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It's cold....Not the soft kind that comes with sleep. No. This is a cold, crushing darkness. The kind that hums with static and smells like metal and sterilized rot. Her world has become a sequence of confinements—one cage to the next, one silence to another.
Sometimes, they give her the mercy of unconsciousness. An injection, a pulse through the wires, and she’s gone for a while.
Other times, they keep her aware.
In her early years, Jack at least pretended to care. Her containment box back then had perches, climbing beams, lights that simulated the sun. A mimicry of enrichment for creatures like her—sirens, as rare and coveted as they were dangerous.
But those days are long gone.
Now, Angel curls in a man-made nest in a sterile glass confinement no larger than a cryopod. There’s no comfort here. No warmth. No stimuli beyond the blinking lights of monitors and the endless hum of life-support machines.
Each limb is tangled in thick wire clusters—twenty, maybe thirty each—feeding into steel arms and fiber-optic bundles that snake upward into Hyperion’s core systems. They keep her body alive. They keep her connected.
They keep her theirs.
Sometimes, she still feels the buzz.
That low, bone-deep hum. A phantom vibration in her skull, like static caught behind her eyes. The echo of when Jack first tried to fix her.
Sirens are supposed to be aggressive. Predatory. It’s part of what they are—what they were made to be. The claws, the instincts, the hunger to hunt and adapt. It’s not a flaw. It’s protection. It’s survival.
But Jack didn’t want that.
He said he was protecting her. Said he was making things easier. Slowing her down. So he got a scientist. One with shaky hands and expensive tools.
Drilled into her skull like she was faulty hardware.
The first time, it was like her thoughts caught fire. Her aggression short-circuited—rage melting into disorientation, instincts cracking under artificial pressure.
And now? Even years later, she still falls into it. Slipping sideways into the cracks and crevices of her own brain. Thoughts skitter like insects, never settling. She feels like she’s falling—not through space, but through herself.
A sharp, wrong note humming in her every time her heart beats. A signal lost in the buzz.
She remembers her wings.
Long. Elegant. Terrifying things—massive, sprawling appendages of light and power that shimmered with shifting runes, each pulse matching her heartbeat like a living second skin. Too large, too strange for her small frame. They were beautiful. Awful. Free.
She only tried to escape a few times.
But that was enough.
Jack said the wings were “too much.” Said they were dangerous. Said they’d draw attention. Said he needed to “protect her.” To “keep her grounded.”
So he trimmed them.
She remembers the thrashing. The way her body refused to obey sedation. It took a sea of drugs, soldiers in riot armor, scientists with trembling hands and reinforced syringes. Even then, she fought. Her instincts burned like fire—pure siren fury, primal and blinding.
And through it all, Jack stood over her. Not a stranger. Not a technician. Him.
“It has to be me,” he said, voice smooth and strained. “She trusts me. She knows I love her. She’ll understand.”
She didn’t.
All she remembers is the slicing. The light dimming. The phantom pain that never stopped. A hole inside her where something once spread wide and radiant.
Now, when she dreams—if she dreams—she can almost feel them. Ghost-limbs twitching, eager to flare open and take her far, far away.
But when she wakes, there’s only glass. Wires. Darkness.
And the memory of wings that were never meant to be caged.
There are a few things in her cell.
Scraps of paper. Crayons worn down to dull, waxy nubs. A few stuffed animals, their fur matted from sterile recycled air. A screen bolted to the wall cycles through pre-approved cartoons and nature programs—bright colors, soft voices, all carefully scrubbed of anything real.
Enrichment, they call it.
But it’s not for a siren.
No open skies. No whispering woods. No sharp cliffs or wild winds. Nothing to chase. Nothing to hunt. Nothing to stir the fire buried somewhere deep under sedation and wires.
It’s the kind of stuff you give a bored human child on a long car trip. Here, be quiet. Stay calm. Don’t think too hard. It’s not stimulation. It’s sedation with a bow on it.
Sometimes she draws. Not because it helps, but because it reminds her that her hands can still move. She sketches the shapes she remembers in her bones—curved wings, jagged cliffs, the flickering silhouette of some prey animal she used to chase in dreams. The crayons snap often. Her hands shake.
The stuffed animals don’t smell like anything. Just factory-clean cloth and plastic eyes.
They gave her a stuffed skag once. She ripped it in half by instinct and spent the next week being punished for “violent behavior.”
They don’t understand what she is. They don’t want to.
So she lies there in her wire-tangled nest, watching a TV that doesn’t speak her language, surrounded by soft things that don’t make her feel safe.
And she waits
Sometimes, she hears them.
Only when Jack is gone. When the Vault Hunters aren’t on the line. When the machines are quiet enough that her own heartbeat becomes the loudest sound in the room.
The whispers slip through the vents, soft and strange—never harsh, never human.
“Poor thing.” “Man truly are monsters.” “Such a little bird.”
She never sees them clearly. Just flickers at the edges of her vision. Shifting outlines in the reflections of the glass. Shadows that don’t belong. Eridians—maybe.
