RAYLA

  SHE REMEMBERED THE SMELL FIRST. Burnt metal. Ozone. Something sharp and clean that didn’t belong in the mountains.

  Then came the noise. Not the usual wind or goat bleats or the distant hammering of the mines. This was heavier. Mechanical. Rotating fans slicing air. Hatches hissing open like monsters exhaling.

  Rayla had been six. Maybe seven. Small, thin, always coughing. Skin pale and cracked from the cold. Bones too big for the body. Or maybe the other way around.

  She sat wrapped in a dirty wool blanket, legs tucked under her, back against the cold rock wall. The others — workers mostly, a few families — kept their distance. Like sickness could leap from breath to breath.

  It could. That’s what they told us. Like it was our fault for breathing too loud.

  The compound had still been alive back then. Not like now — abandoned and covered in dust. Back then it breathed. Lights blinked across the landing pad. Steel towers blinked red warnings into the darkening sky. The Overmen came and went, always in pairs or threes, dressed in white coats or black armour. Sometimes both.

  Rayla didn’t know the words for what they were, not yet.

  But you knew the smell of power. Even then.

  They never looked at the mountain people, the miners. Not really. They floated past them like ghosts pretending not to see the living. Except once.

  One of the men in white — bald, no eyebrows — stopped and turned his eyes on her.

  “Why’s that one out here?” he asked no one in particular.

  “She’s sick,” someone said. Maybe her uncle. Maybe nobody.

  The Overman just nodded, like he was tallying it up. A mark on a clipboard. Something to be added to a shipment list. Then he walked away.

  Rayla didn’t know what that nod meant. Not until later.

  It meant: she won’t last. Don’t waste anything on her.

  They were loading the last of the crates onto the crawler — massive container blocks filled with minerals from the lower shafts, the ones the miners couldn’t reach without gas masks. Rayla remembered the way the ground trembled when the craft lifted off. The dust whipped her face. Her blanket flew up and away like it’d had enough of her.

  She hadn’t cried. She never cried. Not when the fever got worse. Not when her father carried her into the med tent and nobody came. Not when her mother said she’d be back soon and never returned. She just watched the ships disappear into the sky, trailing fire.

  That was the day her fever broke. Or maybe the day her heart froze.

  Depends who you ask.

  Now, standingin the same place, years older and two bottles of vodka deeper, Rayla closed her eyes. The place had changed. Dead now. Silent.

  But she could still smell the scorched metal. Still hear the distant hum of those machines.

  And the voice in her head — the one that never shut up — whispered:

  You were right to hate them.

  It always happened at night when she was alone. When the noise died down and the crafts stopped coming. When the compound was quiet, the engines asleep, and the grownups drunk or gone.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  That’s when she came. Ellie. The woman in the white coat with the soft hands and the hard eyes. She never said it out loud — never once said, I’m your mother.

  But Rayla had known. At least back then. Before things got foggy.

  The door to the med tent would whisper open like a secret, and Ellie would glide in, smelling of antiseptic and burnt rubber and that sharp ozone smell that meant she’d just been near the machines.

  She never touched Rayla without gloves.

  Even when you were burning up. Even when you begged her not to leave again.

  Ellie would press the injector to her thin arm. Rayla would flinch, not from pain, but from the cold. The medicine always felt cold, like snow pouring through her veins.

  Afterward, she’d sleep. Heavy, dreamless sleep. And when she woke, the fever would be less. The tremble in her limbs quieter. And something else. A little less memory.

  She remembered the curve of Ellie’s jaw but forgot the sound of her laugh. She remembered a lullaby once hummed in her ear — then forgot the words, then forgot it ever happened.

  They didn’t talk much. Ellie was good at silence. Too good.

  Sometimes she sat beside Rayla’s cot, arms folded tight like she was guarding herself from something — or from Rayla. And sometimes she said things that didn’t make sense.

  “I didn’t choose this.”

