Chapter 3

The madhouse

"¿M-mom?" Katarina dropped her daggers without noticing.

"Sweetie" the woman kept repeating and the tears kept falling from the assassin's eyes.

'It can't be her, can it?' she wondered with hope filling her heart.

The woman in front of her raised an arm to reach her and Katarina slowly followed suit, not aware of what she was doing. Just when their fingers were about to touch, the woman spoke again

"Sweetie…why…did you…killed me?" when she heard this Katarina looked at the woman flabbergasted, then the woman turned her sight down and so did the assassin, and saw her right hand stabbing a kitchen knife on the woman's stomach.

The sight horrified Katarina, but the sight she had when she returned her eyes to the woman made her heart stop.

Because now the woman had lost stare and started bleeding violently from her eyes, nose and mouth.

"Murder" the woman said spiting blood. To hear her mother saying that broke her cold heart. She tried to utter a response but all that went out of her mouth was

"N-n-o…mommy, I-I didn't …"

"¡MURDER!" the woman screamed, not with her voice, but with dozens of other voices that Katarina never heard, but somehow knew exactly who they belonged.

They were the voices of all the people she killed; men, women, even children.

"MURDER!"

"MURDER!"

"Open the door"

"MURDER!"

The screams were getting louder, their hate thicker. Katarina was feeling something she never felt before. It was hideous, she wanted to scream but the feeling was literally suffocating her. She could feel their pain staining her soul. Their words were reaching a place she thought was closed forever.

Their words…were reaching…her heart.

No, they weren't just reaching it, they were destroying it.

Her horror expression never abandoned her face. The waterfalls of tears falling of her eyes never ceased. Maybe that's why she didn't notice when her mother's blood flooded the whole offices. And the screams seemed to have no end. So she was currently drowning on a pool of dense blood with tears flooding her wide opened eyes and surrounded by hateful screams. Yet she wasn't aware of any of this, she only knew one thing:

Pain, there was so much pain stinging just in the middle of the chest area threatening with consuming her. And at this point all she had left was her survival instinct, and it was telling her one thing.

Stop the pain.

So without thinking it even once, she reached one of the knives of the belt on her leg and pointed the tip to the source of the pain, and started making pressure.

But the knife did not move.

Almost with desperation, she applied more pressure with similar results. She could almost feel something holding her wrist, like a ha…¡SLAP!

Her head shot to the right and saw she was still in the offices.

"¡Wake up already!" Talon's voice reached her confu…¡SLAP! His palm connected with her face a little harder than before, so much she actually took a few steps back. Katarina then took the chance to analyze the situation.

'It was an illusion' she thought and then noticed that the fact she was pointing a knife to her chest was real.

By instinct she dropped the knife and then lifted her gaze at her partner.

"¿What happened?" she asked still a little dizzy.

"You're back" the relief on the shadow's blade was clearly visible.

"I think I am, and what do you mean by 'back'?" she asked trying to dispel the remains of her dizziness.

"Well I guess that's the question, right? All I know is that I found you standing in the middle of the room about to stab yourself in the heart, so I came and saved you" he summarized with a bit of smugness in the last part, which clicked something on Katarina's mind. So she shortened the distance between them and

¡SLAP!

"¡Ow! What was that about?!" Talon shouted to her

"You owed me one" the assassin replied in a non-caring manner.

"Wha…? It was for waking you up!"

"Not the second one. And still what gives the right to slap me for any motive?" she stated merely stating the facts "so you should be happy I just hit you back instead of punishing you accord to your crime."

Talon was about to give her a sharp response but then he shut his mouth and sighed in defeat.

'I'll never understand her' he thought "so what happened to you then?"

"Well I'm not really sure" the assassin replied not wanting to remember what she saw ever again "I just saw some blurry illusions, I didn't knew what I was doing then"

"So you too" Talon replied with suspicion.

"You saw something to?" Katarina asked shocked "what was it?"

"Actually I was going to ask you the same" he replied but she just scowled venomously.

"I don't want to tell you" she said with finality.

"And what if just tell you the same?"

"Then it's fine to me" the assassin replied slightly irritated. Talon understood why she didn't want to tell her story but, in his case, he had to admit he would like to take that out of him.

Also he couldn't keep one detail in particular.

"I was checking on the patient's rooms…"

Flashback: second floor

Talon was currently walking through the hallways connecting the rooms of the patients. They were small with just one bed, one desk and a door leading to a bathroom. Most of them were just gathering dust remaining untouched all those years. But others, for Talon's interest, were upside down. Like if Gnar had destroyed it trying to find his boomerang.

Talon chuckled at this thought. He keep passing the rooms wondering what would leave the rooms like that and what's more, why would it leave the other rooms untouched.

He got the answer to the first question when he found one body on the last room of the hallway. But his attention quickly abandoned him when he saw more blood inscriptions written on the walls. They were overlapping each other to the point they were difficult to read, but Talon managed to pull out the most important parts.

"Must neutralize the patient zero, the patient zero will kill us all, patient zero this, patient zero that and…" Talon looked closer to make sure he didn't misread "don't open the door" he said with curiosity 'what door?' his thoughts were interrupted when he heard running steps behind him. He turned around and with lightning speed burst out of the room only to find that the architecture of the building had changed. Now it looked like made of bricks instead of a cave.

But Talon didn't have time to analyze the structure because he was more interested in the man he heard before. He was standing in the hallway ten meters away from him wearing a hooded cloak that obscured his face.

The figure, seeing him, turned around and started walking deeper through the hallway which got lost in the sight.

"¡Wait!" Talon yelled chasing after it, but the more he ran the farthest it became and the darker the hallway got. 'What the hell is going on here?' he thought growing frustrated.