Never close. Never solid. Just… there.
Sometimes she tries to speak to them, but her throat is dry, her voice cracked from disuse. The words crawl out and fall apart before they can leave her lips.
She wonders if they’re even real.
Maybe they’re side effects—hallucinations from the chemical soup Jack keeps pumping through her veins. Or maybe her mind is fraying, unraveling from years of confinement, from hovering in the space between living and not quite.
Or maybe it’s the part of her brain Jack carved out with surgical precision. The aggression center, he said. The wildness.
He called it an act of love.
She wonders what else he took.
The whispers don’t answer. They never do. But they’re there, wrapped in static and light. Watching. Mourning. Judging.
And sometimes, when she’s almost asleep, one of them hums a lullaby she’s sure no human has ever written.
She doesn’t remember much.
Everything got fuzzy after she told Jack to go fuck himself.
It was worth it—whatever came next. She thinks. Maybe. She doesn’t know anymore. Her mind’s a tangle of static and gaps, like watching water swirl down a drain.
All she really knows is this:
The glass is broken.
The glass that held her. That separated her from the world. That kept her still and soft and safe in the way a bug is “safe” under a jar.
And now… he’s holding her.
Jack.
His arms are tight around her, trembling. His voice is cracked, babbling nonsense between broken sobs. His cheek is pressed to her temple. His mask is gone. And he’s crying. Not the slick, performative kind. The ugly kind. Real grief. Real loss. Maybe too late for it to mean anything.
She crooks her head to the side—slowly, carefully, like it might fall off if she moves too fast.
There are others in the room.
Two girls. Writhing on the floor. Sirens, like her. She can feel it in the way the air bends and crackles around them, the same ancient, alien pulse that always lived in her bones.
One has blue hair. The other, red. They both wear collars—thick and dark and heavy.
She wonders if they’re as heavy as hers was.
The red one’s crying, too—but hers isn’t quiet. It’s loud. Gut-wrenching. Her hands are outstretched, reaching toward a man sprawled on the ground, unmoving.
“Roland…” she chokes. “Please—Roland—no—”
The name stirs something.
Angel thinks she’s heard it before. Feels like it belonged to someone… important. Someone who might’ve smiled at her once. Or maybe just didn’t flinch.
She tries to remember. Really tries. But the static rushes in again. Everything smears into white.
So she just closes her eyes.
Lets Jack hold her. Lets the sobs, the screams, the scent of burning circuits all drift away.
And for a moment, in the middle of the chaos— she feels weightless.
When Jack left, he covered her with a blanket.
A soft one. Too soft. Like he thought it would fix things.
Then he dragged the other sirens out by their hair—screaming, spitting, sparking. He didn’t look back at her. He just turned off the lights.
Now the room is dim. Not pitch black, but dim enough that shadows stretch and bend in ways they shouldn’t.
She sees them again.
The Eridians.
Not just whispers this time. Not flickers at the corners. Closer. Clearer. Almost solid.
One kneels beside her. Long fingers, cool and gentle, brush her tangled hair away from her face.
Another crouches near her mouth and lifts something small—an old metal canteen. No tubes, no IVs. Just… water.
Real water.
It touches her lips, and she startles—shocked by the cold, by the weight of it. It slides down her throat like memory. Like a forgotten freedom.
They murmur something to her. Soft and ancient. Language or prayer—she doesn’t know. Can’t think. Her body is buzzing with pain and exhaustion, her mind a fractured mirror.
She’s cold. And tired. So tired.
One of them slips arms beneath her—delicate but impossibly strong—and tries to lift her.
Pain crackles through her like electricity. Her back arches. She cries out without sound.
The Eridian pauses. Waits. Adjusts. Another hand steadies her, supports her limbs like they’re made of glass.
They try again, slower this time. Cradling her with reverence. Like a relic. Like a child. Like something sacred and broken and theirs.
She doesn’t fight. She doesn’t speak.
She just lets herself be carried.
Somewhere deeper into the dark.
They take her outside.
Out to the balcony—what's left of it. The railing is bent, scorched. There are bodies everywhere—soldiers, bots, bits of broken Hyperion scattered like confetti from a war no one truly won.
But still… it’s nice.
The sky is wide and endless above her, impossibly blue, painted with wisps of white clouds like brushstrokes. The sun is warm on her skin—real sun, not the filtered, flickering imitation from inside the facility.
And the air—
It smells like blood and ozone and smoke.
But beneath that… something green. Something alive.
Grass. Trees. Earth. Things she's only known in theory, in flickering screens and stolen dreams. For a moment, she forgets about the wires. The pain. The gaps in her memory. The hollow carved into her mind.
For once, Angel just exists.
She lies there in someone’s arms—she’s not sure whose. Maybe the Eridians. Maybe no one at all.
And she watches the clouds move.
She breathes the warm, green air.
And she sees the world.
Really sees it.
Just once.
Just for her.
Just for now.