  “You weren’t supposed to survive.”

  “You were just a happy accident.”

  “I don’t know what to do with you.”

  “You’d be happier somewhere else.”

  Rayla didn’t know if those were things Ellie actually said — or if those were things she only heard after.

  It’s the forgetting that makes it worse. As she got stronger, she saw Ellie less. That part wasn’t foggy. That part was clear.

  Health had a cost. Every bit of strength bought with more distance. Every healed cough came with a dimmer look from Ellie.

  The closer Rayla got to life, the further Ellie stepped back.

  Until one night, she came in, stood over Rayla’s cot like she had a thousand times — then turned away without touching her. Without a word. Just silence, and the hiss of the door behind her. No medicine needed anymore.

  Rayla didn’t call out. Didn’t cry. Just laid there and stared at the ceiling.

  And whispered into the dark:

  “Don’t come back.”

  And Ellie didn’t.

  But Rayla missed her. She couldn’t remember why anymore, not clearly. But the ache was there. Heavy. Constant. Like an old wound you stop bandaging but never quite stops bleeding.

  So one night — her breath steady, her body quiet like a shadow — she crept down from the sleeping quarters and slipped into the compound.

  The doors were easy. She had watched them long enough to know the rhythm, the timing of their lazy, mechanical sighs. The air inside was colder than she remembered.

  Light pulsed low from the edges of the floor and the seams in the wall — a soft, clinical glow, like the place had been built to keep secrets instead of children.

  She moved through the hall like a whisper. No alarms. No voices. Not yet.

  Then—voices. Low, hushed, but unmistakably real.

  She pressed herself against the wall, just around the bend from the medical wing, where Ellie used to work.

  And she heard it. Her voice.

  Ellie.

  Cool, exacting. A voice used to control.

  And a man. Stern. Not angry. Just… disappointed.

  “It’s done,” he said. “The High Council made their decision.”

  “I know,” Ellie replied. A pause. A rustle of movement. “Because of me.”

  “Because of your betrayal, yes.”

  That word sliced through Rayla like a blade. Even now, even through the fog of years, it still cut clean.

  Betrayal. Ellie, the traitor. The first to betray you.

  “They’re closing the station,” the man continued. “Resources will be relocated. The new mines are deeper inland. Richer veins. Safer oversight.”

  “And me?” Ellie’s voice was quieter now.

  “You stay. You know why.”

  “I did what I thought was right.”

  “No one doubts that. But intent isn’t what matters. Consequences do. The Council has no room for ghosts.”

  A silence. One long enough for Rayla to think she had stopped breathing.

  “Anyone who wishes to return to the Moon,” the man said, “has this one chance.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “What about the child?”

  “I will send her with the miners. Some of them will want to stay, but most will be eager to leave. Won’t be hard to find a couple who would take of her.”

  The first to betray you.

  Footsteps. A door hissing open. Then closed again.

  Rayla didn’t move. She felt something—something warm on her cheek.

  A tear. She didn’t even remember crying.

  She slid down the wall, knees against her chest, and wrapped her arms around her legs like she used to when the fevers came.

  Now she wasn’t seven anymore. Now she could hold a blade, break a man’s wrist with one twist, shoot straight even with half her sight blurred by vodka and hate.

  But somehow this—sneaking down steel hallways, her back flat to the wall, her breath shallow—this felt exactly the same.

  Exactly like that night. Only colder. Only worse.

  Because now, she understood every word. Every meaning hidden beneath a sigh, a pause, a loaded silence. And the conversation she eavesdropped on now felt more like betrayal than the one from years ago. Worse, because this time she knew exactly what she was hearing.

  The door was slightly ajar. Just enough. Rayla stood in the shadow, body rigid, every muscle taut like a string pulled too far.

  Inside the room—Ellie. Like a ghost from a childhood Rayla wished she could forget. And a man.

  Not a man. A monster.

  Nemeth.