Three rounds tore through the wet air where Sera had not been for two heartbeats. The fourth punched a console and threw sparks into Dr. Orhan’s coat. Layla Orhan did not flinch... she just continued to watch like she was above it all.

Sera did not run.

She walked forward, and the room shortened itself to fit the pace.

Dr. Davis held his ground at the console like a captain on the bridge of a ship he believed could not sink.

The smile that touched his mouth was not triumph.

It was the satisfaction of knowing that his life’s work wasn’t a waste, that the drive to create a better soldier, a stronger human had come to fruition.

He eyes lit up as he continued to watch Sera rip apart the soldiers meant to protect him.

But then again, he didn’t think that he needed to be protected from his own daughter.

"You see?" he announced. His voice sounded smaller without the building to amplify it, but he kept the tenor of a lecture hall. "We did it. Perfect tolerance. No shock. No inhibition. No—"

Before he could finish the sentence, Sera appeared in front of him.

A flash of a smile appeared on her face as she looked at him. "Goodbye Daddy," she purred, speaking for the first time since she entered the room.

Her hand plunged into his chest like his bones and muscles were nothing.

She did not search. She knew exactly where his heart lived inside of him. She took it in her palm with a precision that felt like contempt.

His mouth stayed open around the word he had not finished.

She pulled her arm back.

Blood answered gravity, slapped the floor in thick sheets that spread with a lazy authority.

The heart made three bewildered movements in her grip—futile, messy attempts to continue a job that required chest and lung and a thousand little agreements that were no longer in force.

She looked at it without interest. When it stopped arguing, she let it fall. It landed near his shoe with a sound like a small animal dropping from a tree.

"Funny, I thought it would be black... or rotten... or not there at all," she murmured, looking down at the offending organ.

He stood for an idiot second longer. Bodies were loyal. They tried, even when the effort was pointless.

Then Sera put her other hand on the hinge of his jaw and tore what was left of his argument into a separate piece.

The head came away with a reluctant wet sound, Dr. Davis’s hair caught briefly on her wrist, trying to hold on to something before it gave up.

The head hit the control console and slid down to the ground, leaving a long, dark comma across the dead switches.

When Dr. Davis was finally dead, she turned to Dr. Orhan.

Dr. Orhan had not run.

Sera didn’t know if it was because even Orhan understood would have been foolish to, or she was simply unable to.

Then again, Dr. Orhan was not a foolish woman.

She had simply opened the distance between herself and the center of the room by three unremarkable steps.

Her hands were empty. Her chin was high. She did not smell like fear. She smelled like antiseptic and polished steel, and under that, the bitter smell of someone who has always outlived other people’s choices.

"You do know that you can’t undo what you are," Dr. Orhan said, her voice quiet... even. "Dr. Davis designed you to survive. He designed you to be the perfect weapon. He designed you to obey. Something that Hydra has been working on for the past 140 years. Did you know that you are the only successful subject? You should be proud of yourself."

Ignoring her words, Sera stalked toward her like predator to a prey.

"He designed me to obey," Sera murmured softly. She tested the word obey on her tongue and felt that it was just as disgusting to say as it was to hear. She was not built to obey.

She was built to rule.

Sera shrugged her shoulders, no longer caring what Orhan was saying. "That was your mistake."

The distance between the two of them disappeared.

Dr. Orhan pivoted at the last moment, thinking that Sera wouldn’t be able to react in time.

She thought it would have saved her from a swing. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

But it did not save her from a hand.

Pale lavender fingers found the back of her skull, low, where hair gathered at the base of her neck, as Sera drove her forward into the steel wall.

The impact produced a sound that did not belong to a human body.

Something gave way against the force. The skin was first, it was too soft to stand firm against the impact. Then the bony seams beneath the skin were less willing, but still chose to submit to the monster.

The steel wall bowed a thumb’s width, seeming to know better than to fight.

Dr. Orhan slid down, leaving a dark, vertical brushstroke like a signature.

She pushed herself up with the dedication of a person who thought they were better than everyone else.

Sera caught her by the collar and turned her face toward the dead monitors. Dr. Orhan’s eyes were lucid, insultingly so.

"You think this ends it," Orhan said, a slight smile on her face that Sera hadn’t seen since the last time Orhan had cut her open in her past life. "It doesn’t. There are more facilities. More work. More—"

The rest of the sentence remained in her mouth.

Sera’s palm covered it and decided the sentence did not deserve air.

She drove Dr. Orhan’s head into the console. Plastic gave. Metal dented. Orhan’s body seized, then sagged. Sera held her there until the body stopped twitching in protest.

Silence came back into the room like a tide.

The little sounds took over again. The drip from a ruptured pipe at the corner, the slow tap of blood collecting and running off the edge of the console, the sibilant slide of glass as Dr. Davis’s head finished its patient journey to the floor.

Sera stood in the black center of what had once called itself control and looked at the shapes inside it as if deciding whether they belonged to a world she still acknowledged.

Bullet holes puckered her shirt.

But the skin underneath was perfectly smooth.

Letting out a long breath, Sera walked to the door.

Her bare feet left prints that had depth to them, not just color.

One, then the next, like stepping-stones across a red pond.

She stepped over a body. She stepped around a rifle. She did not look back.

The room had been made to keep the world out. It had failed.

It would remember the failure longer than it remembered the men who tried to survive in it.