What’s Left Behind

The alarms wailed through the facility, an endless shriek that signaled the beginning of the end. Red warning lights pulsed in rhythmic flashes, painting the hallways in a bloody glow. Jessica barely heard it.

Her world had narrowed to the revelation burning in her mind. Jason never existed. She had spent the last three years trying to reconcile who she was, fearing she was losing herself, but there was nothing to lose. Jason Carter was a fabrication, a false life forced upon her. Vanguard had never stolen Jessica’s life.

They had given her Jason, and she had spent twenty years unknowingly living as an experiment. A new kind of rage took root inside her. It wasn’t just anger, It was purpose.

"Jessica! We need to move!" Leanna’s voice cut through the haze, snapping her back to the present.

Jessica turned, adrenaline surging through her veins. The facility was going into full lockdown. Kevin and Hannah were already moving, tense and ready, eyes tracking every twitch of the guards' rifles. The guards weren’t advancing yet, as if waiting for orders. The silver-haired scientist who had called her Subject Zero was gone. He had vanished into the depths of the lab.

The guards moved in, rifles raised, closing like a net. Jessica’s body moved before thought caught up. No plan. No strategy. Just instinct rising sharp and merciless from somewhere dark and buried. Her heel snapped into a guard’s knee, precise, mechanical, before her hands twisted his weapon away with practiced violence that didn’t feel like hers.

Leanna was already on the second, dragging him down in a tangle of limbs and fury. Kevin followed without hesitation, wrestling a rifle free in the chaos. Hannah slammed an elbow into soft tissue, driving a guard backward into the wall hard enough to leave him gasping.

It was over almost before Jessica realized what she’d done. She stood over the fallen men, chest heaving, a rifle clenched in her hands like it had always belonged there. The shock came after, cold and slow, not at the violence, but at the terrible clarity of it.

‘How the hell did I know how to do that?’

For a long beat, no one moved. Jessica stood in the wreckage of the fight, breath raw in her throat, the stolen rifle hanging heavy in her hands. Her pulse thundered in her ears, not from fear, but from the awful, electric certainty of what her body had just done. There was no hesitation. No thought. Just violence executed with surgical precision.

Leanna’s eyes found hers, sharp, calculating, not afraid, but measuring. Kevin shot her a glance, something like respect edged with caution. Even Hannah, steady as ever, looked at Jessica like she was seeing her from a distance she hadn’t noticed before. Nobody said a word, but something in the air had shifted.

It was Olivia who moved first, edging carefully around the downed guards, her eyes flicking from Jessica to the bodies on the floor. Whatever she thought about what she'd just seen, she kept it to herself.

Olivia was the first to break the silence. "They’ll seal the lower levels first," Olivia said, tapping furiously at a control panel. "We have to get out before that happens."

"We can’t just run!" Jessica snapped, her voice raw. "This place, this project, it won’t end unless we make it end."

Leanna grabbed her by the shoulders. "Jess, listen to me. We’ll destroy what we can, but if we don’t make it out of here, it won’t matter."

Jessica's breath came hard, not from fear, but from clarity. She couldn't let this exist. She couldn’t let it continue. She wouldn’t let them take another child, another person, and force them into an identity that wasn’t their own. But she also couldn’t let them win by killing her here.

She exhaled sharply. "Then we do both."

******************************

Olivia worked furiously to override the security systems. "I can get us into the core lab files. If I set a digital burn sequence, we can wipe everything. They’ll lose decades of research."

"And what about the facility?" Kevin asked, gripping his rifle.

Jessica turned to Leanna. "We set charges."

Leanna hesitated, then nodded. "We can do it on a time delay. It’ll give us just enough time to escape before the whole place collapses."

Jessica's jaw tightened. "Start planting them. I’m going for the core."

Nobody argued.

They moved fast, splitting off down branching corridors, methodical and brutal. Jessica pushed deeper into the heart of the facility, toward the place they would never have let her reach while alive. The data center. The nerve center. Whatever was left of her was buried in Vanguard’s machines.

******************************

The room was bathed in a sterile white glow, lined with servers and reinforced glass chambers. Jessica’s past was stored here along with the futures of those still locked away in Vanguard’s grasp.

She ran her fingers along the edge of a control panel, eyes narrowing. The files Olivia was pulling up scrolled endlessly on the screen—blueprints for genetic manipulation, failed case studies, and one unaltered file labeled simply: ‘Prototype Zero.’

Jessica clicked on it. The screen was filled with video logs. Images of her as a child. Her hand trembled.

Leanna’s voice broke the silence. "Jess, we have to go."

Jessica hesitated for a moment, then clicked the purge command. Every piece of data, every file, every blueprint—erased.

******************************

The ground shook as the first charges detonated. The facility’s warning klaxons grew shriller, an automated voice announcing, "Structural collapse imminent. Evacuate immediately."

They sprinted through the corridors, dodging falling debris. Guards pursued them, but the chaos worked in their favor. Jessica led the charge, vaulting over wreckage, her pulse hammering. For the first time in her life, she felt completely herself.

Behind them, the corridor buckled, a collapse swallowing the guards still giving chase. As they neared the exit, she stole one last glance behind her. The facility—her past—was collapsing in on itself. It was over. Or so she thought.

They didn’t stop running until they reached the rendezvous point, an abandoned outpost where Santiago’s people had left an escape vehicle. Jessica’s hands trembled as she climbed inside. She should have felt free. She should have felt victorious, but she didn’t.

Leanna sat beside her, breathing hard. "We did it."

Jessica stared at the horizon, where the remains of the facility smoldered in the distance.

"No," she whispered. "We delayed it."

The others exchanged uneasy glances.

"Vanguard is bigger than just this," Jessica murmured. "They have backups, other facilities, and other scientists. They’ll rebuild. They always do."

Kevin exhaled. "Then what do we do now?"

Jessica looked at him, then out at the vast, open landscape. For the first time, she knew exactly what she had to do. She had spent her whole life running from what she was. Now, she was going to hunt them down. And she wasn’t going to stop.

The war wasn’t over, but Jessica’s war had just begun. There was wreckage behind her. There would be wreckage ahead, but this time, she was choosing it