Sam had never been shot before.

  It wasn’t something she though could happen to her, barely even a consideration in her mind. The burning holes in her chest and head told her otherwise, and persisted like bite marks.

  Static and blood filled her eyes. Half her vision was gone, probably blended into her skull somewhere on the wall behind her. Despite this she could still see, if only slightly, still see the massacred body on the medical bed and the giant man from the buildings entrance gripping his blade like a gun.

  Sam struggled to keep conscious, could feeling it leaking out with her blood and flesh but still managed a stranglehold on what was left of it.

  She choked out parts of words, guttural noises that barely sounded like English.

  “W-wh…y?”

  The man didn’t respond, but his eyes narrowed slightly, puzzled. Clearly she wasn’t supposed to be breathing let alone speaking. With every pant his body seemed to fill more of the room, as if his lust for blood made him a sanguinary machine, a heart that ran on violence.

  Twist spoke up, stepping back from the glass towards the door, “Whatever that was, whatever you are... it can’t be normal.”

  Sam was confused.

  “He wasn’t even human anymore Sam! You made him... not human!”

  Twist suddenly grabbed her own arms, comforting herself. The thought of being changed like that made her skin crawl.

  “No one saw you on the cameras enter the pillar, they detected a breach in the wall minutes before I met you. Whoever you are- whatever you are, can’t be allowed to live”

  Sam didn’t understand, she was just as human as her right? Why was Twist so angry now? So afraid? Part of her realised how bizarre it must’ve looked from an outside perspective, but to kill her over it? This was extreme, this had to be some sort of extreme!

  She knew she wouldn’t get answers to her questions, at least not here, where everyone in the room looked at her like a plague. From her perspective it was unfair to be judged so unfaithfully, like a scourge.

  From their perspective, this was necessary for survival.

  Twist nodded her head towards the doorman, he grunted in response then stepped through the shattered windowpane into the world of gore that he created. Sam had enough sense about herself to run away, despite the chunks of her brain missing, but found it incredibly hard to move. Not only her legs but every part of her body.

  When she looked down at her body with her remaining eye she found that the wounds weren’t healing like before. Out in the snow barren wasteland she could repair herself as she suffocated to death, keeping her body alive, and yet now it couldn’t even heal a couple of holes no bigger than her fingers.

  His column legs shuffled closer to her, his breath steadied with every inch closed between him and his prey.

  Sam still couldn’t move. She tried propping herself up on her limp leg but collapsed slightly under her own weight whenever she shifted. She cursed at her body’s inconsistency, and desperately begged it to move. As it was, she was a limp doll slumped against a wall, a target incapable of being missed. The man gripped his engine blade with the force of a vice, swinging it to his side ready to cleave the tiny woman in two.

  She remembered how she just cured an incurable disease, and became all the more infuriated.

  How the fuck does this work?

  Tears welled up where they could, the frustration getting to her.

  How the fuck do I work?!

  The engine blade transformed over itself, the blade end flattening slightly with spring like pressure. Its appearance changed from the slab of sharp metal to a column, Sam assumed that it’d pop back into shape on impact. The next move was clearly intended to be the last.

  In her panic she did the only thing that seemed to work from memory. She focused yet again, this time on the open wounds on a part of her body. The second she did so the bullet hole sealed itself leaving no trace behind. An initial wave of relief passed over her until she saw the blood thirsted man begin to swing his weapon in her direction.

  Sam repaired just enough of herself to lurch forward, underneath the goliath swing that tore through everything in its path.

  Sam tumbled to the floor, rolling past the man’s leg and into the far wall away from his path of destruction. She got to one knee and looked back at the damage she potentially could’ve endured and winced terribly.

  Everything that was around the blade itself had become rubble, even a couple of inches ahead of its tip’s range there were was cut mark on the surfaces of everything she was propped up against prior. Not wasting any more time than she needed to, Sam focused on the other parts of her body that still felt damaged to heal them like the wounds before. Soon she found herself standing as if nothing had happened to her in the first place, even though the phantom pain all over told her otherwise.

  Sam assumed, incorrectly, that due to his size that the man wouldn’t be able to move very fast, he wielded a slab of metal for a weapon after all, there was only so much someone could do mitigate that kind of weight.

  However, as she rose to her feet to the man was only inches away from her face, having closed the distance in an instant, breathless and still.

