The smell hit Beatrix first. Something was burning. Something that might have been food once, in another life, before it had been subjected to whatever Bodhi was doing to it.

  She stepped into the room.

  Bodhi stood at the makeshift kitchen area, really just a hot plate and some storage containers he'd commandeered from medical supply. Steam rose from pots that bubbled with suspicious enthusiasm. The old soldier worked with the same focused intensity he brought to everything, prosthetic arm steady as he stirred something that looked like it was fighting back.

  Rain sat cross-legged on the floor, tablet glowing in his lap, fingers dancing through diagnostic code. Kivi sprawled on the couch, her color-shifting hair stuck on anxious yellow-green, tablet balanced on her stomach as she ran simulations.

  They'd been waiting for her.

  The realization made something in her chest go tight.

  "What is that?" Beatrix asked, gesturing at the pots.

  Bodhi didn't look up. "Dinner."

  "It smells like a war crime."

  "It's nutritious." He added something that might have been spices. Might have been industrial lubricant. Hard to tell. "Sit."

  Beatrix exchanged a glance with Rain. He shrugged and smiled, also confused.

  They sat.

  Kivi pulled up her tablet, scrolling through footage. "Of the possible matches in semifinals, Kuzima's got this defensive posture that…"

  Slam.

  Bodhi's hand hit the pot down on the counter. The sound echoed in the small space like a gavel.

  "Tonight," he said, voice like iron wrapped in velvet, "we eat bad food and tell worse jokes. No shop talk. No fight prep. No strategy sessions."

  "But…" Rain started.

  "That's an order."

  The room went quiet. Bodhi turned back to his cooking, movements deliberate. He ladled portions into bowls that looked like they'd been stolen from medical. Probably had been.

  "This is a respite," he continued, softer now but no less firm. "Not a break. A tactical decision. Tomorrow you'll need to be sharp. Tonight, you need to be human." He set a bowl in front of Beatrix. The contents were... concerning. "So we're going to sit here and pretend we're normal people having a normal dinner."

  He met Beatrix's eyes. Something passed between them. Understanding without words.

  "And that's not a request."

  Beatrix looked down at her bowl. The food stared back, possibly alive, definitely hostile.

  "Is this punishment for winning?" Kivi asked, poking her portion with suspicious caution.

  "It's love," Bodhi said, deadpan. "That's what that is."

  Rain took a bite. His face did something complicated, a journey through confusion, regret, and grudging acceptance. "What... what is this exactly?"

  "If I told you, you wouldn't eat it."

  "I'm not sure I'm eating it now. This might be eating me."

  Despite everything, despite tomorrow, despite the weight pressing on her chest, despite the secret burning in her pocket, Beatrix almost smiled.

  Kivi swallowed, expression pained. "It tastes like you hate us."

  "If I hated you, I'd have made it edible." Bodhi took a bite of his own cooking without flinching. "This builds character."

  "This builds immunity to biological warfare," Rain muttered, but he kept eating. Kivi couldn’t help but giggle.

  Beatrix picked at her food, couldn't taste it. Her mind was elsewhere. Tomorrow. Kuzima. The offer. Dante's timeline. The weight of choices she couldn't unmake and hadn't made yet.

  Movement beside her. Bodhi leaning close while passing the water container, voice dropping to a murmur only she could hear:

  "Whatever you're carrying, it's making you slow."

  Beatrix's hand stilled on her spoon.

  "Either drop it before tomorrow," he continued, eyes on his plate like he was just making conversation, "or tell us what it is so we can help you carry it."

  He moved away before she could respond. Casual. Like he'd just asked her to pass the salt. Like he hadn't just cut straight through her defenses with surgical precision.

  Strategic necessity disguised as concern.

  She opened her mouth. Closed it. The words wouldn't come.

  "B, you good?" Rain asked, noticing her stillness.

  "Yeah." The lie tasted worse than the food. "Just thinking about possible match-ups."

  "No shop talk," Bodhi reminded, mild but firm.

  Rain raised his hands in surrender. "Right. My bad." He turned to Kivi. "So that analyst who said Beatrix should 'try being less scary'..."

  "Oh God, yes." Kivi grinned and made air quotes. "'The Scav Fist would benefit from a more approachable fighting style.'"

  "Very helpful advice," Beatrix muttered.

  "Right?" Rain's grin was wicked. "I sent him a very professional message explaining the technical impossibility of being less terrifying while also winning fights."

  "What did you actually send?" Kivi asked.

  "I may have included your snarl frequency analysis with a note that said 'This is working as intended.'"

  Bodhi snorted. "You're all idiots."

