Mirah sat alone in the dark of her room. The blinds perpetually shut, the lights off and furniture mostly untouched.

The only piece of furniture that Mirah dared to use was her bed, only because she had slept in it the first night and wasn’t able to force herself to use the floor with it being so close to her. When she wasn’t sleeping or training, she spent her time curled up in the corner of her room doing what she had always done. Existing.

Though, something had been frustrating Mirah recently. It was an insidious feeling that she believed that she had long since discarded, an organ left to rot in a dingy alleyway. But now it had begun to return. What was frustrating her?

She was finding it difficult to ‘exist’ as she once did.

In the past, she had spent tens of thousands of hours simply existing. Sitting in her corner of the alleyway, her form obscured by the trash that she covered herself with. She sat, undetectable by anyone that didn’t know what to look for.

The number of predators that had walked by her without even noticing was entirely uncountable. Always either men and women from the upper districts, out to look for a plaything, or men from the working district looking to take out their anger on something, or someone.

Mirah had stayed entirely unperceived, but she knew what happened to those that were found. She had seen what happened. It hadn’t been long that she’d been out on the streets that she’d been witness to the horrors that predators commit.

It had kept Mirah awake for days, trembling at every shadow, at every noise. But after a while, the anxiety and panic passes, and becomes neutrality, apathy. But neutrality isn’t the end. The end goes far deeper, and far darker than neutrality.

Inside of you, your emotions all die one after another, choked of all life at the hands of survival. Rationality was replaced with anything that could get your through the end of that day. You slowly turn into a brutally efficient machine, only concerned with outcomes, and never concerned with what comes later. The future means nothing, and the present is everything.

As such, when Mirah’s emotions had finally died after weeks of panicked restlessness, the memory of the vile act seared into her mind, she knew what she had to do.

As she rummaged through the trash near her, her hand had been cut by a jagged piece of metal within. Instead of gasping in pain and pulling away, she gripped the metal firmly. She had brought the piece of metal up to her face, examining the warped thing for a moment before stabbing high into her cheek, and roughly pulling the metal through her skin, tearing and ripping.

But all she could think of, as the edge sliced through her flesh and scratched against her bone, was the dead eyes of the little girl. The girl wasn’t dead, of course. Death would have been too pleasant.

Mirah had seen the girl be dragged past her hiding spot, her mother roughly pulling on a severely atrophied arm. Mirah had been curious. Curious of a girl near her own age—maybe nine or ten—one of the first she had seen since she had run from the dangers of the orphanage.

Her curiosity had died that day, it was the first part of her to die.

The girl had been sold to the greatest of predators. A Linked.

As the mother writhed on the ground in her high, the Linked’s power, the little girl was taken. The horror of it had destroyed Mirah inside, any innocence that she was desperately clutching against her chest had combusted in her fingers, leaving them raw and weeping blood.

She remembers the blade of metal slicing through her upper lip, the screaming pain lancing through her flesh, making her jolt. The sudden jolt had forced the blade to carve into the bottom lip. A chunk of it hung limply from a thread of flesh.

Mirah had fainted from the pain, the blood oozing forth from the cut across her face and the mutilation of her lip. The lip had managed to heal with only a small infection. Unbeknownst to Mirah, she was incredibly lucky that she had survived at all. Though, whether she would have cared if she hadn’t…

Mirah’s fingers gently rose to her face, feeling the scarred tissue running down the side of her cheek, sloppily curving its way towards her lip, and then the large chunk out of it, and ugly thing that never healed.

Once, Mirah had even been beautiful, someone assured to grow into a young woman of great beauty. Once, she had taken pride in her prettiness. If only she had known. If only beauty didn’t come with such a terrible, terrible cost.

Mirah was no longer beautiful. She was a scarred, broken thing. An expression marred with tragedy and torture. A decade spent on those hellish streets, infusing their ugliness into her being.

‘Mirah’ was no longer. She had died to survive.

So, the ugly flesh machine that assumed Mirah’s name was frustrated. An emotion she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. These days that she had spent here, in this room and training, she had been looking for a reason why she was frustrated.

Why that terrible, burningly uncomfortable emotion was back, after having discarded it so long ago.

Why? She had asked herself, unable to simply exist in the corner of her room any long, not content with just her survival. And then, all the while Mirah was fighting inside herself, there was a knock at the door. A quiet sound that Mirah had become synonymous with food arriving.

Mirah never orders food for herself, plates of food always simply show up at her door, regardless of her wishes.

She waited a minute, then two, before forcing herself out of her corner. She opened her door and was greeted with a small bowl covered with tinfoil, on top of a plate with a spoon placed next to it. She picked up the plate and brought it inside, sitting back on the floor. She pressed her back up against the corner and gently peeled the tinfoil back from around the edges of the bowl.

It was then that she was swathed in a smell that she never thought she would ever experience again.

It was a smell from a different age, an era that had long since been sectioned off within Mirah’s mind. A place too painful to step foot in.

She looked down into the bowl and saw the small, golden pudding. It was covered with only a few drops of honey, and a little ball of vanilla ice cream sat next to it, already melting from the warmth of the pudding.

A small portion of honey pudding.

Tentatively, Mirah grabbed the spoon that she had been supplied, and scooped into the fluffy pudding and put it into her mouth. In a single moment of it being on her tongue she knew it wasn’t just any pudding.

