground, more lab than home-sat rotting in my mind like a carcass that refused to decay. Its echoes still whispered. Still screamed.

My legs trembled under me. The trembling wasn't from the chill. It wasn't even from pain. No, by then, I was used to pain. It was the language they raised us in.

It was from what came after.

That ache... that throbbing, raw ache between my thighs, was more than a reminder. It was a curse stitched into flesh. The soreness bloomed up my spine, my insides left bruised and burning, like something sacred had been scraped out of me with broken glass. Every shift of my hips, every brush of cloth against my skin, was a reminder of the hands I didn't invite. The weight I couldn't escape. The stink of something that would never wash off.

And my mouth. My throat. Scratched raw, torn quiet. Not a voice left in me after the way I'd been used, filled to silence. The taste never left. It haunted me more than the blood, more than the bruises, more than the searing humiliation. That gushing, foreign fluid-thick, salty, inhuman-had drowned everything else. I still tasted it when I slept.

But the worst violation didn't scar my body. It was carved into something deeper. Somewhere I hadn't known could break.

They called it a test. Just another trial. Another procedure. No names. No apologies. Just restraints, twisted biomass and cold eyes watching. We were to be weapons, forged and tempered-but some of us, who just weren't cut out for that purpose, were just taken apart instead in the name of science.

I could barely walk afterward. The blood had dried on my skin by the time they unshackled me from that glass tube. The metal beneath my bare feet had never felt so sharp, so cruel, so endless. Step by step, I limped back to my dormitory-if you could even call it that. A box. A kennel. Every step hurt. Every step echoed with something inside me that I could never unhear.

And still, I walked.

Because back then, I didn't have the courage to fall.

Suicide was whispered among us like a prayer. A promise. The only door out that they hadn't locked. The lucky ones put a gun to their head before they were reassigned. The others... They ended up like me. Or worse. I remember the way my bunkmate used to look at her own wrists. Like they were traitors for not bleeding fast enough.

Sometimes I looked at mine the same way.

They told us we were fighting for the Emperor. For a "New Dawn." But no one ever told us why the sun burned when it rose. Why our own bones had to fuel its light.

I was ten.

And I'd already forgotten how to cry.

Then, months later... something shifted.

He wasn't supposed to happen. I hadn't shown the signs for it, that's why the Empire even let me go. Dad told me that I could get rid of it, that I should. That it'll only darken my life more than it already was. But I didn't listen, I couldn't.

Because something inside me whispered-not screamed, not roared, just whispered-that maybe, just maybe, this wasn't another burden. Maybe it was the last flicker of humanity I still had.

And fortunately, he could have not been more wrong.

He was small. So small. A tiny, squirming thing with soft gray hair and wide, vibrant eyes the color of fresh spring leaves, mirroring my own. I had never known innocence could exist in this world. Not until he looked up at me and smiled.