The girl's eyes opened slowly to white light and silence — the sterile glare of a room she didn't recognise.
The first thing she became aware of was the smell: the chemical sting of disinfectant fighting to mask the copper tang of blood and the cloying reek of death.
She sat up, breaking the silence in her ears with the soft swish of blankets falling into her lap and the low sigh of the mattress beneath her.
She glanced down; long, loose strands of ash-blond hair spilled over her shoulders like spun silk. She was no longer in the Vanguard field uniform she remembered last wearing. Instead, a blue-white smock was buttoned up the front, its hem cutting just above her knees.
There was an unfamiliar weight against her jaw, trailing down the length of her neck to the curve of her breast. Her fingers brushed the soft fabric of a gauze bandage, five strips of tape pinning it tight against her pale skin.
Her brow furrowed slightly, confusion softening the lines of her face. She couldn't remember the injury — or what had come before it. She couldn't remember after it either.
Then footsteps. Slow, deliberate, echoing down the corridor beyond the door. The girl straightened, her gaze drifting toward the sealed entrance as those unhurried steps drew closer.
The footsteps stopped. A soft mechanical hiss followed as the door unlocked, sliding open on its track.
A woman stepped through, dressed in white scrubs and a disposable mask. A tray clinked faintly in her hands, the sound far too loud in the still room.
For a heartbeat, she didn't move. Her eyes widened over the edge of the mask, surprise flashing in them before she remembered herself. The tray trembled slightly as she set it down on the counter beside the door.
"You're awake," the nurse said at last, her voice low, uncertain — as if speaking too loudly might undo something fragile.
The girl said nothing. She only stared, hand still resting against the bandage at her throat.
The nurse's gloved fingers fidgeted at her side before she forced them still. She moved to the monitor beside the bed, its faint green light reflecting off her mask. The machine gave a soft beep, steady and even — not the sound of an emergency call.
"Don't try to stand yet," the nurse murmured, her tone careful, measured, almost rehearsed. "You've been through a lot."
The girl's gaze wandered past her, taking in the sterile white of the walls — seamless, polished, interrupted only by a single reinforced viewing pane set into the far corner. She recognised it.
The heavy seal on the door. The negative pressure vent humming quietly overhead.
This wasn't a recovery ward. It was containment.
The kind they used during plague sweeps, when infection meant isolation until you stopped breathing or the tests came back clean.
Her stomach turned, though not from fear. Only confusion. She didn't feel sick. Her skin wasn't fever-hot, her breath steady. Whatever the nurse seemed so cautious about — it wasn't apparent to her.
The nurse adjusted the IV line, avoiding the girl's eyes. "Someone will be here soon to speak with you," she said softly. "Please don't remove the bandages."
Then, as if remembering herself, she offered a small, brittle smile behind her mask that never reached her eyes. "You're safe here."
The words rang hollow in the filtered air.
***
"Do you know who you are?"
The doctor — a wisened man with thinning grey hair and a voice softened by years of careful restraint — watched her from behind the silver bridge of his glasses. His expression was composed, but his eyes were searching, measuring.
The girl sat at the edge of the bed, her bare feet just brushing the cold tile. For a moment, she said nothing, gaze fixed on the floor as if the answer might be written there.
"Sable…" Her voice came out hoarse, rough from disuse. She swallowed, the movement tugging faintly at the bandage along her throat. "Field Operative, Sable Quinn."
He nodded once, slow and deliberate, before making a note on the tablet in his hands.
"Good," he said. "You remember your name. That's… a promising start."
Sable frowned. A start to what?
The doctor didn't elaborate. He adjusted his glasses, eyes flicking briefly to the monitor by her bedside, watching the soft pulse of green light reflect against the lenses.
"Tell me, Sable," he continued, tone calm but clinical, "what's the last thing you remember?"
Her mind reached for something — a moment, a sound, anything — but the memory blurred, fragments slipping away like water through her fingers.
"I was on deployment," she said slowly. "Vanguard command sent us into the wastelands. There was fire… No. Ice and then fire… And then…"
Her voice faltered. Her expression remained still, almost doll-like.
The doctor's pen stilled. "And then?"
Sable's eyes lifted to meet his. "Then nothing."
"I see," he murmured, after a moment of heavy silence. "Then I'm afraid there's quite a lot we'll need to discuss."
***
Sable waited for the doctor's return by quietly going through the tests the nurse had stayed behind to lead her through. They checked her vision and hearing, then had her stand up from the bed to test her range of movement.
Aside from the first initial wave of weakness in her legs from prolonged disuse, there was a slight sway in her step that evened out by the time she was told to sit back on the bed. Sable was deemed to be in perfect physical health.
Then the nurse had slowly peeled back the bandage for Sable to see.
A thick line of barely healed pink skin hooked over the curve of her jaw, sliding down the slim column of her pale throat, curving through the ridge of her collarbone and stopping only at the swell of her left breast.
The nurse observed Sable's face, but there had been no change in the girl's expression.
The nurse redressed the wound with careful precision, hands steady despite the tension behind her mask. When she finished, she stepped back, voice quieter than before.
