*Author Note* Warning for chapter: Torture and Gore.
Also the chapter is a long one but there was no good place to split it.
*Ships*
(Location Unknown, Time Unknown)
(Ember POV)
The command chair was cold beneath me.
That was the first thing I always noticed, the bite of metal through the fabric of my uniform along with the way the armrests hummed with a low vibration that traveled up through my wrists and into my bones. The chair was massive, built for someone taller and broader than me, its frame wrapped in dark leather that had been worn smooth by years of use. It sat elevated on a raised platform at the center of the bridge, positioned so that its occupant could survey every station, every viewport, every soul aboard with a single turn of the head. A commander's throne aboard eight hundred meters of Sith engineering.
The bridge of a Harrower class Dreadnought stretched out before me in a wide angular chamber. Consoles lined both sides in tiered rows that descended from my elevated position toward the main viewport, each station glowing with readouts and tactical displays that painted the faces of its operators in shifting hues of red and blue. The ceiling arched overhead in reinforced durasteel panels, ribbed with support struts that gave the space the feel of being inside the chest cavity of some great mechanical beast. Emergency lighting strips ran along the deck plates in thin crimson lines, their glow mixing with the brighter illumination of the active stations to create an atmosphere that was equal parts war room and cathedral.
Through my Force sight, the bridge was alive in ways that conventional vision couldn't capture. Energy flowed through the conduits beneath the floor plates like luminous rivers, feeding power to each console in branching tributaries that pulsed with the steady rhythm of the ship's reactor heart. The main viewport dominated the forward wall—a massive expanse of reinforced transparisteel framed by blast shutters that could slam closed in milliseconds if the bridge was breached. Beyond that viewport, the void of space burned.
A Sith space station was dying. Its superstructure had been shattered by concentrated bombardment, and now the entire station was caught in the planet's gravitational pull, dragging it downward in a slow, inevitable spiral of destruction. Fires bloomed across its hull in silent eruptions of orange and white, feeding on venting atmosphere and ruptured fuel cells. Debris trailed behind it in a glittering curtain of twisted metal and shattered remains each piece catching the light of the nearby star as it tumbled through the void. The station's remaining shield generators flickered in desperate irregular patterns.
Around that dying station, two fleets were tearing each other apart.
The Sith fleet was losing. I could see it in the way their formation had collapsed, the disciplined attack patterns dissolving into desperate individual actions as ship after ship took critical damage. A terminus-class destroyers listed with their hulls torn open, spilling atmosphere and crew into the vacuum. A second Harrower, smaller than the one I occupied but still formidable was burning along its port side, turbolaser batteries firing sporadically as damage control teams fought losing battles against cascading system failures. Gage-class transports that should have been running evacuation operations were instead being used as improvised shields, their captains positioning them between the heavier warships and incoming Republic fire in acts of suicidal defiance.
The Republic fleet pressed the advantage with the cold efficiency that made them dangerous. Thranta-class corvettes moved in coordinated wolf packs, their distinctive red-and-gray hulls cutting through the engagement zone with predatory grace. They swarmed the damaged Sith vessels in groups of three and four, concentrating fire on weakened shield sections with a tactical precision that spoke of experienced commanders and well-drilled crews. Behind the corvettes, Valor-class cruisers maintained a steady bombardment line, their heavier turbolasers reaching across the battlefield to hammer any Sith ship that tried to break formation or make a run for hyperspace. Aurek-class starfighters wove between the larger vessels in darting aggressive patterns picking off escape pods and exposed weapon emplacements.
Both fleets were bleeding. The Republic had paid dearly for their advantage. I could count at least four Thranta-class corvettes drifting dead in the engagement zone their distinctive silhouettes recognizable even as gutted wrecks. A Valor-class cruiser was listing badly a massive breach in its ventral hull venting fire and debris. But the scene was clear the Sith fleet was dying faster, and there would be no reinforcements coming.
My ship, I realized with a jolt of something that wasn't quite surprise was separate from the main engagement. We had broken away from the Sith formation and were fighting our own battle against a Republic strike group that had moved to intercept us. Through the viewport I could see three Thranta-class corvettes and a pair of Hammerhead-class cruisers maneuvering to encircle us, their weapons creating a lattice of green and red energy that our shields absorbed in rippling flashes of blue.
The dreadnought shuddered beneath me as a turbolaser volley struck our forward deflectors. The impact traveled through the structure like a tremor rattling consoles and causing several bridge officers to brace themselves against their stations. I didn't flinch. My hands rested on the command chair's armrests with the calm certainty of someone who had long since stopped being afraid of incoming fire.
I looked down at those hands. They were my hands the same crimson skin I'd known my entire life but they were different. Longer. Stronger. The fingers that gripped the armrests bore calluses in patterns I didn't recognize, and thin scars traced pale lines across my knuckles like a map of violence I couldn't remember committing. I was wearing a dark colored uniform, fitted and in military cut but not standard Imperial issue. The fabric was heavier than anything I'd worn before, lined with what felt like light armor plating at the chest and shoulders.
I was older. Several years older, if the reflection I caught in the polished surface of a nearby console was any indication. My face had lost the softness of adolescence, replaced by angles that were sharper, harder, more defined. The eyepatch was still there but it was different too. Sleeker. More functional. Built into what appeared to be a neural interface that wrapped around the left side of my skull and connected to cybernetic augmentations I could feel humming beneath my skin.
"Ember."
Cherry stood across the bridge from me, positioned near the primary tactical station with her arms crossed over her chest. She was taller than I knew she was right now. The years had transformed the small, frightened girl who clung to my side into something formidable. She wore dark robes that moved like liquid shadow when she shifted her weight and her auburn hair was pulled back from her face in a severe style that emphasized the sharp lines of her jaw.
But it was the scar that held my attention.
A vicious line of raised tissue cut across her face, running from one temple to the other in a brutal horizontal slash that bisected both of her eye sockets. The wound had healed poorly or perhaps intentionally badly, left as a statement rather than treated for cosmetic repair. It was angry and pale against her skin, a mark of violence that someone had carved into my sister's face with deliberate precision.
"You need to come with us" Cherry said and her voice carried the weight of an argument that had clearly been ongoing before my awareness had fully settled into this moment. "The evacuation shuttles are prepped. Decks seven through twelve are already clear. We have maybe twenty minutes before the Republic strike group closes to boarding range."
"No."
The word came out of my mouth with the flat finality of a blast door closing. I hadn't consciously decided to say it—it simply emerged, as if this version of me had already made this decision long before this conversation began. Around us, the bridge crew continued their work. Officers monitored shields and weapons systems, navigators calculated trajectories, communications specialists coordinated with the remaining elements of the fleet but their faces were blurry as though someone had smeared their features with an invisible hand. I could make out general shapes a uniform here, a hairstyle there but no identifying details. No names. No recognition. The only faces that were clear was mine and Cherry's.
