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Today, we are getting inside the head of Hec’ten, one of Lysanders squad leaders. Hec is an ex-military rabbit with a bit of a chip on his shoulder over his role amongst the other squad leaders. Feeling, as rabbits have often felt, that he has been sidelined, with less faith given to him, and less agency to work as he would wish. For a rabbit, he is more serious than most, but still retains a bit of that lighter touch that typifies a person who can sense the strings.
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Chapter 8 - Hec’ten - Rabbit - Male - Testimonial.
Steam was still hissing, and sirens were still ringing out their alarm in the facility, but things were calming down. The creaking and groaning of the pipes wound down. Plumes of hot, searing steam began to calm, wither, and slowly retreat into the crevices from which they had been born. The air I was tugging into my lungs was cooling down with each gasp, and my fur was slick with condensation that had beaded all over me in little clumps.
I lay on my back next to Lys, my new commander. He was kneeling with his head in his hands, shaking, whilst I was splayed out, staring up at the distant ceiling above, wondering if it was an illusion through which the heavens would reveal themselves to me. The sound of my own voice shouting out the countdown was still bouncing around my brain as clearly as if it had just been blasted into the room through the PA system. Numbers bounced off pipes and metal, guiding us down into that moment when it could have all ended. Had it all ended?
The system was back online for sure. Everything around me was so incredibly clear. My brain seemed to be able to cover every sense I possessed with its awareness. My breathing was as vital as a dip in freezing water and regulated with precision. The cast of the light in the water facility was vivid; every detail of the immediate environment was apparent. Even the smell of acrid steam and industrial lubricant was like incense, with each scent particle catalogued like tactical data. My nose twitched a little, perceiving the curls of the aromas as they rose in the air around me. The strings were clearly felt, as real and tangible as the floor beneath my paws, and far more emotional. The energies of the assembled people were like signal vectors outside the facility. Mapping them to their strings was suddenly as easy as looking at a radar readout. They were waiting with bated breath to see if we would emerge or if they would suddenly hear a large boom. My situational awareness was at peak efficiency. I regarded it as a soldier, and I regarded it as a rabbit. My inner soldier conceded to the rabbit.
It was all so... beautiful.
I started to laugh a little at the absurdity of it. The brilliance that had come to me in lieu of not being blown up by a water pipe was infectious. The laughter rushed through me, and even the pain in my right hand paw couldn’t dampen it.
“Is nearly dying always this euphoric?”
Catching my words, Lys smiled and then laughed too.
“There isn’t much that can make you feel more alive.”
It was a strange laugh; it sounded odd coming from the man that I had been getting to know. It was a raw laugh, like a baby’s laugh, but sized up to fit the shape of an adult human. Despite that, it was exactly how I felt, and I laughed with him. For a fleeting moment, our ranks seemed to dissolve. This sudden dissolving of the hierarchy was like being at my old barracks again. We were connecting over this, not as a human and a rabbit. Just as two soldiers.
As I rolled and chuckled on the concrete floor, I was sharply reminded of that crunch I had heard earlier when we had been pushing against the valve release. When I lifted my front paw, it was disjointed and painful. A break in one of my legs. I really had given the strings quite a pull, ignoring all my training to exert that little extra force, a tactical necessity given the situation. Self-sacrifice for the greater good. It was nothing I couldn’t handle, but it was still not ideal. It would put me out of action for a few weeks while I rested it.
But I didn’t want to rest. I was suddenly keen for more. It was a feeling I hadn’t had in years: excitement. I wanted to work!
I sighed and tilted my head back at the irony of being a sudden hero, only to find that I would be forced to ‘rest up’.
That was when I saw it. From my position on the floor below the pipes, strange markings were scratched into the underside of the valve. The etchings were completely out of eyeshot of literally anyone, it was a miracle I had even seen it. What could have possessed them…. There were scorch marks too, all over the underside of the socket where the wheel stem entered into the main valve housing. Not only scorch marks, but clear signs of welding. The gravity of that sight slowly dawned on me.
No wonder we had a hard time turning the wheel; it was not meant to be turned by someone’s design. But whose design? Had someone purposefully started this chain reaction?
“Lys, when you have finished chuckling to yourself, come lie here next to me and take a look at this” I was temporarily shocked at my using his personal name.
Lys looked at me quizzically, sensing the shift in my tone of voice, and his laughter stopped almost immediately.