"The doctor will see you now."
Sable slid off the bed, the tile cold beneath her bare feet. She followed the nurse to the door, where the familiar hiss of the seal unlocking greeted her. The doctor waited outside, tablet in hand, flanked by two soldiers in dark Vanguard uniforms.
"Operative Quinn," he said, giving a slight nod. "Come with me, please."
The soldiers didn't speak. They moved in silent synchrony, one leading, the other falling in behind. Sable walked between them, the thin fabric of her smock brushing against her legs with each step.
Idly, she wondered when she might be able to wear her own uniform again. Not that the hospital smock made her movements less efficient, it was more a simple matter of identity. To her, her uniform was like a second skin.
The corridor stretched ahead in sterile white, lit by recessed ceiling panels. Every few metres, the faint blue shimmer of decontamination fields rippled across the walls. The hum of ventilation filled the silence between the cadence of their steps.
They descended by lift — a glass capsule that sank soundlessly through layers of metal and light. Through the transparent panels, Sable caught glimpses of other corridors, more sealed doors, all marked with red hazard symbols and strings of coded designations.
When the lift doors opened, the air was colder. The light here was dimmer, tinted blue by the reinforced glass that lined the corridor walls. A sign marked the level as they stepped out: Containment Sublevel 3 — Observation Wing.
Sable's pace slowed.
Inside the first room they passed, a figure sat hunched on the edge of a bed, head bowed, hair hanging in tangled black strands. Another room held a man standing motionless at the glass, eyes unfocused, lips moving soundlessly.
She knew them. Not by name — those had slipped away with the rest of her memories, if she'd ever known them to begin with — but by instinct. Their postures, their presence, the faint sense of shared exhaustion clinging to them like dust.
"They're Vanguard," she said. "From the wastelands Operation?"
The doctor didn't look at her. "Yes."
"What happened to them?"
He paused, long enough that the hum of the lights seemed to grow louder.
"They're stable," he said finally. "But not… responsive. Whatever occurred during your mission affected each of you differently."
They walked past another room, this one different from the others. The bed had been moved to the centre of the space, and machines, tubes and wires were connected to the figure lying still and silent on the bed.
"This is one of the researchers from the Operation, Sara Lee." The doctor said. "She fell into a sudden coma two days ago."
She did not recognise the name.
"Why bring me here?" Sable asked.
The doctor adjusted his glasses, studying her reflection in the glass. "Because you're the only one who isn't like the others. The coma you've been in for the last two weeks was one we needed to induce so your body could begin to heal."
He glanced away, his gaze lit with morbid fascination, toward the woman behind the glass. "The coma Dr Lee is experiencing is somehow fluctuating her bio-metric and neurological data, in ways we've never seen before."
***
In a room above the Observation Wing, two Vanguard officers watched the young woman for any reaction as the doctor continued to lead her down the corridor.
The woman — Lieutenant Mara Vance, Internal Oversight Division — scrolled through Sable Quinn's file projected across the side display. The list of missions ran several pages long, each marked as successful, many more marked as classified.
"She was one of Rinnic's, wasn't she?" the male officer asked after a moment.
Mara didn't look up. "Yes. A part of the forward Recon Unit sent out into the Wastelands."
He exhaled slowly, a sound caught somewhere between disbelief and admiration. "Figures. Rinnic always did like her strays."
"The girl wasn't a stray," Mara said. "She was a find."
That made him glance over. "A find?"
"Wastelands salvage team pulled her out of a collapsed mining district years ago when she was a kid," Mara began, eyes still on the file. "No records, no family, no history. They said she survived alone for months."
The man gave a low, humourless chuckle. "Command thought that was recruitment material?"
Mara's tone stayed even. "No. The kid got her hands on one of the Field Operatives' knives and wiped out half the squad that found her before anyone had a chance to stop her."
The man stared at her. "You're joking."
She scrolled further down the report. "Initial assessment lists six fatalities. Three more critical. The after-action file's been redacted since."
"Jesus." He looked back at the feed, where Sable walked in perfect silence between the two soldiers. "And they decided to keep her?"
Mara's lips thinned. "Someone did. Said she was instinct without interference. Pure response, they called it."
"Response to what?"
"Threat. Command. Doesn't seem to matter." She flicked through another section of the file, lines of data streaming across the display.
"They conditioned her after that — extensive behavioural reprogramming. Full obedience imprint. Neural inhibitors, reflex conditioning, and cognitive control trials. Whatever they did, it worked. And then they handed her over to Morrigan Rinnic."
Below, on the screen, Sable paused as the doctor spoke to her. Her posture didn't change, but her head tilted slightly — the same motion that had appeared in every debrief video, every recorded mission log. Calculating. Listening.
Mara folded her arms. "You ever wonder what happens when you train a dog to obey one voice, where disobedience on even the smallest level means being discarded… and then suddenly take that voice away?"
He didn't answer.
"Vanguard has no use for a dog that won't follow orders."
The man shifted his weight, thinking a moment before he added. "And the dog has no one stopping it from ripping out Vanguard's throat."