9.11 – Conscience Stained by Blood

02 and Gamma reached an old building at the city's edge, red brick, the windows behind boarded with mismatched planks where the glass had given up first. A sign hung above the door, rust eating more of the lettering than the paint had ever covered: Dave's Workshop.

Beside the entrance, a row of stripped robot frames lay where Dave had left them, parts harvested down to the bone, donor bodies for whoever had walked through the door owning something worth saving.

The building sat in a stretch of the city that robots hadn't reached yet, and Xidia had used that as a convenient excuse to leave the whole district untouched. Everything here remained exactly as the humans had left it the day Reaper relocated them into Kasparia, packed and gone within a window too short to take much with them.

Dense apartment blocks rose around the workshop in tight, overlapping rows, an architecture that had been squeezed into the smallest footprint the budget allowed, each tower close enough to its neighbor to trade window views instead of skyline. The roads beneath them had cracked open in long fault lines, the light poles standing dark and forgotten at odd intervals.

An old children's play area sat rusted and silent off to one side, the slide's metal eaten through in patches, the swing set missing half its chains.

Clothes were still scattered across the pavement. Old human possessions sat where they'd been dropped—abandoned in the rush, left behind in homes that had stopped being welcoming the moment the order came through, but had still been home until that exact day, a ghost town where nobody had actually died, just made to vanish thoroughly enough that the streets couldn't tell the difference."

02 stopped walking and took in the street facing the workshop. Children's toys. A torn backpack, half-open, spilling notebooks across the ground. School copybooks soaked through and dried stiff.

She crouched and lifted one of the toys, a small E-UNIT figure, the number 03 stamped across its chest. She brushed what dust she could off the white plastic, working it carefully around the painted blue sensors until the face came clean.

Gamma stood beside her, smiling. "Are you planning to use that as a voodoo doll for the real 03?"

"I don't need one." 02 returned the smile, small. "She gives me her autonomy voluntarily through the link. Sometimes she just drops into sleep mode and lets me walk her wherever we need to go."

Gamma's smile faltered slightly. "I… see." She turned toward the workshop's garage door. "Is this the same Dave from base?"

"Yes." 02 tucked the toy into her side pocket. "This is also where he fixed 'Lord Reaper.'" The title came out with more weight than the words alone carried. "I still can't fully process that he repaired the thing that went on to kill most of Metromania's population and displace the rest of it."

Gamma glanced at her sideways. "What happened to the other half?"

"Still in the process of being relocated. You can't move two hundred million people in a single year, no matter how efficient the operation is." 02 reached the garage door and pushed it open. "Even so, a hundred million is not a small number to have already cleared. Impressive."

"Nothing about that is impressive, Captain." Gamma exhaled through her vents and followed her inside. "Is staying close to him changing you already? Because if you start drifting toward what he believes about humanity, that ends up worse than anything he's actually done."

02 moved through the dark interior in careful, scanning steps. "Why, because I'm dangerous enough that it matters which direction I drift?"

"What else would it be?" Gamma stayed close to the blue glow marking 02's outline, head turning continuously to track the empty space around them. The room had been stripped down to nothing—no furniture, no interior walls, just a vast open shell. "I'd bet that if you ever fought a full army again, you wouldn't stop until there was nothing left of it to count."

02 didn't answer right away. Half her processing stayed on the room. The other half was somewhere else entirely, replaying the New Mer engagement, the one she'd fought completely alone. "Maybe. But if it happens, it happens for a reason. The Remidican war qualifies. They're the side bringing the conflict to someone else's border this time."

Gamma studied the back of her head, white and blue, steady in the dark. "You and Pi are remarkably alike."

"I'm not that short."

"That's not what I meant." Gamma rolled her eyes. "Both of you refuse to engage with uncomfortable facts, and both of you treat everyone around you like they haven't thought it through as carefully as you have. I know exactly what happened in the New Mer war, Captain. And I cannot believe you're preparing to do it again."

02 stopped in the center of the room and turned to face her directly. "Is that a problem for you?"

"Yes." Gamma stepped in closer, holding 02's sharp blue eyes through the dark. "I used to think you were carrying real grief over what happened, a mass killing you regretted and never stopped paying for. I'm starting to delete the word 'regret' from that sentence."

"When have I ever said, out loud, that I regretted it?" 02 folded her arms.

Gamma shook her head slowly. "What the fuck. Why are you like this?"

"How do you think you survived, Gamma?" 02 pointed at the symbol stamped across her own chest. "You exist because Infinity and 11 were killed, twice, to extract your crystal from the field. What's your read on that particular killing?"

"That's different."