The space was small, but with a bit of manoeuvring, he lowered himself down and slid his head below the valve beside mine. It didn’t take him long to notice what I had seen as well. He touched it gently, feeling the metal underside where the weld had clamped it closed. ‘It looks new,’ he muttered to himself.
“What do the letters say?” I asked sheepishly. My grasp of their alphabet was well enough, but this handwritten etching was drawn up in a type of handwriting I couldn’t understand. Lys stared at the odd words.
“It says, ‘the fairy queen,” He said nothing more and just stared at it for a long moment. “No one can know about this yet, I will need to investigate it, and the perpetrator will be much easier to manipulate into revealing themselves if they believe they have not been discovered”.
I nodded. A simple, mechanical movement of the head, but it felt like rusted cogs.
To hide a truth, to actively bury it in the dark, went entirely against my nature. A secret is a jagged, discordant knot in the strings. It felt physically wrong to stand over the evidence of a crime and agree to mute its existence. We were supposed to be a team. A unit that worked together.
Lying on the sweltering concrete, for a moment, we had been equals laughing in the face of death. I was a fool, allowing myself to hope that this human might be different. That perhaps, down here in the heat and the dirt, we were forging a genuine partnership built on shared reality, rather than the usual human diet of shadows, half-truths, and withheld hands.
But as Lysander looked at me, his eyes already calculating, the warmth of that shared survival evaporated from my chest like the steam around us. My training kicked in, a heavy, familiar burden settling over my shoulders. He was the commander. I was the asset. The tool. The Rabbit.
Orders are orders, I reminded myself bitterly, the phrase tasting like ash. And yet, despite myself, I wanted to believe things could be better. Instead I sank back into myself, forcibly withdrawing the vulnerable, helpful part of me that had just started to unfurl toward him.
Seeking a comfort I could no longer find in my new commander, I retreated into my strings, letting their vast, indifferent hum wash over the sudden, sharp sting of disappointment.
The anticipation of our success from the amassed outside was growing; I could feel the strings of some of my rabbit unit waiting with the rest. I had trained them to stay tuned in to the strings at a subtle level so that we could project basic patterns to each other over longer distances. I closed my eyes and radiated calm and safety, my string slowed and pulsed with gentle rhythms of sleep and comfort. Code for safety. A string sensation we all learn from young when our mothers would put us to bed. My unit responded in kind, a signal received, they knew we were safe.
“Sir, I have communicated to my squad outside. They will be reporting that we are safe and rallying. We should go and help the people who were caught in the initial blast.”
Lys looked at me as if I were joking. “I did not hear you speak?” He asked.
“We… we have a method that is not as well known to humans. I will explain another time…” Now, am I the one being duplicitous? I wondered. No, I hadn’t outright hidden anything, just deferred the truth. Not quite an eye for an eye.
Getting up, Lys started to regain his command-like posture and began shuffling back towards the pipes through which we had come. He touched the one nearest, gently at first to test its heat. Finding it cooler, he dropped the insulative material he had brought with him, able now to get through without the protection.
“You are quite right, of course, we have people to help.
***
A swift hour later, and I was in the main entrance hall of the water reclamation facility, having my arm treated. The nurse was wrapping it up in a splint, pending X-rays at the nearest medical bay.
Lys, meanwhile, was overseeing the medical response with his usual gravitas. He acted like a gravity well, where authority seemed to naturally orbit him, like a star. It made me wonder, did authority naturally cling to him because he believed himself to be a star, or was he inherently a gifted leader, and so gravity was born of his talents? I could not figure it out, at least not yet, not while there were so many people bustling to and from his presence. He checked in on the work on the two other injured engineers once I had been patched up.
They had both been caught up in that first blast. One seemed well enough, minus a few cracked ribs and minor breaks. The second had been less fortunate, being slammed almost headfirst into a metal railing. The engineer had been bleeding for a while and seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness. The one moment I saw them awake, they seemed heavily concussed. The doctors on site were stabilising her when Kaspa arrived to deliver his report.
General Lysander turned his attention to his second-in-command, extending an expectant hand. “Kaspa. The pad.”
Kaspa, who had been coordinating the perimeter with crisp efficiency, reached down to his tactical pouch. I was naturally attuned to the ambient anxiety of the room, a buzzing wasps nest as if heard from a distance, but the moment Kaspa’s hand hit empty fabric, his string snapped taut with a sudden, deafening panic.
