“Hey Cloud, what’s going on?” “Hey Cloud!” “Cloud!” “Cloud, what’s up?” “Cloud?” Fucking Cloud. How tired of a name can you become in this short of a time? Or maybe how long of a time? Do you even know how long you’ve been lucid? Do you know what year it is? How many years old you are? How much money are you here to blow up a mako reactor and endanger your life for? Is it possible everyone that the former identity of “Cloud” once known before you came along is dead now?

  If so, what does that mean to you? What do you care about? What are your priorities, Cloud? You’ll have time to figure it out, don’t worry. So long as you can stay in your peak physical shape forever, and you never fall to atrophy as the mako takes over. Stay safe forever, Cloud. Everyone believes in you.

  Cloud knew he should have cared more about Shinra hunting him down after this job. It was virtually guaranteed his face would be released publicly, and surveillance across the city would be on the lookout for him. But to care would mandate that he feels he has something to lose. What’s going to happen if Shinra catches him? What are the precautions he takes against being caught going to cost? It’s a great blur.

  Walking through halls. Dead maimed guards and blast marks on the floor. Bullet holes and shell casings about. Turning into other halls. Biggs limping the whole way past his scene with his bleeding leg. Cloud eyeballed the active security cameras as they passed, knowing helicopters could be on the site any minute. This wasn’t something the team apparently took precautions for.

  One long and tall corridor with a door at the end, and they were outside the building. They proceeded onto a T-shaped catwalk, on the right being the grand entrance to Reactor 1. Down the door straight ahead, a presumably similar base over in Sector 8. And on the left, they found themselves suspended hundreds of feet in the air over the gap between Sector 1 and Sector 8 with smog obscuring the undercity below, and—how lucky—a safety net far below to catch them if they fell.

  Wedge broke off to go stand guard at the Sector 8 door while the others turned to the reactor. Barret excitedly hollered, “This is it! Let’s get ‘em!”

  Every memory following the disappearance of his sword was faint. But he remembered getting into a fight with the first civilian who passed by him where he slept. Inconclusive outcome. A shop posted out of an old defunct RV, also part home to a man and child, was nearby, and the clearest first choice to sack for a lead.

  Nobody had one, though. He didn’t know how many times he asked around the district for a large foot-wide blade. But he knew the authorities were eventually called in. He later spent a day roaming the slums carrying a beat up Shinra trooper helmet. A substitute, something for his hands.

  He was slipping into a state of mako-addled neurosis. His brain could barely register what was happening, if anything. Nothing was working. Hours, days, slipping in and out of a lucid state. But some people out there had to have memories of him. Somebody had his sword, still, and somebody had seen it.

  It was… somewhere, maybe still in Sector 5. The Shinra helmet wasn’t magnetic, but he had kept trying to attach it to the magnet on his back until dropping it. And he must have left it there.

  He was inside a dumpy shop with rotting wood floors and a disembodied chunk of mako pipeline for a counter. He was badly withdrawing—twitching and shivering, grabbing at his head like the doddering addicts he had castigated before. But he still walked with some cocky sense of entitlement, because unlike the others, he was a victim, not an addict. It was all the same to everyone else, though.

  He stumbled to the pipe counter. Slammed down his one remaining shoulder pad, beaten and rusted. Then dropped a smaller metal plate with broken latches and cracked screw holes that once held the pad in place, with a wrap-around strap for his arm. It was hard to keep them held still on the curved surface.

  Using some formation of words, he told the person behind the counter to fix it for him, or make a new one. They gave some formation of words back. He didn’t follow, tried to mutter something else. The words felt sensible in his head, but the person didn’t respond to them the way he wanted. He can’t remember anything he might have heard. There was no memory of the interaction’s outcome, only the gravelly feeling in his throat from yelling. And he left as he entered, holding his broken shoulder armor.

  Huh.

  Beyond the passage into the reactor was the end of the hallway and a security gate to crack. Biggs was handed Jessie’s decoding device and got to work on the access panel. Jessie pulled out bandages and disinfectants to patch up the bite on his leg. Nothing to do for the others but stand and wait.

  Barret was eyeballing Cloud, and he noticed. Cloud wasn’t eager to make eye contact, but Barret’s menacing glare insisted. “I take it you’ve been in one of these reactors before, hm? I’m sure you were a well-behaved doggy in one time, and got to have your fun runnin’ around all the restricted spots of your city.”

