Chapter 14
The room was made of raw concrete—no windows, no color, no sign of life beyond the sterile glow of fluorescent lights reflecting off the metallic surface of the long central table. The air was dense and still, as if even the oxygen was tightly regulated. The only constant sound was the ticking of an analog clock, occasionally interrupted by the dry rustling of papers being turned. Silence, in that space, wasn’t a mark of respect. It was habit. Condition. It was Hydra’s native tongue.
Alexander Pierce was the first to break the vacuum hanging over the men seated around the table.
“The incident with Wagner was... unfortunate, but necessary,” he said, his voice low and precise, nearly devoid of emotion. As always, he avoided names. He didn’t need them.
Dr. Kraus didn’t even lift his eyes from the report he was reviewing. His voice cut through the air with the clinical precision of a scalpel.
“The Soldier has been stabilized. Full reset. He’s back in cryopreservation. All associative memories have been erased.”
A faint murmur moved through the room, but no one commented. It was expected. Within protocol.
“I recommend tightening surveillance protocols,” Karpov muttered, his Russian accent thick and unwavering. “If even the Soldier can fail, anyone can. They’re... feeling too much.”
Pierce laced his fingers on the table and stared into a random spot in the void, as if trying to see beyond the concrete walls.
“The girl needs to be reconditioned. The bond with Dr. Wagner introduced vulnerabilities. But she’s still our most valuable asset.”
He opened a folder in front of him, spreading photos, charts, technical notes, and a transcript from one of the sessions across the table:
She said she wanted a name.
The silence that followed was heavier than any spoken word. Until a new voice entered—calm, deliberate.
A silver-haired man in a pristine military uniform leaned slightly forward.
“The Red Room has effective methods for dealing with this kind of issue,” said General Dreykov, his tone firm and direct. “We know how to erase trauma. How to shape obedient assets. A transfer should be considered.”
There was an almost clinical detachment in the way he spoke. Dreykov wasn’t Hydra—and everyone in the room knew it. But there were old ties, invisible threads stitched together over decades of mutual interest. The Red Room was a project older than the fall of the USSR itself, a long-standing experiment in manipulation and control that Hydra had learned to respect... and, at strategic moments, to utilize. In exchange for information, resources, and silence, the Russians allowed some of their methods to be tested on Hydra’s subjects of interest.
Rebecca had now become one of them.
Pierce remained silent for long enough that the ticking of the clock once again filled the room. His fingers tapped lightly on the folder in front of him before he shut it with a soft snap.
“If she survives the process, she’ll be the perfect weapon. If not... at least we’ll know where the limits are.”
Dreykov nodded, satisfied. To him, it was just another variable in an ongoing experiment.
To Rebecca, it would mark the beginning of an even more meticulous kind of hell.
No one replied.
There were no objections. No emotions.
Only the same cold, automatic acceptance as always.
Exactly as it was meant to be.
--
Hours later—or maybe days, it was impossible to tell—Rebecca was still lying on the bed in the windowless room. In that place, time had no shape. Everything was whiter than she remembered. The walls, the polished floor, even the bedding. The television was gone. The books and toys Elise used to sneak in for her—gone too. Even the worn gray blanket had been replaced with a sheet that had no texture, no scent, nothing.
The room had been scrubbed clean with a single purpose: to erase any trace of humanity.
Rebecca lay still, arms at her sides, legs straight. Her eyes remained open, fixed on the ceiling, not blinking for long stretches. A camera high on the wall watched her. The red light in its lens was the only color in that sterile place.
She knew they were watching.
They always were.
But she didn’t move. There was no reason to anymore. Elise was gone. Her soft voice, the movie-like stories, the scent of coffee on her lab coat... all of it had vanished. And the Soldier—with his quiet eyes that once hesitated for her, that once held her hand—was now either frozen, or worse, turned back into the perfect weapon they always wanted.
When the door opened with a metallic snap, she didn’t flinch. The sound of boots on the polished floor was enough to announce who it was.
