The city's veins pulsed beneath leaden clouds, humming with artificial light and frayed intentions. Traffic shimmered on the highways in the distance, headlights dragging across rain-slick streets like tracer rounds. But Akito wasn't watching the skyline tonight. He stood on the roof of a derelict building near the edge of the quarantine zone far from surveillance grids, far from expectation. His phone vibrated once in his pocket, then again. He didn't answer.
His handler would expect a report. A debrief. The formal cadence of clean lies and coded language. But Akito had other priorities. This deviation wasn't strategic.. it was instinctual, compulsive. Like a toothache beneath the skin. A place inside him had begun to itch in recent days, not in the body, but somewhere quieter. Somewhere behind his eyes.
He moved fast through the skeleton of the old district, past collapsing storefronts and waterlogged billboards that advertised dead brands. The air here carried rot and memory. This part of the city had been forgotten even by those who once fought to save it.
It wasn't long before the old hospital came into view.
The structure hunched at the corner of a cracked thoroughfare, its facade grayed with soot and moss. Windows stared out like blind eyes, their glass long since shattered or boarded over. The entrance was sealed with rusted chain and weather-worn signage warning of structural instability, but Akito knew better. He'd bled in these halls once. He remembered.
The side door, half-torn from its hinges, gave easily under pressure. Inside, the air was stagnant and metallic. Dust hung in columns where moonlight pierced through the broken ceiling. Debris littered the floor twisted IV stands, shattered monitors, crumpled sheets stiff with age.
He walked without hesitation.
Third floor. East wing. A corridor where time had curled in on itself. The walls here bore the stains of water damage and mold, and yet the graffiti was newer names, dates, strange sigils etched in ink and anger. As he passed the old surgical ward, a flicker of memory surged beneath his ribs. He had lain on one of those metal tables, gut torn open, breath stuttering between broken ribs. That night had tasted of iron and disinfectant. He hadn't been alone then.
The records room was near the rear of the floor. It had no door, just splintered hinges and a rusted cart blocking the entrance. He pushed it aside and stepped into the dark.
Here, paper was king. Boxes stacked to the ceiling, water-damaged files, forgotten x-rays curling at the edges. A decade's worth of bureaucratic decay. He sifted through the mess methodically, eyes sharp even in the gloom. Names flicked past... patients long dead or vanished. Then, a label that froze him.
Ishida, H. — Surgical / Trauma Unit
He pulled the folder free, shaking off flakes of mildew. Inside, a collection of personnel documents: licenses, medical memos, discharge reports. Several were marked classified internal, but the red stamp had faded into obscurity.
Then came the photographs.
Group shots of the trauma team. A few candid snapshots in the break room. One figure appeared again and again mid-thirties, dark hair tied in a low knot, tired but focused eyes. Her name beneath the photo: Dr. Hana Ishida. Someone had circled it. Not once, but over and over, until the paper tore.
Akito's pulse remained steady, but the sensation behind his ribs shifted no longer the dull weight of habit, but the brittle edge of connection. He turned the page. Attached beneath was a patient intake log. His name wasn't on it. But his initials were. And a photograph. His own, blurry and bloodied, taken without consent, dated the night of the botched extraction in Sector D.
He remembered nothing of her face. Only the cold table, the pain stitched into him with morphine and steel. But something had passed between them that night he couldn't say what.
He tucked the folder into his bag, then swept the rest of the cabinet. Another folder was mislabeled, tucked sideways. Inside, among dental records and psych assessments, a USB drive fell loose. Black. Unmarked.
And then: sound.
Footsteps wet soles on tile. Echoing through the hollow corridors. Muffled voices... three, maybe four. Male. Armed, by the cadence of their motion.
Akito didn't hesitate. He moved like mercury, sliding through shadow, breathing silent. He dropped a broken file rack in the far stairwell as he passed, luring the voices in the opposite direction. Seconds mattered now.
Back through the surgical wing. Down a collapsed hallway where the walls bled moss and ancient wiring. Out through the morgue's rusted sub-exit and into the underground drainage tunnel beyond.
He didn't stop running until the hospital was five blocks behind him, swallowed by fog and memory.
Later, in the fractured silence of a rented room three districts away, Akito sat on the edge of a cot, stripped of everything but thought. The building was a post-war construct, half-forgotten and cash-only. No questions, no records.
The USB drive sat on the cheap plastic table, next to a burner laptop. He hesitated. Not from fear, but something colder. Recognition.
He plugged it in.
The screen flickered. Static. Then, a pulse of corrupted pixels. A file appeared... no name, just a series of symbols. He clicked.
The video quality was degraded, colors muted into grays and jaundiced yellows. The room on screen looked institutional: pale walls, surgical lighting, floor drains. A child sat in the center, no older than nine. Shaved head. Straps at the wrists. Electrodes taped to his temples. His eyes were wide.
Another child appeared beside him, taller. This one was told to hurt the first. No words, just action. The taller boy hesitated. Then obeyed.
Akito didn't blink.
The scene shifted. New subjects. Different angles. Variations of the same method desensitization, submission, command conditioning. Shock triggers. Language disruption drills. Audio overlays that scrambled the speech centers until all protest vanished. Some of the children cried. Others did not. One laughed.
In the final sequence, a voice cut through the static.
"Subject grouping: Phase 3. Initiate Requiem protocol."
A title card flickered across the bottom of the screen, glitched and nearly unreadable.
Project Requiem // Gen VI | Control Group Δ
Akito's eyes narrowed.
The air in the room had gone still. No wind through the broken window. No city sounds beyond the alley. Just the low hum of fluorescent light and the static echoing from the speaker.
Project Requiem.
He closed the video. His hand hovered over the USB, then pulled it free. Slowly, he slipped it into the inside lining of his coat, just above the old scar on his ribs.
His mind wasn't racing. It never did. The information moved through him like ink in water... slow, inevitable, saturating. Every image from the video stitched itself to a place inside him he hadn't touched in years. Not since the compound. Not since the training.
He stood, walked to the small sink, and splashed water on his face. The mirror above it was cracked, fracturing his reflection into six uneven pieces. In each shard, he saw a different version of himself.
None of them looked human.
The name Hana Ishida repeated in his head like a warning or a promise.
There were ghosts in this city, and some of them had his face.