Day in the story: 8th December (Monday)

I arrived at Edge of Tomorrow early, hoping Bobby Carpenter might be the sort who showed up ahead of her shift. Judging by the fact I hadn't seen her start last time I was here, I figured she'd probably already started. I wasn't wrong. She appeared, strolling in with that bright, springy energy that seemed to contradict her years, a good forty minutes before her scheduled start.

"Hello, Bobby," I called out, layering on as much happiness as I could manage. "It's so good to see you."

"Good evening, Elle," she replied, pleasantly surprised. "I was wondering if I'd see you again."

"I'm not exactly good at making friends," I told her, pitching my voice carefully for whoever might be eavesdropping and someone surely was. "But you seemed friendly enough, especially on my first day, so… I wanted to give you something. Nothing big, just a headband. I noticed you wearing one on Friday, so I picked this one out for you."

That was a lie. Alexandra had made it herself, right after my last shift ended, painting it with a swirl of subtle symbols that looked innocent enough to any normal eye. Among them were four small eyes, each facing a different direction and two stylized ears, all woven seamlessly into the design. She had infused it so we could both see and hear through it. A hidden surveillance tool, wrapped up as a gift.

Alexandra had also figured out that day why her mask refused to work whenever she took it off, while her cards always remained active. It was all about the perception of identity, the mask worked only when covering her face, because that was the identity it claimed.

"It's so thoughtful of you," Bobby beamed, genuinely touched. "I'll put it on right away, if you don't mind. It looks so whimsical, my Mark would have loved it. He always fancied abstract shapes."

She took off her old headband and slipped this one on, smoothing it over her hair. The moment it settled, my vision sharpened, stabilizing. I could see through twelve distinct feeds. My own two biological eyes, though hidden behind silver lenses. The card tucked in Jason's backpack. Six more hidden inside his apartment. And now the four watchful eyes woven into Bobby's headband.

Alexandra mentally arranged them across my perception: my natural sight in the center, Jason's angles arrayed to my left, Bobby's to my right. For the audio, she shifted the hearing components in a similar way, compartmentalizing what came from where. It was strange, how our brain just understood all these new perspectives, layered over each other. Probably a gift from our Domain, I reasoned. A normal person might have had their mind split open by the overload; I remembered how Alexandra's skull had felt like it would split the first time she tried to process so many angles.

"Would you share your number with me?" I asked, putting on a friendly smile. "Maybe we could meet up sometime."

She agreed easily, cheerful as ever and we exchanged contact details. She handled her phone with a smooth competence that made sense for someone working at a place like this, though it contrasted with her gentle, almost grandmotherly demeanor.

We said our goodbyes and I headed down to my floors to do the usual dirty work, mopping, checking the bathrooms. But most of my attention was on the feeds from those four new eyes and the fresh audio channels pouring in through the hidden ears.

**********

Bobby was a woman of habits, moving through the corridors with the easy grace of someone who'd worked here far longer than most people could keep a job. She pushed her cart forward, humming a faint tune to herself, when the guard near the elevator stepped out to stop her.

"What's the matter, son?" she asked, polite but surprised.

He was in his thirties, ex-military by the way he carried himself, broad shoulders, squared-off posture, that neatly pressed uniform. His voice was calm as he reached out, one hand gently halting the rolling cart. He signaled to his partner, who moved in with a portable scanning device, working dangerously close to the new headband I'd just given her.

My heart jumped, even though I wasn't physically there. Someone had definitely been monitoring us and flagged the headband immediately.

"She's clear," the scanner guy announced after a moment, relaxing slightly.

Bobby adjusted her sleeves, a patient smile on her face. "It's a gift, this new headband" she explained, a hint of pride in her voice. "Should I take it off?"

That would have been a disaster, but fortunately they waved her on.

"It's fine," the first guard told her. "We just had to be sure."

Apparently these security guys, despite working for a mage guild, either didn't expect enchanted items or simply didn't see Bobby's area as sensitive enough to worry about.

They called the elevator for her, holding the doors open while she pushed her cart inside with the same calm steadiness. My borrowed eyes followed her in as she disappeared behind the closing doors, the hum of the elevator swallowing her up and taking my fresh window into this place with her.