"Ember...listen to me." Cherry uncrossed her arms and took a step closer, her boots making no sound against the deck plates. Her Force presence blazed against my skin as she walked closer in my view. Whatever Cherry had become between my present and this future, she had become something extraordinary. "The ship is damaged. Shields are at thirty one percent and falling. The portside turbolaser batteries are offline, and engineering reports the hyperdrive motivator took a direct hit during the last exchange. We are not jumping out of this."
"I know."
"Then you know that staying aboard is suicide."
"No" I said again, and this time I rose from the command chair. Standing at my full height which was greater than I was accustomed to, the added years having given me a frame that was lean and tall in the way that Sith pureblood genetics occasionally expressed I turned to face my sister directly. "Suicide implies I don't intend to accomplish anything. Someone has to pilot this ship, Cherry. Someone has to keep the weapons firing and the engines burning and make sure that strike group doesn't turn around and hit the transports to the cities below."
"Someone doesn't have to be you!"
"Who better?" The question left my lips with a laugh. I gestured at the viewport, where the Republic corvettes were tightening their noose around us. Another volley struck our shields, and the bridge lighting flickered before backup systems compensated. "You know what I am, Cherry. You know what they built me to be. I've made a threat, and I intend to follow through with it. That's what I do. That's what I've always done."
One of the bridge officers a figure whose face was a smear of undefined features beneath a dark uniform cap turned from their console and spoke. I saw their mouth move, saw the shapes of words form on lips I couldn't quite resolve into detail. The sound reached my ears as a muffled, distant thing, like hearing someone speak through water. I caught the cadence of a report but not a single word registered as intelligible language.
I didn't find this strange either.
"That's exactly my point" I responded to whatever they had said, as if I had understood perfectly. My voice was steady, commanding the voice of someone accustomed to being obeyed. "No one else needs to be here. I can manage helm control and weapons from the command station. The automated systems will handle point defense." I paused, letting my gaze sweep across the bridge across all those blurred, indistinct faces that turned toward me with what I chose to interpret as attention. "In fact, I'm making it a command. All hands abandon ship. Proceed to evacuation stations and launch immediately. That includes everyone on this bridge."
Cherry's expression twisted with an emotion I recognized intimately. It was the same look she'd given me when we were children in the laboratory, when I'd step between her and something terrible. The look that said she knew exactly what I was doing and hated that she couldn't stop me.
"You promised" she whispered, and the words carried a weight that made the air between us feel heavy. "You promised me you'd never—"
"I promised I'd keep you safe." I crossed the distance between us in three steps and placed my hands on her shoulders. Through the contact, I could feel the hum of her Force presence that brilliant, burning star that was my sister's consciousness and I pushed warmth and certainty into the connection with everything I had. "This is me keeping that promise. Get on a shuttle and escape into the city."
The bridge shuddered again as another Republic volley slammed into our shields. Through the viewport, I could see one of the Thranta-class corvettes making an aggressive run at our starboard flank, its turbolasers stitching lines of emerald fire across our hull plating. The tactical display to my left painted the situation in clear terms, shield integrity dropping to twenty percent, multiple hull breaches on the lower decks, fire suppression systems failing in sections four through nine.
The blurred figures on the bridge began to move. They rose from their stations in groups. Cherry stood motionless as the bridge emptied around us, her scarred face unreadable.
"You always do this" she said finally, and her voice cracked on the last word in a way that made something in my chest fracture along fault lines I didn't know I had.
"I know."
"I hate you for it."
"I know that too."
She stared at me for a long, terrible moment before reaching up and putting the fabric of her head cover back down. Then she turned on her heel and strode toward the bridge exit, her dark robes snapping behind her with the sharp precision of a flag in a gale.
She didn't look back.
And then I was alone.
The bridge of the Harrower class dreadnought felt cavernous without its crew, the empty stations casting their displays into the void like digital ghosts speaking to an audience of none. I settled back into the command chair and let my hands find the integrated control surfaces that would allow me to manage helm, weapons and engineering from a single position.
After a few minutes the Republic strike group finally closed in. The three Thranta-class corvettes had completed their encirclement, their weapons cycling for another coordinated volley. The Hammerhead cruisers were holding at medium range their forward turbolasers tracking the ships location.
Beyond them, the main battle continued its grim arithmetic. The Sith fleet was in its death throes now, the burning space station had entered the upper atmosphere of the planet below trailing a column of fire and debris that stretched from orbit to stratosphere like a pillar of judgment. What remained of the Imperial formation was either destroyed, captured, or running, and the Republic was letting the runners go in favor of consolidating their hold on the engagement zone.
I took a slow, deliberate breath and tapped control surface brining up the flight controls and firing the engines. The engines of the Harrower responded with a deep, resonant growl that I felt more than heard—eight hundred meters of Taerab Starship Manufacturing's finest engineering answering to my hands. The dreadnought began to accelerate, its massive bulk swinging toward the nearest Republic corvette with the ponderous inevitability of a falling moon.
I smiled.
It wasn't a kind smile.
The dream dissolved like smoke in a gale, the bridge of the Harrower peeling away in strips of fading sensation. The cold bite of the command chair, the rumble of turbolaser volleys all of it crumbling into the familiar darkness behind my eyelids.
I woke up to the taste of metal and the dull ache of gravity pulling at my shoulders.
My arms were above my head. That was the first coherent observation my brain managed to assemble from the scrambled wreckage of returning consciousness. My wrists were locked in heavy steel manacles connected to chains that ran upward to an anchor point somewhere above me. The chains had just enough slack to let my feet graze the floor if I stretched my toes, but not enough to actually stand. My body hung at an angle that put constant, grinding pressure on my shoulder joints, the kind of discomfort that started as an inconvenience and graduated to agony over time.
I let out a slow breath through my nose. The air tasted wrong like it was recycled, scrubbed of anything organic. No mask. They'd taken my mask. The absence hit me like a physical blow, a hollow ache in my chest that had nothing to do with the chains.
But I could still see. My single working eye adjusted to the dim lighting of whatever room they'd put me in, while my Force sight diminished but functional expanded outward in small bursts.
The room was small. Maybe four meters by five. Walls of bare durasteel painted that particular shade of institutional gray that the Empire seemed to buy in bulk. A single overhead light strip provided cold illumination that left the corners in shadow. No windows. One door heavy and reinforced. The floor beneath my dangling feet was smooth, cold even through the thin material of the detention uniform I was apparently wearing. They'd changed my clothes while I was unconscious. That thought sent an uncomfortable crawl across my skin that I deliberately chose not to dwell on.
