sunnie

The neon hum of the pit still rang in their ears as they ran.

Behind them, the wet, final crunch of Diko’s body echoed—followed by the guttural, animal roar of Khanivore finishing the job. The crowd had gone feral, but Ivina, Wes, and the others didn’t stay to watch.

They’d seen enough.

“Move!” Wes barked, vaulting a low barrier. “Before cleanup drones sweep!”

Ivina didn’t answer. Her eyes were locked on the crumpled shape near the edge of the arena—the human body. Sonn—Sunnie’s real body. Broken. Forgotten. Disposable.

“Wait.” Ivina skidded to a stop.

Wes groaned. “You’re kidding—”

“She’s still in there,” Ivina snapped. “Not in there—but that body matters. It’s hers.”

A beat. Then Wes exhaled sharply. “Thirty seconds.”

They moved fast. Ivina dropped beside the corpse, trying not to look too closely at the damage. Blood. Too much of it. Bone where bone shouldn’t be.

“God…” she muttered.

“Focus,” Wes said, already pulling a compact extractor from his kit.

They worked in silence—efficient, practiced. A sample. Then another. Backup redundancy. No mistakes.

From the arena, Khanivore roared again—louder this time, closer.

“That’s our cue,” Wes said.

Ivina sealed the vial, clutching it tight. “We’re not leaving her like this.”

“We’re not,” he said, grabbing her arm. “We’re bringing her back.”

Months Later

The lab smelled sterile—too clean, too quiet.

Ivina stood behind the glass, arms crossed, staring at the body suspended in the tank.

Sunnie.

Not broken. Not discarded.

Whole.

“Growth cycle complete,” Wes said from behind her, tapping through layers of data on his tablet. “Neural lattice stable. No rejection.”

Ivina didn’t move. “Say it.”

Wes smirked faintly. “Fine. We did it.”

Inside the tank, the cloned body drifted, pale and still—but perfect. Along her spine, barely visible beneath the skin, three faint lines marked the implants.

“Three nodes,” Wes continued. “Motor control, sensory feedback, and override sync. She won’t just pilot this body—she’ll be in it.”

Ivina finally allowed herself a small smile. “About time she had a choice.”

Later

Khanivore shifted restlessly in its containment rig, muscles coiling under armored flesh.

Sunnie was awake.

“I hate waiting,” her voice crackled through the speakers, distorted but unmistakably hers.

“You’ve waited years,” Ivina said, leaning against the console. “You can handle five more minutes.”

“Five minutes is five minutes too long.”

Wes chuckled. “Same Sunnie.”

Before Ivina could respond, an alert flashed across the room.

Incoming call.

She frowned. “Who the hell—?”

Wes had already grabbed the tablet. “Unknown hospital network… encrypted relay… hang on…”

He tapped.

A message unfolded—clinical, detached.

PATIENT RECOVERY: COMA TERMINATION. SUBJECT AWAKE. REQUESTING NEXT OF KIN / CONTACTS.

Ivina froze.

“No way…” she whispered.

Sunnie’s voice sharpened instantly. “What is it?”

Wes looked up, something uncharacteristically serious in his expression. “Your friend.”

Silence.

Heavy. Electric.

“The one from before?” Ivina asked softly.

Sunnie didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was quieter—dangerously so.

“he should be dead.”

“he's not,” Wes said. “he just woke up.”

Another pause.

Then:

“Get me out of this thing.”

Ivina turned to the tank. “We were going to run more tests—”

“Now.”

Wes was already moving. “On it.”

He brought up the transfer interface, fingers flying across the screen. “Linking Khanivore neural core… syncing with implant array… stabilizing—”

The room dimmed slightly as power rerouted.

Inside the tank, the cloned body twitched.

“Connection established,” Wes said. “Sunnie, when I hit this, there’s no half-measure. You’re fully transferring.”

“Do it.”

He hesitated for half a second—then tapped.

“Transfer initiated.”

Khanivore let out a low, echoing growl as the neural bridge activated.

In the tank—

Sunnie’s body jerked.

Once.

Twice.

Then her eyes snapped open.

She gasped—air flooding lungs that hadn’t breathed in years.

Ivina stepped forward instinctively. “Sunnie?”

The body convulsed slightly, hands clenching, muscles remembering motion.

Then—

Stillness.

A slow inhale.

And Sunnie spoke, this time not through speakers, but with her own voice—raw, unfiltered.

“…that feels weird.”

Wes let out a breath. “I’ll take ‘weird’ over ‘catastrophic neural rejection.’”

Sunnie looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers like someone rediscovering gravity.

“…I’m back,” she said.

Ivina smiled. “Yeah. You are.”

Sunnie looked up, eyes sharpening.

“Hospital,” she said. “Now.”

The city lights blurred past as their transport cut through the night.

No arena.

No chains.

No monsters.

Just unfinished history.

And for the first time in a long time—

Sunnie was going to face it as herself With Sonnie’s consciousness completely severed from the beast and routed into the clone, Khanivore’s massive, bio-mechanical body went entirely limp. The bioluminescent markings along her armored hide faded into a dull, cold gray, and her razor-sharp tail slumped lifelessly into the shadows of the holding bay.

The hospital discharge process had been... complicated.

Not because Josh was difficult.