  His fist collided with her tiny frame and slammed her into the wall, no more than an inch behind her. The blow was massive, a wave of inertia ripping through her as the wall strained to hold it back.

  But… it was much more manageable than a gunshot wound.

  Winded? Almost definitely, but more than lucid enough to act. Before the guard had the time to wind up a second strike Sam focused on the wall behind her, pushing into its atomic makeup like she did with the pillar’s door.

  To the man’s bewilderment she completely merged with the steel containing them and passed cleanly through to the other side, her eyes glaring through him as they sifted through metal.

  Sam popped out of the other side plainly, and with a hefty thump to the ground. She took a moment to recollect her breath, clutching her ribcage and pumping at it to force the air back into her lungs. Despite the broken ribs already being healed the instant she noticed them; the pain still persisted. Hell, even the bullets from before still hissed as though holes were there. The pain still persisted.

  Asshole… she hissed to herself,

  Shouldn’t guns be banned?

  Even if it was an engine blade it still had all the mechanical workings of a gun, Sam was sure of it.

  So… loopholes then,

  She clicked her tongue in a disappointed manner,

  Always a fucking loophole,

  Sam gathered, based off of her prior experience, that this probably wouldn’t change in the future. She thought about getting used to this kind of pain, but imagining the sting of being shot again almost made her vomit. Recovering what little breath she had left, Sam glanced around to find that she was near the tubes used to evacuate corpses, which meant she was conveniently only a short walk from the entrance. Before she had any time to plan her next move the wall from which she came from exploded in shrapnel the size of limps. The guard.

  Slinging his sword back around to shred Sam’s distraught face yet, again he revved its giant barrel. A terrible whirring noise came from deep within, of tiny pieces of metal spinning and spinning, warming up.

  He stood too close to the entrance, Sam thought at a glance, and the gun was already at a fever pitch. She hastily looked elsewhere and found one of the disposal tubes still open, empty, and dove in head first. As she slammed the door shut with her mind the bullets rang her temporary shelter like rainfall, the clinking of metal against metal echoing to a deafening scream.

  Her initial instinct was to cover her ears to duck in case of stray bullets, but to her own surprise her palm reflexively stretched itself towards the hatch instead. Something inside her yet again knew that she had the capability to stop what was happening, even now it moved her as she knew better. Sam could feel it, deep down. It was like the ‘power’ was at first a blur in her mind, moving in blinks of speed but now she could track it, keep up with it. The hail stopped after a minute of constant fire, the eery silence that followed only lasting the length of a flies heartbeat as the mammoth man shuffled closer. Each step shook the room, but it wasn’t the sheer size of the attacker that caused it, Sam could tell, it was the anger. He slammed each foot down as if the ground was in itself an enemy, he wanted her to know he was coming.

  They were bred for this, soldiers like them, bred and made for this very thing. They made themselves angry, furious even, to perfect their jobs.

  Sam should’ve been more scared, to get out and run for her life while she still had the chance, But she was more preoccupied with her own body than anything around it. Now more than ever before she felt close to understanding what she could do, this mind bending genetic mishap that seemed to do anything and everything. Sam understood the incoming danger but chose to ignore it. She wanted, craved, to find the answer she was looking for. After all, she couldn’t exactly die, which meant she could take as long as she wanted.

  Sam already gathered she could sense things, understand things as though she had built her whole life around them from birth. That semi omniscience was but a piece of her own puzzle though, she figured. Knowing everything didn’t explain how she could do all of the crazy, supernatural, stuff that had been happening so far.

  It was then that it hit her. Everything she had done up till now was her choice, her unconscious desire to do or need something. The omniscience was unwanted, she didn’t want to know the exact BMI of the man outside but she did nonetheless, it only made sense that the other stuff could be born of want instead. Her focus was only proof of this, she remembered all the times she focused on what she wanted to happen, and it always, albeit suddenly, did.

  Surely its not wishes right?

  No, that she knew for certain wasn’t the case, it had nothing to do with magical wishes otherwise she would already have been thousands of miles away from where she was. She could tell that whatever it was, it was grounded in reality and almost bound to it.

  Maybe the two halves of her symptoms worked together? If her conscious abilities were based in realities rules, then her unconscious abilities gave her all the information she could possibly need. One half made the world into a box of sand, and the other was the instructions on how to make anything and the tools that were needed.

