She had never been meant to exist.
Not in the way normal people did.
Her first memories weren’t of family, weren’t of warmth or childhood wonder—they were of observation. Of watching through glass as strangers scribbled notes about her, voices murmuring in careful detachment.
She was an experiment before she was a person.
The facility had no name, not one anyone outside its walls would recognize. It had been buried beneath layers of security, hidden from the world with precision only governments and corporations could afford. The work they did there wasn’t public. It wasn’t regulated. It wasn’t safe.
She didn’t know why she had been there.
She only knew she hadn’t been the only one.
The corridors had been sterile, the rooms too cold, the walls too thick to hear what happened beyond them. But sometimes—when the guards thought no one was listening, when the scientists let their voices slip just a fraction beyond caution—she caught pieces of what came before.
"She’s the only one left."
"The last viable subject."
"We can’t afford another failure."
She never asked what had happened to the others.
Because she already knew.
Then something changed.
The facility burned.
She never knew how it had happened—whether it was sabotage, containment failure, some force beyond human understanding—but it didn’t matter. The alarms screamed, the air thickened with smoke, the power flickered and died. The security that had surrounded her for years shattered in an instant.
She hadn’t waited to see what came next.
She had run.
Through collapsing hallways, through locked doors forced open in desperation, through corridors lined with bodies of people who had never considered dying in their work.
She made it outside.
She made it into the world beyond.
But she didn’t escape.
Not really.
Because she was never supposed to be free in the first place.
She had never believed in heroes.
She had never believed in villains either.
The world wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t black and white, wasn’t good versus evil—it was just people, trying to survive the best way they knew how.
That was what she had thought.
Until she saw them.
Jump City was supposed to be nothing more than a place to vanish into. A city like any other—one that didn’t care who walked its streets, who disappeared into its alleys.
She had perfected invisibility.
But they noticed.
The Titans weren’t like the facility. They weren’t shadows behind glass, weren’t calculations etched into paper—they were real, loud, reckless, alive.
And the worst part?
They weren’t the kind of people to ignore things that didn’t make sense.
The first time Robin’s gaze landed on her, sharp and assessing, she knew she had already been seen.
"You don’t move like a civilian," he had said, not accusing, not demanding—just knowing.
She could have walked away.
She should have.
But for the first time, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to.