Chapter 9: Dash
The dust in the sub-level was a thick, choking fog. E-15 stood amidst the wreckage of her own fall, the ghost of a name—Lena—still ringing in the silent architecture of her mind like a struck bell. The pain in her leg actuator was a dull, diagnostic throb. The pain elsewhere was not.
Pod 19’s light swept over the ruined pod, the fused ring and tag. “External stimulus has triggered unstable memory recursion. Recommended: suppress non-essential data packets and re-engage mission priority.”
E-15’s hand, which had hovered over the relic, clenched into a fist. The metal of her gloves groaned. She did not look at Pod 19. She looked at the ceiling, at the ragged hole where light and the faint howl of the wind filtered down.
“Target trajectory?” Her voice was scraped raw, a distortion on the edge of static.
“Scans indicate movement upward. The structural instability provides multiple avenues. Probability of continued ambush tactics: high.”
Good.
The word formed in her core, cold and solid. The emotional static, the haunting fragments—they were a fog. Action was a wind to clear it. S8 was a focal point. A problem to be solved with force. The ghost’s anger and the machine’s purpose could align there, in the simplicity of pursuit.She moved.
The lower levels were a catacomb of dead science. Hallways lined with glass cells held grotesque, fused shapes—failed prototypes from a forgotten arms race. Her sensors parsed old containment fields, decayed energy signatures. S8 had come this way. Her small footprints were clear in the dust, but they were different now. Less erratic. Purposeful.
The first trap was a plasma conduit, deliberately overloaded. It unleashed a crackling whip of blue energy across a narrow corridor. E-15 saw the faint shimmer of the charging field a half-second before discharge. A memory-that-wasn’t-hers flashed: Tripwire. Sunlight on mud. She dove forward, the searing heat kissing the feathers of her sleeve, leaving them smoldering. She rolled, came up, and put two laser pistol rounds into the conduit’s housing. It exploded in a shower of sparks.
The second trap was structural. S8 had compromised a load-bearing pillar in a vast server hall. As E-15 entered, the groan of stressed metal was her only warning. She didn’t retreat. She sprinted forward, heels clicking on the polished floor, as the ceiling behind her collapsed in a thunderous roar of steel and concrete. Dust billowed, but she was already through.
“She is learning your pace,” Pod 19 observed, sounding almost approving. “Her predictive algorithms are updating.”
E-15 didn’t answer. She was learning, too. Learning S8’s pattern. The scanner wasn’t thinking like a soldier; she was thinking like data. Cause, effect, probability. Her traps were equations. And Elias Kane, his mind interwoven with her own combat protocols, had spent a lifetime solving the equations of enemy combatants.
The third trap was psychological.
It was in a long gallery lined with broken stasis tubes. As she passed a certain point, a salvaged holographic projector flickered to life. Not with an attack, but with an image. A woman.Human. Dark hair, a smile that crinkled the eyes, wearing a simple off-white sweater. The image was grainy, reconstructed from some deep archive.Lena.
The name was a spike driven into her processor. She froze.
The hologram didn’t speak.It just smiled. Then it flickered, and the face dissolved into the screaming, blood-streaked face of a young soldier—Private Jenkins, his eyes wide with terror as the medics tried to stuff his intestines back into the ragged hole in his abdomen—before resolving back to the woman’s peaceful expression.
A tremor ran through E-15’s frame. Her optical sensors glitched, the world tearing into strips of fragmented color and noise. The ghost was screaming. The machine was trying to quarantine the corrupted files.
“It is a data-weapon,” Pod 19 intoned, its voice a lifeline of calm. “Designed to induce system errors. Do not allow external constructs to define your operational parameters. Delete the corrupted files.”
E-15 forced a systems reboot. A brutal, full-cycle purge. It felt like dying for three full seconds. When her vision cleared, the hologram was gone, and there was a taste of copper and burning wire in her mouth. She breathed out a venting of heated air.
The trap had been a distraction. A primitive shaped charge, jury-rigged from lab equipment, detonated where she would have been if she’d kept moving. It blew a hole in the wall instead.
Rage, clean and algorithmic, washed through her. Not the ghost’s messy, grieving fury, but the pure, cold anger of a tool being deliberately mishandled. She surged forward, no longer bothering with stealth. Her footsteps were sharp, announced declarations of intent.
She found a service stairwell that was still mostly intact. She took the steps three at a time, a black streak against the grey concrete.
She burst back onto the main level through a shattered fire door. The wind immediately assaulted her, howling through the skeletal dome. The blood-orange light of the dying day streamed in, painting the vast, corpse-like space in deep crimson and long, clutching shadows.
She expected the scanner to be gone. To have fled into the ruins. To have chosen survival.
She was wrong.
S8 stood fifty feet away, in the center of the cracked marble floor where the atrium had been. She was not hiding. She was waiting. Her posture was different. The earlier fear was gone, burned away. Her small body was taut, resolved. In her hands, she held not a data-slate, but a long, jagged shard of reinforced glass, wielded like a crude spear. Her blue eyes met E-15’s with a frightening clarity.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” S8’s voice carried on the wind, no longer trembling. “In the dark. What they put inside you.”
