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She gestures vaguely at herself. "The changes. The things they put in us to make us better."

A chill runs through me. "Who put them in you, Eden?"

"The doctors. The ones who help us survive outside." She frowns slightly. "Didn't they tell you about yours?"

I struggle to maintain my composure. "No, they didn't. Can you tell me more?"

Eden studies me for a long moment, then sighs with aweariness no child should possess. "There are different kinds. Mine help me see in the dark and climb the cliffs where we live. Yours..." She sniffs again. "Yours are deeper. They're still waking up."

My heart pounds so loudly I'm sure she can hear it. This child—thisSplinterchild—is confirming suspicions I've barely allowed myself to consider: that the anomalies appearing in my system might be deliberate modifications, not malfunctions.

"Why are you here, Eden? Inside the arcology?"

Her expression clouds. "They said I needed to find someone. That I'd know them when I found them." She looks at me intently. "But it's not you. You're like me, but you're not who I'm looking for."

Before I can ask more questions, Eden's attention shifts to something beyond me. I turn to see what she's looking at, but there's nothing there, just the blank wall of the chamber.

"They're coming back soon," she says with certainty. "I need to rest."

With that, she lies down and closes her eyes, effectively ending our conversation. I sit beside her bed, mind racing with implications and possibilities. If she's right—if I do have some kind of genetic modifications that are "waking up"—then everything I thought I knew about myself, about my role as a Sentinel, about Unity itself, is built on lies.

And what about Trent? His interaction with Eden revealed a side of him I'd glimpsed but never fully seen—compassion and a moral framework that exists independent of Unity's protocols. His words to her weren't just cover; they carried the weight of genuine belief.

Because that's what people should do. Protect each other. Even when they're different.

Hours pass as I watch over Eden, who sleeps with the deep exhaustion of someone who has endured too much for her young age. I try to imagine the world outside as she seesit—not a wasteland but simply "different," a place where her modifications aren't aberrations but adaptations, gifts that help her survive.

Everything Unity has taught us about the Splinters—that they're monstrous, unstable, a threat to human purity—seems impossible to reconcile with this small, vulnerable child sleeping before me.

The chamber door slides open quietly, and Trent slips in, his movements silent and efficient. He checks the corridor before sealing the door behind him.

"Kaplan?" I ask quietly.

"Coordinating with the other sympathizers. We have approximately twenty minutes." He moves to my side, eyes on the sleeping child. "She identified me as a Sentinel."

"She identified me as a Splinter," I counter, my voice barely above a whisper. "Or something like it."

Trent's eyes shift to mine, intense and focused. "Explain."

I recount my conversation with Eden, her insistence that I have "sleeping patterns" similar to hers, the implication that my genetic anomalies might be deliberate modifications rather than random mutations.

"You believe her?" Trent asks, his voice carefully neutral.

"I don't know what to believe anymore." I look down at my hands, half-expecting to see some visible sign of the changes occurring within me. "But it would explain the enhancement reactions, the sensory fluctuations, the abnormal neural patterns."

Trent is silent for a long moment, processing this information with his usual thoroughness. "If you do have adaptive modifications, and they're only now activating..."

"Then I'm exactly what we've been trained to hunt," I finish for him, the weight of this realization pressing down on me. "A Splinter infiltrator inside Unity."

Except I have no memory of infiltration, no sense of another life before the one I've lived as a Sentinel. Justfragments of dreams that feel increasingly like memories—a research facility, a woman named Elara, something about adaptive genetics.

"That's not the only possibility," Trent says, more gently than I've ever heard him speak. "The sympathizer network isn't just helping Splinters enter Unity. They're also identifying and assisting citizens with spontaneous genetic adaptations."

I look up at him sharply. "The anomalies Marlow mentioned."

He nods. "What if these modifications aren't external contamination but internal evolution? What if some Unity citizens are naturally developing adaptations despite Unity's genetic stability protocols?"

The implication is staggering. If true, it means Unity's entire premise—that genetic purity can be maintained through controlled environments—is fundamentally flawed. That change and adaptation are inevitable, even inside their perfectly regulated arcologies.