Gene adjusted the collar of her uniform, the starched fabric cool and unyielding against her skin. It was still the official dress, bright white, freshly laundered, faintly scented with industrial cleanser and ozone, though few operatives outside of headquarters wore it anymore.
The embroidered silver wings over her chest caught the sterile overhead lights, the emblem once meant to evoke salvation, protection, and impossible flight. But in the field, no one wore symbols.
Not anymore. Most seasoned Angels had long traded in their ceremonial whites for muted tones, layered jackets, and nondescript badges, armor suited for quiet wars and dirty work.
Still, Gene clung to the ideal. The uniform made her feel like she was part of something righteous, something noble. But lately, wearing it felt less like belonging and more like pretending.
Not with rank, she hadn't earned that, but with the weight of illusion. Of something kept spotless so the blood underneath wouldn't show.
The White Angels' headquarters, all steel bones and reinforced concrete, had always thrummed with sterile purpose. But today, it felt colder.
Not just in temperature, the air had always carried that dry, metallic tang, but in spirit. The halls echoed too sharply, and the light felt too white.
A hush lingered in the corners, not silence, exactly, something thinner. Worn. As if the walls themselves were tired. Or maybe it wasn't the building at all. Maybe it was her.
The erosion was quiet but constant: that wide-eyed belief in purpose slowly hollowing out, leaving behind a space where doubt could finally take hold.
And of course, it had to be that room again. The cold always settled deeper in her bones whenever she was summoned to the operations wing, the heart of it all. Where the real decisions were made. Where silence echoed louder than footsteps. Where he waited.
The message had come less than five minutes ago. Short. Brutal. No greeting. Just:
"Gene. Operations. Now."
Classic Jack.
She'd barely had time to shut down her terminal, still knee-deep in a data cross-reference that made her eyes ache. Third summons this week, and it was only Wednesday. It was starting to feel less like a standard debrief and more like a countdown.
Like every walk down this fluorescent-lit corridor shaved off another layer of her carefully constructed armor. Each time, a little less certain. Each time, the white of her uniform felt a little more like a costume, and the person underneath was less sure of who she was pretending to be.
This wasn't a meeting. It was a warning. She could feel it in her spine.
Jack Smack didn't summon her unless something had gone wrong. Not just numbers or projections, those weren't how this worked. She knew they managed the Alucards carefully, tracking their movements, controlling their memories to keep dangerous ones in check, to keep the population stable, and, one day, maybe free.
This week had already been tense, with reports of unusual behavior, a slipped protocol, the kind of thing that set alarms ringing behind closed doors. And now another summons.
Gene smoothed the front of her uniform, trying to steady the clamminess in her hands, and took a breath that felt thinner than usual. Whatever Jack had waiting behind that door, it wasn't going to be good. The man didn't deal with good news. Only damage control.
She pushed back from her cluttered desk, its surface buried under piles of technical manuals, energy cell schematics, and half-eaten nutrient paste packets.
The low, relentless whirr of the aging data server filled the cramped office, vibrating through the floor and into her bones. That constant drone felt like a ticking clock, slow, unstable, always on the verge of breaking down, echoing the worry that ground her thoughts.
Stepping into the main hallway, the cool fluorescent air felt thin and sterile, a manufactured chill struggling against the heat leaking from the server rooms deeper in the complex.
The recycled atmosphere carried a faint, acrid undertone, a constant reminder of how isolated they were. As she rounded the corner toward the operations floor, her eyes caught the mural lining the wall.
The mural stretched across the corridor wall like a frozen lie. It was titled Sanctum Ascendant, a sweeping, romanticized tableau of White Angels operatives descending from the sky on gilded wings, arms outstretched as if offering salvation. Below them, helpless civilians, ragged, nameless, looked up with awe and desperation, reaching toward their deliverers like saints in stained glass.
At first glance, it radiated hope: order imposed upon chaos, light triumphing over darkness. But Gene had walked this hallway enough times to notice the cracks. The civilians' faces were too smooth, eyes vacant with a devotion that felt rehearsed.