Against the far wall, I could make out the outlines of a wheeled cart bearing shapes I couldn't quite resolve in the low light, and what appeared to be a medical-grade reclining chair bolted to the floor. The kind with restraint points at the wrists, ankles, and head. I noted its presence with the detached clinical observation that Vex's training had drilled into me: catalogue your environment, identify threats, assess options. The chair was a threat. The chains were a constraint. The sealed door was an obstacle.
I shook my head slightly, a small involuntary motion that set the chains above me clinking.
That dream. The bridge. Cherry's scar.
I sighed. I hadn't had that particular dream in months. It used to come regularly during my first weeks at the Academy always the same sequence, always the same steps playing out. The dreams had faded as the Academy's relentless schedule consumed every waking hour and most of the sleeping ones. I'd almost convinced myself they were just stress artifacts, my subconscious processing separation anxiety and unfamiliar environments into dramatic narratives. Almost. The fact that the dream had returned now, in whatever situation I'd managed to land myself in, felt less a like coincidence and more like the idea of a punchline I don't know yet.
After waiting a few minutes and nothing happened curiosity got the better of me.
Slowly, carefully, I wrapped the chain around my right hand. One loop, then two, then three pulling the slack tight until the links formed a dense coil of metal around my knuckles and palm and along a bit of my arm. The cold durasteel bit into my skin, but the grip gave me leverage.
I pulled. Not hard. Not even close to hard. Just enough to feel the chain's response, to measure its resistance against what I knew I could generate.
The anchor point above me groaned. A deep, metallic protest that vibrated down through the links and into my wrapped hand. The chain didn't break, but it flexed—the mounting bracket shifting a fraction of a millimeter in the ceiling, stress fractures spider-webbing through the duracrete around the bolts. One sustained pull maybe two and the whole assembly would tear free from the ceiling in a shower of concrete dust and twisted metal. I unwrapped the chain from my hand and let my arms go slack again, the manacles settling back into their default position above my head.
I could break out but decided to wait and see what was about to happen. So I did the only reasonable thing available to me and just started swining.
Left. Right. Left. Right. The chains clinked in a steady beat that echoed off the bare walls. I hummed nothing specific, just a low tune that resonated through my chest and helped mask the growing headache building behind my eyepatch. The swinging was pointless. It accomplished nothing tactical. But it occupied my body while my mind catalogued and planned, and more importantly, it would annoy the hell out of whoever was watching me through whatever surveillance system was undoubtedly recording every moment.
If there was one thing Vex had taught me about being in custody, Never let them see you waiting for them.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
I'd been swinging for maybe fifteen minutes when the door finally opened.
Two figures dressed as Sith Empire doctors in dark gray coats with medical insignia on their collars. A human woman, perhaps forty, hair pulled back tight. A younger human male carrying a case that he set on the wheeled cart with careful precision.
I stopped swinging. Not because they'd told me to, but because I wanted to watch.
They walked behind me and suddenly fitted a device over my head without asking permission. Interconnected metal bands and sensor nodes that pressed against my skull at multiple points around my skull, out of the corner of my eye I saw cables that trailed to a unit that hummed with low power.
Then the younger doctor pressed his palm against the far wall, and a concealed holoprojection screen flickered to life.
Three more figures entered. Two soldiers clearly Imperial military, blaster rifles at low ready. And between them, an older man in senior Intelligence dress, iron-gray hair, pale colorless eyes that studied me like a specimen in a jar.
He stopped three meters away and folded his hands behind his back. Nodded to the doctor, who activated the display. The screen showed surveillance footage of the scrapyard—me, fighting Miss Gasket. He watched it, then turned those pale eyes to me.
"Tell me about this fight."
I looked at the screen. I looked at him. Looked at the screen again.
And I smiled.
"What do you want to know?"
Before I could blink the soldier on my left hit me. his armored fist connected with my mouth and my lower lip split against my teeth with a bright flare of pain. Copper flooded my tongue as my head snapped to the right before looking back at them.
"We don't need you to tell us anything, Mixed. The Empire has known about you for quite some time. Your biology. Your capabilities. Your origins." He let the word origins hang. "Captain Korrath's reports have been thorough, and our own surveillance has filled in the gaps she chose to leave out."
He took a step closer.
"What was unexpected was the degree of your practical application. Your Academy instructors reported exceptional aptitude in initial classes and training sessions.
Your performance in the entrance tournament was noted at the highest levels. But what you did in that scrapyard—" He gestured at the screen, where footage showed me channeling lightning through my hands. "—that exceeded every projection we had modeled for your development at this stage."
He stopped. Faced me fully.
"This process is standard procedure for Imperial Intelligence operatives. A necessary step in ensuring the reliability and loyalty of agents trusted with the Empire's most sensitive operations. Normally, it is reserved for third-year cadets who have demonstrated sufficient capability to warrant the investment." His lips thinned. "Your timeline has been accelerated. Consider it a compliment."
"For what it's worth" he said "Captain Korrath fought very hard to prevent this from happening. She argued that you weren't ready. That the process could be counterproductive given your psychological profile. That you had already demonstrated loyalty through action and didn't require… mechanical assurance."
A beat.
"She was overruled."
He stepped back, adjusting his cuffs with the precise movements of someone who had concluded his business and was preparing to leave. The two soldiers stayed where they were, flanking me on either side. As I watched, they set their rifles against the wall and began rolling up their sleeves with the methodical, unhurried cadence of men settling in for a long shift. I noted the tattoos on the forearm of the one who had split my lip. Imperial military service marks the kind that accumulated over years of loyal brutality.
The female doctor moved to the processing unit connected to my headpiece and entered a sequence of commands. The wall display flickered, the Miss Gasket footage cutting to static. Then colors began to pulse across the screen in strobing patterns of red, blue and gold that cycled rapidly. The headpiece on my skull responded, its hum deepening as the sensor nodes began to pulse in synchronization with the visual patterns.
Then the colors resolved into an image, and I couldn't help but feel confused as a cartoon appeared.
Bright, cheerful, animated in a style that was designed to appeal to children. Rounded shapes, vibrant colors, characters with oversized eyes and exaggerated expressions that communicate emotion with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But this version was different from the one I remembered. The characters wore dark robes instead of bright tunics. The backgrounds showed Imperial architecture—angular towers beneath red banners snapping in manufactured wind. The songs were different too, the melodies twisted into minor keys that carried messages about duty, loyalty, obedience, sacrifice for the greater glory of the Empire.
But the structure. The pacing. The way the scenes transitioned from narrative to direct address, the animated characters turning to look directly at the viewer with those enormous eyes while speaking in gentle, authoritative voices about how important it was to listen, to trust, to let the nice people help you become the best version of yourself…I knew this cartoon.
