Chapter 65 CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Chapter 65 CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Amelia’s POV

The night had swallowed the sky whole.
Even the moon seemed afraid to look down on us. The car’s headlights cut through the fog like a blade, pale and trembling, until the iron gates of the Blackwood estate loomed into view half-open, like an invitation or a trap.
Adrian killed the engine. The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was heavy, alive. The kind that made you aware of your own heartbeat.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I whispered.
His eyes, shadowed under the faint dashboard light, flicked toward me. “We’re past shouldn’t, Amelia.”
He was right. The moment I’d seen that message, if you want the rest of the truth, come to where it began, something inside me shifted. It wasn’t curiosity anymore. It was compulsion. I needed to know.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the air still carried the storm’s weight. We stepped out, shoes sinking into mud, flashlights cutting through the mist as we followed the overgrown path toward the estate’s northern wing.
The ground sloped downward, toward a half-collapsed structure that had once been a conservatory, all glass and steel and forgotten beauty. The vines climbing its frame were thick as veins, wrapping around shattered windows that reflected our lights at us in fractured pieces.
It didn’t look like a lab.
It looked like a mausoleum.
“Here?” Adrian murmured.
“Yes.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “This is where it began.”
He pried open a rusted door. It groaned like something waking from a long sleep. The scent that hit us was a mix of dust, metal, and something older, like preserved air. Inside, the remnants of the once-grand space spread out before us: glass walls, broken workstations, and the skeletal remains of lab equipment strewn across the floor.
I swept my flashlight across the room. Something glinted faintly, deliberately a control panel embedded in the far wall, half-hidden beneath cracked glass. The panel was still humming.
“How is there power?” I asked.
Adrian crouched beside it, inspecting the wiring. “Backup generator, maybe. Or something newer.” His brow furrowed. “Someone’s been here recently.”
My stomach turned cold.
We descended a flight of metal stairs, the echo of our footsteps hollow and rhythmic. Each level seemed older, less touched by time, like the deeper we went, the closer we came to something preserved.
When we reached the bottom, a door stood waiting. Frosted glass. My name was faintly etched on a plaque that time hadn’t erased.
SUBJECT A. BLACKWOOD
The world tilted.
“I don’t...” My throat closed around the words. “I don’t remember this.”
Adrian’s gaze lingered on the plaque, then on me. “Maybe you weren’t supposed to.”
I pressed my hand against the glass. For a moment, I expected it to be locked. But the door opened soundlessly, as if it recognized me.
Inside, the lab was almost intact. White walls dulled to gray. Tables lined with outdated medical instruments, their labels faded, a wall of data screens, most dark except one.
A faint blue glow pulsed at the center of the room.
We approached cautiously. The hum grew louder, steadier. Adrian brushed dust from the console, and the monitor flickered to life.
Two men appeared on the screen.
Charles Blackwood.
And my father.
I froze. My chest felt like it was being crushed from the inside.
The footage was grainy, timestamped twenty years ago. My father’s voice, younger, nervous:
“We can’t keep doing this, Charles. The subjects are children...”
Charles interrupted, calm and certain.
“They’re the future. Don’t think of it as harm. Think of it as heritage.”
“Helix was supposed to be medical, not… this.”
“You say that now. But when they come of age, when they pair correctly, we’ll have a bloodline that cannot be corrupted, perfection through design.”
My knees buckled. Adrian caught my arm.
“Amelia.”
But I couldn’t speak. I stared at the screen as if staring could turn time back.
I was hearing my father, my birth father, talk about me like a blueprint.
The footage flickered again. Another voice, distant, faint. A woman, this time, my mother.
“She’s too young. She doesn’t understand what she carries.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Charles replied. “She just has to exist.”
Then the screen went black.
I backed away, air shaking in my lungs. The room suddenly felt smaller, the walls closer.
Adrian moved to the console, trying to pull up more files, but the system glitched, flooding the display with static.
He muttered under his breath, fingers flying over the controls. “There’s another directory here. A hidden one.”
The monitor flickered again, a different interface this time. Sleek. Modern. Active.
And there it was.
A single file is glowing at the top of the list.
HELIX III: ACTIVATION SEQUENCE
User Signature: D. BLACKWOOD
My pulse roared in my ears.
He wasn’t just continuing the project. He was evolving it.
Adrian’s jaw clenched. “Damian knows. He’s building on it.”
I took a step back. “No. He can’t, he doesn’t even understand what this is.”
But even as I said it, I knew I was wrong. Damian always understood too much.
I ran my fingers across the cold metal of the console. For a moment, I felt something not just fear, but familiarity.
The sterile scent. The hum of machines. The faint echo of footsteps.
A flash hit me so vividly that it made me stumble.
A small girl, no more than six, sitting in a white chair, a band around her wrist.
A man’s voice: “She carries the stabilizer gene. She’ll be fine.”
Another: “If she remembers, it all collapses.”
My hands shook violently. Adrian steadied me, his eyes searching mine. “What did you see?”
“Me,” I whispered. “I was here. I’ve been here before.”
Silence pressed between us. Only the low hum of the machines filled the air.
Adrian’s voice came soft, almost reverent. “Then this place isn’t where it began. It’s where they built you.”
The words lodgedheartep,, hea,vy and terrible. I turned back to the monitor, to the single glowing file.
HELIX III.
Damian’s signature.
Adrian looked at me. “Do you want to open it?”
I hesitated. My thumb hovered over the key. Somewhere deep down, a voice that sounded like my father whispered Some truths aren’t meant to be remembered.
I pressed the key anyway.
The system began to decrypt. A line of numbers and letters rolled across the screen fast, endless. Then a red warning flashed:
ACCESS RESTRICTED – PRIMARY USER ACTIVE.
“Primary user?” Adrian murmured.
I swallowed. “It’s Damian.”
As if on cue, the lights flickered overhead. The hum shifted pitch, turning sharp and mechanical.
Adrian’s eyes darted to the ceiling. “He’s in the system. He knows someone’s here.”
The sound of the generators deepened a pulse, rhythmic, like a heartbeat syncing with my own.
I whispered, “He’s watching us.”
The monitor flashed once more before it shut off completely. Just one line appeared before the darkness swallowed the room:
HELLO, AMELIA.
The screen went black.
The echo of those two words lingered in the silence, heavy and deliberate.
Adrian reached for my hand. His skin was cold, slick with rain and fear. “We need to go.”
But I couldn’t move. My reflection stared back from the dead monitor, fractured and doubled by the glass.
For the first time, I didn’t recognize myself.
Whoever I used to be had died in this room long before I arrived.
And somewhere above us, Damian was already awake and waiting.