As the elevator doors slid open, Bobby rolled her cart into what could only be described as the central lab hub. It was a vast, sterile space, white from floor to ceiling, with glass-panel walls dividing off smaller, room-sized laboratories like cells in a hive. Tables, chairs, banks of computers and specialized equipment lined those sealed rooms, the kind of tools that even to my untrained eye screamed biological or chemical research.

The very first room on the right was enough to make me freeze, even seeing it just through Bobby's planted eyes. Inside, something that looked like a shadow stuffed into a monstrous testing tube pulsed with hideous life. The tank was easily twenty feet across and the mass within it bulged and writhed, folding over itself in a way that reminded me of a primeval soup refusing to settle. Thick cables and snaking tubes ran from the glass into its body, feeding or maybe draining it, I couldn't tell.

Bobby, unbothered, stepped inside and began calmly sweeping the floor, as if she were tidying up a cafeteria instead of a horror exhibit.

A man in a white lab coat, covering a plain gray sweater and a pair of jeans, entered behind her. He moved with a quiet, casual confidence, tapping out commands on a keyboard. Bobby was too far from the screen for me to read what he typed, but it hardly mattered, my attention was already drawn to the next room beyond, visible through another stretch of glass.

In there, a more human-shaped shadow hung suspended from the ceiling by its arms, its legs clamped down by a mechanical brace bolted into the floor. It was barely hovering above the tiles, restrained so completely that only its head and a set of writhing tentacles sprouting from its abdomen could move at all. Tubes stabbed directly into its flesh pumped clear fluids in steady drips, a sick parody of an IV keeping this nightmare alive.

If you could even call that living.

This place was a warehouse of horrors and Bobby, impossibly steady, went on sweeping as if she had never seen anything out of the ordinary.

I moved in tandem with Bobby, as she navigated her part of the complex. While I scrubbed toilets on my side of the facility, she was handling a particularly filthy containment tube in a lab otherwise crammed with equipment but currently empty of any test subject. It had a cold, clinical look.

But then something moved behind her through the corridor.

I saw it through the eyes on her headband as two soldiers in tactical gear guided it, half dragging, half supporting it in a heavy-duty harness. Two scientists waited nearby, looking for all the world like normal people in their white coats and sterile confidence. They barely flinched at the creature's arrival and that alone sent a chill down my spine.

Because this thing, this shadow, was nothing like the others.

It was humanoid, yes, but clothed, which was new. A simple, coarse robe clung to its frame, ragged at the edges, as if it had been given modesty only as an afterthought. Its skin was scaly, but on top of those scales grew short, iridescent feathers that shimmered green and blue, shifting as it breathed. From its head rose a dramatic crest of longer, sharper feathers, almost like a ceremonial crown.

The face was the worst part: reptilian snout where a human mouth should be, no ears at all and eyes that were pools of unbroken yellow with slit-pupils, deep and unblinking. Its tail, feathered, too, with that same brilliant plumage, was strapped tightly into the harness to keep it from lashing out.

It looked like a grotesque cross of human, crocodile and parrot.

I had to force myself to focus, to breathe evenly, as Bobby worked in that room barely six feet away from this impossible creature, calmly mopping as if it were a stray dog behind glass.

"I don't care about that," one of the scientists snapped as he entered the lab Bobby was cleaning.

The soldiers had already moved the creature to an empty corner of the room, where they began securing it in a wall-mounted harness, locking its limbs into place with practiced, methodical efficiency. The creature didn't resist, not physically, at least, but when it opened its mouth, a sound like a bird's melodic call twisted through with reptilian hissing filled the room.

It wasn't speech in any traditional sense and yet, the scientist understood it.

"They'd have to find us first," he said calmly, not looking up from the console he was checking. "And I'm telling you, that's impossible."

More song-like notes followed, this time faster, more layered.

"Think what you want," the man replied, voice colder now. "You're staying with us. Until you die."

That line cut through me.

Whatever the creature said in response, I couldn't hear, Bobby had moved out of the room and the thick lab walls were apparently as soundproof as they looked.

For the next hour, she went about her routine with the same quiet precision, cleaning one lab after another in the sprawling hall. Then, finally, she approached a large set of reinforced double doors at the far end. They opened easily with a swipe of the keycard clipped to her belt.

Why did she have so much unrestricted access? Even if her memory was compromised or regularly wiped, that level of clearance made her a serious security risk. Unless—they didn't care. Or they were too confident no one would ever see through her eyes.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The doors opened with a hiss, revealing a long, sterile corridor like a tunnel connecting wings of a military base. Bobby pushed through, checking a few rooms along the way, empty offices, a couple storage closets and a standard restroom. Everything looked normal. Too normal.

