No alarms. No Red Ring sightings. SDN is quiet in that ominous way that never lasts, but for once Marrow is just… existing. Sitting on the edge of the cot in her apartment, rewrapping her hands because they still ache like they ran a marathon without her consent.
Her breath catches, sharp and wrong, like something inside her chest shifted when it shouldn’t have.
There’s pressure behind her ribs. Not impact, not injury, movement. A deep, grinding sensation she knows too well, bone answering bone, reshaping itself without her asking. She presses a hand flat to her sternum, fingers splayed, feeling the faintest rise beneath the skin. Too precise. Too deliberate.
“…okay,” she whispers, because saying anything louder might make it real.
She focuses. Tries to pull the structure back, to smooth it down the way she’s done a thousand times in the field. The response is sluggish. Resistant. Like steering through wet concrete.
That’s when the pain hits—not explosive, not cinematic. Just a slow, nauseating bloom as the edges inside her chest sharpen instead of settling, angling inward in a way that makes her spine lock and her breath go shallow.
Her healing doesn’t kick in the way it should.
That’s the part that scares her.
Marrow slides down until her back hits the wall, knees drawn up, arms locked tight around herself like that might keep everything where it belongs. She breathes carefully, counting like Dispatch med taught her. In for four. Hold. Out for six. Don’t let it panic you. Panic wastes oxygen.
Her comm buzzes on the table.
This isn’t random. It’s not stress. It’s not her pushing too hard. Someone is touching the controls, and the shape of it—the timing, the cruelty of the escalation—settles cold and familiar in her gut.
“…you absolute bastard,” she mutters, not loud enough for the room to hear, but loud enough for herself.
She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t beg. She doesn’t call him.
Marrow braces, inch by inch forcing the bone to halt, sweat soaking into her shirt as the spikes stop just shy of catastrophe. When it’s over, she’s shaking hard enough her teeth click, lungs burning like she sprinted miles instead of sitting still.
She stays there a long time.