  "Says the man who cooked this," Rain gestured at his bowl.

  "It's nutritious."

  "It's slime with bugs inside."

  "Same thing."

  They were laughing. Actually laughing. And Beatrix realized she was part of it. Not watching from outside. Inside the circle.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  The thought made her chest tight.

  Kivi's hair shifted from anxious yellow to something warmer. Pink-orange. Happiness-adjacent. She caught Beatrix watching and smiled. "Remember that time Rain tried to explain apps to Bodhi?"

  "Oh no," Rain groaned.

  "'It's like training wheels for your brain,'" Kivi quoted, voice pitched high in mimicry.

  "That's not what I…"

  "Training wheels," Bodhi repeated, deadpan. "For my brain."

  "It was a metaphor…"

  "A shit metaphor," Beatrix added. Found herself grinning.

  "You all suck," Rain said, but he was smiling too.

  They finished the terrible meal, kept up the terrible jokes. Bodhi told a story about his fighting days that might have been true, might have been complete fiction, either way it was funny. Kivi complained about the betting pools getting her odds wrong again. Rain demonstrated his "pre-fight ritual" which was just him making dramatic gestures while humming something off-key.

  Normal. Stupid. Human.

  The kind of moment Beatrix never thought she'd have again.

  She watched them. Bodhi's rare smile. Kivi's genuine laugh. Rain's unguarded grin. Tried to memorize it. Lock it away somewhere the coming fights couldn't touch.

  After dinner, Rain pulled out his tablet. "Quick diagnostic while you digest... whatever that was."

  "It had a name once," Bodhi said, collecting bowls. "Lost it in the cooking process."

  Rain's fingers danced across the screen, movements casual, routine. But Beatrix saw his eyes narrow. Saw the tension in his jaw.

  Virgil reported privately.

  "Your stress hormones are elevated," Rain said, not looking up.

  "It's the food," Beatrix replied.

  "It's not the food." His tone stayed light, conversational, but there was an edge underneath. "Rage Mode is destabilizing. The neural integration is starting to show pre-transformation markers even when you're not in combat."

  Beatrix felt everyone's attention shift to her. Tried to keep her voice casual. "So fix it."

  "I would. If you'd let me install the safety protocols."

  The room temperature dropped.

  "We're not doing this tonight," Beatrix said.

  "When then?" He still wasn't looking at her, staring at the data like it might change if he looked hard enough. "After it cooks you from the inside?"

  "Rain." Bodhi's voice cut through. Gentle but absolute. "Not tonight."

  Rain's jaw worked. He wanted to argue. Wanted to make her see. Wanted to protect her from herself with the tools he knew how to use, data, evidence, irrefutable proof that she was killing herself by inches.

  But Bodhi's order stood.

  "Yeah." Rain closed the tablet with deliberate care. "Not tonight."

  But the data was still there. The danger still real.

  And they both knew it.

  The silence stretched. Awkward. Heavy with things unsaid.

  Kivi stood abruptly. "Come here," she said to Beatrix, voice bright, deliberately shifting the mood. "Hair adjustment. It’s time."

  "For what?"

  "Your hair." Kivi pulled Beatrix toward the mirror. "Makes you look like you're constantly about to kill someone."

  "I am constantly about to kill someone."

  "See, that attitude." Kivi's fingers were already in Beatrix's hair, making small adjustments, recalibrating the bio-luminescent implants. Her touch was gentle. Familiar. "This is why people find you scary."

  "People should find me scary."

  "There's scary-in-the-arena and scary-in-the-grocery-store. You're currently broadcasting scary-everywhere-always."

  Despite herself, Beatrix felt some of the tension drain away. "What color should it be for tomorrow? Celebration red? Stay-calm blue?"

  The question was small. The choice was tiny.

  But it was hers.

  "Surprise me," Beatrix said.

  Kivi's reflection smiled. Her own hair flashed grateful pink. "I can work with that."

  They worked in comfortable silence. Kivi's hands steady and sure, making adjustments that were part technical and part care. Beatrix watched their reflections. Two women who shouldn't be friends.

  But here they were anyway.

  "Thanks," Beatrix said quietly. "Not just for this."

  Kivi met her eyes in the mirror. "Yeah. Not just for this."

  The others fell asleep eventually. Bodhi claimed the medical bed, snoring with the confidence of a man who'd slept in worse places. Kivi crashed on the couch, tablet still glowing in her lap, code half-written, hair settling into peaceful blue.

  The room darkened to emergency lighting. Soft. Red-tinged. Like being inside a wound.

