Every living being is connected to something. Connected to lungs that keep them breathing, connected to muscles that keep them moving, connected to relationships that drive their motivations. Whether a persons strings are visible or not, if you follow their trail to the end, you'll find something connected on the other side.
I was born different. Mutant. That's the term they use. Born with a extra gene that grants special abilities. Mine is tied to strings, I can create and control them like an extra appendage. I've overheard I awakened this power before I could crawl, it's what put me on their radar. They trained me since birth, to be a weapon, to sever the strings that keep others attached to life.
I lament the waste of my potential, the thought only taking root as I get older, because I have a secret, something even I have only recently discovered. The strings that connect events, decisions, and people I can see all of them. But my ability doesn't end there, I can manipulate, shift, alter and sometimes sever these strings to achieve my desired outcome. The feeling that I could do so much more, be so much more grows day by day, but there is no place for feelings in this place. This was the first lesson I learned growing up here, in this windowless hell masquerading as a facility. If every living being is connected to something, than I have never been alive. I'm just a tool like a sharpened pair of scissors that exists only to cut strings.
The observation deck sat above the training pit like a cold metal god, watching. I don't need to see through the reinforced glass to know they're up there. Dr. Rice's eager anticipation, Dr. Kinney's carefully neutral expression that never quite hid the tension in her jaw, , and Omega Red's oppressive presence. I could feel the weight of their attention, the invisible strings of expectation pulling taut between us.
X-23 stood across from me in the sterile white space, thirty feet of nothing between us. Her stance was perfect—weight distributed, hands loose, breathing controlled. She was smaller than me, had been since we first met years ago when we were both children learning to draw blood. But size meant nothing when adamantium claws could punch through bone.
Green eyes met silver. No acknowledgement. No greeting. We'd never spoken, not once in all these years, but I knew her patterns better than my own heartbeat.
The buzzer sounded.
She moved first—low and fast, closing the distance in three explosive strides. Left claw extended mid-strike, aiming for my femoral artery. Textbook. Predictable.
I sidestepped, already weaving strings between my fingers, invisible filaments that caught the fluorescent light for just a microsecond. Wrapped them around her extended wrist and pulled, redirecting her momentum past me. She twisted mid-air, impossibly agile, feet finding purchase on the wall behind me before launching back.
Both foot claws out now.
I dropped, felt the displacement of air as she passed overhead. Sent three strings up in her trajectory, wrapped them around her ankle and yanked her to the ground. She hit hard, rolled, came up slashing. One claw caught my shoulder—shallow, glancing. First blood to her.
"Good," Rice's voice crackled over the intercom. Satisfied. She was winning.
I could see the strings connecting this moment to the next. If I pressed the advantage now, used the razor wire technique to her legs, she'd be down for seven seconds. Long enough to incapacitate. Long enough to win.
I hesitated.
Half a second. That's all it took.
She was inside my guard, claws driving toward my ribs. I twisted, took the hit on my side instead of centre mass. Pain—bright, sharp, familiar. Blood on white floors. I grabbed her wrist with one hand, sent strings from the other to bind her remaining arm, but she was already moving, reading my intention before I'd finished the thought.
Her headbutt caught me in the jaw. Stars. Copper taste.
I released the strings, staggered back. She pressed forward relentlessly, the way they'd trained her. No mercy. No hesitation. Everything I should be but wasn't.
We traded blows in rapid succession—her claws against my strings, close quarters brutality that had been drilled into us since we could walk. She was better at this range. Always had been. But I was faster, could see the angles before they formed, could read the micro-adjustments in her shoulders that telegraphed her strikes.
I caught her in a string net, full body bind. She struggled, tendons standing out in her neck. I could end it now. Simple choke hold. Thirty seconds.
Her eyes met mine. No pleading. No fear. Just acceptance.
I saw the strings then—the ones connecting this moment to her future. If she lost again, Rice would withhold meals. Three days this time instead of two. I'd heard him say it to Kinney before we started.
My fingers twitched.
The net loosened.
Just fractionally. Just enough.
She tore through, healing factor already closing the cuts the razor wire had opened. Her elbow caught my temple. The world tilted. I felt myself falling, felt her weight on my chest, felt the cold press of adamantium against my throat.
Not breaking skin. Never quite killing. That wasn't the point of these exercises.
The buzzer sounded. Match over.
"Pathetic," Rossovich's voice. Flat. Disgusted. "He had multiple opportunities."
I lay there, feeling the concrete against my back, feeling X-23's weight as she was pulled off me by handlers. Our eyes met for one more second before they dragged her away.
Worth it, I thought. Worth whatever comes next.
The walk back to my cell was silent except for Rossovich's footsteps behind me. Heavy. Deliberate. The carbonadium coils in his arms made a faint metallic whisper with each movement—a sound I'd learned to associate with pain.
