"Evelyn Vigo. Partner from the Black Gloves period."

The trial provided limited information about each fear, enough for a basic profile. Alp didn’t move immediately. He watched the scene take shape, looking for the right angle before committing.

In the trial’s rendering, both Raphael and Evelyn were in Black Gloves uniform, running through the interior of a high-rise that was burning from multiple points.

The air distorted with heat. Flames everywhere, the kind that had already passed through the stage of fire and were becoming structural.

Behind them, several men in suits, disheveled now, the elegance stripped off, were following them into the fire, pushing through, refusing to stop.

"Kill them both! Damn it, they took the ledger!"

"Split up, cut them off at the other side, the woman is out of rounds, the man’s almost there, they’re finished!"

The pursuers divided, converging from multiple directions, while the building continued its work around them, walls coming down in sections, debris and fire consuming two of the hunters mid-stairwell, the rest not slowing.

Raphael vaulted the broken stairs to the floor below. Evelyn followed without losing a step. Two people who’d done this long enough not to pull against each other.

Then the floor they were on detonated.

An explosion tore the corridor open ahead of them, concrete pulverized, rebar heated from the inside out to a visible orange glow, seconds from structural failure.

Even that, they met without panic. The pursuers were closing. Raphael raised the handgun, took aim, fired in one motion, the round went straight through a man’s skull and the body dropped into the path of the one behind him, who went down in the fire following immediately.

Raphael pulled the trigger again.

The chamber was empty. The slide stayed back. He’d fired the last round just now.

Evelyn’s jaw tightened. Her hand went to something on her forearm, a heavy, sealed restraint, something between a shackle and an inscription, pressing against the skin like a bounded secret. She reached for it.

Raphael’s hand closed around her arm. He shook his head. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

She didn’t understand, but she followed him.

They ran to where the path ended, and the path had ended. Ahead of them, the only thing remaining was a single piece of rebar hanging down from above, orange with heat, swinging slightly in the convection.

Raphael took a running start, jumped, and caught it.

The temperature transmitted through the metal and through his gloves immediately.

Not flame, just stored heat, the kind that had been building for however long the building had been burning.

His palms registered it as damage before his conscious mind had finished deciding to hold on.

He held on.

He swung, the arc working against him at first, his body weight pulling the wrong direction, but he used the motion and came up, hands and feet both working, pulling hand over hand, getting above the gap.

He didn’t pause. He turned and reached back down.

The gloves had fused to the skin underneath. The material had bonded with the burned palm, the layers indistinguishable from each other.

The exposed parts were blistered and wet, the muscle visible at the edges.

Evelyn’s eyes were clear. They took in his hand and didn’t look away from it.

She ran, jumped.

She didn’t reach the rebar. Her hand connected with nothing. But his was already there, and it closed around her wrist.

The pain drove up through the burned palm and into his shoulder and he held it. She slipped twice. He caught her twice. The grip remade itself each time at a cost that showed on his face.

Below them, a gun was rising.

Alp had been watching. In the original memory, the reasonable inference was that Raphael had held on, pulled her up, and the two of them had found another exit.

The fear buried in this scenario was the near-miss, the terror of almost losing someone irreplaceable. A significant fear, workable, exploitable.

He didn’t wait any longer. He slid into the scene and rewrote what came next.

Bang.

Three rounds, close succession, through Evelyn’s abdomen. She coughed blood. The red of it bright against the pale of her skin.

She looked up at Raphael. The expression in her eyes had something unresolved in it, something that had expected more time and wasn’t going to get it.

Her body lost its coherence. The grip that had been holding onto his reversed, and then released.

And in the nightmare’s logic, Raphael’s burned hand couldn’t sustain it. His fingers slid. His eyes reflected her face as the life went out of it, and then she was falling, into the fire below.

Alp moved into the space behind his perception, preparing the blade:

Because of you. She died here because of you.

If you were stronger,None of this would have happened, and she wouldn’t have died.

He didn’t get to deliver either line.

The hand slipped. And in the same moment Raphael jumped.

He went down. Dove into the fire after her.

"You’re insane!"

The reversal had happened too fast. Alp’s entire prepared script, every carefully positioned blade, sat unused in his mouth as Raphael simply fell through the floor of the nightmare toward her.

He caught her in the air. Both of them came down through the space where the exposed rebar hung in the heat, and the rebar went through him.

Thud.

The glowing bar entered through his chest and stopped somewhere in the middle of him, and he hung there, both arms still around her.

His eyes were open. Half open. Whatever had been maintaining his conscious presence was almost gone, and what remained was running on something older than thought.

He reached for the restraint on her arm and pulled it free.

A surge of profane thorns erupted from the seal. The vines wound around him, and the thorns found his skin, and the life being drawn from him began moving toward her.

The silver-haired woman’s color returned.

His eyes closed.

The nightmare terminated, forcibly, because the trial’s subject had died inside it, and that condition automatically ended the round.

Alp dropped back through the dark to the star field, and sat with the specific feeling of a plan that had been constructed carefully and then invalidated before it was used.

He hadn’t expected that. The speed of it. The completeness of the decision, no hesitation in it, no space between seeing her fall and jumping. He hadn’t been able to say a single word.

The trial was designed so the subject shouldn’t be able to perceive Alp’s interference, which meant that had been Raphael’s genuine response. Unmediated. The way he actually was.

"That man. He’s more afraid of losing his partner than he is of his own death."

Alp let out a slow breath and accepted what that meant for the trial.

Two rounds. Both failed. Two remaining.

Using both of them at this point seemed unlikely to change anything. He’d give it one more serious attempt, and if that didn’t land, he’d concede the dominant position voluntarily.

He scanned the star field. Chose one. Settled his consciousness into it.

---

A narrow alley. The sky the color of concrete. Invisible particles drifting in the air, originating from the industrial quarter not far off, the smell of it chemical, hot.

A boy stood in the alley, slightly stunned, looking at his own hands.

His breathing was hard and uneven. His hands were wet with blood that was still warm. His pupils moved in a way that was beyond voluntary control.

He breathed and breathed and couldn’t reach the bottom of a breath, couldn’t find whatever would make the inside of his chest stop feeling like this.

"What did I just do."

Raphael, At this moment, he was still a boy in a school uniform, his innocent face filled with helplessness.

This was the beginning of his career as an executioner, the starting point of everything.

This was the first time he had taken a life.

At his feet: a thin man, dirty, clothing half-off, a sharp-bladed tool on the ground near his hand. He had been in the process of something and had not finished it. He would not finish it. He had been killed.

In the alley’s corner, a young woman, a senior student from the same school, was pressed against the wall, both arms pulled close, looking at the boy with wide eyes.

She had watched him do it. Her junior. One pen, the standard steel kind students carried, pressed against the underside of the man’s jaw, and then through the carotid artery, with the economy of motion someone used when they’d already decided.

No hesitation. The kind of calm associated with practiced action rather than impulse.

And then afterward, this, the boy looking at his hands as though they belonged to someone he hadn’t met.

Alp’s Shadow observed from a distance, thoughtful.

"An executioner who still carries the fear from his first kill. Interesting." A pause. "This might be workable."