The violet petals were softer than he recalled, their delicate texture standing in contrast to the rough, calloused skin on his fingertips.
He shouldn't remember anything at all. Not about Mara, not her quiet strength as she moved among the potted plants, not the way she hummed low in her throat while tending the soil, a sound like a sleepy bee.
He shouldn't remember the sting of sunlight refracted through the dusty glass panes overhead when she lifted a heavy clay pot to water its roots, the light catching dust in the humid air. And not violets.
Their specific shade of muted purple, the way the light caught the fine hairs on the stems, the faint, sweet scent, all of it should be a blank slate.
And yet, he did. Not like a clean, clear memory, something pulled from a neat archive in his mind. More like a glitch in the system, an echo ringing where no sound should exist, persistent and out of place.
A color too vivid against the muted palette of his reality. A smell too familiar, stirring something dormant. A touch, like this brush against the petals, that felt like it belonged to someone else's hands entirely, but bloomed a sharp, foreign ache in his chest, a phantom pain for a life he didn't possess.
His fingers twitched, an involuntary spasm he tried to suppress, as he reached forward again, deliberately brushing the petals once more, testing the sensation. His knuckles cracked, a sharp, dry sound in the quiet stillness of the greenhouse, the joints protesting some unseen tension.
Something was off. More fundamentally off than the intrusive, fragmented sensations.
The air felt thicker today. Heavier. Not the typical, pleasant weight of the greenhouse humidity, dense with the scent of damp earth and growing things.
Not even the seasonal burden of pollen hangs in the air like a golden haze. It was a different kind of pressure, a distinct presence. Someone else occupied this space with him.
He didn't need to turn around, didn't need to rely on his enhanced senses, to know who it was. The air thrummed with a specific, familiar frequency that settled cold and certain in his gut.
Gene.
He heard her enter like a knife slipping into warm fruit, not loud, not abrupt, but quiet, smooth, and utterly definite. The heavy door creaked almost imperceptibly, then settled back into its frame with a soft thud that shouldn't have registered but did.
"Don't stop on my account," she said. Her voice cut through the quiet, clear but somehow distant.
Her voice felt like it came from behind glass, slightly distorted, muffled. Or perhaps it was him, muted by an unfamiliar, translucent barrier that separated his awareness from the outside world.
He turned. Slowly. Intentionally. Each movement is measured carefully. No sharp, sudden gestures that might betray the tension coiled beneath his skin.
The panes of the greenhouse windows directly behind her reflected slivers of her form, fractured images layered like pieces of a woman trying not to be seen, or perhaps, a woman who didn't want to be seen whole.
She stood silhouetted against the bright sky outside, a dark shape against the light, making it impossible to read her expression. His crimson eyes pierced through her warm brown ones, creating an intense connection that felt both electric and unsettling.
"You shouldn't be here," he said. His voice scraped out low and flat, deliberately devoid of inflection, more ragged breath than actual sound.
"Neither should you," she answered immediately, her voice level. "You're glitching."
That word again. The clinical term for the terrifying unraveling he was experiencing was. The word they used to describe instability, malfunction.
His jaw tightened instinctively, a knot forming in his muscles. And as it did, something shifted beneath his fingernails. A sudden, sharp ache bloomed there. A prickling sensation, not of pain, not exactly, but a definite warning. A signal from his flesh.
Don't show it. The silent command echoed in his skull. But he couldn't stop it, couldn't halt whatever biological process was underway.
He reached for the chipped ceramic watering can nearby, a familiar, grounding action, intending to use it to cover the tremor that had started in his hands. Only then did he see his hands properly.
His nails had grown.
Not dramatically. Not into monstrous claws that scraped against the pot. But longer than they had been moments before, thicker, the keratin somehow denser, harder.
A faint, unnatural glint shimmered beneath the skin, a pale, bone-like hue emerging from below the surface, as if a concealed threat were rising from hidden depths.
His body was reacting before he was conscious of why. His instincts were overriding his programming.
The watering can clang lightly as his shaking hand knocked it against the rim of a nearby clay pot, the sound echoing too loudly in the sudden silence.
Gene noticed. Of course, she did. She missed nothing.
She stepped closer, her boots making no sound on the packed earth floor of the greenhouse, her movements silent but certain.