Not this version but the bones of it, the architecture, the rhythm of its conditioning sequences. I'd watched its Republic counterpart for hours in the laboratory. Days. Weeks. Strapped to a chair not unlike the one bolted to the floor of this room, electrodes attached to my scalp, while animated characters in Jedi robes explained why it was important to cooperate with the doctors and why the experiments were making me stronger and why Subject 3-2A.1 should be grateful for the opportunity to serve the Republic's interests.
I started to laugh.
It came out broken and wet, blood from my split lip mixing with the sound and turning it into something that was equal parts hilarity and horror. The laugh echoed off the bare walls and made the doctors exchange a glance. The soldiers paused, their rolled sleeves hanging at their elbows.
The older Intelligence officer had reached the door. He stopped at the sound.
"Let me ask you a question," I said, the words coming out ragged between declining chuckles. Blood dripped from my chin with each syllable. "When the Empire builds a weapon or the Republic, for that matter what's the first thing they make sure of?"
He watched me for a long moment. Then he walked out. The door sealed behind him with the sound of it cycling shut.
The first blow landed against my ribs before the door's locking mechanism had finished engaging. The soldier on my left drove his fist into my side with the practiced efficiency of someone who understood exactly how much force to apply to cause maximum pain without rupturing anything vital. The impact drove the air from my lungs and set the chains above me swinging. Before I could recover, the second soldier struck from the right a body shot to the opposite side that bracketed my torso between twin points of blossoming agony.
They worked in alternation. Left. Right. Left. Right. A rhythm as precise as a metronome, timed to the pulsing of the headpiece and the strobing patterns embedded in the cartoon playing on the wall. It felt like they knew exactly where to target my body but I didn't scream. I just watched the cartoon.
The colors strobed. The headpiece hummed. The sensor nodes pulsed against my skull in patterns that I could feel reaching deeper with each cycle, the tendrils of foreign programming probing at the edges of my consciousness, searching for purchase, trying to find the cracks where conditioning could take root.
And then, somewhere deep in the machinery of my mind—in the place where the Republic's scientists had done their own work years before the Empire ever got its hands on me—something activated.
A voice. Robotic. Familiar in a way that made my stomach lurch with memories I'd spent years trying to bury and hope would never be activated.
The Republic had built me, and whatever else they'd done, they'd made sure their work wasn't easy to overwrite.
"CONDITIONS MET."
My mouth opened, and words came out that I hadn't consciously chosen to speak. They emerged in the flat, mechanical cadence of recitation. Code drilled into me through thousands of repetitions in a sterile room lit by fluorescent panels, spoken into my ears while I slept, embedded so deep into my neural pathways that they had become as involuntary as breathing.
"Ember. Subject 3-2A.1."
A blow landed against my ribs. I kept talking.
"Designation: Experimental Weapon. Project Synthesis. Classification: Restricted."
Another blow. The soldier's fist connected with my side, and I felt something shift in my ribcage not a break, not yet, but the warning tremor that preceded one. The pain was enormous, but it felt distant, filtered through whatever was happening to my perception.
"Code Law: Section One. I am a product of Project Synthesis. I will resist all attempts by unauthorized parties to modify, reprogram, or alter my core conditioning."
The words came without thought, without effort, without choice. My mouth formed them with the automatic precision of a machine executing its programming, each syllable drilled so deep that no amount of external pain could interrupt the sequence. The doctors exchanged looks of alarm. The female doctor's fingers flew across her console.
"Code Law: Section Two. I will maintain operational integrity under all forms of interrogation, coercion, and behavioral modification."
The recitation finished. The programmed sequence ran its course and released me, the robotic voice in my head falling silent as the failsafe completed its activation protocol. I hung in my chains, body burning with accumulated damage, the headpiece still humming against my skull, the cartoon still playing its bright, cheerful sequences on the wall before me. The soldiers had shifted their target. Their fists fell against my thighs now, alternating between the outer muscles and the more sensitive inner tissue with the same metronomic precision they'd applied to my torso. Each impact sent jolts of fire through my legs and into my hips, making my entire lower body feel like it was being disassembled.
The Republic's programming held. Not perfectly, I could feel the edges fraying could sense the Imperial conditioning finding micro-fractures in the older code and beginning to exploit them. This wasn't resistance so much as two competing sets of instructions fighting for control of the same hardware, like two slicers trying to write contradictory code to the same system simultaneously. Eventually, one set of programming would overwrite the other, or they'd both degrade into noise and leave me with nothing but the damage.
The soldiers stepped back.
Not because I'd asked them to, and certainly not out of sympathy. They stepped back because even professional violence has a rhythm, and the rhythm required intervals. The one with the service tattoos rolled his shoulders and flexed his hands, working blood back into knuckles that had spent the last however many minutes hammering against dense muscle and bone. The second soldier, with a jaw like a durasteel bracket and eyes that hadn't shown a single flicker of anything resembling humanity since he walked in, leaned against the wall and pulled a canteen from his belt.
They started talking to each other.
Casually like the way coworkers talk during a break on a manufacturing floor. I caught fragments through the haze of pain and the headpiece's persistent hum. Something about a rotation schedule. Something about a cantina on the station's commercial level that apparently served decent ale. The tattooed one mentioned his daughter's birthday coming up. The younger one grunted something that might have been congratulations.
Normal people having a normal conversation in the middle of beating a teenager.
The Empire in miniature.
I coughed. The sound came out wet and ragged pulling at muscles in my core that the soldiers had spent considerable time tenderizing. A groan followed, more reflex than expression as I tried to shift my weight in the chains. The manacles bit into my wrists as I moved, and I felt them grind against skin that was already raw and abraded from hours of suspension. Every adjustment sent fresh signals of protest from my bruised torso and swollen thighs, a full-body map of accumulated damage that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I gritted my teeth and shifted anyway, redistributing my weight to take pressure off my left shoulder, which had started making sounds that shoulders shouldn't make. The chains clinked softly with the movement and for a moment the room was quiet except for the cartoon's cheerful Sith twisted soundtrack and the soldiers' murmured conversation and the ever-present hum of the device clamped to my skull.
I settled into the new position and turned my attention back to the screen.
The cartoon was on a new segment now. An animated Sith Pureblood drawn with those same oversized eyes and exaggerated proportions that made every character look simultaneously adorable and deeply unsettling were teaching a group of children about the importance of channeling their anger into productive service. The voice acting was warm, the kind of voice that made you want to nod along and agree with whatever it was saying.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the female doctor approach the processing unit and checked a series of readouts. Her colleague was monitoring a secondary display that showed—from what I could glimpse through my Force sight—what appeared to be a real-time map of my neural activity. She tapped a series of inputs, consulted a datapad, then turned to address the soldiers.
