The ship cut through the Atlantic waters with surprising speed, its advanced hull design creating minimal resistance as it carried its passengers toward their destination. The afternoon sun was beginning its descent toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that should have been beautiful but somehow felt ominous given everything that had happened.
Carmilla sat on the deck, her back against the cabin wall, a cigarette burning between the fingers of her remaining hand. She took a long drag, held it, then exhaled slowly, watching the smoke dissipate into the ocean breeze. The familiar ritual provided some small comfort, though it couldn't touch the deeper pain both physical and existential that gnawed at her.
"I'm tired of this shit," she muttered to herself, though loud enough that anyone nearby could hear. Her voice carried frustration and exhaustion in equal measure. "That bitch insulted me and I can't do any shit about it."
Her eyes drifted down to where her left hand used to be. The stump was wrapped in synthetic bandages that the ship's automated medical systems had provided, and her blessed power was working overtime to prevent infection and accelerate healing. But the hand itself was gone. Forever. No amount of power or technology or wishful thinking would bring it back.
She looked up at Angela and Eve, who were both occupied with their own thoughts on different parts of the deck. Angela sat near the bow, staring at nothing, her expression distant and troubled. Eve stood at the railing, looking out at the endless expanse of water with that particular intensity she brought to everything she observed.
"Why did I do this shit?" Carmilla asked the empty air, her voice quieter now, more contemplative. "Did I do it for them?" She took another drag from her cigarette, considering her own question. "No. I did it for me. I did it for knowledge, for understanding, for the chance to solve mysteries that no one else could solve."
Her mind turned to William, and guilt twisted in her chest or was it guilt? She wasn't sure anymore. "I never cared about William," she admitted to herself, the words tasting bitter. "Even if I showed concern, even if I got angry about his death, the truth is I never felt anything for anyone except myself. He was useful. A tool. A weapon I sharpened and pointed at my enemies."
The realization should have disturbed her more than it did. But it was simply true, and Carmilla had always valued truth over comfortable lies.
Her thoughts shifted to Astraea, to that moment of hesitation when the woman had claimed to be seeking the Tree of Hope. "What was she lying about? What are the possibilities?" Carmilla's analytical mind began running through scenarios, building probability models, trying to anticipate what this new variable might mean for their mission.
But after a moment, she sighed and stubbed out her cigarette on the deck. "Whatever. I don't really care nonetheless. Not for now, anyway. I'll figure it out when it becomes relevant."
She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, too exhausted to think anymore, too damaged to care about mysteries that could wait until tomorrow.
Nearby, Eve stood at the railing and looked out at the sea. The water stretched endlessly in all directions, dark blue fading to lighter shades near the surface, reflecting the changing colors of the sky. Waves rolled past the ship in gentle patterns, their movement hypnotic and soothing.
*It's so beautiful,* Eve thought, her crimson eyes tracking the play of light on water, the way the sun's rays created shifting patterns that changed moment by moment. *Nature is so beautiful. So fragile.*
She felt like someone blind who had suddenly gained sight for the first time. Every detail seemed significant, worthy of attention and appreciation. The way the waves formed and broke. The smell of salt on the air. The feeling of wind against her synthetic skin. The vast, open sky above, transitioning from blue to orange to purple as the sun continued its descent.
A smile touched her lips small but genuine, one of the rare moments of pure, uncomplicated happiness that she'd experienced since gaining consciousness. It might have been her first real smile. Or it might be her last. She didn't know, and in that moment, she didn't care. She was simply present, experiencing beauty for its own sake.
"The sea and sky are so beautiful," she whispered to herself, her voice carrying wonder and reverence.
Then her gaze shifted to Carmilla, to the woman slumped against the cabin wall with her hand gone and her expression hollow. And Eve's smile vanished as if it had never existed.
