Her eyes are owl-wide and her lips are always parted, as if she's taking in too much and has to let the excess fall out with her breaths. Even in the snow, her skin is flushed from the fire inside.

When you caught glimpses of her in the labs, she was always shrinking into herself, mouth pinched and eyes glassy. "Stay away from her," Cid told you. "She's not like you."

She's like a stranger wearing a stolen skin, scrubbed clean of ghosts. It's hard to visualize her face reshaped by despair or her voice pitched low and broken. When she looks at you, there's no flicker of recognition, only the same desperate curiosity with which she regards all the world.

"I'm not like you," she replied, when you stole a moment to ask her. "I was born like this."

"Then we are alike," you insisted. "They made me like you."

She stared at you, mouth tight and eyes tired. "I don't think they'd agree," she said, and you couldn't argue; only one of you was locked up.

Your twist of irony, the bitterness in your tone—all of it flows in and out of her without making an impression. There's nothing left for your hooks to catch. This time you're the one to deny her symmetry.

You'd seen her depressed, hurt, resigned, and withdrawn, but never frightened. Her distress struck something inside you inside like a sudden thaw.

"He wants to take my mind away." Sobs shook her voice. "He wants to erase me. Please—please—"

You squeezed her hand, which burned like a live coal, and brushed your lips against the fever-heat of her forehead. "I'll find a way to stop it," you whispered, and couldn't.

Nervous hope flutters in her voice; for an instant she is almost familiar. "Have you... loved anyone?"

When you saw her again, she was gone.