Not a single camera was visible. Not in this hallway, not in the main lab. Either they had some advanced hidden surveillance or maybe they relied on something more like Alexandra's approach, indirect perception. If that was the case, a teleportation spell into this zone might actually go undetected. I'd have to test that later.

I was just starting to spiral into possibilities when a sound from Bobby's feed snapped me back to the present.

She had just reached another set of heavy doors at the very end of the corridor. They creaked open and immediately, the muffled but unmistakable noise of fighting hit my ears.

"I can't beat this guy!" the shout came sharp and furious, echoing off the high walls.

The man it came from looked like a nightmare version of Thomas, if Thomas had overdosed on every strength enhancer on the planet. His muscles had muscles, every part of him bulging grotesquely, veins like cables snaking beneath skin stretched too tight. His head was half-swallowed by traps the size of barrels.

Bobby's view passed between him and the woman he was yelling at, a tall, composed figure in a fitted black suit. I recognized her instantly from the intel photos. Alicia. Head of EoT. Likely my target.

She was striking in a hard-to-define way. Tall, six feet at least, with a narrow, angular frame. Her blonde hair was cropped close to the scalp, sleek and businesslike. She wore rimless glasses and her face was handsome rather than pretty, defined more by sharp lines than soft curves. There was a gravity to her, the kind of presence you felt even before she spoke.

The man Roids was raging about stood across from him in the ring and he couldn't have been more different.

He was short, maybe 5'7", lean and wiry, like a coiled spring. He had the constant motion of someone who couldn't sit still if his life depended on it: bouncing on the balls of his feet, shoulders twitching, arms loose like a boxer's. He wore loose black pants, a grey tank top clinging to his sweat-slicked body and was completely barefoot. A faded scar ran down the right side of his face, from just above his eyebrow, slicing cleanly past his eye and ending near the corner of his lip.

He grinned, wild and sharp. Malik's energy came to mind, all jittery unpredictability, but where Malik was thoughtful under the chaos, this guy looked like chaos was his natural state.

"His powers are like cheating!" Roids bellowed. "There's no way, ma'am. No damn way!"

The break-dancer shrugged with a smirk and replied, voice slick and mocking, "Told ya, you're just meat. No brain."

"I have a PhD in biology, moron!"

"Yeah? Still dumb."

Before the shouting could get worse, Alicia lifted a hand just a little and the room obeyed.

"Calm down, both of you."

Her voice wasn't loud, but it cut.

They stood inside a kind of arena, octagonal, caged in floor-to-ceiling glass walls. A training room, clearly. Maybe even a dueling ring. The floor inside was spattered in blood. A lot of it.

None of the men looked injured now… which either meant someone had healed fast, or that the last fight had gone very differently for someone else.

"We'll run it again," Alicia said, voice flat but firm. "You all need to adapt if you expect to progress. There are still stronger people out there."

I noted her tone. Not encouraging. Not nurturing. Just the cold fact of it.

She wasn't interested in making champions.

She was building weapons.

The roided man let out a long, annoyed sigh, then stepped toward the arena wall. To my surprise, the solid-looking glass shimmered and rippled around him like water, parting just enough to let him through before sealing shut again. The break-dancer followed, practically bouncing in place as he entered. His grin hadn't faded.

"Come, Bobby."

The voice came from Alicia, sharp, precise and suddenly focused on her. She was the first to acknowledge Bobby's presence at all. The first to even see her.

"Sit and watch with me. These guys are spectacular."

Bobby hesitated, hands still resting on the cart's handle.

"I'm not really a fan of fighting sports, Alice."

Alice. Not ma'am. Not Miss. Not Director.

Just Alice.

"Still," she said, adjusting her glasses slightly without looking away from the ring, "come sit with me, please."

There was a softness to her tone now. Not warm, not quite, but almost… intimate.

"Okay, sweetie," Bobby replied and made her way to the small seating area beside the ring. She sat next to the head of EoT like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And maybe, to her, it was.

To me, watching from behind a dozen sets of eyes, it was anything but natural.

**********

"Look," Alice said, narrating the scene as casually as if they were watching a documentary, "the big muscular guy is Dr. Gerard Jugger. You know him."