“Sir...” Kaspa patted himself down, his rigid military bearing dissolving into frantic, jerky movements. He looked around the floor as if the metal grating might have swallowed it. “It’s gone. I had it secured right before the blast.”
“Gone?” Lysander declared. His voice didn’t rise, but the air around him seemed to drop in temperature.
“Someone must have bumped me on the gangway,” Kaspa pleaded, his polished English composure entirely stripped away. “In the panic... the engineers running out...”
Lys gave his order over the security team’s radios.
“All units, please initiate the lockdown protocol. We have a potential security breach. No one in or out until I say.”
Dr. Hedghe, who had been lingering to oversee the medical transport, let out a sharp, theatrical scoff. Through the strings, I felt his tangled, chaotic energy spike with sudden, predatory delight.
“Bumped?” Hedghe’s voice dripped with condescension. “A seasoned Lieutenant General, bested by a terrified group of tourists in a cloud of steam? Tell me, Kaspa, is it not more likely you simply dropped it in your terror?”
Kaspa’s face flushed a deep, humiliated red. “I know how to secure my gear, Doctor.”
“Clearly,” Hedghe sneered, gesturing a long, pale finger at Kaspa’s empty hip.
I watched Lysander. The human instinct to punish failure was hovering heavy in the air, but Lysander was a tactician. He didn’t dress down his subordinate in front of a rival.
“Enough,” Lysander cut in, his voice a rolling boulder that silenced them both. He looked at Kaspa, offering a strict, cold lifeline. “Lieutenant General, take a squad. Trace the evacuation route. Find it.”
Dr Hedghe hid a thinly veiled sneer; his own energy was such a tangled mess that it was hard to know what he was feeling. Not someone I would like to cross in combat, where the strings could often give me an edge.
“Mr Tanner,” Hedghe continued. “I implore you to release the two injured parties to the medical team at once, lockdown or no. There is no situation that should take precedence over the health of these two engineers under my jurisdiction.”
The General seemed not to mind him for a moment while he spoke through the radio. The show of nonchalance was expert, and it seemed to wind Dr Hedghe up immensely. Eventually he regarded his counterpart.
“Do not alarm yourself ‘MR’ Hedghe.” His demeanour remained stoic, but there was a subtle change in the General’s string, a slight hint of satisfaction. “I will be letting the medical staff remove the wounded from the site under careful supervision.” He looked at the two engineers and then at me. I got a sudden jolt; there was no way I was leaving.
“Sir, I request the leave to remain and see out this security breach.”
Lysander held my gaze for a fraction of a second, registering my disjointed paw. Was it a disqualifier? Thankfully, he seemed to see it only as an acceptable tactical penalty. He gave a single, curt nod. You will help me set up a secure evacuation of these injured personnel.” I was close to sighing, relegated again to menial tasks. But just as soon as I had thought it, he leaned in close.
“This is no coincidence, given what we have seen, I want you to surveil the crowd quietly while you work, get your team looking for anyone out of place.”
I nodded and gently hopped off the bench where I had been getting attended to. “Sir, my squad and I will start a sweep of all the people. We have ways of not being noticed.”
Lys looked at me again with those quizzical eyes, joining the dots from my comment before. His string pulsed gently with curiosity. My stomach clenched. Revealing this secret would be a huge step in trusting him. Did I trust him? But before I could say anything more, he had started organising the quarantine zone and coordinating the search.
Kaspa, Rez and a few members of my own personal squad headed up the data pad search. Meanwhile, the General and I set up the quarantine zone to ensure the engineers could be safely taken to the medical bay without anyone else leaving. As I sat on a nearby crate supervising, I leaned one ear to the conversation between Kaspa and Rez as they marched off into the facility again. It was a testament to how much I had shifted from near-euphoria to becoming inward-facing and avoidant. Normally, the back and forth between those two was always enough to bring a tap to my foot, but in this instance, it barely made my whiskers twitch.
Their familiar dynamic, Kaspa’s rigid, oblivious panic and Rez’s deflection through sharp humour and apparent flirting, was a loud, discordant hum in the strings. I logged their emotional signatures as the baseline, tuning them out so I could sweep the rest of the atrium for anomalies.
