Chapter 8
TUR
Iteach her situational awareness the way I was taught to kill.
Slow.
Precise.
Unforgiving.
We start in the lower access corridors two levels beneath the safehouse, where the concrete sweats faintly with condensation and the air smells like dust, ozone, and old machinery that hasn’t moved in a decade.
The lighting is low and uneven, utility strips flickering at irregular intervals along the walls, throwing long, distorted shadows that make every corner look like it’s hiding something that wants you dead.
It’s perfect.
“Stop,” I say quietly.
Kimberly freezes mid-step, one foot still lifted, her weight balanced on the ball of her back foot like she’s about to bolt or throw a punch.
“Why,” she asks.
“Don’t move,” I repeat. “Tell me what you see.”
She exhales slowly through her nose, eyes tracking left, then right, then up.
“Two corridor intersections within sprinting distance,” she says. “One to my left, one behind me. The one behind me is darker, which either means bad lighting or someone deliberately shot the strip.”
“Good,” I say.
Her jaw tightens.
“There’s a low vibration through the floor,” she continues. “Probably a generator somewhere below us. Which means this hallway might be carrying power cables in the walls. Which means it’s not structurally empty, which means it would collapse in a predictable way if something heavy hit it.”
I blink.
“Again,” I say.
She shifts her gaze.
“There’s a camera dome in the ceiling corner behind you,” she adds. “It’s old. Not municipal spec. Private security. Probably offline, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.”
I don’t tell her she missed the heat distortion against the far wall that marks a ventilation outlet.
I don’t tell her she didn’t clock the asymmetry in the scuff marks near the left intersection that suggests someone heavier than her uses that corridor regularly.
Those corrections come later.
“You expect me to be scared,” she says, still not moving.
I tilt my head slightly.
“I expect you to be overwhelmed,” I reply. “Scared would be healthy. Overconfident will get you killed.”
Her mouth twitches.
“I am extremely not overconfident right now,” she says dryly. “I just don’t see how panicking improves my odds.”
It’s the wrong answer.
It’s also the exact right one.
“Move,” I tell her.
She lowers her foot and steps forward, slower now, shoulders loose, head up, eyes moving constantly.
I walk behind her, far enough back that she has to operate without my physical presence bleeding into her spatial awareness, close enough that I can catch her if she missteps and her leg gives out.
Her arm is still in a compression wrap beneath the jacket I scavenged for her, her movements stiff and careful when she forgets to mask the pain, but she doesn’t complain. She doesn’t ask for breaks. She doesn’t make jokes when her breathing gets shallow or her balance wobbles.
She just keeps going.
“Threat profiling,” I say. “What do you look for first when someone enters your space.”
“Hands,” she answers immediately. “Then eyes. Then gait.”
“Why.”
“Hands are where weapons live,” she says. “Eyes tell you if they’ve already decided to do something violent. Gait tells you if they’re trying to look harmless.”
I stop walking.
“Where did you learn that.”
She glances back at me.
“I ran a restaurant on Novaria,” she says. “You learn to read men with bad intentions real fast.”
The jalshagar stirs faintly behind my ribs, not sharp, not feral, just… aware.
“Again,” I say, my voice rougher than I intend.
We drill exit scanning next.
I make her stand at random points in the corridor network and identify every viable escape route in under five seconds.
She gets it wrong at first.
She favors doors over ventilation shafts.
She misses one maintenance ladder because it’s painted the same color as the wall.
She underestimates how far she can drop without breaking her ankle.
I correct her.
She adjusts.
She starts seeing things.
By the third run-through, she’s memorizing patrol rhythms of the security drones that skim the upper access tunnels like lazy sharks.
“Two-minute loop,” she murmurs, watching one pass overhead through a grated ceiling. “Seventeen seconds of blind time if you move when it hits that corner.”
“How do you know,” I ask.
She doesn’t look at me.
“Because I counted.”
The jalshagar hums.
Low.
Warm.
Steady.
It feels… wrong.
In a way that makes my throat tight.
She adapts frighteningly fast.
Not just intellectually.
Physically.
Her posture changes within an hour, her shoulders rolling back, her head coming up, her steps getting quieter and more deliberate. She starts moving like someone who knows the world is actively trying to kill her and has accepted that information instead of freezing in front of it.
It terrifies me.
It impresses me.
It makes something deep in my chest go uncomfortably quiet, like a predator realizing it’s not alone in the dark anymore.
“You’re drifting too close,” I snap suddenly, stepping backward hard enough that my heel clips the wall.