"That's Dr. Jugger?" Bobby blinked, clearly surprised.

"He's using his Domain, Biology. That's how he looks when he fights."

"I didn't know he was a fighter."

Alice tilted her head toward her with a faint smile. "You did, Bobby. You did."

A strange answer. Soft, with the weight of memory behind it.

Down in the arena, Jugger's skin rippled. Veins bulged with eerie bioluminescence, glowing in pulses of harsh, chemical blue. His musculature swelled grotesquely with each breath, pushing the limits of what skin could contain.

"And the other guy," Alice continued, eyes fixed on the ring, "he's new. But powerful. He believes in what we're doing here. Calls himself Rhythm."

There was a beat, not in the air, but in the atmosphere itself. Alice leaned in just slightly.

"Watch him closely, Bobby. Hear him closely."

Then, as if on cue, the bass dropped, thick, bone-deep, unmistakable. Kendrick Lamar's DNA exploded into the air, not from any visible speaker, but from nowhere. From everywhere.

Bobby flinched, glancing up at the ceiling. "Where's that coming from?"

"No speakers, Bobby," Alice said. "That's him. That's Rhythm's Domain—Soundtracks."

The word hit me like a slap. I was so startled I released Elle's identity without thinking, pulling back into myself. I needed to see this, really see it, hear it, without the filter. Elle could take her break early.

I locked the stall door, sat on the closed toilet, leaned back and let my senses flood in through Bobby's borrowed eyes and ears.

If this guy's Domain was what I thought it was…

This fight was about to be epic.

A pulse radiated out across the ring, subtle at first, then growing. Rhythm's body shimmered with overlapping waves of blue and violet light, like his very shadow had synced itself to the beat.

"It's his Manifestation soulmark," Alice said, voice rich with admiration. "He can conjure a soundtrack that fits whatever situation he's in. And that second soulmark, Resonance, it lets him pull power from the song itself. Convert sound into effect."

God, that was cool. Another creative Domain user, but his? It was so perfectly tailored, so intuitively expressive, it made mine feel like a blunt tool. Could I even acquire a Manifestation soulmark myself? That power, the beauty of it… It was like being the soundtrack and the action hero at once.

Suddenly, Rhythm moved. No, glided. A blur of color and motion, so smooth it looked like the world was lagging behind him.

Jugger swung, a brutal haymaker, but hit nothing but air.

Rhythm ducked under with fluid grace, planted a hand on the mat and launched into a one-handed slide, kicking up with both feet. His body flipped like a ribbon caught in wind.

And as the bass dropped, the floor responded.

Mini shockwaves thudded around Jugger's feet, each one synced with the music, destabilizing his stance. He staggered, growling and his skin thickened, warped by rapid biological mutation. Fists the size of anvils tore through the air, wild and thunderous.

Then the track shifted, Warrior by Imagine Dragons. The tempo picked up. Sharper. More precise.

Rhythm wasn't dancing anymore. He was commanding.

He sliced through the air like a conductor with blades instead of a baton. Every drum hit triggered motion, each strike a metered response to the beat. A snare roll? That summoned three phantom jabs that hit Jugger dead in the chest, fast as thought.

Then came the cymbal crash, Rhythm spun left, pivoting hard and drove an elbow into Jugger's shin with a crack that echoed like gunfire.

Jugger bellowed and snatched at him, catching Rhythm's leg mid-jump. His grip tightened, muscles swelling grotesquely, his entire body becoming a fortress of brute strength.

But the bridge hit and Rhythm channeled it.

The ring itself shifted. Almost imperceptibly at first, but then more: timing, balance, movement, all began to follow his rhythm.

He'd changed the tempo of reality.

Jugger threw a punch, fast, impossibly fast, but it landed a beat too late and Rhythm got free.

Another punch, another miss. Every time. Every single time.

Rhythm wasn't dodging anymore. He was predicting. Moving in sync with the music that bent the world to its timing.

And Jugger? He was just another beat too slow in a symphony he didn't understand.

The flow shifted again.

Battlecry by Nujabes.

A softer beat, liquid jazz sharpened by battle drums. Smooth, elegant, dangerous.

Rhythm began to weave. Breaking. Spinning low. Always moving. Never still. His motions echoed with afterimages, blurred shadows of where he had been, like time itself was lagging behind him, trying to catch up.