  Before she could tell for certain she first had to test the theory.

  With her already spread hand she focused yet again. This time however she focused on the air around her hand, the very particles themselves. The skin of her hand dissolved revealing the bizarre framing of her musculature underneath yet again, before immediately closing back up like the teeth of a snapping maw. She pinpointed every molecule that surrounded her, and with but a thought began to rearrange them in front of her piece by piece. She concentrated on a form in her mind, a tiny metal claw she intended to slip outside the tube and press the evacuation button on the wall.

  Everything stopped moving in front of her, the air stopped moving, the light froze, everything hung in the air like puddles of glass, hung at her whim. Just as fast as it had stopped it began to drift again, swirling into the palm of her hand, the air changed from clear to a deep dark, metallic grey. Everything was rearranging itself to suit her thoughts, losing and gaining Planck sized chunks, changing themselves into metal simply because she urged them to. Within time a small fragile claw on a spindly metal frame materialised inside of her hand.

  Clearly the contraption wasn’t anything sturdy, more ephemeral than physical, like a creation only half finished barely held together by its own frame. But this proved it, somehow she could manipulate matter around her as long as she concentrated on it, she really could do anything.

  Of course it was much easier just thinking about it as a possibility. Even if it was something she could technically do, rearranging particles bit by bit was just as taxing as she expected.

  Using the claw in her hand, limply propping itself up with nothing but Sam’s conscious will, she tried to slither it through the tiny crack in the tube’s hatch. It didn’t move like anything made of metal should’ve, it lurched and snaked along the hatch surface with grey fingers and twisted like rope as it turned for a different angle. Occasionally though as Sam lost focus for brief moments the claw would go back to being rigid and mechanical, shuddering as Sam held it together with a loose kinetic grasp.Finally, finding the gap and squeezing flat through it, the claw opened itself back up in a flower like fashion and stretched its feelers towards where the button was supposed to be. As it got further away from her, Sam fed it with more and more metal from the air around her, weaving it like thread into the tiny thing’s base.

  Careful

  Sam mouthed to herself, the lack of a visual guide making the task of control all the more difficult.

  Miraculously she felt the small metal frame graze along plastic by sheer chance, as it flailed along the wall in search. Sam imbued the claw with strength, as much as her waning concentration allowed, and slammed its fist into the ejection button.

  Sam’s body launched backwards, the claw all but vanishing in her hands like dust.

  Head, then arms, then back to her head followed by bumps on the spine, neck and knees. With every corner and drop another part of her was battered with her own weight colliding with rusted steel. Loose lug nuts caught her clothes and skin and cut them, and even though they repaired themselves just as fast the sensation was still irritating and painful. The beatings only ended once a vent shunted open, spitting her out into a dingy room dimly lit by a dark, flickering red.

  Sam fell for a bit until a conveyor belt caught her coldly, and she cursed on impact with one of its metal cogs thinly veiled underneath. As she brought herself up she looked around at the new place she resided within.

  The conveyor belt Sam had landed on was much wider than a normal one, about twice the size she guessed,and was entirely littered with the dead, of which she was in the convenient spot without any.The deep red that illuminated the room came from a fire, more-so a blaze, that towered at the end of whatever hall they were all in.

  Sam weakly chuckled at how she grouped herself in with the fellow dead on the belt.

  However, when she saw the belt she laid on feeding itself into the flame it suddenly dawned on her what this place was made for. The tube she threw herself down was the disposal tube after all…

  Choosing to ignore the mounds of bodies for now, Sam noticed that the belt split itself in twine just before the mouth of the flame met the corpses. For whatever reason half the vessels on the track were being carried past a door somewhere.

  Could be a bad idea…

  She thought that maybe more guards or people in general lied behind it, the bullet wounds still singed across her body.

  She looked at the fire instead briefly, then back at the door. She shuddered at the thought of burning in an immortal body like hers.

  Can’t be worse than burning though, I guess,

  Sam slowly crept towards the fires, tensing her legs to switch tracks as soon as the opportunity revealed itself. However, just a couple feet from the split a hand clasped her ankle tightly. Sam span her eyes down to see a woman, a dying and wounded woman, clinging to her body with an outstretched hand. This wasn’t like the patients from before, who grabbed at her in a similar way; this was the grip of a woman who was scared of dying, it was desperation.