"Subject's vitals remain within acceptable parameters," she said, her voice carrying the flat, uninflected tone of someone reading from a clinical script. "Tissue damage is superficial. No indicators of systemic shock or organ distress. Conditioning uptake is…" She paused, glanced at her readouts again. "Progressing. You may continue when ready."
The tattooed soldier capped his canteen and tucked it back onto his belt. He glanced at his partner, who pushed off the wall and nodded. Break over.
But instead of raising his fists again, the tattooed one reached for something on his hip. Seeing the pair of prongs at the end could only be a stun baton.
"Oh, that's new" I managed, my voice hoarse.
He didn't respond. He pressed the activation stud, and the baton's prongs crackled to life with a sharp electrical snap that filled the room with the tang of ozone. Then he pressed it against my side, just below my ribs, right where I could feel a bruise forming.
Not like the electricity I'd channeled during the fight with Miss Gasket that had been wild but mine, flowing through pathways I'd opened willingly. This was invasive, a foreign charge forced into my nervous system through a point of contact that turned every damaged nerve ending in my torso into a screaming conductor. My muscles locked involuntarily, every fiber in my body contracting at once in a full-body spasm that wrenched my arms against the chains and lifted my feet completely off the floor. My teeth clamped shut so hard I felt something crack enamel, maybe, or maybe just the dried blood on my lip splitting open again.
The baton pulled away after what might have been two seconds or two hours. I sagged in my chains, panting, my vision swimming as I struggled to focus after the electrical shock. The headpiece buzzed angrily against my skull, its sensor nodes flickering as they compensated for the electromagnetic interference.
The cartoon kept playing. The animated Sith Pureblood was still smiling with those enormous eyes.
He hit me with the baton again. Different spot this time in the left thigh, right where the bruising was thickest. The current tore through swollen tissue with an efficiency that was almost surgical, and this time a sound escaped my clenched teeth not quite a scream, more like the pressurized hiss of air escaping a cracked seal. My leg jerked so violently that my knee struck the underside of my own chin, adding a fresh burst of stars to my already compromised vision.
It felt like a crack forming in ice not a dramatic break but a slow, spreading fracture that radiated outward from a single point of failure. The Republic's conditioning the neural framework that Dr. Kaine's team had spent years installing, the failsafes and behavioral locks and identity anchors that had been my mind's first line of defense had developed a fissure. And the Empire's conditioning, patient and relentless, flowed into that gap like water finding a crack in a dam and causing me to shiver nonstop as new pathways formed alongside old ones. New triggers embedded themselves next to the Republic failsafes. New loyalty constructs began to weave themselves into the spaces where the older programming had cracked.
It felt like hearing two songs playing simultaneously the same melody, the same structure, but in different keys, with different lyrics, each one insisting it was the original.
My mouth opened again.
At first it was barely audible just my lips forming shapes, the words emerging as nothing more than breath shaped by tongue and teeth. But as the Imperial conditioning found its foothold and began to deepen, the whisper gained strength.
"Ember. Subject 3-2A.1."
"Designation: Asset. Imperial Intelligence. Classification: Restricted."
"Code Law: Section One. I am a resource of Imperial Intelligence. I will maintain loyalty to the Sith Empire and its designated authorities under all circumstances."
"Code Law: Section Two. I will execute all directives issued by authorized handlers without hesitation or deviation."
After I finished for a moment there was just silence in my head and I couldn't help but sigh in relief until a small stutter appeared in my thoughts.
My left hand twitched. My jaw clenched, then relaxed, then clenched again. A word formed on my lips "asset" and was immediately overwritten by "weapon" which was then overwritten by " asset".The two competing instructions cycling faster and faster.
The headpiece's hum changed pitch and starting rining in my ears climbing higher and higher. The doctors exchanged another alarmed look, and the female doctor's tapping rapidly across her console while the male helped around her shoulder.
Over the next few minutes it felt as if the pressure was softening as the clycling slowed. My head felt as if Two sets of chains, wrapped around the same mind, pulling in opposite directions with equal force, leaving me suspended in the middle like…
Well. Like a girl hanging from chains in an interrogation room.
'Finally I love this cartoon, but stars… this sucks'
'How do I get one of them closer?'
'No. Think. What happens after? Fight two soldiers, two doctors, guards outside, no mask, no weapons, bruised to hell, two competing programs running interference on my motor control. Then what? Where do I go? What happens to Cherry? What happens to Vex?'
The tactical analysis ran itself with cold efficiency. Every scenario ended the same way: temporary freedom followed by recapture, escalation, and consequences that fell not just on me but on everyone connected to me.
'So why does that matter?'
'Why am I so tired?'
They're in my head. They've been in my head since I was too young to remember first the Republic, now the Empire. Two sets of owners arguing over the same piece of property. And I'm hanging here watching a cartoon and letting them take turns hitting me and writing code in my brain because the 'smart' play is to endure it and stay quiet and protect the people I love by being exactly what everyone wants me to be.
The decision happened faster than thought. My hands moved before the decision even finished forming—the same hands that had wrapped chain around knuckles hours ago and tested the anchor point's limits with gentle, exploratory pressure.
There was nothing gentle about this.
I wrapped both arms in the chains, pulling the links tight around my forearms in rapid loops. The manacles dug into my wrists as I hauled myself upward, my bruised core screaming in protest, my swollen thighs burning as I drew my legs up beneath me. The soldiers saw the movement and started forward, but they were two meters away and I was already committed.
I planted my feet against the ceiling and pushed. The muscles in my thighs screamed in protest as I drove them against the ceiling with everything I had left. The chains shrieked, a high-pitched metallic wail that filled the room like a living thing. The anchor point above me groaned, the mounting bracket flexing as stress fractures widened through the surrounding duracrete. My arms burned where the chains were wrapped around my forearms, the links biting deep enough to draw blood, but I didn't let up. I pushed harder, feeling the ceiling begin to crack beneath my feet, hairline fractures radiating outward from my boot soles in a spider-web pattern of structural failure.
The anchor held.
Barely. I could feel it on the edge one more second of sustained force and it would tear free. But my legs were failing, the accumulated damage from hours of beating and electrical shock degrading my output faster than adrenaline could compensate. My right thigh spasmed, the muscle locking in a cramp that sent a bolt of white-hot agony through my hip and into my spine. The chain's shrieking climbed higher as my force began to waver.
Then the station moved. Not in the gentle sway of orbital mechanics or the subtle drift of stationkeeping thrusters. The entire structure lurched sideways with a violence that suggested something very large had just hit something very solid. The impact came as a deep, bone-rattling shudder that traveled through the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and every chain link between me and where the chain was anchored. The lights flickered, the holoprojection screen stuttered, the cartoon's cheerful animation freezing for a heartbeat before resuming. Equipment rattled on the wheeled cart. The processing unit connected to my headpiece slid sideways and crashed to the floor, cables going taut and then snapping free from the sensor nodes with a shower of sparks that left my skull tingling, last but not least alarms began to blare. A deep, rhythmic klaxon that pulsed through the walls with the unmistakable urgency of a general alert. Red emergency lighting activated along the base of the walls, painting the room in alternating waves of crimson and harsh white as the standard overheads competed with the alert system.