He could feel her eyes on his hands, the hands he now tried awkwardly to hide behind the rim of the watering can, gripping it perhaps too tightly.
"You've been… off," she said. "Wandering, blanking out. Forgetting what day it is. Cracks are showing, Igor. Cracks in the facade they designed."
A jolt, sharp and violent, rocked him through his core.
Not memory. Not yet. It wasn't a recalled image, a sequence of events he could piece together.
But the impression of it saturated his senses. Like a scream muffled under deep water, distorted and terrifying.
A burning heat in his throat, as if he'd swallowed fire or acid. A scraping sensation in his mouth, raw and metallic.
Images flashed, not of chains necessarily, but the feeling of being bound, restrained. Or teeth. Sharp, tearing teeth. His own? Someone else's? The fragmented sensations were nauseating.
"I'm fine." He murmured, the lie feeling thick and clumsy on his tongue. He struggled for control, for the blankness that should be his default state.
But his hands were shaking uncontrollably now. The watering can rattle against the pot again, louder this time. And his nails didn't retract; they felt fixed, foreign.
He clenched his fists, hard, desperate to make them normal, until his knuckles cracked again and the bloom of blood threatened beneath the unnatural pressure on his palms. His body felt wrong, loose in its skin, betraying him at every turn.
Gene's voice softened further, a dangerous calm entering her tone. She was inching closer to something deeply buried, something explosive, and they both knew it. She wasn't just making accusations; she was peeling back layers he didn't know were there, or layers he'd been forced to build.
"No, you're not." She walked closer to him. "You're remembering things. Maybe not, only in flashes, but they're slipping through. I've seen it before. I know the signs. I saw the video. I know what they made you do. I know what they made Tak do. You didn't want to fight, Igor. I saw it in your eyes." That name.
That goddamn name. It landed like a physical blow, shattering the fragile control he was clinging to.
Tak Jagger. The image formed unbidden, sharp and clear despite the surrounding fog. Short. Slouched shoulders. A shock of unruly hair.
Broken wings, poorly concealed beneath a patched jacket. Annoying, chatty, relentlessly kind in a way that didn't make sense in the world they inhabited.
Igor hadn't known him. Not really. They had been on opposing sides, soldiers in different armies. But he'd... he'd liked him. That was the part that hurt the most. That made absolutely no sense according to his programming, according to the purpose he was built.
He remembered the van. The cramped space, the tension, the shared, grim purpose that wasn't shared at all.
He remembered the way Tak had looked at him, not with hatred, not with fear, but like they were equals stuck in the same impossible situation.
Like they were in it together, even when they weren't, even when one was predator and the other prey.
Then, flashes. Rapid, brutal.
His hand. Moving with impossible speed and strength. The sword he carried, suddenly heavy, foreign. A sickening crunch. A body falling. Tak's body.
No. No, no, no. The denial was a desperate scream in his mind, trying to override the horrific images.
Gene kept speaking, her voice a steady current pulling him towards the jagged rocks of truth he wanted to avoid.
"They set you against each other like animals," she continued, not harshly but truthfully, her words a painful balm on a festering wound.
"You were both under control, puppets dancing on their strings, but there was still a part of you left in there. I saw it. The way you hesitated. The flicker of recognition in your eyes before… before it was too late."
"Shut up. I didn't want to kill him," Igor hissed, the words expelled too fast, too raw. "But I did. I killed him."
His voice cracked mid-syllable, jagged and exposed, a sound of splintering. The nails were still painfully long, still thick and hard against his palm. His skin suddenly felt too tight, stretched taut over bone and muscle that felt alien.
The world swam out of focus for half a second, the edges blurring, the sounds distorting. His senses heightened uncontrollably; he could smell the faint metallic scent of ozone on Gene's clothes, the clean scent of her skin, and then, horrifyingly, the rapid, steady beat of her heart, a vulnerable rhythm only inches away.
"I know." Her gaze was steady. And she hadn't moved. Not a flinch, not a step backward, not even a shallowing of her breath at the obvious physical signs of his instability, of the monstrousness surfacing.
And that scared him more than the memories, more than the glitches, more than the terrifying images of Tak's broken body.
Because she wasn't treating him like a monster. She was treating him like a person in pain.
Not yet anyway. And the absence of fear in her eyes was a terrifying judgment.