  “Ple...ase…” the woman pushed the words out of her mouth, struggling, “Plea...se…”

  The window to jump was quickly waning and having no time to decide a proper course Sam panicked, pulled her leg violently away. She wasn’t letting go, no matter how violently Sam pulled away, the last embers of the woman’s life just continued to cling to her.

  The split was among them now, the conveyor belt parted ways inch by inch, in only a few seconds the gap would be too far to cross.

  Sam looked down at the woman beneath her with anger and frustration. She could feel the skin on her face dissolve, a slight shimmering light emanating from underneath,and a familiar tension filled her mind. In an instant the woman’s hand exploded with sharp, thin spikes that pinned her palm open. She howled in pain and reeled back, just in time for Sam to leap across to the other conveyor belt as it turned away.

  Barely avoiding the tongues of fire lashing out of the incinerator like unfurling whips, Sam collapsed into half a dozen moving corpses piled on top of each other.

  Sam struggled to catch her breath, the adrenaline in her lungs still pulling in air as fast as they possibly could. By the time she could think properly it was already far too late. The woman, still clutching her hand, fell into the maw of fire before her.

  Her screams betrayed her appearance, loud and shrill and… awful.

  Sam stood for a moment as the screams hissed to silence. She had killed her, an innocent person desperate for life, clinging to the only person who could’ve possibly saved her from her fate, and she had killed her. Sam had other things to worry about, but she spared a moment to accept the guilt of her actions.

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  “I’m sorry...”

  There was no response.

  Something about the place felt wrong to Sam, the fire, the conveyor belts and the chimney stacks that led up from the mouth of the incinerator...

  Chimney stacks? She looked over them with curious eyes.

  Chimneys didn’t make sense, the smoke from a disease this infectious would be dangerous to touch let alone breathe, and yet there was a chimney pulling it somewhere. She used her sense to feel the exhaust pipe of the incinerator with ephemeral hands, the one that rose up and out of the room and into the ceiling. She crouched down on her moving belt and followed the pipe with her mind to find out where it went.

  Sam hoped it was leading somewhere to be processed, to be contained and safely disposed of, however to her dismay she found it led directly outside, blending in with the carbon ejectors found in every pillar.

  The carbon ejectors were necessary for keeping the snow outside filled with as much carbon ice as possible, hell she was one of the three scientists that patented the design in the first place. Any carbon emissions would funnel outside and become converted, over time, into snow, but these fools were ejecting corrupted ash directly back out into the atmosphere, and along with them thousands of diseased cells.

  If what she was sensing was true then it was no wonder why six disease continued to form itself from the snow! She couldn’t wrap her head around why anyone would even agree to implement a pipe like this without filtration.

  A flash of cynicism streaked her mind, painted it with made up scenarios of comically evil corporate officials approving of such an idiotic choice on purpose. Sam smiled to herself, amused by her own imagination’s ability to water a scenario down to a simple matter of ‘bad people doing bad things for the sake of being bad’. Although, the thought wasn’t without merit, no one is simply “foolish” enough to do something this stupid. There was no such thing as an accident in a collaborative world, someone had to know what this would do.

  Quickly banishing the thought from her mind to focus on more important things at hand, she turned her attention towards the large doors at the end of her conveyor’s journey.

  The two large, yet thin, panels were more like sheeted curtains than doors, the bolts holding them in place probably having more substance to them than the gate itself. With how skinny the metal appeared to be it was no challenge at all for Sam to see what, if anything, lied behind it.

  She seemed to have gotten a decent enough grasp on her detection ability by this point to use it relatively comfortably, and saw through the other side as if a light was shining behind it onto paper. She could see a person stood by the belt, doing something to the bodies with a small tool in his hands. Someone else was there too, but their outline was muddier and hard to see by contrast.

  Sam jumped back, put off by the image she saw.

  It couldn’t be that, right?

  She doubted her senses, their visions were based off of her will after all, surely they were twisted by her fear, or maybe even stress?

  Inching closer to the edge of conveyor belt, being careful not to disturb the dead any further, she pulled at a far wall until a slab of it slid out. It stretched towards Sam until it was close enough for her to step on, before retreating back the second she was secure on its platform.