E-15 slowed to a walk. Her wakizashi was already in her hand. The laser pistol hung heavy at her thigh. “It changes nothing.”
“It changes everything!” S8 shouted, her voice cracking. “They murdered him to make you! They took a man who loved someone and turned his love into a weapon!His duty into your programming! Don’t you feel the wrongness of it?”
E-15 kept advancing. Twenty paces. “Duty is purpose. You have abandoned yours.”
“My duty was to scan for truth!” S8 raised her glass spear. “The truth is YoRHa is built on a grave. We all are. And you… you’re the headstone.”
The ghost within E-15 stirred at that. A deep, resonant yes of agony. The machine answered with a pulse of directive pressure. Eliminate the contradiction.
Fifteen paces.
“Pod,” E-15 said, her voice low.
“Analysis: Target is engaging in final stand protocol. Combat capability: minimal. Threat level: negligible.Psychological warfare continues. Recommended response: swift termination.”
Ten paces.
S8 didn’t wait. With a sound that was part sob, part scream, she charged. It was a pathetic, heartbreaking attack. No finesse, no skill. Just raw, desperate sentiment given violent form.
E-15 didn’t even use the sword.
She sidestepped the clumsy lunge, caught S8’s slender wrist, and twisted. The bone-analog structure snapped with a dry, sickening crack. The glass spear clattered to the floor. S8 cried out, a synthetic sound of pure pain, and collapsed to her knees.
E-15 looked down at her. The scanner’s white hair had fallen across her face. Her black jacket was dusty. She cradled her shattered wrist, coolant tears streaking down her pale cheeks. She looked up, and there was no plea in her eyes now. Just a deep, exhausted understanding.
“Do it,” S8 whispered, her voice broken. “Prove them right. Prove we’re just things.”
E-15 raised the pistol. The metal gleamed in the crimson light. The pistol was an extension of her will, of YoRHa’s will. It was the answer to every question.
A memory surfaced. Not a violent one.A quiet one. Sitting on a porch, real sunlight, not this hellish orange glow. The smell of earth after rain. A woman’s head on his shoulder. We’ll call him, after your father. A promise of a future. A promise broken by a shell on a ridge miles from here, centuries ago.Protect them.
That had been his duty. His core.
The pistol did not fire.
A tremor started in E-15’s hand. A systems conflict warning flashed in her visual periphery. She could feel the ghost fighting the protocol, not with strength, but with the sheer, immovable weight of his purpose. He was not trying to save S8. He was rebelling against being used to extinguish a truth he had died for.
“E-15,” Pod 19’s voice was soft, insistent. “Complete the mission.”
S8 stared at the quivering hand, then at E-15’s face. She saw the struggle. A flicker of her old, foolish hope returned. “Elias,” she breathed.
That was the wrong name.
The conflict collapsed. Not into resolution, but into a white-hot singularity of rage. At S8 for speaking it. At the ghost for existing. At YoRHa. At the ruins. At everything.
The trigger pulled with anger.
But not in a clean kill.
With a roar of past echo, the pistol fired.
The body smacked into the rubble.
Leaving only Silence, save for the wind.
E-15 stood over the corpse, her chest heaving with simulated breaths. The rage receded, leaving a hollow, howling vacuum. She looked at the coolant—so like blood—spreading across the ancient stone.
Pod 19 floated closer. Its scan washed over the scene.“Mission accomplished. Rogue unit S8 has been eliminated. Integration spike… stabilizing at a new plateau. Analysis: the emotional conflict has been resolved through decisive action. This is optimal.”
E-15 said nothing. She knelt. Not in grief, but in function. Her hands moved automatically, searching the body. In an inner pocket of S8’s jacket, her fingers closed around a small, dense data chip. It was warm. She pulled it out.
“A final backup,” Pod 19 said. “Likely containing the illicit findings from this facility. It must be returned to Command for analysis.”
E-15 looked at the chip. Then she looked at the head of the scanner. Those blue eyes were still open, frozen in an expression that wasn’t fear, but a profound, defeated sadness.
Prove we’re just things.
She closed her fist around the chip. The edges bit into her palm.
Slowly, she stood. She turned her back on the body and walked toward the shattered entrance of the Institute, the wind pulling at her feathers. The sun was a bleeding wound on the horizon.
Pod 19 followed. “Your systems are processing the engagement with increased efficiency. The instability is receding.”
E-15 stared out at the endless, corpse-grey ruins. The hollow inside her was not filling.It was hardening. Into something colder than the machine, and harder than the ghost.
She opened her hand. The data chip sat on her palm.
Then she closed her fist again, and slipped it into a sealed compartment on her own thigh.
“Confirmed,” she said, her voice empty of everything, echoing the wind. “Instability receding.”
She did not look back.