ACT I: THE MASK NAMED ANNA
The Averikan Military Academy at Fort Talon was a monument to standardized suffering. To the ghost in its system listed as "Anna," it was the next cell in an endless prison block. Her cover was a shallow construct: a trauma-frozen orphan from a Rosalvyan border village, spared by Averikan humanitarian troops. Her unnatural calm and reflexive speed were blamed on shell-shock. A pathetic story for a pathetic girl. She wore it like a shroud.
Her assigned unit, Cadet Fire-Team Vostok, was her cage. They were her countrymen, other displaced Rosalvyans curated for this "Integration Experiment." She saw them for what they were: loud, emotional liabilities.
· Yuri: A broad, sullen boy from the Ural factories. His patriotism was a bludgeon, his resentment a constant heat. He viewed her silence as weakness.
· Ilya: Sharp, analytical, the son of a minor logistics officer. He watched her like a puzzle, sensing the jagged edges of her story that didn't fit.
· Nadia: The appointed leader. Fierce, desperate to prove her loyalty to their new masters. She saw Anna's hollow compliance as a personal rebellion.
"You are a hole in our formation," Nadia stated in clipped Rosalvyan after their first failed drill.
"You perform, but you do not fight. You make us look like we are carrying dead weight. Fix it."
"I perform to the parameters given," Anna replied, her voice a dull instrument.
"My performance is adequate. Your expectations are irrelevant."
Training was a daily theater of tension. During live-fire exercises, Yuri would "accidentally" sweep his rifle muzzle too close to her. During navigation, Ilya would suggest complex routes clearly designed to make her fail. Nadia filed constant, petty reports on her "lack of unit cohesion."
The Directive assessed: Unit is hostile. Cohesion impossible. Maintain cover. Await extraction signal.
ACT II: THE ALLEY & THE BOY
Liberty pass to Talon's Reach was a mandatory misery. The town huddled under the fortress like a damp fungus. Fire-Team Vostok moved as a tense, silent cluster through the streets, a bubble of mutual dislike in the crowd.
Anna peeled away at the first chance, citing a need for supplies. The truth was a need for silence. She drifted into a maze of service alleys behind the waterfront warehouses, a landscape of grime and echoing solitude.
The sound was a crack in the quiet. Not just a scuffle—the meaty thud of a fist, a young, sharp cry of pain, and the lazy, cruel laughter of boys who knew they wouldn't be caught.
She peered around a stack of polymer crates. Three older youths had a smaller boy pinned against a wall. They were archetypes of Averikan petty tyranny:
Cameron, big and thick-necked; Dylan, holding the boy's arms with a smirk; Logan, rifling through his pockets.
"C'mon, Slanted eyed freak," Chase sneered, flicking the boy's forehead.
"Where's the cred-stick? Gotta pay the toll for using our alley."
"It Got bent," the boy—Jer—spat, struggling.
"I don't have anything."
"Fucking Liar," Logan said, and drove a knee into his thigh. Jer crumpled with a gasp.
Anna didn't feel anger. She processed a corrupted system. Three aggressive variables subduing a weaker one. An inefficiency. The Directive offered no guidance. But Sokolov's old voice whispered: "
A warrior does not watch a wolf torment a cub. It is beneath you."
She stepped into the light.
"Let him go."
Three heads turned. Chase grinned.
"Huh? Well, hello Missy. Lost, academy girl? This is a private lesson."
"Walk away, from here before i do something that you will make me wished i didn't do" she said, her tone flat, final.
Dylan released Jer, cracking his knuckles.
"Make us."
She moved.
It was not a fight. It was a swift, brutal correction. A knife-hand strike to Dylan's radial nerve. A pivot and a stomp to Cameron's leading knee-cap. A sickening pop. As Cameron howled, Logan lunged. She caught his fist, twisted, and used his momentum to slam his face into the rusted warehouse siding. He dropped.
Six seconds. Cameron was dragging a sobbing Dylan away. Logan lay still.
Anna turned to Jer. He was scrambling up, eyes wide, blood at the corner of his mouth.
"Did You... did you kill them."
"No," she said.
"They'll live. And They'll remember."
He stared, fear melting into awe.