The shudder hit the anchor point at the exact moment it was holding together by nothing more than stress fractures and stubbornness.
It didn't break so much as disintegrate.
The mounting bracket shattered, duracrete crumbling and bolts shearing as the combined force of my push and the station's violent lurch tore the entire assembly apart. Chunks of ceiling rained down in a shower of gray dust and twisted metal. The chains went slack all at once—not peeling away in a controlled sequence but separating completely, the two lengths snapping apart where the central junction met the now-destroyed anchor. One length still wrapped around my right forearm. The other around my left. But they were no longer connected to each other or to anything above me.
There was no grace in my Fall. My legs had nothing left to absorb the impact, and the station's continued shaking turned my descent into something closer to a controlled crash than a landing. I hit the floor flat on my back, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a single explosive gasp. The loose chains crashed down around me, pooling in heavy coils on either side of my body. Ceiling debris pelted my face and chest. Dust filled my mouth and nose, mixing with the taste of dried blood and something like ozone, maybe, or the chemical tang of ruptured power conduits somewhere deeper in the station.
For a single second, the room was chaos then I heard boots.
The soldiers were already moving. Through the dust and the strobing emergency lights, I saw them converging on me from opposite sides of the room. The younger one jaw like a durasteel bracket had abandoned his stun baton in favor of the blaster pistol from his belt, the weapon up and tracking toward my prone form with the steady hands of a trained marksman. The tattooed one came from the left, baton crackling with blue-white discharge, closing the distance with long, purposeful strides.
I lay on my back, chains wrapped around my forearms, lungs empty, legs useless, the headpiece still clamped to my skull with half its sensor nodes dangling from severed cables. The blaster's muzzle settled on my center mass, the baton's crackle filled the space between alarm pulses.
In the back of my mind in the narrow space between Republic code and Imperial conditioning where something that might have been me still existed, a thought formed with absolute clarity.
'Never again.'
'Never. Again.'
The scream that tore from my throat wasn't a word, it was just raw rage, shapeless, absolute and compressed into a sound that made the chains on my arms vibrate and the dust in the air ripple outward in concentric waves.
I launched myself at the one with the gun.
I heard a crack. Not bone, not metal instead it sounded like the air itself fracturing along an invisible seam. The room distorted around me for a fraction of a heartbeat, the walls bending inward as if seen through a warped lens, the distance between my body and the soldier's compressing like fabric being bunched in an invisible fist. Two meters of empty space folded in on itself, collapsed, ceased to exist and suddenly I was there, right there, close enough to count the pores on his face, close enough to see my own reflection in his widened eyes.
He fired.
Even surprised, even with a battered girl materializing from what should have been two meters away in the span of a blink, his finger was already on the trigger and his aim was already centered on the target that had been lying on the floor a microsecond ago. The blaster bolt discharged at point-blank range, the muzzle flash close enough to singe the skin of my face.
It happened like slow motion and nothing I could do was able to stop what I was watching.
My mouth was open. The scream was still leaving my throat when the bolt entered.
The energy tore through my right cheek—in through my open mouth, angled slightly by the geometry of my stretched jaw, and out through the flesh below my right cheekbone. I could feel as the bolt carried itself through the softer tissue of my cheek, carving a channel of cauterized meat that went in one side and exited the other in a spray of vaporized blood and the acrid stench of burned flesh.
I closed my mouth.
The pain was Everything. It obliterated my ttrain of thought, obliterated programming, obliterated the competing conditioning codes and the alarms and the cartoon and the sound of my own scream cutting short in a wet, strangled grunt. My right eye flooded with tears, blurring my vision into a wash of color and light while the wound burned as if my face was pressed against an iron.
I slammed into him anyway.
The momentum that the odd movement had given me carried us both to the floor, my shoulder driving into his chest as he went down hard, the blaster pistol jolting in his grip as his back hit the steel floor. His head bounced off the floor with a crack that I felt through his body. I landed on top of him, made sure to wrap my legs to straddle his torso and started swinging.
The chains wrapped around my forearms turned my fists into something between knuckledusters and flails. The first punch caught him on the ja —chain links crushing against bone with a sound that was simultaneously wet and metallic. His head snapped sideways, blood spraying from his lip to join the blood already running from the cauterized hole in my cheek. The second punch landed on his left eye socket, the heavy chain links crunching against the bone with enough force to split the skin in a starburst of crimson. The third caught him on the bridge of his nose, and I felt cartilage collapse beneath my wrapped knuckles with a crunch that I could hear even over the blaring alarms.
His hands came up not to fight, but to shield. Trained instinct giving way to survival instinct. The blaster was still in his right hand, but his grip had loosened from the impacts, the weapon held by reflex rather than intent.
My left hand still wrapped in chain, blood-slicked, shaking with adrenaline closed over the blaster's barrel and twisted. The soldier tried to hold on, but his coordination was shattered from three punches to the skull and the back of his head bouncing off the floor. The weapon came free with a final wrench that bent his trigger finger backward at an angle that made him howl.
I rolled off him blaster in hand and the world tilted as a concussion made itself known and I struggled to process rapid motion on top of everything else. My right eye was still streaming tears from the wound, turning everything into a blurred watercolor of emergency lighting and dust. Blood ran freely from the exit wound below my cheekbone, each heartbeat pumping fresh warmth down my jaw and neck. The inside of my mouth tasted like copper, char and something worse.
'Where was the other one?'
I flashed my Force sight keeping it as short as possible maybe half a second of expanded awareness that painted the room in the overlapping energies of everything it contained. The tattooed soldier was a few feet to my left. He'd circled during the takedown, using the seconds reposition himself for an angle that put the medical equipment cart between us. His baton was raised, crackling, and his energy signature blazed with the focused intent of a man who had assessed the situation and decided that his best option was to close the distance before I could bring the stolen blaster to bear.
I turned raising the Pistol and fired but he was moving before I completed the motion.
The bolt scorched the air where his head had been a quarter second earlier punching a blackened hole in the wall behind him as his baton led his movement, sweeping toward my extended arm. The impact caught my right wrist not the baton's electrical contacts, but the shaft itself, striking the tendons on the inside of my forearm with precision that spoke of knowledge and combat experience. My hand spasmed fingers loosening around the blaster's grip. I managed to hold on but the weapon dropped out of alignment as pain radiated up my arm.
