They told him not to speak to her.
"Observe. Report. Do not engage," said the voice on the comms. "She's volatile."
But Jin had always been better at reading people than following rules. And the girl in the cage wasn't volatile.
She was tired.
Seventeen years old, maybe. Smaller than the other fighters. Bone-thin, bruised in places that didn't show under the skin. And she was silent — not out of fear, but choice.
Jin had been in the Phoenix network for two years at that point. Long enough to know DaeCorp's ghosts when he saw them. Fighters bred in silence. Puppets turned gladiators.
But Ash — Aara, back then — wasn't a puppet.
She was a grenade no one had the courage to throw.
He first saw her fight from the viewing deck, behind a one-way mirror. No cheering. No sponsors. Just a training match — quiet and brutal.
Her opponent was twice her size. Didn't matter.
She took him down in thirty-seven seconds flat.
Not with strength.
With precision.
She didn't smile after the win. Didn't sneer. She stepped back, waited for the medic, and walked off the mat without looking anyone in the eye.
But she looked at the mirror.
Straight through it.
Straight at him.
And that was the moment Jin knew he was in trouble.
He didn't speak to her for another week. Not until they assigned him to her corridor as a technician — a disguise meant to keep surveillance quiet and internal.
He checked the lights in her cell. Changed her bandages. Replaced broken lockers.
She never said a word.
But she noticed everything.
One morning, he found her kneeling on the floor, rearranging crumbs into a coded pattern — Phoenix signals, carved from memory.
His blood ran cold.
"You know who I am," he said quietly.
She didn't answer. Just tapped twice on the floor — yes.
"Why haven't you turned me in?"
She finally looked up.
Her voice was a whisper, dry as gravel. "Because I don't want to survive this place. I want to burn it down."
Jin stared at her for a long moment. Then knelt beside her and began moving crumbs into a new formation.
She watched him.
She didn't flinch.
That was the beginning.
They never called it friendship. That would've been dangerous.
But he smuggled her antiseptic. She gave him names of guards who abused the others.
He tapped three times at her door each night, and if she tapped back, he knew she'd made it another day.
Jin had protected many people in Phoenix.
But she was the first one who made him feel safe — like the act of protecting her was protecting some last flicker of his own humanity.
And when she escaped — when the footage of her final fight leaked and the name Ash took fire across the underground — he felt something strange.
Pride.
And heartbreak.
Because he hadn't gone with her.
Because he hadn't said goodbye.
Because even if he never touched her, never kissed her, never called her his — she still was.
In every quiet beat of his heart, she always would be.
Now, years later, she stood across from him on a rusting bridge, her face harder but her eyes still sharp.
And Jin knew.
He'd never be the one she chose.
But he'd always be the one who never stopped choosing her.