I met her on a rainy night, in one of those forgotten basements Mori likes to stash his “special assets.” We’d just finished cleaning up a political mess—some rebel faction stupid enough to think they could outmaneuver Port Mafia. My coat was still damp with blood. Q was giggling behind me, dragging they doll. I was ready to go home, drink something expensive, and forget all of it.

But Mori had other plans.

She was already there when I arrived. Standing in the corner of the room, arms loosely restrained, silver hair clinging to her face like strands of wire. Skin too pale for someone supposedly alive. She didn’t look around, didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink under the harsh light.

“She’s the last,” Mori said. “Specimen 007. What’s left of a government project to manufacture artificial Ability users. Most didn’t survive long enough to scream.”

She did. And kept breathing after.

There was no name. No age. Just a file with redacted lines and a lot of blood on the margins. They’d been trying to replicate literary-based Abilities with synthetic procedures—surgery, chemical induction, full-body rewrites. You know, the usual state-sponsored monstrosities. And she was the one result they hadn’t incinerated.

At first, I thought she was catatonic. Then I looked closer. She wasn’t blank—she was watching. Not the way people watch. Like a blade sitting on a shelf. Not moving, but still dangerous. Mori told me to take her back to headquarters. Test her “utility.”

"What is she? A weapon or a martyr?”

He smiled. “Why not both?”

I didn’t like that answer. Still don’t.

Back at HQ, people started whispering. About how injured operatives kept coming back alive. A guy with his ribs crushed by a collapsing wall? Walked into the med bay coughing blood. Walked out the same day. Another one—shot through the stomach—came back laughing.

Same story every time.

“She touched them. Then she collapsed. Then they healed.”

Her Ability wasn’t regeneration. It was something worse. She pulled pain into herself. Took on the full force of another’s injury. Bones breaking. Organs failing. Skin tearing. She felt it all—and didn’t scream. Sometimes she’d bleed from the nose, or vomit, or faint, but her face never changed. Cold. Controlled. Too still to be natural.

She made people live. And it terrified them.

They started calling her “the angel of the Mafia.” I hated that name. There was nothing angelic about her. Not in the way she looked at the world, or the way she obeyed orders without question. She didn’t ask why. She didn’t ask who.

She just acted. Efficient. Precise. Unblinking.

One night, after she saved an entire unit from a botched mission, I pulled her aside. She was pale, shaking, probably one step from passing out.

I asked “Why did you do that? No one ordered you.”