  Sam figured that going through the main entrance wouldn’t be a smart idea, especially if that vision was anywhere near real. Shuffling along the nearby wall she watched the steel maws shiver themselves open, and slam shut quickly after consuming a handful of bodies, only getting glimpses beyond the mouth of the entrance. This time Sam could see the people in there personally, and they were doing the exact thing the vision said they were.

  She shivered, could it be that what she sensed was true? It had proven itself trustworthy before but even still, surely this was a stretch? Whatever the case was, now she had more than justified why lightening her step as she walked was, in fact, a good idea. If she was seen now, she would be attacked, just like the burly man from before, just like Twist.

  Trying not to dwell on the bitter feeling of betrayal, Sam turned her attention towards infiltration. She paced back and forth along her made wall ledge, running through plans in her head to find her perfect solution.

  Somehow, her final conclusion was to sneak in from the ceiling. How she got to this was a mystery, even to her, and yet she found it to be the most convenient way of getting inside undetected. She could do anything, no one would expect a person to crawl into a room from the roof, no one normal anyway, it was the perfect method of infiltration considering her abilities. Either that or Flick’s infectious knack forflair had gotten to her more than she initially realised. In the end, the more she thought up different ways of reconnaissance the more her eye drifted towards the corner of the ceiling, the one meeting the wall that the door was affixed upon. After the glances advanced into stares, she no longer could shake the urge to breach from such a ridiculous angle.

  Her “instincts” got her this far, so choosing to indulge in them once more wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, far from it actually. In fact, why shouldn’t she enter the room through the ceiling? She could get back up from being shot or stabbed multiple times over, so there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be able to do something that simple. Especially considering she could walk through walls like it was air, and ceilings were basically just walls on the roof anyway. No, the more she thought about it the more she deserved this cool entrance. Nothing could stop her anyway, so fuck it, why not?

  She placed the pads of her fingers on the rusted wall and concentrated fiercely on climbing. The metal suddenly stuck to her, clinging with the same force as the ground did beneath her feet. With how firm the grip was on her fingers she thought, correctly, that standing as though the wall was the floor would allow her to walk along it, gravity be damned, and the thought was too tempting to refuse. Within minutes she found herself strolling up to the corner of the wall feeling, admittedly, cool as hell, before crouching down at the point where the ceiling corner lied.

  Sam took in a deep breath, and effortlessly slipped through into what she hoped was a place somewhat inconspicuous.

  Rusted metal, salt, blood? No, metal again, sand, definitely sand. Rushing pipes and jagged edges, death, dark, silent then immediately loud. Was the wall really this thick?? The doors were only an inch in width at most, surely it shouldn’t take this long...Up? Maybe down or perhaps left. Endless. Swimming, falling, climbing, clawing, can’t breath.

  A flood of air suddenly filled her lungs followed by the blinding light of fluorescent neon, provided by none other than a shifty metal-framed lamp. Sam patted herself for security, checking the parts of her body she swore were left behind in the transition, though everything seemed to still be there. She hadn’t remembered it being that difficult to navigate through the walls last time, the suffocating sensation of having your lungs filled with metal and concrete was unlike anything she could’ve imagined. Sam shook her head free of the memory and refocused herself back towards the task at hand.

  Although successfully breaching into the adjacent room, she found that she didn’t appear from the position she necessarily wanted to. Instead of casually peaking out through the little corner of the wall, like a squirrel poking its head from a tree hole, she was dangling from the roof head-first towards the ground.

  Trying to ignore the blood rushing into her head at a painful rate Sam carefully oriented herself to hang from her arms instead of her torso. Shuffling tetchily towards the nearby wall she was supposed to come out of, she swung her lower half to magnetise it at the corner. As she moved however, more and more of her arm slipped from the ceilings grip, the sand becoming looser with every minute sway of her legs. Focusing on keeping her hand in place whilst also trying to stick her legs to the wall was too much, it was impossible to think of both things at once without one or the other becoming lax.

  Suddenly Sam fell, only by an inch or two, with her wrist being the final and only thing still clinging to the place she phased out of, and the angle it was being pulled from was anything but comfortable.

  She took a deep breath and reevaluated her position, realising what she was doing clearly wasn’t working.