Jugger, in contrast, raged like a wild beast. A stampeding bull in a maze of mirrors. One hit from him, just one, would end it, crack bones, pulp organs. But Rhythm slipped through each swing like smoke in sunlight. Feint upon feint, his footwork carving intricate patterns in the air, lines that stayed, etched into space by that shimmering shadowlight.

Then Jugger glowed, a sickly green flare of chemical fury and charged like a freight train.

Rhythm waited.

Just before impact, in perfect sync with the drop, he slammed a bass pulse from the track into the floor. The echo rebounded up like thunder from the earth, slamming into Jugger's core with the force of a cannon blast. The brute was launched backward, crashing through the beat, gasping.

The song shifted again.

X Gon' Give It to Ya.

Rhythm smirked.

The track hit like a sledgehammer. Every beat was a blow from nowhere, fists of force materializing out of sound and striking Jugger from angles he couldn't brace for. His overgrown muscles caved, twitching under invisible strikes.

Rhythm leapt, flipping into a handstand. Both legs glowed with violet energy. Time twisted. Slowed.

Jugger wound back, one final punch, enough to crater steel, but it was too late.

The shadowlight in the air, echoes of Rhythm's past motion, merged. One from the ground, one from behind. They snapped together at the precise moment his heel came down.

The kick connected.

And the chorus exploded.

A shockwave of light and sound ripped outward, detonating in violet brilliance. Jugger flew backward, a ragdoll torn from gravity. He crashed into the transparent hexagon wall with a thunderous crack, then slid down, leaving a long red smear.

He groaned, breath ragged, muscles spasming and already healing, strands of bio-thread knitting like worms, crawling over open flesh. But it was reflex, not will.

Jugger collapsed.

Unconscious.

The ring fell silent. Except for the fading beat.

Rhythm dropped to his feet. Calm. Smiling. Breathing in sync with the last bar.

Oh Reality, how I wanted to face that guy. To beat him, to break his rhythm with my own. But it wasn't time yet.

I chuckled to myself at the thought of Penrose getting hold of that Domain, Soundtracks. What kind of chaos would he unleash? What kind of music does that man even listen to? With a breath, I let go. Become Elle—I thought, fading to the background again.

"This was very brutal, Alice," Bobby said, rising to her feet.

"I'll clean up the mess, alright?"

"Yes, do that. After you're done with the arena, come to my office. That'll be all for tonight," Alice said.

Bobby spent the next two hours scrubbing away blood, viscera and the echoes of Domain-powered violence. The two fighters and Alice left her alone eventually. I finished my shift as well and drifted into the social room to eat, to pass time, to wait.

When Bobby was done, she packed her cart and returned down the corridor, to one of the offices she'd already cleaned. Alice was waiting inside.

"I'm ready, Alice."

"Good, good. Thank you," Alice said, stepping closer. Her movements had a tension to them, like steel under silk.

And then she struck.

The blade was long, thin, a stiletto designed for surgical murder. It slid straight into Bobby's eye.

I flinched. Not from fear, but from the proximity. My hidden eye was nearly aligned with the impact. A jolt of instinct.

Bobby choked on a wet breath, her body twitching as life faded like a light dimming. Alice caught her gently, like a mother catching a falling child.

Then came the glow.

Shadowlight, Alice's Domain, bloomed in hues of soft gold and orange, rippling outward like quiet fireflies, seeping into Bobby's body.

A few seconds passed.

Then Bobby moved.

She opened her eyes, or what was left of them and looked at Alice.

Alice smiled. Tender. Grateful.

"You're done for tonight, Bobby. Thank you."

"Already?" Bobby asked, her voice strange. Hollow.

"Yes," Alice said. Bobby nodded and walked away, her stride smooth, too smooth. Not a glance to the side. Not a twitch of confusion. Just one straight path through the lab, to the elevator.

She rode it up.

Came back into the same room where I sat, waiting. She looked tired, but whole.

As she entered my aura, I focused on the headband and removed my Authority. The senses, the remote feeds, vanished. My perception collapsed inward to just my own body and the feeds from around Jason.

"Hello Bobby," I said softly. "How was your day?"

She looked at me. Her eyes struggled for meaning.

"Uhm… I think… it was fine?" Her words were slow. Uncertain.

"Anything interesting happen?"

"Uhm… dear…" she said, blinking, her voice distant, fading, "nothing ever happens… on my watch…"

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