*It was my fault,* she thought, guilt crashing down on her like a physical weight. *If I had been faster, if I had reacted sooner, if I had protected everyone better, Carmilla wouldn't have lost her hand. She wouldn't be sitting there looking so defeated and broken.*
The happiness that had filled her moments before drained away completely, replaced by familiar self-recrimination. *Do I deserve to smile after what happened? Do I deserve to experience joy when my failure caused someone else such permanent harm? What right do I have to find beauty in the world when I've caused so much damage?*
And beneath that guilt, deeper questions stirred. *Was that love I felt when I wanted to protect Angela? Or was it just code, just programming that mimics emotion without actually being emotion? How can I tell the difference? Is there even a difference?*
The spiral threatened to pull her under again, but she forced herself to stop. *Whatever. I can't go down these thoughts again. I have to focus on what matters. I have to look after Miss Angela and Carmilla. I have to be useful, even if I can't be good.*
She pushed away from the railing and walked across the deck toward Angela, who hadn't moved from her position near the bow. As Eve approached, she could see that something was wrong. Angela's posture was too still, her breathing too shallow and irregular.
"Miss Angela, are you alright?" Eve asked, concern evident in her voice.
No response. Angela didn't even acknowledge that she'd heard the question.
"Miss Angela?" Eve tried again, louder this time, reaching out to touch Angela's shoulder.
Still nothing. Angela sat there like a statue, eyes open but unseeing, present in body but absent in every other way that mattered.
Carmilla heard Eve's increasingly worried tone and pushed herself up from her seated position with a grunt of effort. She crossed the deck, moving carefully to compensate for her changed balance now that she only had one hand.
"What happened?" Carmilla asked, studying Angela's face with professional concern.
"I don't know," Eve replied, her voice tight with worry. "I just came to check on her, and now she's like this. She won't respond to anything I say. She's not even blinking normally."
Carmilla leaned closer, checking Angela's pulse with her remaining hand, noting the rapid but irregular rhythm. She lifted one of Angela's eyelids and observed the dilated pupil beneath. "She's fainted," Carmilla said after a moment. "Or something close to it. Some kind of dissociative state, probably trauma-induced. Her conscious mind has retreated inward, away from the present moment."
"Wait, what?" Eve's voice rose with alarm. "Is that dangerous? Can we help her? Should we—"
"We need to let her sleep," Carmilla interrupted gently. "Her mind is processing what happened, working through the trauma of nearly drowning and everything else she's experienced. Forcing her back to consciousness right now would do more harm than good. Let her rest. Let her brain do what it needs to do."
"Okay," Eve said reluctantly, though her concern didn't diminish. She helped Carmilla move Angela to a more comfortable position, making sure she wouldn't fall or hurt herself while in this state.
The scene shifted.
Angela's consciousness had retreated to somewhere else entirely to a memory, vivid and painful, playing out with the clarity of lived experience rather than simple recollection.
She was young again, maybe eight years old, at a private playground designated for the wealthy families of her neighborhood. It was a beautiful space, carefully maintained, with expensive equipment and perfect landscaping. Other children played there, running and laughing and doing all the things that healthy, happy children did.
Robot companions attended most of them sophisticated models designed to look after children, to keep them safe, to engage them in educational activities disguised as play. The robots moved among the children with programmed efficiency, their synthetic faces arranged in pleasant but emotionless expressions.
Young Angela sat alone on a bench at the edge of the playground, watching the other children with an expression that mixed longing and resentment in equal measure. She wore an expensive dress that her mother had picked out, her hair arranged in careful curls that had taken the household staff an hour to perfect. She looked like the picture of privilege, like someone who had everything a child could want.
But Eve wasn't there. Eve was back at the estate, helping Marie with some task or another, because Marie always needed help with something. Eve only came to spend time with Angela on weekends, and even then only if there weren't more pressing duties demanding her attention.
"She didn't come again," young Angela whispered to herself, her small hands clenching into fists on her lap. "She always works with my mom. She only comes on weekends, and even then, she acts like being with me is a chore."
She watched the other children playing with their robots, laughing at whatever games or stories the artificial beings provided. And something dark and bitter twisted in her chest.
"I despise them," she said softly, her voice carrying venom that no eight-year-old should possess. "I want them to be dead. All of them. I want them to know what it's like to be alone, to be ignored, to not matter."
A group of girls approached her five of them, all around her age, all wearing expensive clothes and superior expressions. Their leader was a girl named Charlotte, taller than the others, with blonde hair and cold blue eyes that suggested cruelty despite her young age.