I let them go and allowed my attention to sit back on the room at large, both with my eyes and ears, as well as with the strings. Looking for anyone behaving out of the ordinary. Other members of my squad were doing the same from various positions around the atrium. A sharp, nearby string-vibration snapped my attention. Curiosity, directed squarely at me. There was a pair of eyes on me.
“Your inquisitiveness is quite loud, you know!”
My eyes settled on a smaller female rabbit, a medical scanner wrapped with Velcro around her paw.
“Yes, you.” She said pointedly at me, now that she had collected my gaze. “Are you always so inquisitive, or is this just a habit you have picked up for your work?”
“You noticed, huh?” She didn’t wait for permission, hopping up onto the crate and stepping close to adjust the splint on my arm. As she worked, her eyes flicked to my face, catching my sweeping gaze.
“You’re casting a net over the whole room,” she murmured, her voice dropping underneath the ambient noise of the lockdown. “Are you always this nosy, or is it just the uniform?”
I bristled, a confusing mix of tactical annoyance and sudden, undeniable warmth spreading through my chest. “I am calibrating. A useful skill when you need to understand intentions hidden beneath human facades.”
She leaned in closer, tightening a strap. “For someone so keen to listen, you don’t talk much.”
“Listening for the quiet that I can only suppose exists in the spaces between your constant chatter.” I smiled inwardly to myself. The dance had begun. Consequently, she nipped me. “Ow!” I looked at her, half mockingly exaggerating the pain. It hadn’t been a hard nip, though, and her body language was still amenable. The air between us crackled, a sudden, sharp connection in a room full of chaos. But before the dance could continue, Lysander strode back into view making a beeline for Dr Thorne.
She looked at me inquisitively then. Examining the slight deflation of my chest and the drooping of my head, she followed it across the room to where Lysander stood, deep in conversation. Thankfully, she hopped down off the crate then, at least having the good sense to make it seem as though she had not been distracting me.
“I’ve often wondered how you all do it. How do you manage to be so obedient in your job? Especially when it is humans at the top. They are so...”
Kaspa and Rez bustled over to the general, looking accomplished. The missing data pad was handed back over to the general immediately. They started walking towards me, Lysander keenly tapping on the screen, his left eye wide for the eye scanning feature. I locked my awareness of the strings directly onto him and trained my ears on the approaching party so that I could listen in.
“...found on a console back near the gangway where the tour had first broken up, sir. It doesn’t seem tampered with.” Kaspa reported, practically melting with relief.
I kept my string-sense locked on the General. As the datapad’s screen flared to life, a massive, jagged spike erupted in Lysander’s string, a moment of terrifying, chaotic realisation, followed a microsecond later by an iron-clad suppression. His face remained a mask of placid command, offering Kaspa a curt nod of dismissal.
Beside me, the medic rabbit flinched violently. Her sharp intake of breath perfectly mirrored the knot twisting in my own gut. The sensation squared off with us both simultaneously. A blatant, towering lie.
“They can be so two-faced,” she whispered, her nose twitching with unfiltered disgust.
The words hung between us, an invitation to a shared reality. I desperately wanted to agree. I wanted to validate her disgust and share the burden of this suffocating human duplicity. But the heavy fabric of my uniform suddenly felt like a belt around my throat. A soldier does not undermine his commanding officer to a civilian.
I forced my jaw to lock. I buried my own revulsion beneath years of spec-ops conditioning, reshaping my face into a blank, tactical mask. I said nothing.
She looked up, searching my eyes, listening to my strings. She didn’t find the kindred spirit she was looking for; she only found the soldier. Her ears flattened slightly, the playful spark in her gaze dampening into something resembling pity.
“Watch out for that one,” she said, her voice cooler now, stepping away from the crate.
“Wait, what’s your name?” I asked, a sudden, pathetic grasp at the connection I had just actively severed.
She paused, offering a cheeky tilt of her foot. “I’m sure a nosy rabbit like you can find me if you need to.” Her eyes shimmered with a wry quality before she hopped off to continue her work. Fortunately, she was gone when the General and the rest of his retinue showed up.
“Sir, I am up to speed already with the basics. I understand the pad has been found.”
The general looked at my ears for a moment. “Yes, very good. Kaspa, Rez, please report to Dr Thorne. She is keen to discuss next steps for when the lockdown is lifted, so she can get back to work. Turning to me once they were out of earshot, he looked out over the crowd and whispered. “It has been broken into, hacked!”