  “Meaning?”

  “So how do we get down to mako storage from here?”

  He turned away uninterested. “Shinra didn’t give tours of every restricted area in Midgar to SOLDIER recruits.”

  “No. But you SOLDIERs get around, includin’ at mako reactors. I would know; my old hometown had one. So you better not be holdin’ out on me.”

  He’d been in a mako reactor. He knew that there was a common layout between them. But not when there was already so many loose pieces of memory to restore.

  “What’s the problem, merc? Gettin’ cold feet in the lair of your former master? Is little Stamp scared to bite the hand that fed him?!”

  More seconds are burned foraging through the scattered puzzle pieces… Why can’t he remember?

  “You can have it your way, merc! We’ll do this with or without you! You can either stay out of our way and go home, or the mutt can be put down right here! What’s it gonna be?!”

  What was that early mission briefing Barret gave? “Jessie and Biggs’ll be the main grunts and tech people, Wedge is our munitions expert, I’m your heavy-armed support, and you’ll be our attack dog. Sound good enough, merc?”

  Jessie, done patching up Biggs, slapped Barret’s shoulder. “Hey, chill out a bit, will ya?”

  Cloud shook his head, trying to swipe away the brain fog. “I’m just getting paid to be your attack dog. Isn’t that what you said?”

  There was a beep from Biggs’ hand, and a number displayed on the decoding device that he input to the gate panel. It slid right open. Cloud stormed past and took the first step through, only to be spotted by four troopers camped by another gate on the right wall.

  “They’re here! Shut the doors!”

  They pulled open the plastic cover to a big red emergency switch, flipped that, and the gate behind Cloud slammed shut to Barret shouting, “Wait!” Flashing red lights on the ceiling and a siren activated.

  Four guns surrounded and fixed their sights on him. “There’s nowhere to run!”

  Cloud sighed. “That’s my line.”

  Grabbing for the sword first would have gotten him shot. So he snuck his hand into his pocket for the ice materia. At its unveiling, they went, “What the hell is that?” And then they found out.

  Where was Cloud to find a workshop at? Whatever the answer was, he didn’t find it. But he found himself with a few mounds of scrap in a tent city, somewhere within a… scrapyard. All he needed was a flat surface. Or rather, what he needed was a way to not look stupid while hunched over fixing his shoulder guard on the ground.

  He got a couple screws, a couple nondescript warped slabs of metal, a hammer, a chipped and jagged novelty sword he didn’t recognize, and… some idea of what to do with those. It must have made sense when he grabbed them. Now, he was just looking at an ensemble of random materials and a big idea that he lost.

  There was a subtle rumbling in his ears. Not a voice, not a physical thing, just a noise. He couldn’t slap his ears to stamp it out, nor anything. He could only listen. Perhaps it was something to be heard.

  A guard laid destitute around chunks of broken ice, the roof of his helmet shattered. Various other marks from ice were on the walls and floor. Someone sat in a pile of crushed empty cardboard boxes in a corner. The other two were in open fire. Cloud was underneath it, primed to slash through one’s chest. His upper body was in a lot of pain.

  Jamming things into other things hadn’t produced anything yet. His inability to figure basic processes out was making him upset. He reminded himself of an angry toddler who can’t discern what wooden shape goes in what corresponding hole. Every day that he could remember has felt like a convoluted process to learn all of his basic motor skills.

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  Today was bringing him no closer. So he threw his tantrum and quit. He figured going somewhere else would solve his problem. So he stuffed all the materials down his pockets, and put the jagged sword on his back.

  Plenty of people were sitting around that could assist him. He found a group of beat down nobodies around a campfire, and stepped past them into their tent to forage through their stuff. Nothing on the faces of their piles of junk looked shiny and metal, so he swept through it to find something else. Somebody apparently shouted their objections at him and grabbed his shoulder. He threw the hand right off.

  A pressure point on his neck ached with the force of a bullet hit. He had been hit in the face, and his non-iron-skinned cheeks were bleeding. His ear got hit and cut through as well, and a host of blood was trying to escape through that exit.

  A guard laid against a wall with an upward slash mark on his chest and a coinciding blood spurt behind him and the buster sword left by his side. Another laid on the floor bleeding from a sizeable tear in his helmet next to his gun encased in ice. Only one survivor left, holding a baton.