The hallway kept getting darker to the point he could no longer see. He was about to stop but out of nowhere he tripped and started to fall.

He kept falling for several minutes although he should have hit the in the first seconds. The fall itself felt like a nightmare to him. No, it wasn't a nightmare or a dream, or maybe it was more like a…memory?

Suddenly he started to hear something, it was like a wail. The sound slowly got louder till it became a cry, the cry of a child.

He tried to locate the source of the sound but only saw darkness. Then without reason, he opened his mouth and the cry started to emanate from it. He couldn't understand why, all he knew was what he felt. Fear, sadness, betrayal, anger, helpless.

The emotions were so strong that he started crying for real, never in his life he felt like this before. He started to remember, yes he felt like that once, but when? What happened?

Silence

The whole world went silent, the cry, the emotions, his thoughts stopped. He could only think of being dead.

The darkness started to fade and with that his conscience started to return. First came his senses, he could see a floor of bricks around him and a circle of light above him with the cloaked man peering from it. Then came his reason, he realized he hit the bottom of his fall and that man was the one who throw him down there. The man revealed his face: he had dark red hair, beard and moustache; he had green eyes and a tattoo darkening his left eye.

'General' with the recognition Talon recovered his emotions, but now that man's face only caused him fear, not of him but of being abandoned alone.

'No, please not again, help' Talon extended a small arm to try to reach him and as if on cue, the man started to close door of the circle of light, but not before saying one last thing to him

"Failure" and with that he close the door leaving a five years old Talon crying alone with the darkness.

He spent an unspecified amount of time wailing before listening to a whisper on the distance. It was too far away but the child managed to catch some words.

"No…other one….open… save her" Talon woke up in the middle of the hallway panting after hearing this. He couldn't understand what happened or what those words meant, but the last ones kept resonating on his head for a few moments.

Save her.

Without thinking it, he ran to the first floor only to find Katarina standing in the middle of an office with a blank expression and a knife dangerously close to her heart.

Flashback ends

"So then I just hurry to stop you from killing yourself" Talon ended "you're welcome by the way"

Katarina was speechless, 'why did i get the creepiest part?' she thought at first. She barely understood what did he saw or why. From her experience it should be some kind of memory but, to see her own father doing that to him. She was aware of how much did Talon respect him. But it was impossible that that was exactly what happened.

"Things are really fucked up here" Katarina commented

"Tell me something I don't know" he said back "but it doesn't matter, we're leaving"

"What? No, I'm going to end this" the assassin said firmly

"I don't believe you wanting to spend another second here!"

"Well I don't know you but I'm not going to leave whatever messed up with my mind alive" she stated "don't you want to take revenge on whoever put those images on your brain?"

Talon had to admit she had a point. Also like hell he was allowing her to go there alone.

"Well I don't think I'll be able to change your mind so…"

"See? Now what's our next step?"

"Probably we should exchange info, which I already did so what did you find out?"

"Well I think the scientists may have had illusions to" she said "none of their wounds seem to be of battle, I think that whatever they saw made them want to do that to themselves" Talon heard her and went to examine the bodies himself.

"And what do you think of that?" he said pointing to the abrasions they all had.

"If you ask me, I said it was the same thing that made their eyes black" she answered

"Maybe you are right ¿Anything else?"

"Yeah remember what Swain said about the project being a failure? Well he was lying"

"¿How so?"

"I found these ones" she showed him the plans of the exoskeleton "unless I'm mistaken it speaks about how it can keep the user of the drug alive".

"Hmm" he said thoughtful.

"What? Do you have something in mind?"

"I was thinking about the writings I saw upstairs, 'patient zero'. It matches with some of the references shown here"

"What does it mean?"

"It isn't a term used on biological weapons; it means the first patient of an epidemic"

"So then the drug was some kind of disease?" she asked, making sure she was right. There seem to be a lot of shit going on there.

"If it was a disease they weren't creating a weapon here but a cure" the thief stated with suspicion. Then looked at the state of the scientists, and then connected the dots.

"I think they were trying to create a weapon, but maybe the reason they canceled the project was because things got out of their hands and it turned into a disease. That maybe explain the state the scientists are, when they got here they got infected" he explained.

"Wait, If it is a disease that means we are infected?" she asked disgusted.

"It is a posibility, lets just hope that we don't end as bad as them" they looked at the bodies with worry.

"Well that it's something but it still doesn't explain why they were sent here in the first place or what happened with the crimson team" Katarina observed

"Yes but I think that's the reason we are here don't we?" Talon stated again and then gestured her partner to move to the next step of their plan, said the next lower floor. When they were in front of the stairs Katarina had an idea, a very creepy one.

"Do you think that 'patient zero' is behind all of this?" she suddenly asked and Talon looked at her with questioning gaze.

"What made you think that?"

"Just a hunch" she didn't mention it was the same feeling she had when she had the illusion of her mother. They just went down the stairs to face whatever they encounter.

...

Darkness

Silence

Emptiness

Could this be… death? Am I dying?

"You are not dying majesty, at least not yet"

A voice, where did I heard that voice before?

"You can think of that later, now I must give you a message"

Well I don't have anything better to do so shot.

"You are recovering your spark, that's good, you'll need it" I can feel whoever it is smirking "this is because one of my children is about to wake up, and someone has to teach him the invention of living"

It remembers me of a movie I regret seeing.

"You have to be that one, if it is anyone else the consequences would be troublesome for both of us"

Both of us huh? And who are you anyway? He is smirking again

"You'll find out on your own, for now rest, hard days await…majesty" I can feel its presence fade, and mine back into sleep, thinking of what I been told.