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Ares had made a terrible miscalculation.
In the moment that mattered most, he’d misjudged everything—the angle, the timing, the chaos that erupted in a fraction of a second. He hadn’t accounted for the D.A.R.T. flipping the way it did, hadn’t foreseen both Athena and Eve being hurled through the air like broken data fragments. Nor had he expected it to strike him as well.
He survived, of course. He was designed to withstand impact, to endure forces that would crush most beings. But Eve was not built for survival in the same way. She was human, fragile, mortal, breathtakingly finite. When he saw her sprawled amid the drifting digital ash, blood streaking her cheek and soaking through the white fabric of her shirt, something inside him cracked. For the first time, Ares felt his heart drop.
Was this nausea? Fear? The sensation was foreign—too big, too sharp, too human.
He couldn’t remember ever running faster. His steps barely touched the ground, his knee plating scraped the pavement, sending him tumbling forward. He caught himself over her, breath ragged, disbelief flooding through him.
She had been thrown fifty feet. By all logic, she shouldn’t have been conscious. And yet, she was. She looked up at him, dazed but smiling faintly, her eyes glassy with pain. Somehow, with what little strength she had left, she managed to slide his disk toward him while he was still locked in combat with Athena. How she did it, he would never understand.
He remembered the sound of sirens in the distance, the way her blood smeared across his armor as he gathered her into his arms, a feeling he never wanted to feel again. He spoke to her softly, trying to anchor her in the moment—telling her about the old grid, the one from the 1980s. About Flynn. About the binary digit that had led him to the man, and how the permanence code was now stored safely within his disk.
That memory had burned itself into his circuitry. He replayed it again and again, like a corrupted file looping endlessly. He’d been ordered to kill her, to retrieve the code and erase her existence. How he’d defied that command. And yet, despite all that defiance, despite choosing to save her, he’d still almost gotten her killed.
“You only get one,” Flynn had told him.
And Ares realized, with something heavy and hollow in his chest.
He had almost taken Eve’s one.
“Is it possible for a program to be lost in thought?”
The voice was quiet but it cut through the sterile hum of the room like a spark in the dark.
Ares blinked. He hadn’t moved in over two hours. His armor still glowed faintly, the white hue soft and steady—so unlike the sharp, violent red he’d been built with. His head turned toward the sound.
Eve was awake. Barely.
She lay tethered to the bed by a web of tubes and wires, her skin pale against the sheets. The list of her injuries replayed in his mind like a diagnostic report he couldn’t shut off: internal bleeding, broken ribs, concussion, fractured collarbone. Every detail burned into him.
His memory flickered. An image of her past he’d studied, frame by frame, when he’d combed through her records. He remembered the videos of her trying to put on a brave face while her sister faded. How she clung to her.
And now, here she was. Trapped in the very place that brought a pain no hospital could heal.
He lowered his gaze, voice quiet and oddly uncertain.
“Perhaps,” he said at last, his tone distant yet contemplative. “I am unsure if lost would be the correct term.”
“And what term would you use?” she asked, tilting her head slightly, a soft, tired smile tugging at her lips.
“Evaluating. Reviewing,” he replied after a brief pause, turning fully toward her. His posture was precise—hands clasped neatly behind his back, stance like that of a soldier awaiting command.
“Okay,” she murmured, lifting her hand and rolling her wrist in a small circular motion to prompt him to continue. It took him a moment to recognize the gesture, to process that she wanted him to elaborate.
“Reviewing… the events that led to your condition,” he said finally.
A subtle frown crossed his face, one that didn’t quite fit but lingered anyway. He was still learning how to arrange his features, how to feel what they meant. The tightness in his chest, the heaviness behind his voice—it was an emotion he was only beginning to identify.
Guilt.
Was that the word for it?
“Ares.”
Eve sighed, already recognizing the direction of his thoughts. She shook her head slightly, careful not to move too much, the motion sent her vision spinning for a moment before she steadied it again.
“If I had calculated my throw more accurately,” Ares began, voice low and measured, “you wouldn’t have been thrown. The D.A.R.T. wouldn’t have flipped.”
He had run the numbers. Again and again. The trajectory, the impact, the velocity—all of it. There was no room for error, not for him. He was designed to be precise, efficient, perfect. And yet, he hadn’t been.
“I could’ve been better,” he said quietly. “I was made to be better.”
Eve let out a breath, half a laugh and half an ache. “And if you’d waited a moment longer, Athena would’ve ran you over,” she countered.
Her tone was calm but firm, like someone trying to reason with a storm. “And then she’d have dragged me back to the Grid, taken the code, and we both would’ve ended up dead.”
Her words hung in the sterile air—gentle, but immovable.
Ares fought the urge to respond with numbers, with ratios, probabilities, and calculations that might somehow prove his mistake. If he could quantify it, he thought, maybe he could fix it.
“The point is,” Eve said gently, “what happened, happened.”
“But—”
“Ares.”
Her voice cut through his protest, quiet but firm enough to stop him cold. The unspoken weight in her tone settled the words on his tongue before they could form.
He had learned, over time, that Eve was stubborn, unyielding in her convictions, even when she could barely sit upright. And in that reflection, he recognized something of himself. He, too, was stubborn. Relentlessly so.
“Come here,” she whispered after a long silence, lifting a hand and beckoning him closer.
An advanced AI, built for precision and combat, Ares hesitated. He could face enemies without flinching—but this? This quiet, human tenderness? It disarmed him completely. Still, he obeyed, stepping forward until she reached out and gently took his hand.
The contact startled him. Her fingers were warm against the cool surface of his armor, fragile yet steady. Before he could analyze the motion, his body acted on its own. His free hand reached behind him, dragging the chair closer. He sat, the movement awkward, uncertain.
Then, after a brief pause, he lowered his head and rested it carefully against her stomach. His other hand came to rest near his face, palm open, almost protective. It was an echo—an unconscious imitation of an image he’d once seen: Eve comforting her sister in the same way. He mimicked the gesture not out of understanding, but because he didn’t know what else to do.
Eve didn’t mind. She didn’t flinch or pull away. Instead, she lifted a hand and began to rub slow, gentle circles across his back.
The sensation was foreign to him, warmth without purpose, touch without command. But as the seconds passed, he found he didn’t want it to stop.
It was… comforting.