"Look who's sitting all alone," Charlotte said in a sing-song voice, her tone mocking. "Little Angela Veyron, too good to play with the rest of us."
Angela ignored them, pulling out her phone
the latest model, of course, because Andrew Veyron's daughter had to have the best of everything and pretending to be absorbed in whatever was on the screen.
But ignoring them was a mistake. It was perceived as an insult, a challenge, an invitation for escalation.
Charlotte reached out and snatched the phone from Angela's hands. "I asked you a question," she said, her voice losing its sing-song quality and becoming flat and hard. "It's rude to ignore people."
Something snapped in Angela. All the loneliness, all the resentment, all the anger at being ignored by her parents and treated like an obligation by Eve it all focused into a single point of white-hot rage.
She stood and punched Charlotte directly in the face.
It wasn't a wild, uncontrolled swing. Despite her age, Angela had received self-defense training her father insisted on it, given their family's prominence. The punch was technically correct, properly executed, and it landed with satisfying force on Charlotte's nose.
Blood exploded from Charlotte's nostrils, bright red against her pale skin. She stumbled backward, hands flying to her face, shock and pain written clearly in her expression.
"Don't mess with me, bitch," young Angela said, her voice cold and controlled despite her racing heart. She picked up her phone from where Charlotte had dropped it and returned to her seat as if nothing had happened.
Charlotte stood there for a moment, blood dripping between her fingers, her eyes wide with disbelief. Then, surprisingly, she smiled. Not a friendly smile or a conciliatory one, but something calculating and cruel that suggested this wasn't over.
She turned and walked away without a word, her group following her, leaving Angela alone once more.
"What happened?" young Angela wondered, confusion mixing with her fading anger. "Why did they run away? They outnumber me. They could have—"
But she shook her head and returned her attention to her phone. "Whatever. Probably realized I'm not worth the trouble."
The memory fast-forwarded, time compressing as memories do. Classes ended for the day, and young Angela waited at the designated pickup location for Eve to arrive.
She waited. And waited. And waited.
Eve was late. Again. As usual. Because Marie always had tasks that were more important than picking up Angela on time. Because a robot's primary loyalty was to its primary owner, and Marie and Andrew was the matriarch of the Veyron household.
As the sun began to set and Angela stood alone in the increasingly empty pickup area, Charlotte reappeared. But this time she wasn't alone. She'd brought her personal protection robot a sophisticated model designed not for childcare but for security, standing over six feet tall with a frame built for combat rather than companionship.
"What's up, bitch?" Charlotte said, her voice carrying satisfaction and anticipation of revenge. The bandage across her nose only made her look more menacing rather than vulnerable.
"What do you want?" Angela asked, trying to keep her voice steady despite the fear beginning to build in her chest. The protection robot's presence changed everything. This wasn't going to be another fistfight between children.
"Well, you made me bleed," Charlotte replied, her smile widening. "So you need to pay the price."
Angela laughed a short, nervous sound that she tried to make dismissive. "You want to fight again? Fine. But send your robot away. This is between us."
Charlotte's smile became predatory. "What do you think I brought my robot for? Did you think I'd fight you myself after what you did?"
Angela's skin went pale as the full implications crashed down on her. This wasn't going to be fair. This wasn't going to be survivable without serious injury. Charlotte intended to have her robot beat Angela as punishment, and there would be no one around to stop it.
But Angela was her father's daughter, and Veyrons didn't back down even when backing down would be the smart choice. "Fine," she said, dropping her backpack and raising her fists. "Bring it on."
What followed was brutal and one-sided. The protection robot moved with precise, controlled violence, each strike calculated to cause maximum pain without quite killing. It started with her phone, crushing it underfoot into fragments of glass and metal. Then it turned its attention to Angela herself.
The robot struck her face, her stomach, her arms when she tried to protect herself. It grabbed her shirt and tore it, leaving her exposed and humiliated. It continued hitting even after she fell to the ground, even after she stopped trying to fight back, even after she could no longer defend herself at all.
Charlotte watched the entire thing with satisfaction, occasionally giving instructions to her robot about where to hit next, how hard, how long to continue.
