​Intermission 8. Diana

She really did want to help him. Not deceive, not lure — help. Yes, according to protocol, she was supposed to arrest or kill Mark Kane. But this was Mark... Not some faceless entry in a report, but her past.

In the Ring, he had always found time to explain how to file reports without mistakes. He helped her, supported her — while staying the same cynic who hated everyone around him. She loved him for that, and she left him for that. Everything had changed since, but the memories hadn’t been erased.

She had believed she could find him a way out. If he surrendered voluntarily, it would be a mitigating factor.

“This isn’t betrayal. This is better for him,” she repeated to herself as she walked through the snow-filled plant. Her steps echoed through the empty corridors where rust coated the walls in a thick, crumbling layer. She activated the scanner on her cuff — trying to trace his signal, but the snowstorm’s interference distorted everything. Mark was close — she felt it.

After their conversation, when her wrist unfolded and a barrel slid out from beneath her skin, she understood: the neural patch was thinking and deciding for her now. A vibration tore through her bones. A thought flashed in her head: this is a malfunction.

It felt like watching herself from the outside. The barrel spat fire. Everything around her lost sharpness, turning into a blurred backdrop. Mark turned, his face pale in the glow of the lamp. She wanted to scream: “Stop, this isn’t me!” — but she couldn’t even open her mouth. Her body remained frozen.

No. I don’t want this.

But the shots rang out. The roar echoed across the factory, bullets striking the wall behind him. Sparks from rusted metal, fragments of concrete raining down.

She remembered their old argument — how he’d told her that patches change people. She’d laughed then, but now she knew she’d been wrong. Everything had started to fall apart from that moment onward.

Never, not once in all her years of service, would she have missed at this distance. Less than ten meters, visibility decent despite the snow.

A miss.

Good. I didn’t want to hit him anyway.

But the surrounding space trembled in the frozen haze. Every movement Mark made looked unreal — too blurred, too fluid. He slipped around the corner without looking back. The world distorted around him, redirecting the bullets.

Her hand — an alien tool — moved on its own, the patch issuing commands she couldn’t hear but felt as pressure in her temples.

When Mark burst through the gates and got into the car, her other hand rose by itself. A dry click — the panel opened. A compact one-shot grenade launcher slid out from beneath her skin, meant for emergencies. She tried to jerk, to throw off the aim.

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t!”

Her desperate cry echoed through the empty hall. Her body didn’t respond. She couldn’t change anything.

The grenade left the launcher and shot forward with perfect, machine-like precision, cutting through the blizzard and curving toward his car. It detonated right above the windshield in a garish orange flare. The snow swallowed the shrapnel. The car jolted, but the engine roared, tires screeching across the ice. Wreathed in flame, it tore away.

A trail of fire stretched along the snowy road, and the blast’s echo still rolled through the empty factory blocks. But the car held its line, following its assigned route. Diana stood at the gate, snow falling onto her coat, melting from her body heat. The headlights receded, weaving between the debris.

Mark had always acted on impulse, on instinct, on reckless momentum. And suddenly, he’d shown such foresight.

But that didn’t change the fact: she had killed him.

The headlights flickered one last time before disappearing around the bend. The blizzard remained with her — and the scorched void inside.

The weight of a foreign will slowly drained away, leaving a headache behind. The grenade launcher slid back under her skin with a soft hiss, as if nothing had happened. Her fingers obeyed again, her knees trembled; she leaned against the wall, and the plaster crumbled in a suffocating cloud. Her breath burst out in white plumes into the frozen air.

She inhaled and exhaled — again and again. A vacuum in her chest. A sticky heaviness in her mind, as if someone had run her thoughts through a filter and handed them back.

I fired. I launched the grenade. But it wasn’t me.

She repeated it to herself, trying to grasp it. Soldiers justify it by saying, “My hands moved on their own.” Psychiatrists call it dissociation. But this had actually happened. Her body had lived its own life while she remained a spectator. This wasn’t a hallucination — the metal under her skin was still warming her hands.

“Who?” she breathed. But there was no answer. Only the wind, hissing and throwing fistfuls of snow.

Protocol and law. Empty words, behind which someone pulled the strings of her nerves. Her life — service record, promotions, her dream of the Center — who had been steering it all this time? The system? An algorithm? The thing that had forced her to shoot at Mark despite her own no? She remembered installing the neural patch: a quick procedure in a pristine, gleaming clinic, with promises of full control and safety. Lies.

Who was looking now at the burning trail of the car — Diana Wells, detective? Or that foreign, invisible force that had killed Mark?

She stood for a minute, staring into the darkness. She needed to report, but no words came. Instead, she turned and headed back into the hall, her legs heavy. Snow crunched under her boots.

Above the factory, faintly, a few drones whispered past. But she no longer saw them.