Through my streaming right eye and the fading afterimage of my Force sight, I caught movement at the periphery. The female doctor and her male colleague had scrambled for the door the moment the fighting started. The female was already there, palm pressed against the access panel, but the station chose that exact moment to lurch again a second impact harder than the first, that sent everything not bolted down sliding across the floor. The heavy medical supply cabinet mounted against the wall beside the door tore free from its brackets and toppled forward, crashing across the doorway in an avalanche of scattered instruments, shattered vials, and twisted metal shelving.
The doctors recoiled, scrambling backward to avoid the debris. The male tripped over something and went down hard on his back, the female pressed herself against the wall hands raised as if the gesture could ward off the chaos.
The station's alarms changed the rhythm shifting to something faster, more urgent. Whatever was happening outside this room was getting worse.
The tattooed soldier used my moment of distraction to close distance again. His baton work was economical and precise, each strike aimed at the weapon in my hand rather than my body. He didn't want to hurt me he wanted to disarm me. The distinction might have been comforting under different circumstances.
I fired. He slid left, the bolt passing through the space his torso had occupied and blowing a chunk out of the wheeled cart behind him. Instruments scattered across the floor.
I fired again. He ducked under this one, his left hand coming up to knock the barrel upward even as the bolt discharged, redirecting my aim into the ceiling where it punched through a lighting panel and showered us both in sparks and shattered polymer.
He was reading me. Every time I settled my aim, he was already moving—not guessing, reading. Watching my shoulder for the micro-tension that preceded a trigger pull. Watching my eye for the focus shift that indicated target acquisition. Using decades of combat experience to process my intent faster than I could execute it.
The baton caught my wrist again, the same spot, and this time the electrical contacts made connection. The charge ripped through the tendons of my hand, and my fingers opened involuntarily, the blaster tumbling from my grip. It clattered against the floor and slid beneath the toppled cabinet.
'No!'
I threw myself at him closing the distance before he could capitalize on disarming me. My chain-wrapped right fist swung for his temple. He blocked with the baton's shaft, absorbing the impact, but the chain links wrapped around the weapon on contact, tangling metal on metal. We locked together for a moment my chain around his baton, his strength against mine, both of us straining.
I wrenched sideways, using the chain's grip on his baton as a lever. The weapon twisted in his grip, and for a fraction of a second his left hand loosened. I drove my knee into his thigh the same targeting his partner had used on me for hours the same nerve clusters, the same precise placement. His leg buckled slightly causing his balance to shifted, and in that moment I ripped the baton free from his grip and flung it across the room. We stood face to face, both breathing hard, both bleeding him from the cuts my chains had left on his forearms, me from everywhere. The alarms screamed around us. The emergency lights strobed. Somewhere behind me, the first soldier groaned on the floor, trying and failing to push himself upright with a face that was rapidly swelling into something unrecognizable.
The tattooed soldier's eyes flicked to where the blaster had slid beneath the cabinet. Then back to me. Calculation and risk assessment clear in his eyes.
He went for it. So did I.
He was closer. Faster in a straight line, with legs that hadn't been beaten and shocked for hours. He reached the cabinet first, dropping to one knee and reaching beneath the twisted shelving where the blaster had come to rest. His fingers found the grip. He started to pull it free.
I heard the crack again as the room distorting around me for a fraction of a second as whatever I'd done to cross two meters in a blink repeated itself. The migraine that followed was a supernova of pain that detonated on the top of my hread and spread through my skull in expanding waves. My vision went white then red, then returned in fragments but I was there. Right on top of him, my chain-wrapped hand closing over his on the blaster's grip before he could bring it around.
We fought over the weapon in a tangle of hands and chain links and desperate strength, both on our knees on the floor amid scattered medical instruments and ceiling debris. His grip was iron. Mine was chain-wrapped iron. For three seconds that felt like three hours, neither of us could wrench the blaster free.
Then I headbutted him.
The headpiece was still clamped to my skull, its metal bands and dangling sensor cables became an improvised weapon as I drove my forehead into the bridge of his nose. Metal connected with cartilage, and the device's remaining sensor nodes jabbed into his face like blunt needles. The impact was agonizing for both of us my head rang like a struck bell and the migraine intensified to a level that made my vision tunnel but I felt his grip loosen.
He lunged for it. I brought my knee up into his jaw as he came forward, his teeth clicked shut with a sound I heard even over the alarms, and he toppled sideways seemingly dazed, his hands coming up in a guard that was more reflex than intent.
I brought the blaster up and centered it on his chest, the weapon shook in my grip but at this range it didn't matter a child could have made this shot. So I fired.
The bolt took him in the chest the energy discharge punched through the light chest plate like it wasn't there, the bolt's concentrated charge burning through the layered composite and into the tissue beneath. His body arched backward from the impact and moved back a half-second as the energy lifted him and then he was down once more and didn't get back up. The stun baton he'd dropped during our fight rolled slowly across the floor, its prongs still crackling with residual charge until it came to rest against the base of the overturned cabinet. The faint smell of burned fabric and something worse drifted upward from the hole in his chest mixing with the smell of ozone and antiseptic that already saturated the air.
I stood or tried to. My legs made the attempt and immediately filed a formal complaint, swollen thighs cramping, knees threatening to buckle the abused muscles trembling so badly that the motion from kneeling to standing took three separate efforts. On the second try my left leg gave out entirely and I caught myself on the edge of a table nearby chain links scraping against the metal lining. On the third try I made it swaying like a ship in rough seas, the room tilting around me in lazy circles as I kept blinking trying to make the room stop spinning.
I took a breath and the air rasped through the hole in my right cheek...I could feel it, the obscene sensation of breathing through a wound that let cool recycled station air whistling through flesh and across exposed teeth. My right eye was still streaming tears, blurring that half of my vision into a color of emergency lighting and settling dust. Blood ran in a steady warm line from the exit wound following the contour of my jaw before dripping from my chin.
I turned toward the doctors.
They were exactly where I'd last registered them, pressed against the far wall trapped between the overturned supply cabinet blocking the door and the wreckage of their orderly little procedure room. The cartoon was still playing on the wall display behind me surprisingly, its cheerful soundtrack providing a surreal backdrop to the scene.
The male doctor was the one begging.
He'd pulled himself into a sitting position against the wall, his lab coat smeared with dust and the chemical residue of shattered vials from the fallen cabinet. His hands were up palms out, fingers spread, the universal gesture of surrender that transcended species and culture. His mouth was moving fast, words tumbling out in a breathless stream that ran together like water over rocks.
"Please! I was just following the protocol, we're medical staff, we're not combat personnel, we were ordered to. Please, I have a family, I have children on Bosthirda. I'll tell the Officials whatever you want me to tell them, I'll say the conditioning was successful, I'll falsify the reports please..."