And the Alucards beneath them, clawed, winged shapes rendered in jagged strokes, weren't depicted as beings to be understood or saved, just as shadows writhing beneath the feet of their so-called saviors. Not threats. Not victims. Just props in the myth, the White Angels told about themselves.
Gene paused, her eyes tracing the blur of painted wings and hollow snarls. For a second, the air felt thinner. She'd believed in this once, believed they were helping. Saving lives. Restoring something broken.
But now, with every assignment, every protocol that asked her to look the other way, the story felt harder to swallow. The mural stared back, silent and gleaming, and she looked away first.
Propaganda, she thought, the word bitter in her mouth. The mural portrayed civilians as saviors, and Alucards as shadows, faceless, chaotic, beneath them. But Gene had seen the reports. The missions weren't clean.
The "threats" were often just hybrids who remembered too much and wanted too much. The mural wasn't just a lie; it was a cover story painted over silence.
But the silence was survival here. No one questioned the narrative. Not out loud. She adjusted her datapad strap, kept her head down, and walked faster. Whatever Jack had waiting behind the operations room door, it wouldn't be the truth. Just another version of it.
Her comm unit chimed, short, sharp, and familiar. "Gene. Operations Room. Now. Stat." No greeting. No context. Just a command. Jack Smack never wasted words, and walking into his domain always felt like stepping onto a blade's edge.
She'd spent months watching the silhouettes' territory inch forward on the classified maps, an agonizing, inevitable sprawl. Down here, at the heart of the machine, silence wasn't just protocol.
It was survival. You didn't just keep secrets. You kept your thoughts sealed, your doubts buried. As the mural's painted lies faded behind her, Gene picked up her pace. The doors to the operations room loomed ahead.
Inside, Jack was waiting.
He didn't look up at first. Just sat behind the sleek obsidian slate, fingers moving with calculated ease as streams of encrypted data flickered past. But Gene felt it, the way the air shifted the moment she stepped in.
The stale scent of ozone and long-burnt coffee clung to the room like residue, but what froze her wasn't the chill. It was the weight of being seen before being acknowledged.
Then, slowly, Jack Smack lifted his gaze.
His eyes were ice, sharp, clinical, and impossible to read. The kind of blue that made you think of scalpels and frostbite. Not piercing. Dissecting.
"You're late," he said, voice quiet, flat, and utterly unforgiving.
Gene slammed the hatch shut behind her, the sharp clang bouncing through the silence. Her heart picked up, and a pulse of frustration tangled with quiet defiance. "Thirty seconds late," she muttered, the words tight and bitter on her tongue.
She instantly regretted speaking aloud. Thirty seconds after battling snarled transit and tight security checkpoints, all supposed to be under his control.
Jack didn't bother to meet her eyes. Instead, a slight shift in his stance, the faintest clench of his mouth, spoke volumes. Then came the slow, deliberate raise of an eyebrow, calm but loaded with judgment.
It almost felt absurdly understated, if not for the weight Gene knew it carried. His voice dropped, cold and razor-edged. "And those thirty seconds could cost us."
The unspoken accusation settled between them implies incompetence, negligence, or failure, any of which could trigger a catastrophe. Around them, the machines' steady buzz swelled into a deafening roar.
Before she even processed it, her body tensed, an electric jolt shooting down her spine, muscles tightening as if waking from a restless sleep. She straightened, squared her shoulders, and met Jack's gaze with laser focus. Adrenaline, cold, and sharp, rushed in. "What's the assignment?" she asked, her voice steady, masking the sudden surge beneath.
Jack didn't bother placing the slate gently; with a sharp flick of his wrist, it clattered onto the cold steel table between them, the sound echoing in the sparse room. The screen displayed a grim, pixelated face, Igor's.
Even frozen, his eyes seemed to follow her. "Full behavioral tracking," Jack said curtly, cutting straight to the point. "Location tags. Voice logs. Every move, every whisper. If he deviates, steps off the approved path, or contacts unauthorized parties, we initiate fallback."