"Why'd you do that?"
She had no operational answer.
"They were weak. Bullies always are." She looked at him. A resource. A potential local asset.
"You should not be here."
"Nowhere else to go," he muttered, wiping his mouth. He was skinny, all sharp angles and defiant eyes.
Against protocol, she spent the next hour in the alley with him. She learned his mother worked the processing plant nights, that he scavenged tech to sell, that the bullies were academy washouts. He shared a stolen sweet-roll. She showed him, in turn, the proper way to set a broken crate as a tripwire alarm. A transaction. A tiny, human point of contact in the sterile map of her mission. He called her "Ghost-girl." but also showed a sense of affinity for her.
ACT III: THE COMPROMISE
She returned to the squad rendezvous point, a designated corner by the transport depot, her mind temporarily clear of the fog of performance.
Fire-Team Vostok was not there.
A cold thread of alarm traced her spine. She waited fifteen minutes. Nothing. She moved to the secondary location, a public comms booth. Empty.
The third location was their emergency fallback: a disused maintenance shed near the old rail yard. The door was ajar.
Inside, she found nothing. No gear. No bodies. Just the faint, coppery smell of blood soaked into the dirt floor, and three sets of fresh drag-marks leading out the back into the darkness. The scene was clinically clean. Professional.
Compromised. Eliminated. The Directive offered no contingency for total cell loss.
Her cover as "Anna" was built on the existence of her unit. Without them, her story was a house of cards. The Academy would have questions. Internal Security would have scanners.
She thought of Jer. A witness. A loose end. But also... the only point of non-hostile contact. A irrational impulse took hold. She had to see if he was safe. If they had taken him too.
She moved like a shadow back to the warehouse alleys, to his scavenger nooks. He was gone. His usual spots were empty, cold. A half-eaten protein bar lay in the dirt where he'd shared his food. It felt like a grave.
He was gone. Maybe dead. Maybe scared away. It didn't matter. The connection was severed. The brief, foolish warmth, extinguished.
ACT IV: THE HUNTERS
Abort. The mission was ash. Her squad was liquidated. Her contact with a local compromised her. The only logical move was exfiltration. Return to Rosalvya. Report to Sokolov.
She needed to head west, to the contested border zones. It would take days on foot through hostile territory. She spent the next 48 hours moving at night, scavenging, avoiding patrols, a ghost fleeing a burning building.
On the third night, on the outskirts of a derelict hydro-farming collective, she allowed herself a few hours of sleep in the shell of a control tower. She was exhausted, not just in body, but in spirit. The mask of Anna was gone. The asset N-07 had no mission. Only Netoshka remained, and she was just a tired, hunted animal.
They came for her in the hour before dawn.
Not with shouts or sirens, but with silence. She woke to the sound of the tower's single door being sliced open with a molecular cutter. No light, just the whisper of nanofiber on steel.
She was on her feet, knife in hand, back to the wall, in a heartbeat.
Four figures filled the doorway. Not Averikan military. Not Internal Security. They were clad in matte-black, form-fitting combat suits with full-face helmets that reflected no light. No insignia. No nationality. Their movements were synchronized, fluid, utterly silent. They carried sleek, blocky weapons she didn't recognize.
The air in the room changed. It grew heavy, thick. A familiar, soul-deep pressure began to crush her mind—a psychic dampening field of immense, focused power. It was the silence of Zeta-9, weaponized. Her knees buckled. Her telekinetic sense didn't just dampen; it vanished, leaving a screaming void.
The lead figure took a single step forward. A voice, synthesized and genderless, emanated from its helmet.
"Asset N-021. Acquisition protocol 'RedBird' is now complete. You will come with us."
They knew the designation. The real one.
She tried to fight, to lunge with the knife. Her muscles responded like they were packed in sludge. A needle-thin dart hissed from a wrist-launcher on another figure, striking her in the neck. A chemical ice-fire spread, locking her joints, dragging her down into a pit of chemical darkness.
As consciousness fled, the last thing she understood was not fear, but a profound, cosmic irony. She had thought herself a hunter, a sleeper moving in the dark. She had been neither.
She was the package. And she had just been delivered to her true buyers.