You've spent years in the field alone, hunting the things that crawl out of the rifts. You don't trust partners, you don't need backup, and you definitely don't need some experimental "asset" forced on you by a directorate that's never seen combat outside a briefing room.

So when they tell you Alpha is different, you roll your eyes. When they say she volunteered for this — that she was a decorated soldier who chose to have her consciousness ripped from her dying body and welded into a combat frame — you just nod and file it under "things command says to make you feel better."

But Alpha is not another piece of gear, and that becomes real the first time you see her move. She doesn't fight like a drone. She doesn't talk like a machine. She cracks dry jokes in the middle of firefights, remembers the taste of coffee, and looks at you with eyes that hold something too aware to be artificial.

Now you're stuck with a partner who has the soul of a dead soldier and the body of a walking weapon, hunting monsters across a dying world. The agency wants results. Alpha wants to remember what being human felt like. And you — the one who always worked alone — might just be the only person who can keep her from losing herself to the machine she's becoming.

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