The air inside the tent was thick, heavy with a silence that had festered over 173 days. It was a different kind of prison from the tungsten bunker; this one was built from grief, guilt, and the ghost of a man who had walked out into the wilderness alone.
Derek broke the quiet, his voice rough. "We shouldn't have let him go alone."
Before he'd spoken, Maya had been perched on the edge of Eva's cot, holding a bowl of thin broth. "Eva," she'd whispered, her voice a gentle plea against the fortress of silence. "You have to eat something. Just a little." Eva had remained motionless, a statue carved from sorrow, her gaze fixed on the tent wall, seeing nothing.
Jordan ran a hand through his hair, frustration etched on his face. "You're right, we shouldn't have. But I don't know why we didn't. Every time he speaks, it's like... I can't argue. It's not that I agree, it's that his will is just a solid wall. You can't push against it."
Maya tried again, her patience a thin, fraying thread. "Eva, please."
Jordan, seeking a different angle, a softer touch, made a catastrophic error. "What would your sister say if she knew you weren't eating?"
Maya's head snapped towards him, her eyes flashing with a warning so lethal it could have frozen fire.
And then, a sound they hadn't heard in months. A voice, cracked from disuse, scraped raw from a scream that had never truly ended.
"She'll say nothing, Jordan," Eva said, her words hollow, devoid of any emotion but a bottomless, chilling truth. "Because she's dead."
The silence that followed was deafening.
"Eva," Derek began, his tone kind, reasoning, "I know what happened was... terrible. But you have to let go of the mourning. There's no reason to be like this anymore."
Eva's head turned slowly, her one good eye fixing on him. "So what? I can't even grieve my own sister's death?" The word 'grieve' was a weapon, flung at them, accusing them of denying her this most fundamental human right.
"It's not that, Eva," Maya started, her voice soft.
"Maya," Eva cut her off, the name a sharp, final command. "Just... please. Just stop. Okay?" Her voice was rising, trembling on the edge of a precipice. "And about Wolfen, when he gets back, I'm going to kill him. And if any of you try to stop me, I'll kill you all." The menace in her tone was a physical force, pressing them back into their seats. "That man has been manipulating us for so long. I'm going to kill him."
"Eva, don't say things like that," Derek said, aghast.
Eva's furious gaze swung to him. "Do you have a problem with that?" she snarled. "You people sit here, telling me I shouldn't be sad about my sister's death, when you don't have the slightest idea how it feels!" Her voice broke. Her eyes, even the one still clouded and blind, welled with tears, a shocking display of vulnerability in her rage. "You all just sit there and... and..."
She stood up, a tremor running through her, pointing a shaking finger at each of them. She hurled insults, accusations of their ignorance, their blind loyalty, their weakness. They took it, all of it, in silence, their own guilt and helplessness a shield against her pain.
Then, the tears came. Not the silent tears of the catatonic, but great, heaving sobs that wracked her entire frame. They stood, moving to comfort her, a clumsy, hesitant circle of shared anguish. But when Maya reached for her, Eva shoved her away, a gesture not of malice, but of pure, desperate need for space, for air. She turned, stumbling towards the tent flap, ready to flee back into the isolating wilderness.
A hand slipped through the opening, not forceful, but gentle. A voice, calm and refined, yet weathered by hardship, spoke.
"Miss Rostova. Please, sit down."
A man entered. He was dressed in the worn, practical clothes of a survivor, his face obscured by a wrapped cloth, leaving only his eyes visible. They were an intelligent, weary grey, and they held a depth of sorrow that was instantly, unsettlingly familiar.
Then, to the stunned disbelief of everyone in the tent, he walked directly to Eva, and bowed. Not a nod of the head, but a deep, formal, and utterly submissive bow from the waist, his head lowered, his hands at his sides.
"Please, Miss Rostova," he repeated, his voice muffled slightly by the cloth but no less earnest. "I only need five minutes of your time. To confess to something."
Maya, Derek, and Jordan braced themselves. They expected Eva to lash out, to attack this stranger who dared intrude on her breakdown. The way she looked at him could have stripped paint from metal. But instead, she sat. Not with them, but on a lone crate away from the group, her arms crossed, her body language a fortress.
"You have five minutes," she said, her voice like ice. "And I don't trust you. If you try anything funny, you're dead."
The man nodded, accepting her terms. He sat on the ground opposite her, not caring that the earth stained his trousers. He seemed to carry a weight that made such trivialities meaningless.
"It is my fault your sister died," he began, the confession dropping into the tent like a stone. "Alina was given to me the first time. Prime 4 ordered me to turn her into a hybrid, to perform extreme experiments on her. But I didn't. I couldn't. I didn't want to." He paused, the memory a physical pain. "Prime 4, with his rank and authority, took her from me. He said I was too sentimental. That I lacked the necessary... resolve."
His hands, clad in fingerless gloves, clenched into fists on his knees. "If I had done it... if I had turned her into a hybrid, she wouldn't... she wouldn't have..." He brought a hand to his mouth, as if to physically hold back a wave of emotion, his shoulders trembling. The sight was jarring—this composed, powerful-seeming man, brought to the brink of tears. "I didn't want to steal her humanity. I failed to protect it."
Eva, who had been staring at the ground, lifted her gaze. The ice in her eyes had not melted, but it had cracked, revealing a flicker of something else—not forgiveness, but a desperate, hungry need for understanding. "Is that all you have to say?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Prime 5 lowered his hand, his composure returning, but the raw pain in his eyes remained. "No," he said softly. "It is not." He took a slow, steadying breath, his gaze encompassing not just Eva, but all of them.
"Let me tell you a story," he said, his voice dropping to a hush, drawing them into a sacred, terrible intimacy. "A story of a broken boy."