  Rain was still there. Still working at the diagnostic station.

  Of course he was.

  Beatrix moved to sit beside him. Close enough their shoulders almost touched. The warmth of another person. Solid. Real.

  "You don't have to keep doing that," she said quietly. "It's past 0300."

  "Yeah, I do." He didn't look up from the code.

  Didn't explain why.

  She watched him work. The focused way his fingers moved through the interface, mind and machine operating in concert. The small frown when he hit a problem. The tiny nod when he solved it.

  Comfortable silence. The kind that felt like something.

  Beatrix noticed the glitch in his right arm for the first time. It looked like old code embedded subdermally from wrist to elbow, flickered and stuttered. Old corruption. Permanent scar.

  She didn’t ask. There was something she wanted him to know.

  "I made my mother a promise," she said. Almost too quiet.

  Rain's hands stilled on the keyboard.

  "When she was dying. Promised I wouldn’t fight again."

  She stared at her hands. Clean now, but she could still see blood from the execution fight. Some stains didn't wash away.

  "You didn't have a choice," Rain said softly, looking at her.

  "You always have a choice. But I chose this." She looked at him finally. Eyes locked. “And I don’t regret it."

  The weight of those words sat between them. Time slowed down.

  Rain looked down at his hands. At the glitching tattoo. Made a decision.

  "Six months," he said finally.

  Beatrix waited.

  "That's how long I was in jail. The mark won't update properly anymore. Corrupted file. Metaphor for the whole thing, really."

  "What happened?"

  His jaw worked. This cost him.

  "I was working on advanced tech. A neural interface for humanware, the kind that adapts to individual brain chemistry in real-time. I imagined medical applications, therapeutic use, safety protocols."

  "That sounds noble."

  "It was naive." His voice flattened. "My partner… business and..." He paused. "Girlfriend. We were building it together. But she was also talking with the Malebolge clan. They were interested in the code's potential for addiction-based control."

  Beatrix felt cold. “Drugware?”

  "She was optimizing profit margins. Her words." Rain's laugh was bitter. "When I found out, confronted her, she reported me for illegal neural experimentation. One lie, that's all it ever takes."

  "Oh, no."

  "I went to jail because I trusted her." He finally looked at Beatrix. "Told me she needed me. That we were building something together. That I could trust her. And when things got complicated, she lied. Said it was for my own good. For the project. For us."

  The echo of his earlier words about safety modifications.

  "She was right about one thing," Rain continued. "The lie was for my own good. I was too stupid to see what she was."

  "She was the stupid one," Beatrix said slowly. "If she couldn’t see what you are."

  Rain turned again to look at her. Didn’t smile.

  They were close now. Too close. Rain's hand was on the workstation, inches from hers. His eyes dropped to her mouth. Back up.

  The air felt compressed.

  Beatrix could move forward. Close the distance. It would be easy. Natural. Everything in her wanted to.

  But Rain's words echoed:

  She thought of Kuzima’s offer. Her refusal for safety.

  Lies.

  She pulled back. Just an inch. But it was enough.

  "Soon," she said.

  Rain's jaw worked. He wanted to argue. Wanted to close the distance himself. Wanted to pretend tomorrow didn't exist.

  "Yeah," he said finally. Voice rough. "Soon."

  It was a promise. Maybe one she couldn't keep.

  But it was the only honest thing she could offer him right now.

  Beatrix woke to soft light and empty quiet.

  Her comm unit was pinging.

  > [BRACKET ANNOUNCEMENT CONFIRMED | 4 FIGHTERS REMAINING]

  > [KUZIMA - DIS CLAN VS BEATRIX ALIGER - UNALIGNED]

  > COUNTDOWN: 11:59 HOURS]

  It didn’t take too long for a private message to reach her:

  Beatrix stared at the screen.

  Doubled. Twenty years of support. Everything Dante needed. Medical coverage. Rehabilitation. Quality of life. All the things she couldn't give him even if she won the whole tournament.

  All she had to do was lose the fight and her freedom. All she had to do was betray everyone who'd just built her armor out of love.

  She could tell the team. Should tell them.

  But last night was a gift. That moment of normalcy, of family, of believing tomorrow might be survivable.

  If she tells them now, it poisons all of it.

  She deleted the message. It was her choice. Just like she'd done everything else.

  Alone.

  Virgil said in the privacy of her skull.

  "I know."

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe."

  "Virgil."

  "None of your business."

  A pause.

  Beatrix stood, tested her body. Everything hurt in a strange, alien way. Everything would hurt tomorrow too.

  But she'd hurt before. She'd survive this too.