She startles.
“What.”
“Your pulse just spiked,” I say tightly. “Back up.”
She frowns.
“I literally did nothing.”
“You stepped inside my sensory range.”
“Your what.”
“Back. Up.”
She takes a step away, hands lifting slightly in an unconscious placating gesture.
“Okay, damn.”
The jalshagar surges anyway, hot and insistent, reacting to the way her breath changed when I snapped at her, reacting to the way her body leaned toward mine without her realizing it.
Mine.
No.
I turn away from her sharply and walk six paces down the corridor, jaw locked so hard my teeth ache.
“Do not do that again,” I growl.
She follows me anyway.
“Do not what,” she demands.
“Do not close distance without warning.”
“Tur,” she says flatly. “We are in a hallway that is approximately three feet wide.”
“That does not make it better.”
She stares at my back.
“You realize how insane that sounds, right.”
“Yes.”
“You’re acting like I just pulled a knife on you.”
“You did something worse,” I snap, then immediately hate myself for it.
Her footsteps stop.
“What the hell does that mean.”
I drag a hand down my face and force myself to turn back toward her.
“It means,” I say slowly, choosing each word like it might explode in my mouth, “that my nervous system is currently not calibrated for proximity. And when you step too close to me without warning, things inside my body light up that I am trying very hard to keep in a cage.”
She goes very still.
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
Silence stretches.
Then she says quietly, “Do you need more space.”
The question hits me like a blunt object to the sternum.
“Yes,” I whisper.
She nods once and takes three steps backward without breaking eye contact.
The jalshagar eases.
Just slightly.
“Thank you,” I murmur, before I can stop myself.
Her mouth twitches.
“You’re welcome, bone-knives.”
We take a break after two hours.
I sit on a concrete step near one of the old generator housings and drink water straight out of a battered canteen. My hands are still shaking faintly, the residual adrenaline and restraint burn humming through my nervous system like bad electricity.
Kimberly sits on the floor a few feet away, back against the wall, knees drawn up, breathing hard, sweat plastering her hair to her temples.
She looks at me sideways.
“You gonna tell me where you learned all this.”
I take a long swallow of water.
“No.”
She waits.
I stare at the stained concrete floor.
“I was raised in an Alliance conditioning facility,” I say finally. “They called it a training academy. It wasn’t.”
Her hands still.
“They put us in cages,” I continue, my voice flat and distant and not mine. “Individual steel enclosures. One meter by two meters. You could stand or lie down. Not both.”
The jalshagar coils tighter, not feral, just… heavy.
“They left us in them for days at a time,” I say. “Sometimes weeks. Sensory deprivation. No light. No sound. No human voices. Then they’d pull us out and throw us into combat simulations until our nervous systems collapsed.”
Her fingers curl into fists.
“They punished us for mercy,” I add. “If you hesitated. If you tried to help another Reaper instead of finishing the objective. If you refused to kill a civilian proxy target.”
My mouth tastes like metal.
“They’d reset the simulation and do it again. And again. And again. Until you stopped making the choice they didn’t want you to make.”
Silence.
Thick.
Electric.
“I was twelve the first time they put me in a restraint harness and forced me to watch myself kill a man in a simulation over and over until I stopped throwing up,” I say. “They told me it was for my own good. That empathy was a bug they were fixing.”
My voice never shakes.
I don’t let it.
Kimberly’s hands do.
They tremble visibly in her lap.
“That’s not destiny,” she says quietly. “That’s systemic cruelty.”
The word lands inside my chest like a fracture line opening up.
Systemic cruelty.
Not necessary evil.
Not unfortunate side effect.
Not tragic inevitability.
Cruelty.
Something in me gives way.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just a quiet, internal collapse of a structure I didn’t realize I was still leaning on.
I swallow hard.
Her eyes meet mine.
“You’re not broken,” she adds, her voice rough. “You were tortured into being useful.”
My breath stutters.
Just once.
Her fear fades in real time.
Not all at once.
Not magically.
But I can see it happening behind her eyes, the way her gaze changes from wary to focused, from braced-for-violence to braced-for-truth.
It terrifies me more than her screaming ever did.
“Get some rest,” I say hoarsely. “We’ll continue tomorrow.”
She nods.
“Okay.”
I stand and turn away before she can say anything else that cracks something open in me I do not have time to deal with.
Behind my ribs, the jalshagar hums low and warm instead of sharp and feral.
For the first time in my life, restraint does not feel like a prison.
It feels like a choice I might be able to keep making.