  If the wall was too far away, then it simply had to be closer. The diverted the rest of her waning focus into the ceiling, turning it into the fine sand-like substance she could swim through, and moved it gently like water. It rippled, then swirled to pull her wrist along it until her whole body was pressed up against the wall.

  Sliding the remainder of her body out of the ceiling Sam slowly lowered her weight into the corner and stuck herself to it.

  A giddy excitement filled her, it dawned on Sam just how insane this all was. Being able to move through ceilings, make platforms, stick to walls, it was all so… Fantastical, a part of her still couldn’t believe any of this was real.

  Then, the headache returned again and this time it was much more intense, enough to make her whole body seize in place. For a moment she slid down the wall as her feet lost traction with the cold engraved steel, until the headache finally subsided and allowed her to breathe again. She shuffled herself to look out at the rest of the room, hoping it wouldn’t happen again.

  As Sam thought, the conveyor belt pushed through the doorway with all of its bodies still present, and still very dead. But, to her utter disappointment, she also saw the two people stood at either side of it as the bodies sailed past them.

  “Hey, when does your shift end?” One of them spoke, aloud and with the cadence of benign boredom still lingering on their tongue.

  The other medically garbed ‘worker’ tilted their head up, “…I’m pretty sure its two hours from now... No... Actually it might be two and a half,” they tutted to themselves, “Man, why don’t they put clocks in here?”

  Sam only just now realised that there truly weren’t any clocks around, odd considering she knew that it was exactly 3:05.

  “I don’t know. You’d think a butchers would have a fucking clock, but what do I know, I’m ‘disposable’”

  “Watch it man, ‘government s’already got us doing their dirty work here. You don’t wanna end up a statistic right?” he flourished the blocky axe, something Sam was dreading his use for, and pointed it at the other worker.

  “Hey! Don’t point that shit at me I don’t want whatever they have inside me too, dickhead.” They clicked their tongue again before calmly returning to their work, “And stop calling me ‘man’, we’re not friends”

  The aggressor pulled his arm back slowly and rolled his eyes, not entirely sure how to address that last insult.

  Eventually though, once the resentment between them settled they went back to their bloodied work. Butchering the bodies with makeshift tools and offloading the parts into burlap sacks, each one marked with a supply number and type of edible meat.

  The taste of stomach bile is something a lot of people forget by the time they reach adolescence, only being reminded periodically throughout life just how bitter their own insides really are. Suddenly, in just the swing of an axe head into the neck of a small body, Sam was greeted by that sweet bitterness flooding from her throat into the back of her mouth.

  She pinned her lips shut with trembling hands, wanting to look away from the sight, but unable to. There was something else that crept up from her chest along with the bile, something she never thought she’d truly feel. A burning violence, the urge to wrench open her mouth and bite down as hard as she could on the nearest threat.

  Her eyes couldn’t be torn away from the butchering, consuming as much of the sight as possible. It fuelled the fire building up where the vomit left.

  Still crouching, she edged back into the darker corner of the wall. Not to breathe or calm down, but to plan yet again. Despite the burning rage that ate at her she didn’t want to hurt anyone, at least not yet, right now all she wanted was to know why this was happening.

  She heard ‘government’ before, was that right? In what world would they sanction cannibalism? Not only that but all of the ‘meat’ was surely contaminated, it was sheer lunacy to even suggest this was an option anywhere!

  Soon, soon she will understand what’s happening, she just had to wring that information out of these creatures claiming themselves as people.

  The first thing she needed to get out of the way was the method, simple fear tactics would do nicely, all she’d need is a threatening looking sharp object and a hell of an angry tone. One of those was already at her disposal, the other could easily be made.

  The only other thing was her face. It was much harder to be afraid of something that looks human, unfortunately even more so if that human face is attached to a raggedy woman with more blood in her hair than her own body. She had no doubt a sight like that could be scary, but Sam also felt like she looked more homeless than horrific. Well, either way Sam would have to use her power again, something that she was, surprisingly, getting more and more comfortable using.