"You pulled your strikes." Not a question.
"No."
"Don't insult me with lies, boy." His accent thickened when he was angry. "I've watched you train for fifteen years. I know what you're capable of."
The sterile hallway stretched endlessly ahead. White walls. White floors. White lights that never dimmed. No windows. No sky. No proof that a world existed beyond these corridors.
"She was better today," I said.
"She was fed. You gave her that." His hand clamped on my shoulder, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. "Your weakness will be corrected. Tonight."
I didn't respond. There was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.
He shoved me into my cell—ten feet by ten feet, a cot bolted to the wall, a toilet, nothing else. The door sealed with an electronic lock, six-inch steel, biometric scanner. They'd designed it specifically for me after I'd picked three conventional locks in my first year.
"I'll return for you in one hour," Rossovich said through the observation slot. "Then you'll remember what happens to tools that malfunction."
His footsteps receded.
I sat on the cot, cataloguing the damage. Three cracked ribs. Deep laceration on my side—would need stitches. Shoulder wound already clotting. Minor concussion. I'd had worse. Would have worse soon.
Fifteen years. This had been my entire existence for fifteen years.
I didn't remember anything before. Sometimes I tried—lying awake in the dark, searching for some fragment, some proof that I'd had a name once, a family, a life beyond this. But there was nothing. Just white walls and the taste of blood and the sound of her claws extending.
X-23.
We'd fought each other countless times, I couldn't remember the actual score but each victory or loss was carefully recorded, analysed, used to justify funding and continued operations. We were their proof of concept—rival facilities competing for government contracts, using our bodies as resumés.
I understood her without words. Understood the exhaustion in her eyes after particularly brutal sessions. Understood the way she held herself slightly differently after Rice had been alone with her for "attitude correction." Understood that she pulled her strikes sometimes too, though not as often as I did. She was better at being what they wanted. Better at survival.
I'd only seen Sarah Kinney twice in fifteen years. Once when I was seven, brought to their facility for a joint evaluation. She'd looked at me with such profound guilt that I'd felt it like a physical thing, a weight pressing down on my chest. She'd opened her mouth like she wanted to say something, then closed it. What could she say? I'm sorry you exist like this?I'm sorry we made you into weapons?
The second time was three years ago. She'd been arguing with Rice outside the medical bay where they were stitching up one of X-23's more severe injuries. "She's a child," Kinney had said, voice shaking. "They're both children."
"They're assets," Rice had replied. "Resources. Try to remember that, doctor."
I'd filed that moment away, turned it over in my mind during long nights in this cell. The concept that someone saw us as something other than tools. It didn't change anything, but it... mattered somehow.
The facility hummed around me—ventilation, electricity, the distant sound of other projects being put through their paces. I'd mapped every inch of this place in my head, could navigate it blindfolded. Could see the strings connecting every system, every protocol, every weakness.
I'd never tried to escape. Where would I go? What would I be outside these walls?
Just a weapon without a target. A tool without purpose.
An hour stretched ahead of me. Fifty-seven minutes now. Fifty-six.
I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, prepared for whatever Rossovich had planned. Pain was temporary. Pain was familiar. Pain was—
The alarm shattered the silence.
Not the training alarm. Not the meal alarm. The security alarm—high-pitched, urgent, accompanied by flashing red lights that turned my cell into a crimson nightmare.
Footsteps in the corridor. Running. Shouting. The kind of chaos I'd never heard in fifteen years of rigid order.
"—containment breach in sector seven—"
"—lock down all projects—"
"—get Rice to the safe room—"
I stood, pressed myself against the wall beside the door. Waited.
The footsteps passed without stopping. Whatever was happening, I wasn't the priority right now.
I looked at the electronic lock. Six-inch steel. Biometric scanner. Theoretically impenetrable.
But I could see the strings—not physical ones, but the causal chains that held this place together. The connection between the scanner and the central processor. The processor and the power grid. The power grid and the backup generators. Every link in the chain that kept me caged.
I'd never tried to break free because there'd been no point.
Now, in the chaos, in the moment where all eyes looked elsewhere—
Now there was a chance.
My hand moved before I'd fully decided, strings manifesting from my fingertips. Not the physical kind. The other kind. The ones that could slice through cause and effect, through the logical progression that said locked door stays locked.
I found the weakness—a single connection point where the security protocol interfaced with the door mechanism. If I severed it there, just precisely there, at the exact microsecond between processor checks—
The string pulled taut between my fingers.
I cut.
The lock disengaged with a soft click that was drowned out by the alarm.
The door swung open.
For the first time in fifteen years, nothing stood between me and the corridor.
I stepped through into the flashing red chaos, into the unknown, into whatever came next.
Behind me, the empty cell waited for a weapon that would never return.