Pierce entered with his usual calm, hands clasped behind his back, posture immaculate. He stopped beside the bed and watched her in silence for a few seconds. Then he spoke, in that same soft, threatening tone she had learned to understand.
“I hope the punishment was enough to put your thoughts back in order, 616.”
Rebecca took a moment to respond. When her eyes finally moved to meet his, she spoke in a firm, steady voice:
“My name is Rebecca.”
Pierce sighed, like he was dealing with a stubborn child.
“You were promising. Efficient. Obedient. But then... you started to think you could choose. That you could want.”
He stepped closer, resting one hand on the edge of the bed.
“‘Rebecca’ is a mistake. A noise implanted by a traitor. And because of that name, you lost everything.”
She swallowed hard but didn’t look away. They had taken everything from her—objects, smells, voices—but one thing still remained. The name. The echo of Elise’s voice still whispered somewhere inside her, like a warm scar:
You can choose. You can be whoever you want to be.
Rebecca wasn’t a code. She wasn’t a number.
The steadiness in her eyes seemed to unsettle him more than he cared to admit. He masked it with a cold, fleeting smile.
“Such a disappointment,” he muttered, straightening up. “You’re being transferred. To a place where what you think—or feel—doesn’t matter. There, even your name will be reduced to nothing. No number. No pronoun. Just pain.”
She blinked slowly. Her throat tightened.
“And the Soldier?”
The question slipped out before she could stop it. Weak. Almost a whisper.
Pierce paused at the door. He turned just enough for her to see the cruel smile forming on his lips.
“Oh, my dear... I’ll make sure the two of you never see each other again.”
Two guards entered the room. Rebecca didn’t resist. She had learned that inside these walls, resistance wasn’t strength — it was punishment. She allowed herself to be led down the cold corridors of the base, the sound of boots echoing like a funeral march.
Above the exit door, the Hydra symbol loomed, rust creeping along its edges — a reminder that nothing left that place the same as it came in.
The light outside blinded her for a moment. It had been weeks since she’d last seen the sun. A helicopter waited, rotors already spinning. Beside it stood a man in a military uniform, deep red cap, and a face carved from stone. One of the Hydra soldiers handed him a sealed dossier.
“This her?” Dreykov asked, emotionless.
“Experiment 616. Still viable, despite the setbacks,” the other man replied.
Dreykov gave the girl one last look, like someone assessing a new weapon.
“She’ll be useful,” he murmured. “Or she’ll break. The Red Room will find out.”
Rebecca stepped into the helicopter in silence. There was no one left to look back for. Elise was dead. The Soldier, frozen and forgotten, as if he had never existed. Even the cell she’d once called her prison had been taken from her.
Now, all that remained was herself.
Her — and the name they tried to erase.
Rebecca.
She sat on the metal bench and curled her fingers around the cold seat. Outside the small window, the sky was a dull gray, without a horizon.
She didn’t cry. Didn’t tremble. But she didn’t go completely numb either.
Because deep down, in a place Hydra’s machines could never reach, something still remained.
Small. Faint.
But alive.
--
The Red Room didn’t smell like blood, even though blood was spilled there every single day. It smelled like chemicals, rust, and dried sweat. A smell that clung to the skin and seeped into your hair — a constant reminder that this place wasn’t made for growing. It was made for shaping.
Rebecca arrived there at seven years old, carrying a weight she couldn’t fully understand. She had already killed. Already been used as a tool. She knew pain intimately, like someone who knows their own reflection.
But inside the Red Room, everything was different. In Hydra’s lab, she had been special — an experiment, a rare successful result. Here, she was just another. A number. A body to be trained, broken, and rebuilt. And if she failed, discarded.
Time in the Red Room wasn’t measured in days, but in commands. In shifts, orders, punishments. Rebecca quickly learned that there was no room for hesitation or questions — only efficiency. From the start, she stood out in physical tests. Running, combat, accuracy, endurance… her body responded with precision. Like a weapon. Just as they expected.
“Up. Now.”
