For days, the lab was my world. The dust, the silence, the flickering holograms. I trained until my body was a single, coherent ache. I memorized every one of Ravage’s combat protocols until I could see them in my sleep. I was becoming a weapon. But it wasn’t enough. Ravage was still out there, a ghost in the city's machine, and my family was still breathing the same air as him. The ice in my stomach never melted.
“This is pointless,” I said, swiping my hand through the holographic model of Ravage, shattering it into a million pixels of light. I was pacing the length of the lab, my bare feet worn raw, my body thrumming with a useless, frustrated energy. “We’re stuck here, playing video games, while he’s out there turning my city into his personal buffet. We have all this data, all this tech, and we’re still just reacting.”
“I am detecting a significant spike in your cortisol levels,” Handy’s voice chirped from my wrist. “Might I suggest a calming cup of… oh, wait, all we have is two-year-old nutrient paste. Never mind. Carry on with the brooding. It’s a good look for you.”
“I’m not brooding,” I snapped, turning on him. “I’m strategizing. And my strategy so far is to punch a ghost. It’s not working.”
“Patience, my vessel of teen angst,” Handy said. “While you’ve been perfecting your ‘punching the air’ technique, I’ve been multitasking.” A dozen different data streams and complex encryption keys flashed in a holographic display around my arm. “Your uncle was a master of paranoid data-hoarding. He didn't just have one firewall. He had firewalls within firewalls, nested like those little Russian dolls. I’ve been running a brute-force decryption on the deepest layer since we got here. The files were corrupted and labeled with extreme prejudice. He really didn’t want anyone seeing them.”
“And?” I asked, stopping my pacing.
“And,” Handy said, a triumphant little synth-flourish in his voice, “I’m in.”
The chaotic stream of data on the display coalesced, resolving into a single, heavily redacted file. The Pandora Corp logo was stamped at the top, along with a string of ominous-looking classification warnings. The file name was simple:
SUBJECT-17_ORIGIN.
My breath caught in my throat. This was it. The beginning.
“Play it,” I whispered.
The file opened. It wasn’t a neat, organized report. It was a chaotic jumble of data. A doctor’s audio log, full of static. A single, grainy security camera image. A page from a medical chart, most of it blacked out. My uncle’s work. His sin.
“—initial subject acquisition has proven… difficult,” a tinny, unfamiliar voice crackled from Handy’s speaker. It was a recording, dated two years ago. “The physical conditioning is taking, but the psychological resistance is… formidable. Subject exhibits extreme dissociative tendencies when confronted with memory-stimulus…”
A grainy image flashed on the screen. It was a man, gaunt and hollow-cheeked, with haunted eyes, sitting in a sterile white room. He was wearing a simple gray jumpsuit. Before Pandora. Before the fur and the claws and the rage.
Then, a new document appeared. A psychological profile. And on it, a name, not a number.
HALE, HARK.
My breath hitched. He had a name.
The floor seemed to tilt, and I stumbled back, landing hard on a dusty stool. He wasn't just a monster. He was a man. A homeless veteran, according to the intake notes, abducted from the streets of the Lower Sector. A disposable subject.
“My God,” I breathed.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“It gets worse,” Handy said, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. “Your uncle was meticulous. He recorded everything. Even the things that broke him.”
A new file fragment opened. It was a video log. Not from a doctor, but from my uncle. He looked younger, but his eyes were already weary, haunted by the work he was doing.
“We’ve hit a wall with Hale’s mental conditioning,” my uncle said, his voice low and strained. “The memory implantation isn’t taking. His own subconscious is too strong. It keeps… reasserting itself. There’s a single emotional nexus that we can’t seem to overwrite. A recurring memory fragment. We’ve isolated the primary sensory inputs…”
A text document scrolled onto the screen.
SENSORY TRIGGERS (HALE, H.):
- Petrichor (smell of rain on dry pavement)
- Sound of a child’s off-key humming (specific melody)
- Tactile sensation: small hand in his
- Visual: a yellow raincoat
- A poem of a stolen life. The words were ghosts, tiny details of a memory that refused to die.
“It all seems to revolve around his daughter,” my uncle continued, his voice cracking slightly. “She died of a respiratory illness a year before his acquisition. He lost everything. The memory is all he has left. It’s his anchor. And it’s the one thing standing between us and a successful prototype.”
I stared at the list of words, a knot tightening in my chest, cold and heavy. A yellow raincoat. The sound of humming. A little girl.
I had been trying to figure out how to fight a monster. A mindless, raging beast. But that wasn’t what Ravage was. He was a man, a grieving father, trapped inside a prison of fur and cybernetics, haunted by the one thing they could never take from him.
I stared at the list of triggers. A yellow raincoat. A little girl's humming. This isn't just data. The thought hit me like a physical blow. It's a weapon. I had been trying to beat the monster. But what if the key was to find the man?
I had been so focused on brute force. On being stronger, faster, a better predator. I was trying to beat Ravage at his own game. But that was a game designed by Pandora, and he would always be better at it. I couldn’t overpower him. He was a walking tank, a purpose-built killing machine.
But Hark Hale wasn’t.
Hark Hale was a broken man who missed his little girl.
My mission wasn't to hunt a monster anymore. It was to strategically, surgically, exploit the last vestiges of the man trapped inside. I didn’t have to be stronger than the beast. I had to be smarter than the man.
“Handy,” I said, my voice quiet, but ringing with a new, terrifying clarity. “The holographic projector in this lab. Is it still functional?”
“The lens is cracked, but the core emitter seems to be intact,” Handy replied. “Why? Are you planning on staging a light show?”
“Something like that,” I said, my mind racing, the pieces of a new, dangerous plan snapping into place. I wasn’t just reacting anymore. I wasn’t waiting for the next attack, the next tragedy. I was going on the offensive.
I stood up and walked over to the whiteboard, the one covered in my uncle’s faded, frantic equations. I wiped a section clean with the sleeve of my jacket; the dust coming away in a gray cloud. I picked up a dry-erase marker.
I was no longer just training my body. I was planning an ambush of the mind.
“If we can’t track him, we’ll have to lure him out,” I said, my voice steady. “We need to get his attention. And then… we need to set the stage.”
I sketched a rough map of the city’s underbelly. The abandoned subway tunnels that ran beneath the industrial sector. Dark. Enclosed. Perfect.
“We can’t fight him on his terms,” I continued, more to myself than to the AI. “We have to fight him on mine.”
I looked at the list of sensory triggers still glowing in the air. A yellow raincoat. The smell of rain. An off-key lullaby. It was an arsenal. A psychological toolkit.
The fear for Jackie was still there, a cold, hard diamond in my chest. But it wasn’t just fear anymore. It was fuel. I wasn’t just trying to save her. I was trying to save the man inside the monster, too. Or, at the very least, use his ghost to put the monster down for good.
My hand moved across the whiteboard, choreographing a tragedy.
I was setting a trap made of memory and grief, using one man's broken heart to kill another. The thought left a bitter taste in my mouth, but I swallowed it down. I wasn't a hunter anymore.
I was the trap.