Gene stepped back from the table, her face paling under the harsh fluorescent light. Her throat tightened as she swallowed hard, the sound unnervingly loud in the sudden silence. She avoided looking at the slate, her gaze locked instead on Jack. "Fallback meaning...?" she asked, voice hesitant and barely above a whisper.
Jack's gaze didn't move, ice-blue and steady, but his voice cut through the air like a blade. "You know what it means, Gene. There's only one meaning."
The silence that followed was graver than any answer. No explanation is needed. No mercy is implied. Just the cold finality of erasure, dressed up as protocol.
She felt it click into place, the familiar shift. The part of her that asked questions, that lingered on doubt, folded inward. Her spine straightened, shoulders squared, every motion smooth, automatic. Ready. Not for discussion. For execution.
"What's the assignment?" Her voice was level and controlled. No room for nerves.
Jack didn't answer right away. Instead, he flicked the slate across the table with a heavy casualness. It skidded, spun once, and then settled, displaying a low-resolution capture of Igor's face. Standard ID shot. Poor lighting. But the image still held something unnerving. A glint in the eyes, a tension in the jaw. Something feral. Or worse, aware.
"Priority one," Jack said flatly. "I want full behavioral tracking. Real-time location. Voice logs. Pattern data. If he deviates again, even slightly, if he wanders, if he speaks to anyone outside protocol…" He leaned forward, fingers steepled, gaze sharp as broken glass. "We initiate a fallback. No hesitation."
She did.
The memory of the training cube, the sterile light, the flickering projection explaining Protocol 7, Subdivision C: Handling of Cognitively Emergent Assets, was etched into her brain like a scar.
She'd memorized the flowcharts, absorbed the outcome matrices, and repeated the justifications until the icy precision of it all dulled her reaction. Any hybrid exhibiting the barest hint of independent cognition, an unscripted question, an emotional deviation, or an unexpected workaround was to be flagged, isolated, and resolved.
Resolved. A word that meant mindwipe, or erasure. Quiet. Clean. No witnesses. No sympathy.
Gene had complied. It was the job. A protocol. A checkbox. She'd never flinched.
But now, in the low, humming quiet of the secure sub-level, that old certainty began to slip. Jack sat half in shadow, the glow of the screen painting hard lines across his face. He looked relaxed. But the stillness wasn't calm, it was control, and it filled the room like cold water.
She spoke before she could stop herself.
"Why me?"
Her voice came out smaller than intended. A thin thread of sound against the weight of the assignment. Not a protest. Just a question. One, she suddenly wasn't sure she wanted to answer.
Jack leaned back in his chair, then slowly leaned in again, elbows braced on the table. His eyes, sharp and cold even in the dim light, fixed on hers with surgical precision.
The movement wasn't casual. It was deliberate, predatory. "Because you're soft enough that they don't see you coming," he said. His voice was low, smooth, and cold. Like a crack running through the ice.
She flinched.
The word soft hit like a slap, not because it was false, but because it was true. Painfully so. She'd built her whole career on it. Gene had spent years in the corners, processing endless reports, flagging anomalies no one else noticed, and translating death into numbers for people too high up to care.
She wasn't flashy. Wasn't feared. She was useful. Quietly. Invisibly. The kind of person Jack didn't trust so much as utilize, precisely because she followed orders and didn't ask questions.
Not yet.
And that unspoken yet hovered between them now like a knife.
"I thought we were focused on external threats," she said. "The Human-Alucard conflicts. Not… internal surveillance."
Jack gave a short, humorless chuckle. "You still don't get it." He sat back, folding his arms. "The real danger's never outside. It's the ones we trained, the ones we raised, the ones we thought we controlled." His gaze sharpened. "The ones who forget they're weapons."
Gene picked up the slate. Igor's face remained frozen on the screen. She remembered him from the Lennox estate, quiet, obedient, too polished. But his eyes… they looked different lately. Unsettled. Aware.
"You said Maisie Lennox is off-limits," Gene said, not looking up. "But if Igor's near her..."
"She's valuable for now. Don't complicate things." Jack's tone went cold. "Keep watching. Report directly to me. No one else."
Gene nodded slowly. "Understood."