Because nobody could explain why a man who had spent years in a coma was insisting that the first people he wanted to see weren't family members, doctors, or therapists.

It was Sunnie.

The ride back was quiet.

Josh sat in the passenger seat of Wes's transport van, staring out the window as neon lights reflected across the glass.

they soon made it back to the hideout

Wes and Ivinia carefully helped Josh out of the van, settling him into a heavy leather armchair in the center of the main workshop. The room was cluttered with monitors, tools, and the faint, rhythmic pulse of heavy machinery. Josh looked around, his voice a raspy, fragile whisper after years of disuse.

"Sonnie...?" he breathed, his eyes locking onto her. He looked down at his own trembling hands, then back up at her unblemished face. "They... they told me you were dead. The night at the docks... I tried to stop them, but everything went black. Where are we? What is this place?"

Sonnie stepped forward, kneeling down right in front of his chair so they were at eye level. She reached out, taking his hand. Her grip was warm, solid, and undeniably real.

"I'm here, Josh. It's really me," Sonnie said softly, her voice carrying a weight that hadn't been there when they were kids. "But a lot has changed. You've been in a coma for years. And the girl you knew... the body you saw get broken... it didn't survive."

Josh frowned, his brow furrowing in deep confusion. "What do you mean? You're sitting right here."

"Wes, bring up the auxiliary power," Sonnie ordered quietly.

With a low hum, the heavy blast doors at the back of the workshop slid open, revealing the massive, darkened containment bay. The floodlights flickered on one by one, illuminating the towering, terrifying form of Khanivore resting in her harness.

Josh gasped, instinctively flinching back into the chair, his eyes wide with sheer terror at the sight of the apex bio-weapon. "What the hell is that thing?!"

"That's me," Sonnie said directly, her tone unwavering. "Those bastards didn't just beat me, Josh. They tore my body apart. They thought they left me a broken, brain-dead toy. But Wes and Ivinia... they found a way to save me. They took my mind—my actual consciousness, my soul, everything—and they permanently wired it into her. My original human body was just a puppet I operated from inside that beast's skull so I could fight in the underground arenas."

She stood up, walking over to the glass pod she had stepped out of just an hour ago.

"This body I'm using right now? It's a clone. We grew it from what was left of my original flesh," she explained, pointing to the three silver neural ports embedded along the base of her neck. "Wes built these implants into my new spine. It works like a radio frequency."

To demonstrate, she looked over at Wes, who was already holding his tablet. "Show him, Wes. Just a quick sec."

"Sinking the link," Wes murmured, tapping the interface.

Instantly, Sonnie’s cloned body went entirely rigid, her eyes rolling back as her consciousness was yanked away. At the exact same microsecond, Khanivore’s massive head snapped up. The beast's eyes flared with a piercing, brilliant blue light, and her heavy, armored tail whipped through the air with terrifying precision, stopping just inches from the containment glass. The raw, indomitable spirit of Sonnie radiated from the monster's gaze.

Josh stared in absolute awe, his breath catching in his throat as he realized the monster wasn't looking at him as prey—it was looking at him with the exact same protective intensity Sonnie always had.

A second later, Wes tapped the tablet again, breaking the loop. Khanivore’s body slumped back into its lifeless harness, and Sonnie gasped, blinking rapidly as her mind slammed back into her human form. She steadied herself against the pod, looking back at Josh with a faint, weary smile.

"I had to become a monster to survive, Josh," Sonnie said, walking back over to him. "And I've been fighting every single night to make the people who did this to us pay. But now you're awake. And we're going to make sure they can never touch either of us again." * she then gives a nod to wes to put her back in khanivore for the night before ivina and wes go home for the night*

She stood up, rolling her shoulders to loosen the lingering tension in her cloned muscles, and turned toward the tech console. She caught Wes’s eye and gave him a firm, definitive nod.

"Alright, let's put me back on ice for the night," Sonnie said.

"You got it," Wes replied, tapping his tablet to prep the transfer protocols. "The clone's vitals are perfectly stable, so she’ll just go into standard stasis. Ivinia, lock down the primary atmospheric feeds."

Ivinia nodded, walking over to help Sonnie step back into the bio-regeneration capsule. As the glass door slid shut around her, Sonnie closed her eyes, letting out one final human breath.

Wes tapped the command button on his screen.

The clone body instantly went slack, suspended safely within the nutrient fluid. A heartbeat later, the massive, armored form of Khanivore shuddered to life in the adjacent bay. The bioluminescent rings along her sleek, predatory hide flared into a brilliant, electric blue. Khanivore's heavy head lowered, her intelligent, piercing eyes looking through the thick observation glass at her friends.

"Link is solid. Tracking at one hundred percent," Wes announced, shutting down the peripheral monitors and grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair. He walked over to Josh's armchair, offering the young man a hand up. "Come on, man. Let's get you set up in your quarters. It's been a hell of a day."

Ivinia grabbed her bag, walking over to the glass to look up at the towering bio-weapon. "We're heading out for the night, Sonnie. The automated base defenses are active, and you've got full control of the internal cameras. See you in the morning."

sonnie nods "see you sunnie replied her voice coming out of 2 speakers on her containment cell as while shes in khenivore shes unable to speak otherwise*