Cammy White: Delta Red by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Cammy-White-Delta-Red-1271777882#image-1

Cammy White: Delta Red ANIMATION

Echo of the Red Beret

When I slit the canvas that had muffled her for months, the light that spilled into the crate did not fall where it should. It slid along wrong planes, like water over a mirror polished wrong, and the face that turned toward me wore my bones with uncanny generosity and cruelty.

The girl in the crate—because that was what the researchers had still insisted on calling her—looked like elegance hacked at the joints. Her hair wore my braids as though borrowed; her beret sat cocked at the same jaunty tilt that had once meant mission-readiness and now tasted like a ritual relic. But her smile was an engineered cove, an inlet cut into flesh by someone who had practiced the angles of my mouth on a mannequin and then learned to angle it more slowly, as if performing a charm for an audience that was no longer human.

"You're late, Cammy," she said.

Her voice was thin as thread and thick as oil at once. My name in her mouth had the cadence of a secret liturgy. I should have felt triumph—the capture had been mine. The Shadaloo cell we had hunted for weeks should have given up this mistake to me like a confession. Instead, heat rose to the back of my throat, a memory of pain and of a child's lullaby I hadn't sung in years.

"Don't call me that," I said.

She laughed, and it sounded exactly like me three days before dawn, the old laugh that came from the bottom of the ribs when training succeeded. She stepped out of the crate the way a shadow steps out of another shadow, all motion at the wrong speed. Her limbs were too limber, joints bending the way a marionette might when strings are being tugged by someone with bad taste for beauty.

"You always were prickly," she said. "Dolls are meant to be given strings, not to hold them. They made me hold them anyway."

I kept my hands at my sides because any twitch could be a confession. My mission was to interrogate, to destroy what I had to and leave no room for feeling. The Confederation had closed the case files on my old life. This Shadaloo cell had been sloppy—crudely transcribing the programs they’d stolen from other labs, mixing DNA they didn't understand with memory-scripts of my own. If they were proud of that, then arrogance had bloodied their teeth.

"I was ordered to bring you in," I said. "You are an experiment. You have no ledger here. Who—"

"—whoever wrote me into being liked the way you walked," she said, sliding closer. The hem of her uniform whispered against concrete. "They wanted a mirror that could steal everything from you and owe them nothing. But look." She tilted her head and let light pass over her cheekbone. "They improvised."

There was a swell of insects somewhere in the old warehouse, a hidden coil of summers gone stale. Behind her, a table of surgical lights leaned like the ribs of a ruined boat. The lab's hum was the last civilized thing in the room, a refrigerator lullaby. Her eyes, though, were the grievance. They matched mine in color but not in the way they measured the world. Mine were precise; hers echoed like a word heard across a canyon and repeated wrongly.

"Who are you?" I asked, and the question was a fingertip on a wound.

She came close enough that I could see the hairline stitchwork at the base of her skull, a vertical seam that tried to hide itself in a curl. "Names are choices," she said. "They called me Project Sable. They called me Camellia. I like—" she touched my beret, fingers trailing like a lover who knows the rhythm of a wrist— "—I like fewer syllables. Call me 'Cammie.'"

The name made my skin prickle. If I struck her now, it would be the same as striking a mirror. But this was no mirror; it was a thing that learned how to pull at memory and find the loose threads. Shadaloo's experiments had been designed to domesticate identity, to strip away what made people inconvenient. The Dolls were meant to be obedient. I had escaped that. She had been made to mimic escape with practiced tenderness.

"You think I'll obey you," I said. I moved my head, gauging a route to the door. Her gaze followed, not with surprise but with an intimacy that suggested she had rehearsed my curve, catalogued my reflexes. "You think you can lure me."

She tilted her chin, a small, theatrical movement like the closing of a book. "Lure? Oh, Cammy. The only thing I want to lure is truth. And maybe your forgiveness."

It was the last word that mattered. Forgiveness was currenc
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