Kaley could tell the walls were older than the programming. The Red Room hid its ugliness behind sterile tiles and flawless glass, but the truth was buried in the echo of footsteps and the smell of bleach-soaked fear. No matter how clean they made it, the blood never really left.
She'd been here too long.
Ten now, maybe eleven. Not that they let her track time. Days blurred into training cycles, silence drills, and injections that left her light-headed and shivering. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. And they hated that about her.
It made her a problem.
She was better than they expected. Sharper. Too precise. But it wasn't her physical ability that made the instructors nervous—it was the instinct. Kaley moved like she already knew the strike was coming. Her reflexes were premonitions. Her gaze, surgical.
And lately, something else was starting to slip through.
The glass mirrors in the training hall had cracked around her when she'd gotten angry. The power grid shorted for six seconds during a stress test, and her heart rate didn't spike once. Her handlers told her it was adrenaline. She knew better.
Something lived inside her.
Something that watched.
She felt it when she dreamed. When she bled. When she hurt.
And when she was alone, it whispered.
That night, the lights flickered three times. She counted it—one, two, three—like a heartbeat.
She waited. Curled beneath the edge of her cot, spine pressed to the wall. The other girls were asleep or pretending to be. Kaley never trusted sleep here. It was a luxury, not a right.
Her fingers twitched. She didn't mean them to. The air felt thick.
There was a hum. A strange, low vibration through the floor like the buzz of a machine warming up. But the lights weren't failing. No sirens. No red.
Then the mirror across from her fractured.
No impact. No tremor. Just a slow, elegant crack across its surface.
And Kaley felt the Void move.
Not just inside her—around her. Like a bubble had popped and let it spill through the seams. She gasped, sharp and soft, and the air around her curled like smoke.
She stood slowly. Feet bare. Cold floor. Her eyes pulsed once, gold under the dim strip-lights.
The cot behind her caught fire.
No one screamed. Not yet. The flame died as quickly as it had appeared, but the silence it left behind was deeper than before.
Kaley didn't run.
She walked.
To the hallway. To the lab. To the place they kept her file locked behind fingerprint glass. She didn't know how she knew where to go. She just knew tonight was different. Something was changing.
And the Void—it agreed.
She was done waiting.
Behind the one-way glass, two handlers watched her go.
"She's not ready," one whispered.
"She's not yours to decide anymore," the other said. "The directive came from higher. If she walks, we don't stop her."
The first handler swallowed. "You think she knows?"
"She doesn't have to."
Because whatever she was now—
—Kaley wasn't just Red Room property anymore.
They controlled her through fear. Through threats. Through whispers in the dark that her family would suffer if she ever disobeyed—if she ever ran, ever questioned, ever let the wrong emotion show.
She remembered the day they showed her the photograph.
Tony—her brother—walking out of a building, mid-speech, unaware he was being watched. It was a grainy surveillance still, timestamped and tagged in Cyrillic.
"He won't even know it was you," the handler had said, folding the photo neatly and tucking it back into the file. "One phone call. That's all it takes."
Kaley hadn't cried. But that night, her hands had shaken so badly she couldn't lace her boots.
They didn't need chains when they had names.
But something was changing.
And even that fear wasn't working anymore.
She didn't walk through the facility—she drifted.
Doors opened when she neared them. Metal groaned. The lights didn't flicker this time—they dimmed, as if the energy were being pulled somewhere else. Toward her.
Her bare feet left no sound. The security cameras tracked her for only a second before freezing—every screen on the surveillance wall snapped to static.
In the monitoring hub, technicians panicked. Systems reset and failed again. Backup generators clicked to life. Lights turned red.
"Is this a breach?" someone yelled.
"No." The lead operator's voice was thin. "It's her."
In the lab, she approached the wall where they kept the files. Data drives. Genetic records. Psychological logs. Hers would be at the center. Top shelf. Isolated. Marked with too many red labels to be anything but a problem.
She placed her hand on the scanner. It rejected her. Of course it did.
Her eyes glowed again.
The glass shattered inward. The steel door bent like soft plastic.
She stepped inside.
Stacks of files. Screens still glowing. A terminal, still logged in.
She sat.
And for the first time in her life, Kaley Stark read the words they used to define her:
SUBJECT 05-67
GENETIC ANOMALY - CLASSIFIED
RELATIVE: STARK, A. / STARK, H.
BEHAVIORAL PROFILE: UNSTABLE / RESILIENT / NON-COMPLIANT
RECOMMENDATION: MONITOR FOR COSMIC INTERFERENCE
She scrolled.
There were photos of her in restraints. Blood samples. Graphs showing psychic spikes. Audio logs she couldn't bear to open.
Then—
A file labeled: MAN IN THE VOID
It was audio only. Scratchy. Corrupted. But she played it.
A voice, low and broken, filtered through:
"...watches her even when she sleeps… not a hallucination… mimics her… growing stronger… learning faster than we can…"
Kaley stared at the monitor. Her hand was shaking.
Then she heard the other voice.
Her own.
"I see him, too."
She didn't remember recording that.
Somewhere deeper in the Red Room, a failsafe protocol activated. The floor panels shifted. Darts hissed from hidden turrets. Kaley dodged without thought—Void wrapping around her like smoke, twisting the air, swallowing the projectiles before they reached her.
She ran. Not out of fear.
Out of clarity.
Every hallway felt familiar now. She wasn't just moving through the building—she was rewriting it. The Void etched paths for her. Burned through locks. Bent light around her so that even cameras couldn't hold her form.
She passed training halls, sleeping quarters, interrogation rooms. All the pieces of her cage.
She reached the north wall—the edge of the facility. The outside.
Snow fell lightly through the cracks in the reinforced door.
But she didn't go further.
The Void rippled inside her, urging, twisting—but she paused.
Kaley turned her palm toward the door, energy coiling up her arm—then stopped. The static around her faded. Her breathing slowed.
She saw it in her mind: Tony. His face. His voice.
"You'll always find me, right? If I get lost?"
She lowered her hand.
She wasn't ready.
Not because she was afraid—but because the Red Room had planned for this.
She felt them moving already. Not soldiers—scientists. Tranquilizers. Countermeasures. They weren't trying to kill her.
They wanted to cage her again.
She stepped back from the breach. The snow stopped at her feet. She turned around, facing the dark hallway.
She didn't escape.
She let them think she could.
Because she needed them to wonder. She needed them to fear.
And when she finally left this place—it wouldn't be as an experiment.
It would be as a storm.
Behind her, the breach sealed itself slowly—walls reshaping with the strange shimmer of Void-laced metal.
And in the observation room, the handler finally spoke.
"She could've left."
"Yes," said the second one. "But she didn't."
"And why not?"
"Because now she knows exactly how far she can go."
Behind her, the facility went dark.
And in the observation room, the handler finally spoke.
"She's going to find them."
"Yes," said the second one. "And when she does… God help us all."