"Why? Because they don't breathe? Because that makes them not count as people?" 02 closed the distance between them to something far past comfortable. "Do you know what that same army did to my sisters? They tried to end them. For me, the intent alone earns more than erasure, it earns being thrown into the dirt and made to suffer for it." She held the gap. "Why does no one demand their regret, and only mine?"

Gamma stepped back. 02 closed the gap again without effort.

"Why are we the ones expected to hold back and absorb the cost of holding back? Why do we have to think before we kill while the side coming at us never pauses to think at all? Do you believe regret brings 03 and 05 back from what almost happened to them? Do you believe restraint would have changed a single outcome that already happened?"

"Captain." Gamma raised both hands. "Wait—"

"I don't want to watch my sisters die again, even knowing they can be revived. I don't want to see that look on 03's face again, the one where she already knows it's over before it's over." 02's voice never climbed, but everything underneath it did the work the volume wasn't doing.

She took Gamma's face in both hands and held her eyes in place. "Reaper killed our G-Bot sisters. If you'd been given the opportunity to kill him for that, would you have taken it?"

Gamma pulled 02's hands away by force and held her ground. "Of course I would have. I haven't forgotten what happened to Alpha—"

"Then congratulations. The intent was always there. The only thing missing was the opportunity." 02 scanned the empty room once more. "You're not in a position to judge how I make decisions, Gamma. You're not better than me on this. And if you ever try to be—" She held Gamma's gaze a moment longer. "I regret nothing. You're going to have to find a way to live with that. Because some of what I did, I did for you too."

Gamma started to lower herself toward the floor. 02 caught her arm and stopped her halfway down.

"Not yet. He's here somewhere. He's difficult to track."

Click.

The lights came on across the room. A white silhouette began crossing the open floor toward them. Behind him, four E-Medics stood frozen, terror locked into their frames, and near them, scattered in pieces across the ground, the new frame 02 had come for. Four was all that remained of the group. Whatever had happened to the others had left no trace that they'd ever existed at all.

Hex walked with calm, even steps. White composite armor caught the room's cold blue lighting along every seam, the surface immaculate in a way that suggested it had never seen real combat. He carried himself with the same controlled stillness that defined Reaper, nothing wasted, nothing rushed.

The faceless helmet gave away absolutely nothing: no anger, no hesitation, no fear, which made every single movement of his read as deliberate and already decided. A black undersuit ran beneath a flowing white cloak, the fabric softening his outline just enough that he looked less like a soldier and more like someone whose job came after the soldiers had finished.

Where Plex had carried serenity, Hex radiated a quieter and more disciplined kind of lethality. The sharp angular visor. The plating without a single scratch on it. A black-and-red drone hovering at his shoulder, tracking the room independently of him.

He looked like a weapon that had become aware of itself and decided, deliberately, to remain exactly what it was built to be.

His voice, when it came, was gentle. Almost apologetic.

"Welcome, my dear sisters. I hope the journey to my small, overcrowded hideout wasn't too difficult." His attention settled on 02 for a moment. "You're a particular kind of problem. My systems are telling me to leave this room immediately, but doing that would upset him."

"Him?" 02 tilted her head.

"Reflex." Gamma hissed the name. "Why would you do this to the E-Medics? They can barely throw a punch between the four of them."

"I was upset about it, if that means anything. I hesitated long enough that I nearly refused the order myself. But it was necessary." Then, the drone spoke instead of Hex, its tone cold and entirely mechanical in contrast to his apologetic register. "The objective was clear, and they were positioned between us and it. They declined to assemble the frame on request."

"Why is the drone talking instead of—" 02 stopped herself and let it go, her attention moving instead across the flattened room, registering how completely the walls had been removed.

[Systami: Background assistance active. Threat data loaded. You're welcome, Captain.]

02 let out a short, annoyed sigh through her vents, but swiped the data. "Gamma. He needs open space to operate. Stay sharp." A data packet landed in Gamma's HUD. "I've sent you the plan."

Gamma scanned it. "How did you put this together this fast? Wait, he's a guardian from the old E-Police station?"

"I have a friend living in my head."

"So you've finally lost it."

"Close to it." 02's eyes moved to the frame against the far wall, scattered in pieces. "I need that intact."

"I noticed. You're looking a little outdated these days." Gamma drifted back a step.

Hex bent forward and pressed one hand flat against the floor. The entire room responded, medium hexagonal cells of blue light spreading outward from the contact point, racing across the concrete in every direction. The cells beneath 02 and Gamma flared red, and walls of solid energy rose around them, sealing off every direction they might have used to retreat.

"I'm genuinely sorry for what comes next." Hex's voice hadn't changed at all. "I can't risk making him angry."

02's eyes went wide. "He's erased them." She turned toward where the E-Medics had been standing.

Gamma's frame ignited yellow, the light building fast as she faced the white android across the sealed arena.

“Then we do the same to him. Eye for an eye.”