  She held out her arm, palm faced down towards the platform, and tensed her eyes like trying to pop them out of her own skull. Yet again, with but a simple illusionary form in her mind, metal began to form out thin air. It weaved itself along her palm this time, flattening and widening near its tip, its jagged edges like shattered glass apart from its ‘blade’ which was smooth and finely sharp like one should be. Sam grabbed the handle of her knew makeshift weapon, checking its weight in the air to see if it was accurate to her instructions. As suspected it was perfect, the weight and feel of it was exactly what she wanted out of a sword, although clearly her power would need to work on fulfilling her desires for appearance. She vanished the bile that was still in her mouth, breathing it out as vapour and moved on.

  Figuring the best option next would be a mask of sorts, Sam focused on trying to form a metallic shape around her head. Usually her power was quite obedient, making whatever she wanted, but for whatever reason it refused to create the helmet of her vision. She would’ve been confused about such a thing being so inconsistent now of all times, but Sam already had a good idea of why this was happening.

  Fear. She wanted a metallic helmet, yes, but after seeing the jagged blade she created a fear was growing in her mind. It was a seed rooting itself in her mind, that jagged edges could press against her face or lacerate parts of her neck. A seed was the only way she could visualise such a fear in her mind, she could feel its reach dug deep inside her and instinctually understood that they wouldn’t be uprooted so easily.

  Suddenly, Sam could feel something touching the back of her head. Shivers went down her spine as a collection of thick wooden branches spiralled around her face, swallowing it whole like the reclusion of a vortex. The seed she had envisioned had grew, replacing the metal she initially wanted. She could still see, easily in fact, it was as if she was looking through a clear pane of glass inches away from her face, only she knew that wasn’t the case.

  Scrambling her hands together Sam thought of a mirror. The shards swirled in her hand and clicked into a spherical disc allowing her reflection to be seen.

  What stared back at her was a faceless jackal’s skull, made entirely of a twisting conglomerate of tree roots. Its appearance was like her captains helmet she wore with Flick, only much more violent and twisted. It was Perfect, it even spooked her a little.

  Before she set off to interrogate the people below Sam decided to add her own personal touch to the already furious entangled web of branches stuck on her head. A simple parting in the wood, around eye level, with a surge of glowing purplish red smoke snaking out of it. Trying, with difficulty, not to get too absorbed in her own reflection, she dissolved the mirror in her hand.Quickly remembering to form black leather gloves, an extra touch of coolness she thought might add something to her look, she shuffled over to the platforms edge.

  Gripping her jet-black blade she dropped off of the platform landing just a couple feet behind the vulgar masked worker with an eery amount of ease, no noise or weight followed her fall. In one instant movement the edge of her sword was scraping against his neck, the cold shock of the metal causing a gasp from the now shaken hostage.

  “A-AHHH” They yelled a bellowing cry of fear,

  The man opposite them almost collapsed from shock alone. This was far too loud for Sam, it irritated her already sensitive mind, and instinctually commanded the room with a simple word

  “Quiet,” Her voice boomed more than the two workers screams combined.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the irritation or not, but her voice carried much more weight than it usually did. It gave her the courage to continue her demands.

  Silence fell on the room entirely within an instant.

  “You” the tip of her mask nodded towards the man opposite, now frozen in fear.

  He nodded back shakily, like prey at the mercy of a kill

  “I need answers, why are you doing this? Don’t you feel any remorse?”

  The tension in the room loosened slightly, the two looked at each other as though Sam’s words were conjecture in some twisted way. They both shrugged as though unsure of how to answer.

  Her blade pushed further against the pulsing veins of the worker’s neck, a drop of blood ran down it.

  “OKAY OKAY! just calm down a sec we’re here because its work” he waved his hands frantically for her to stop as he spoke, “Obviously what other reason is there-“

  “Work?” her voice beckoned the question more than she ever could’ve hoped, angrier and deeper and louder than she could possibly do before.

  “GOVERNMENT WORK! SHIT!” his hands gripped his scalp like rope as he paced back and forth to calm down.

  “HEY!” Sam interjected, “Eyes on your friend here, I’m gonna need more information than just ‘Government work’, freak”

  She tensed her hands grip on the blade further. Sam could feel the adrenaline coursing through her like a shimmering stream of energy.

  “Okay okay listen man… they need us to collect parts for food alright? Look at the label-”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Um…” he hesitated for a second, but recognising the tension he quickly intimidated himself into talking,

  “B-because of the food shortages, there’s not enough of anything to go around so we need to make do with recycling”

  She almost bit the inside of her mouth, out of anger.