“I thought Hawkesmoore had said they were...”
“Yes, well, clearly Hawkesmoor was wrong. Have you sensed anything from the crowd?” At that moment, a triumphant spasm shuddered through the texture of the room. Several of my Rabbit squad suddenly flared as well, alerting each other to the same anomaly. I scanned in the rough direction I had felt it. “Sir, 1 o’clock, by the service gantry.” There was a woman there with purple hair and a grease-stained overall, the same woman who had been asking innumerable questions during the tour. She was looking at us and smiling. I didn’t need to know who she was; it was obvious she was the person who had instigated all of this. A silent predatory tension grew taut between them as she and the general locked gazes. She wore a deep knowing smile, a dangerous smile. The dark alley feeling that had wiggled into the room reached a peak before she quietly stepped backwards, melting away into the shadows of the reclamation facility access ways.
Instead of sounding the alarm, Lysander swallowed the truth of her appearance and disappearance, pocketed the pad, and lifted the lockdown.
“Have you ever been involved in a game of cat and mouse before?”
The horrifying depth of my commander’s lone-wolf pathology became clear. To humans, secrets are a game; to a rabbit, they are a severed connection.
***
Two days passed in the quiet of my quarters, leaving me alone with the throbbing in my sling and a dangerous, suffocating secret. I was officially wrapped up in a conspiracy, bound by the rigid tenets of my role. To follow the chain of command, even when every instinct in my body screamed against it.
My mind kept circling the man who had put me in this position. Could I trust General Lysander?
On the surface, he was a natural commander. In the terrifying heat of the reclamation facility, he had acted like a gravity well, issuing calm, precise orders that cut cleanly through the panic.
I knew I was unusual in my ability to sense the strings so clearly, but even without them, I could see how easily people acquiesced to his unnerving stillness. His stoic poker face conferred a massive tactical advantage, and I confess, I was starting to respect his inner resolve. But that respect was plagued by a lingering, maddening itch. Why had a man so otherwise calculated decided to manually stop an explosion?
It had been foolhardy, rash, and borderline suicidal. He had risked his life and mine. Was I missing a piece of the board? Was there some hidden variable that made his reckless descent the wiser choice?
I rarely doubt my own tactical judgment, but the jigsaw pieces of Lysander’s character simply refused to fit together.
Once the preliminary assessments were done, the department heads would convene. Lysander’s actions would come under intense scrutiny from the quorum. And there I would sit, an accessory to his silence regarding the doctored valve and the mysterious woman.
A familiar, bitter taste rose in my mouth. Memories surfaced of previous commanders who had ordered my silence when the truth begged to be spoken.
Humans possessed this duplicitous need to keep their cards pressed tightly to their chests, weaponising isolation and calling it strategy. Be silent. Be commanded. That small, unspoken command caused a pain far deeper than the fracture in my arm. It agitated the eternal conflict I carried within me. To be a good soldier, I needed to follow orders and trust my superior.
But if it had been my call, I would have shared the evidence with the security heads. We could have investigated the sabotage as a unit, a cohesive team. I knew in my heart that I had the chops to lead and to do so with a moral compass. But I am a rabbit. The galaxy might be opening up to us, but the human ceiling remained firmly in place. I would never get the chance. So, I was left to appraise Lysander from the shadows of his own secret.
Was he the wise, compassionate leader I hoped for, or a fool crippled by trust issues?
My rabbit’s gut insisted there was far more to this human than met the eye.
I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.
Just moments after the thought crossed my mind, a sharp knock broke the silence of my quarters. The door slid open, and Lysander invited himself in with that rehearsed, impenetrable demeanour. I composed myself accordingly, sitting up straight despite my injured paw, and waited. An expectant silence settled over the room as the door clicked shut behind him.
“So, let’s talk,” he said.
From the Cartographer’s Desk:
After a fair amount of deliberation, I have made some rather large changes to this chapter. Namely, adding an extra 3k words to it. It solved a few problems with the next few chapters by doing so, but more importantly, it gave the chapter a much more foundational, character-driven reason for existing. I am not satisfied with releasing ‘a bunch of stuff that happens’. I want every chapter to take us deeper into who we all are as humans and as a society.
Before, Hec’ten felt like a spec-ops bunny. Now, I hope he feels like a deeply conflicted and multi-layered individual who doesn’t quite know what to do with the way the world is throwing him about.
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