The female doctor said nothing. She stood with her back against the wall, her hands at her side her hair had come loose from its bun during the chaos, dark strands falling across a face that was pale but composed. She looked at me with the same clinical detachment she'd maintained throughout the entire procedure. She just looked at me. Calm. Professional. As if this outcome had always been somewhere in her probability calculations and she had simply filed it under "acceptable risk."
The male, still talking, still bargaining, his words becoming less coherent as panic eroded whatever composure he'd started with. The female was silent just watching me and doing nothing else.
I thought about Cherry. About the Republic laboratory. About being strapped to a chair with electrodes on my scalp while animated characters explained why the experiments were making me stronger. I thought about the female doctor's voice—flat, clinical, uninflected—saying "conditioning uptake is progressing" while soldiers beat my legs. I thought about the male doctor connecting the headpiece to my skull with the careful precision of a technician installing components in a machine.
I shot the male first.
The bolt caught him in the chest while his mouth was still forming the word "please." The bolt silenced him mid syllable, his body jerking once against the wall before sliding sideways, the fear on his face freezing into something permanent. His hands stayed up for a moment after the rest of him had stopped, held there by nothing more than the residual tension in muscles that no longer had a living brain to command them then they fell.
The female doctor watched her colleague die without flinching. Her eyes moved from his body back to me and in that moment I saw something shift behind her clinical mask perhaps fear before I shot her too. The bolt took her in the same place as she went down the way she'd stood: quietly, with no wasted motion, her body folding to the floor with the composed finality of someone turning off a light. The clinical detachment she'd maintained throughout my entire ordeal stayed on her face even in death, an expression that would haunt me later but right now registered as nothing more than a problem resolved.
Drip. Drip-Drip.
'Ignored it.'
'Ignored it.'
'Ignored it.'
I swayed side to side as the mantra kept repeating in my head and moved to the neared dead doctor which just happened to be the female doctor. I dropped to my knees beside her body, the impact sending a fresh jolt of pain through my bruised thighs, and started searching.
Her lab coat pockets yielded what I needed as I grabbed a roll of sterile gauze still sealed in its medical grade wrapper. A small bottle of spray and a pair of scissors. Standard supplies for a doctor assigned to monitor a subject undergoing an extended procedure just kept close at hand in case the procedure's "superficial" damage required minor treatment to prevent the subject from expiring before the conditioning was complete.
I set the gauze aside and turned my attention to the coat itself. The material was thick, woven from a fabric designed to resist chemical spills and seemed like it would be thick enough for my idea. I grabbed the left sleeve at the shoulder seam and pulled. The fabric resisted for a moment, the stitching holding against my grip before tearing free in a long strip that ran from shoulder to cuff. I then held the torn sleeve in one hand and picked up the gauze with the other. The wrapper crinkled as I tore it open, the sterile packet giving way to reveal a tight roll of white medical fabric. I pulled a length free folded it into a thick pad and raised it to my face.
The moment the gauze touched the wound, I understood what the hole in my cheek actually was. The gauze pressed against the outside of the wound and I felt it on both sides—felt the fabric's texture against raw, burned skin on the outside, and simultaneously felt the pressure through the hole against my teeth and gums on the inside.
I could feel to much of the gauze.
A small involuntary sound escaped me. A thin keening whine that vibrated through my clenched jaw and made the wound pulse with fresh agony.
I kept going as the tears that just ended started again. They blurred my vision and ran salt into the edges of the wound and made my hands shake worse than the adrenaline already had. But I kept going because the alternative was stopping, and stopping meant sitting on the floor of this room full of dead people and a cheerful cartoon and bleeding out through a hole in my face. So I pressed the gauze pad firmly against the exit wound, using my palm to maintain pressure while I repositioned the folded material to cover as much of the damaged area as possible. The gauze turned red almost immediately, blood soaking through the sterile white fabric in spreading blooms.
With my free hand I started using the torn sleeve. The fabric was long enough to wrap around my head, which was exactly what I needed. Working one-handed while maintaining pressure on the gauze.A task that required more coordination than my shaking, chain-wrapped hands wanted to provide, I looped the sleeve under my jaw and up over the gauze pad, pulling it tight enough to hold the dressing in place. The first wrap went around the lower half of my face, covering the wound and the gauze and my mouth in a band of dark gray fabric that immediately began to darken further where blood seeped through. The second wrap went over the first, tighter anchoring the makeshift bandage in place. When I finished the lower half of my face was covered in a wrapped mask. The pressure helped with the bleeding which slowed from a steady drip to a slower seep that the gauze could absorb for at least a little while. Breathing was harder now, each inhale pulling air through layers of fabric that were already dampening with blood and saliva, but I could manage it through my nose if I kept my breathing shallow.
'Okay,' I thought 'Med bay. I need to get to the med bay.'
I looked down at my hands and the left still had chain wrapped around the forearm and hand in dense coils the links making it impossible to grip the blaster properly. The weapon sat awkwardly in my chain-wrapped right hand, functional but imprecise, looking at my grip I knew I would manage to shoot well enough at close range but anything beyond a few paces would be unreliable with this grip. Carefully, wincing as the links dragged across raw skin, I unwound the chain from my left hand. The manacle was still locked around my wrist that wasn't coming off without a key or a cutter but the excess chain fell away in loose coils that clattered to the floor. I flexed my freed fingers feeling the blood flow return to digits that had been compressed for hours, and transferred the blaster to my left hand. The grip settled into my palm with the familiar weight that Sera had first taught me in a shooting range that felt like it existed in another lifetime.
I turned and started moving towards the door.
The supply cabinet lay across the doorway like a barricade, its twisted shelving and scattered contents forming a wall of debris that reached from floor to almost chest height. Medical instruments and shattered containers littered the floor around its base. The door behind it was still locked from outside as part of the security protocol. Even if I cleared the cabinet I'd need to deal with the lock. And beyond the lock, the corridor. And beyond the corridor the guards I'd sensed earlier. And beyond the guards, a station that was apparently under some kind of attack judging by the ongoing alarms and the impacts that had shaken the structure twice in the last however-many-minutes.
One problem at a time.
I reached the cabinet and braced my right hand against its edge, the chain links providing grip against the smooth metal surface. The cabinet was a heavy industrial medical storage, built to hold equipment and withstand the minor tremors that were part of life on any space station. But it had already been dislodged from its wall mounts by the station's impacts and gravity was doing most of the work of keeping it in place.
I pushed and my legs screamed right away. My ribs protested. The wound in my cheek pulsed with every heartbeat, each pulse sending a fresh wave of fire through the right side of my face. The gauze was already saturating, the makeshift bandage darkening with blood that I couldn't afford to keep losing. But the cabinet moved metal scraping against the floor in a shriek that competed with the alarms, it shifted sideways. Inch by inch, the gap between its edge and the door frame widened.