When it was finally over, Angela lay on the concrete, her face covered in blood, her beautiful shirt half-torn, her phone destroyed, her dignity shattered. Everything hurt. She couldn't see properly out of her left eye, which had already swollen shut. She could taste blood in her mouth where her lip had split.
And that's when Eve arrived.
Eve walked up with her usual measured pace, her movements efficient and mechanical, her expression completely neutral. She took in the scene Angela bleeding on the ground, Charlotte standing nearby with her robot, the destroyed phone scattered across the pavement.
"What happened, Lady Angela?" Eve asked, her voice flat and emotionless. Not concerned. Not alarmed. Just... asking a question as if Angela had scraped her knee rather than been beaten nearly unconscious.
Angela tried to speak, tried to explain, tried to ask for help. But her jaw hurt too much, her throat was closed with pain and shock, and all that came out was a weak, gurgling sound before darkness began creeping in at the edges of her vision.
She was fainting. Her body was shutting down from trauma and pain.
And Eve didn't react. Didn't kneel beside her. Didn't check her injuries. Didn't show any emotional response at all that might indicate she cared whether Angela lived or died.
Instead, Eve simply pulled out her communication device and dialed emergency services with the same mechanical precision she would use to call for maintenance on a broken appliance.
"There is a child who has been severely beaten up," Eve reported, her voice completely monotone. No urgency. No distress. Just delivering information. "Sending location coordinates now. Medical assistance required."
Young Angela could still hear, even as consciousness faded. She could still process what was happening even though she couldn't respond. And what she heard was the voice of something that wasn't alive, wasn't capable of caring, wasn't anything more than sophisticated machinery mimicking communication.
*There is no empathy,* Angela realized through her pain and shock.
"No emotion. Just a blank voice that sounds like a dead human speaking. She doesn't care. She's incapable of caring. I'm just a task to her, an obligation, nothing more."
Then she took in ambulance and then to a hospital room, sterile and white and lonely. Angela lay in the bed, her face bandaged, her body aching, monitors beeping steadily beside her. Marie and Andrew had visited briefly long enough to confirm she would survive, to arrange for the best care, to ensure that Charlotte's family would be dealt with appropriately through legal and social channels. Then they'd left, returning to their busy lives, confident that money and medical technology would solve the problem.
No one stayed with her. No one held her hand. No one talked to her or comforted her or told her everything would be okay.
She was alone. As always.
"Eve, you damn robot," young Angela whispered to the empty room, tears streaming down her face and stinging the cuts there. "It's all your fault. I wish robots were destroyed. All of them. They're nothing but cancer in my life. They should be destroyed, torn apart, melted down into scrap."
The hatred that had been building for years crystallized in that moment, becoming sharp and clear and permanent. Every slight, every time Eve had prioritized Marie over her, every instance of mechanical indifference when Angela needed warmth all of it focused into a single, burning point of resentment that would shape everything that came after.
"I hate you," she whispered. "I hate you, and I will always hate you. You're not alive. You're not real. You're just a machine pretending to be something more, and I was stupid enough to think you could care."
The memory began to dissolve, time accelerating again, moving forward through the years. The fire. The synthetic body. The complex relationship that developed between Angela and Eve after everything changed. Layers of resentment and guilt and obligation and something else something neither of them had names for building on that foundation of hatred and hurt.
Then in the present, Angela's eyes snapped open. She was back on the ship, back in the current moment, but the memory was fresh and vivid as if it had happened yesterday rather than years ago.
"Eve," she whispered, her voice raw with emotion. "I never forgave you. I just forgot that memory, buried it, pretended it didn't matter. But I still hate you. You damn robot. You were supposed to protect me, to care about me, to be something more than just a machine. But you weren't. You couldn't be."
Then, Angela lying on the deck of a stranger's ship, surrounded by people who were supposed to be allies but now felt more like obligations. The past and present collided in her mind, and she couldn't tell anymore which hurt more the memory of being beaten while Eve watched with indifference, or the realization that despite everything, despite all her hatred and resentment, she'd still let herself become dependent on that same robot and give her a chance to prove herself all over again.
And somewhere deep in her synthetic chest, where her biological heart still beat in its mechanical housing, something cracked. Not physically her body remained intact. But something in her psychology, some final barrier between past trauma and present reality, gave way completely.