  Fucking recycling?!

  Sam calmed herself down, regaining enough composure to continue her questioning.

  “Food shortages? So… what, the government has to eat people to live now?”

  The two workers chuckled and in an instant the tension had vanished.

  “If they pretend it ain’t happening then I guess they don’t care either, ‘for the greater good’ and all” the worker under her blade chirped, suddenly stopped being so stiff dropping his hands by his side, completely relaxed.

  “Are you serious? You’re seriously okay with fucking eating people?!” Sam grew more furious with every passing second,

  “Hey it pays well man, I don’t give a shit what I eat as long as I can eat!” the man opposite responded,

  “THEN WHAT ABOUT THE DISEASE” her voice didn’t scare him nearly as much any more, “You’re eating contaminated flesh are you brain-dead?”

  “Hey fuck you too buddy! We don’t have a choice! If you wanna make a complaint than file it with the big guys that hire us!”

  He started to move backwards towards something warily, Sam noticed.

  “Alright then who? Who the hell is getting you to do this shit?!”

  He chuckled again “Oh you don’t wanna mess with the government like that, trust me.” He reached the back of the wall.

  “I can get them for you right now though!”

  He slammed his hand down on a button that could’ve only be an alarm of some sort, especially in this kind of business. The second the button clicked into place he made a mad dash for the exit.

  Sam’s anger reached a boiling point, she could feel her rage tingling in the ends of her fingertips like boiling water. She threw her hands out immediately and, without having a second to process what she was actually doing, a myriad of giant crystalline red spears appeared around the man skewering him all at once, shattering inside his body.

  He didn’t have time to scream or cry in pain, nor could he have considering the fist sized holes permeating his lungs from every direction. He sputtered up blood, then fell face first on the cold steel below now warmed in his own essence.

  Sam froze, not quite sure what to make of the situation. She had already taken a life but hadn’t physically chose to kill anyone. This was certainly a first, and yet somehow she felt nothing.

  The man beneath her blade struggled free from her grip, tumbling away from danger in a raggedy and hasty motion. Sam sliced at the air with a deadly precision, the tip of her blade just barely scraping by his neck and cutting through deep. It flung through their jugular and far across Sam’s wingspan in a massive arc spilling blood in a crescent moon across the floor.

  This kill was much slower than the last, the person’s life dripping out of them like falling sand from a cracked hourglass. Hands covered in red, scraping at their neck trying to peel the cut off like it wasn’t there. The legs gave way first, buckling in every which direction before dropping to the floor unceremoniously. The death crept up from there, numbing their chest and arms dooming them to the same fate as their coworker before their head crashed against steel, a lot squishier than Sam would’ve thought or liked.

  Yet again silence fell like stagnant air, three bodies placed at equal distance from each other with only one still breathing.

  One thing was certain after such a scuffed exchange and that was her next goal, to find the next government official and interrogate them the same way. However as she moved past the two corpses between her and the door her hands shook, the blade turned to dust in her fingers and she felt a tear escape from her eyelid.

  Grief.

  “Oh… God...”

  It was relieving to say the least, to feel empathy for another human’s passing that she scarily thought had lost her for a moment. Then why did she feel so empty before? It was like Sam barely registered the corpses as human initially and it was only now dawning on her what she had done so brutally. She was torn between anger and sadness, the two ripping at her morality like dogs on flesh, and for the one hundredth time that day she didn’t know what to do now.

  Does she keep going? Looking for the corrupt fool that gave the green light on such a hideous and gruesome command? Or should she simply turn away and stay blissfully ignorant? Sam knew she would have to take more lives if she kept on her current path, but struggled to decide whether or not she actually cared. It was then that she sensed three more figures, each carrying a brandished weapon of varying lengths, all of which moved towards her with steady pace.

  Her anger surged again, her mind fixated on the path she needed to choose. These weren’t human beings; they were some sick and twisted animals. Knowing what they’ve been doing to cause such chaos here fuelled Sam with the same, guttural, violence.

  There was no time for peaceful conclusions any more, these... Things lost that privilege the moment a person was fed with another.

  As much she wanted to calm down she couldn’t.She hoped, for the pillars sake, that the official she was about to question was reasonable. If they weren’t? then someone would have to be broken, and Sam knew she wasn’t easy to destroy.