Chapter 17

Chapter 17
Three days later, we crossed into the States under the names we’d been given.

Elisa Navarro. Carlos Rivas. Mateo’s alias didn’t matter much—he’d long stopped believing in names. Ryan went as “Dominic Vega,” which suited him in an ironic, too-neat way. He looked more ghost than man in the rearview, his reflection always half-faded.

Marina sat beside me in the backseat, humming a tune she never learned, tracing invisible constellations on the window with her fingertip.

We didn’t talk much. The silence had weight now—a shared understanding of everything we’d lost, and everything still coming.

We weren’t safe. Not really.

Serrano’s compound had burned, yes. But the organization that built her—the shadows behind Division R—weren’t gone. We’d poked the hive.

And the hive would retaliate.

But first, we needed to disappear.

Our safehouse was tucked in the hills outside Flagstaff. A ranch once owned by a conspiracy theorist who turned out to be right about more things than anyone ever wanted to admit. Ryan still had access to the property through dead channels and forgotten safe lines.

The place was wired like a bunker. Off-grid. Monitored. Shielded.

We were ghosts hiding in a ghost house.

I didn’t sleep the first night. Or the second.

Too many questions buzzed in my head like angry insects. Why me? Why her? How deep did the experiments go? How many others were there?

And worst of all: Had I ever really been free? Even before the memory wipes. Even before Diego. Had I ever chosen my own life?

Ryan found me on the porch the third night, sitting in a rusted chair and sipping lukewarm tea.

“You don’t look surprised,” I said when he joined me.

“I’m not.” He set a folder in my lap. “Figured you’d start asking again.”

I opened it.

Names. Files. Coordinates. Photographs of other test subjects—survivors. Some were children. One was a woman who looked eerily like me. Another was a boy with eyes like Marina’s.

“These are the ones who got out,” he said. “Some ran. Some were helped. But most of them? They’re still in hiding. Scared. Like you were.”

I ran my fingers over one of the photos.

“You knew about all of them?”

“Not at first. But after you disappeared… I started digging. I wanted to know what else Serrano was hiding. What she planned for you. For Marina. For the others.”

“And?”

“And it’s bigger than any of us.”

I looked up at him.

“Then we fight bigger.”

He hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m done hiding. They tried to bury me. Rewrite me. Raise my child like she was an experiment. I will not let that stand.”

He exhaled slowly.

“You sound like the woman I first met. The one who wouldn’t back down from senators or death threats.”

“That woman died,” I said. “I’m what came back.”

By the end of the week, the plan had changed.

We weren’t running anymore.

We were building something.

Ryan reached out to one of the survivors—Amira Dal, a Turkish geneticist who’d faked her death after leaking research on the program. She agreed to meet us, but only in person. Only in a neutral zone.

Mateo made contact with someone in Mexico City—an underground journalist who’d been hunting Division R for years. He had evidence. Footage. Names of politicians who’d greenlit the experiments.

And me?

I trained.

Every day.

Woke before dawn. Ran until my legs burned. Practiced firing drills. Taught Marina how to disappear into a crowd, how to blend, how to listen to instinct.

She never complained.

She was too much like me for that.

But I saw the weight in her eyes. She knew what we were doing.

She understood.

One night, after drills, she sat beside me and asked the question I’d been dreading.

“Am I broken, Mama?”

I froze.

“No, baby. You’re extraordinary.”

“But I hear things other people don’t. I feel things that aren’t there.”

I touched her face.

“That’s your gift. Not a curse.”

Her brow furrowed. “But they wanted to use it. Use me.”

“And they never will again. Not while I’m breathing.”

She leaned into me then, small arms wrapping around my waist.

“I want to help. I don’t want to run anymore.”

I held her tighter.

“I know.”

And in that moment, I stopped seeing her as the child they experimented on…

And started seeing her as the weapon they created by mistake.

But she wouldn’t be their weapon.

She’d be mine.

Two weeks later, the message came.

From a scrambled channel we hadn’t used in years.

Four words.

“They know. Be ready.”

I showed Ryan.

He nodded once.

“They’re coming.”

Mateo checked the perimeter. “Three days, maybe less.”

I looked out across the canyon, the endless stretch of sky above us.

Let them come.

Let them try.

I was Estela Maria Rivera.

And I had nothing left to lose.