  Cloud aimed the ice materia at him and tried to exert it one more time, only for it to sting his hand and drop to the ground.

  There was a good-sized container in the tent underneath a lot of dirty clothes. He geared towards it and swept everything off. But the man grabbed him a second time and pulled him away from it. Cloud pushed him away and tried to open it. But the man pushed him back.

  This man was like a nagging flea to Cloud. The audacity to push and pull him around, as if this container didn’t belong to him, this tent didn’t belong to him, this whole camp and this whole Sector wasn’t his, was pissing him off.

  When that arm made contact with him one more time, he grabbed it and threw the man down onto the container, and wringed his hands around his throat. In the decrepit and patchy grey face, he saw something worse than a hoarder—a thief.

  “Was it you?! Where did you hide it?!”

  There was shouting, but not from his direction. A different person grabbed at his shoulders and punched his arm uselessly. Cloud flung him off, lunged in a spike of adrenaline, and sloppily punched him in the head.

  As Cloud started to fall forward, he dragged the man down with him, pinned his head down with one hand, and started cracking into it over and over with the other hand. He fantasized about his fist smashing the skull like a glass vase, the bones shattering and blood splashing out like water, his brain being crushed and pounded like a mound of dough. He needed something to break under his hand, and he had to keep striking at the bloodied mess until it happened, again, and again, and again, and again…

  …And the helmet shattered more under every punch, the face underneath grunting and gasping each time his skull came closer to splitting, until he couldn’t muster a noise anymore. Cloud had to bring his other hand into the action, and split the other half of his helmet apart. Back and forth, his head kept flinging at the direction of his fists. It was like a toy for a toddler, bringing Cloud that feeling of childhood whimsy at the silliness of this man’s head constantly turning left and right, and left and right.

  One of the doors slid open, and out ran Jessie, Barret, and Biggs again. “Finally!” went Jessie.

  Barret came over to Cloud to interrupt him playing with his toy. “I think you got ‘im already.”

  Cloud stopped. He was being watched, and he was sitting over a broken and brain-damaged human. The blood painted over his knuckles trickled down his fingers as he stood up. It almost tickled. He picked his sword back up next to the dead MP on the wall and the materia, and used the body’s neckerchief to wipe the blood off his hands and face.

  The alarm remained active. Jessie rushed to the next door and quickly reinput their cracking device into the circuitry. “Here we go again. It’ll give you time to catch your breath, at least.”

  Cloud had been panting from that pointless beatdown. He needed to conserve energy, not indulge recklessly.

  “The ice materia,” Cloud said while presenting it to her. “There a story on how you got ahold of this?”

  She sarcastically arched her back straight up and said in a mocking deep voice, “Nope.” That must have been an attempt to imitate him.

  They stood there waiting under a blaring alarm. Barret guarded the door they entered from, and Biggs waited behind Cloud. Jessie tapped her fingers on the wall as the seconds ticked. Once that beep finally came, she speed-typed the code and ran through the open door.

  In the next room, they went to an elevator, and Biggs hit the call button. Waiting some more for the elevator to come.

  Behind them, somebody ran into the room with all the dead guards, and tried to shout something in their radio before Barret walked over and hosed him quiet with gunfire. When he casually walked back, Cloud said, “You didn’t need to kill him mid-sentence.”

  Barret gestured up at the flashing red lights. “You tell me what difference it makes.”

  “They know exactly where we’re at now. If you waited for him to get off the radio, then we’d have more leeway. You should think with your head, not your gun.”

  Barret’s tremendous figure inched forward to look down on Cloud. “You’re just here to be our attack dog, ain’tcha? So why don’t you act like it?”

  Ding. The elevator arrived. How unfortunate. Biggs said to Cloud while walking in, “We’ll manage.”

  The four of them packed inside and pushed the lowest of four buttons. They’re not done standing and waiting just yet. Cloud spotted a camera hidden a corner of the roof, and split it in half with his sword without showing his full face.

  He was starting to remember his first interaction with Barret before the job, just as unpleasant as all the ones during it. At least a piece of it. They were sitting in a bar, not nearly drunk enough.