The voice came every morning before sunrise. Metallic, cold — like the day itself began with the trigger pull of an invisible gun. Rebecca moved with the precision she had known since her earliest memories. Bed made in twelve seconds. Uniform on in nine. The girls lined up in rows, neatly arranged like dolls on shelves. Some older, some as small as she was. None of them spoke. Eyes down. Hands behind their backs.
The first training was always physical. Running, agility, strength. Then came combat simulations. Rebecca always excelled physically. The serum in her veins made her muscles react faster, her strength surpass expectations. But that didn’t make her a leader. On the contrary — the other girls watched her with suspicion. Her expression unreadable, her movements flawless, her lack of hesitation... she didn’t seem human. And maybe she wasn’t.
But there was something Rebecca couldn’t grasp, no matter how hard she tried. The other girls smiled at each other, even in the brief moments between sessions. They shared whispers, quiet laughs. They knew how to flirt with disguises, mimic gestures, fabricate bonds. Rebecca only observed. Tried to copy. But it always felt… artificial.
In the camouflage and acting classes, the goal was simple: look real. Be the perfect daughter, the model student, the normal child. Rebecca always failed. Her movements were stiff, her words came out like she was reciting lines from a script. The instructor would frown.
“You move like a programmed doll,” said Instructor Olga one day, staring her down with icy eyes. “And dolls break easily.”
The words ricocheted through her mind like echoes of a code she hadn’t written herself. And then, in the suffocating weight of silence, a memory burst through — so vivid it burned.
The snow. The starless sky. The taste of iron in her mouth. The mission with Volkov still fresh, like an open wound. And the Soldier, standing before her, a protective shadow amid the chaos.
She remembered the cold cutting down to the bone, the way she let herself fall to her knees, face buried in trembling gloves. She remembered the pain — not the physical kind. Something else. A muffled scream with no voice to give it sound. And then, she felt his arms around her. Not squeezing. Just… holding. A silent anchor in the middle of the storm.
"You survived, doll," he’d said. "And that’s what matters now."
Rebecca squeezed her eyes shut, as if she could force the memories away. The Soldier. Elise. The arms that held her in the snow. The gentle voice that called her by name. That hurt more than any failure. It was like a crack beneath her skin, always ready to split wide open.
She couldn’t think about them. Not here. Not now.
The real pain — the kind that rotted from the inside — didn’t come from the blows in combat class, or from Instructor Olga’s cold corrections when she missed a movement. The pain came from those memories. From what had almost been... home.
Rebecca drew a deep breath, the metallic taste of anger blooming on her tongue. That was weakness. Feeling was weakness. And she couldn’t afford to be weak.
"Focus," she whispered to herself, a mantra through clenched fists resting on her knees.
That was it. Rebecca could crush concrete blocks with a single punch. She could run for hours without stopping. Endure pain like someone who no longer noticed the cold — with ease, with habit. But she didn’t know how to pretend. She couldn’t fake a smile, laugh to be polite, cry on command. During espionage drills, when they told her to act like a normal child, she froze.
Her body had been shaped to obey, not to feel. Learned reactions. Programmed reflexes. Emotions… were interference.
She sat among the other girls, trying to mimic the gestures she saw in the training videos, copying expressions with the precision of a puppet. But something was always off. Something in her eyes. Something in the silences. The instructors noticed.
“You’re not convincing,” Olga had said once. “Behind your face, there’s only a void calculating its next move.”
And Rebecca wanted to scream that it wasn’t true — but she couldn’t. Because sometimes, she feared it was. That she really was just a shell, a mask, a reflection of what they wanted her to be.
She got up from the thin cot in her cell, pacing back and forth, bare feet brushing the cold floor. She needed to erase it all. Erase the sound of the Soldier’s voice, the smell of Elise’s hair when she hugged her, the lopsided cake from the first time someone remembered her birthday.
None of that could exist here. None of it would help her survive.
"You survived, doll," he had said.
But surviving meant forgetting.
And Rebecca knew: forgetting was the price of staying alive.