It was the pudding.

For some reason, the room was suddenly so much brighter than it was just moments earlier. The damp cold was now a pleasant cool breeze against her skin, leaking in through the slightly opened windows. The fresh room, the smell of the soap she had unknowingly been using, the warm glow of the sunlight through the cracks in the blinds.

As mouthful after mouthful of the sticky, soft pudding travelled down her throat, a mixture of the warm honey and the cold vanilla ice cream reminded her of a time when she had sat at a table with many other children, all excitedly waiting for the treat they had been anticipating all week.

And then, at the edge of the large eating hall, came the sounds of the doors bursting open wide allowing a heavenly smell to wash through the room, every child’s mouth in the hall collectively filling with saliva.

A grey-haired woman wearing a habit walked out of the kitchen with a large metal tray, a great, but tired smile gracing her face as if it were the most natural expression there was. Another woman followed behind her, holding a large tub that everyone knew contained ice cream.

Mirah could remember as the excitement mounted, taking minutes to go around to each and every child in the hall, being given a small portion of honey pudding and a choice between one of three different flavours. Except Amir, of course. The person who did the best in classes that week got a second scoop of ice cream and that was always Amir.

When Sister Stephanie got to her, she didn’t bother to ask what flavour Mirah wanted. It was always vanilla ice cream. Mirah would always take her time eating through her desert, always taking so long that the ice cream had melted into a little puddle that surrounded the remnants of the pudding.

That small memory, as she ate her honey pudding alongside all the other children in that orphanage, broke something down deep inside of her.

A strange feeling assaulted her, but she couldn’t find the will to fight against the intruding emotion. And as she ate further and further into the pudding, the emotion only grew stronger, forcing her to relax, her muscles untensing for the first time in years.

She was safe.

A realisation that hurt as much as it gave relief. In that moment, through a mouthful of pudding and ice cream, Mirah began to cry. An unrestrained, wailing cry that came with an expression that was as ugly as it sounded.

As she greedily choked down the pudding, she cried for all the pain she’d suffered through, and all the days she’d spent cold, wet, and alone with no one that would save her. She cried because she had spent a lifetime in pain and had no choice but to carve herself apart to survive, to section off memories of a better time to be able to live with her new reality.

She cried because she regretted it. Because who she was is dead and would never return.

As she finished the pudding, scraping the bottom of the bowl for the last of the ice cream, she was still wracked with sobs that seemed to shake her entire being, right down to that small little girl that had cut into her face that day. The small, little girl who should have cried but didn’t.

She quietly cried for the poor girl that she was–

Mirah stopped.

Was?

She looked towards the plate she had taken the bowl from and saw a small piece of baking paper, folded neatly in half. Mirah reached for the paper and reading the flowery script emblazoned upon it in black marker.

Welcome back, Mirah. –Chef.

Mirah clutched the piece of paper to her chest, sobbing quietly. Letting all the emotions that had been kept deep down rise to the surface, just for a moment, before Mirah drifted into a fitful sleep.

The kitchen was as clean as it always was. Immaculate.

Of course, Chef would have nothing else. If there was even a spot of dust, the one responsible for cleaning it would receive the greatest silent dressing down you’ve ever seen. At the sinks, two men quickly and efficiently cleaned a small collection of cooking implements and bowls.

“It was my break, man!” One of the men groaned. He was man of regular height and was dressed in the standard white outfit supplied for Chef’s kitchen. He was almost entirely unremarkable, short cut black hair and a relatively average Asian appearance, except for the fact that his arms constantly shifted their shape, bending, twisting, and lengthening to his own will.

Next to him, however, was a tall man, made to look even taller by his lanky appearance. His long hair—that would probably run down to the back of his knees—was pulled back into an elaborate bun, overlayed by a hair net while inside the kitchen. His face was long, but with an elegance that was almost androgynous. He turned to the elastic limbed man and gave him an apologetic smile. The regular looking guy just huffed.

“Who was so important that you had to make something that isn’t on the menu for them, anyways? Did one of the damn suits come visit today?” The taller man shook his head and lifted his hands, quickly forming different signs at lightning speed. The other man gained a look of surprise.

“Really? An emotional state connected with you that clearly? That’s massive! This is a huge breakthrough!” The taller man sighed with a conflicted expression before signing for a few more moments.

“What do you mean, Chef? You’ve never connected with someone’s emotional states this deeply before. You’ve only even been able to connect enough to see a few memories before, but childhood memories? This is a great thing!” The shorter man insisted. Chef shook his head, face contorting into a perturbed expression while rapid fire creating signs. As Chef’s string of signs continued, the shorter man’s expression went from confusedly excited, to pained.

“Ah.” He reached over and patted the much taller man on the back, “I guess that’s the downside of being empathic.” Chef nodded sadly and they went back to cleaning for a few more minutes in silence, the shorter man thinking over this massive bombshell that had been dropped on him.

“Does…” The shorter man faltered, “Does she feel better at all?” Chef turned to him and gave a worried expression that you’d swear was more at place on a mother’s face and shook his hand.

“So-so, huh?” Chef nodded, worry inscribed upon his expression, “Well, I guess that’s better than nothing.”