  “I’ve met my share of ex-SOLDIERs before, kid. You folks leave the company a lot, but for some reason the Shinra indoctrination still leaves a stamp on you. Never wanna talk bad about your old daddy. So how do I know you’re different?”

  “If you’ve got the money, I’ll be as ‘different’ as I need to be.”

  He laughed snarkily. “Just like your daddy, only in it for the money. Ain’t that an irony? But does that mean you ain’t gonna choke the moment the heat is on?”

  “I don’t choke.”

  He made an inquisitive face at Cloud, trying to stare through his hard skin. “Gotta say, merc, you don’t do well makin’ a good first impression. In case you never learned, the planet’s dyin’ ‘cause of your old company. Mako is the lifeblood of the land, and they turned it into a popular consumable that powers damn near everything people use. If Shinra isn’t stopped, there ain’t gonna a planet left for you or I to live on. Extreme measures are required. So once you’re in, there’s no easy gettin’ out. You’ll be an enemy of the company. Think you’re ready for that?”

  “I’m not here to save the planet, nor listen to your lecture. I’m here to get paid.”

  “Huh! You think it’s that simple?! Your money ain’t gonna be worth shit once the planet is bled dry! Just look at the outskirts of Midgar, and see that dyin’ expanse Shinra’s caused with their damn reactors!”

  “Midgar’s outskirts look that way because it got bombed to shit to ward off monsters.”

  “‘Cause Shinra bombed it to shit! And they’ll continue doin’ it elsewhere if nobody stops ‘em!”

  “That’s elsewhere’s problem. You can enjoy yourself in your savior complex crusade once our job is done, and I’ll find other work.”

  “Think you’re invincible, kid?! You ain’t just gonna walk away from a job like this!”

  “Watch me.”

  Somehow, from that, he stayed hired. And still fears no consequences for his actions.

  Cloud’s indifference to saving the planet had kept Barret bothered for days. And watching him pacing in the elevator, he had a feeling it was about to be brought up again.

  “Now you’ve seen it up close. The sole purpose of this reactor is to suck all the mako out of the ground. While you eat, while you sleep, while you shit, dozens of these things are out there bleedin’ this planet dry! Shinra taught you that the lifestream was the enemy, and sprouted the fiends to destroy us, but that’s a lie! Mako created life, not the other way around! The planet bleeds green like you an’ me bleed red!”

  Biggs and Jessie looked awkwardly at each other as the unprompted familiar spiel went on.

  Cloud sighed. “Is that your revolutionary sales pitch?”

  Barret stopped his pacing to face down Cloud. “Is there a problem you have with it?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re a bad rhetorician.”

  Barret laughed it off. “Say that again, merc. Rhetoric ain’t gonna be what saves the planet. This is.” He patted the big lump in his satchel, apparently their bomb.

  “The leader of the revolution should have the ability to rally people to his side. The successful ones tend to.”

  Biggs interjected, “Hey, Barret’s a plenty capable leader. He’s gotten the movement this far.”

  The use of the word “movement” almost made Cloud laugh.

  “Damn straight!” Barret hollered. “We’re makin’ history tonight, whether you like it or not, merc. ‘Cause we know what’s at stake! Somebody’s gotta shut down these reactors, and somebody’s gotta stop Shinra! You gonna stand there and pretend you can’t hear the planet cryin’ out in pain too? I know you can!”

  Cloud nodded along sarcastically. “You hear that?”

  Barret pridefully pounded his chest. “You’re damn right I do.”

  He snorted. “Get help.”

  Jessie groaned, “Oh my god.”

  Barret aimed an accusatory finger at Cloud. “You’re just like everyone else, thinkin’ they’re invincible ‘cause you haven’t been affected yet! But mako ain’t infinite, and little by little, one day they’re gonna drain out the very last drop of it! What do you think’s gonna happen then?! Huh?!”

  “Do you even know?”

  “I’ve seen what it’s done already! All the monsters sprouting from the ground and the caves, tryna stop us from killin’ the planet; the lifesprings, infectin’ the air and turnin’ innocent wildlife and even humans into mutant creatures, attackin’ everything they see—just think how much more shit’s gonna happen if we don’t stop Shinra!”

  Cloud had a funny thought as the elevator stopped. “Was it a mako mutation that made you a walking brick golem?”

  The door opened, and Barret cackled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” He pushed Cloud back with his gun and walked out of the elevator.