Chapter 189 CLXXXIX

Chapter 189 CLXXXIX
Isabell's POV

The white room had become something I knew the dimensions of completely. Four meters by four meters. Ceiling height approximately three point two meters the door was sealed with a magnetic lock that disengaged from the outside only. 

The IV stand had been there since the first day, changed twice, the bag always cleared fluid and whatever they were adding through the port.

I have been here for four days. I knew it was four days because of the meal schedule, three times per day, brought through a small access panel in the lower section of the door that opened and closed from the outside. I counted twelve meals in four days.

The blood draws happened every morning, four of those too. Callum had come twice more after the first conversation. Both times he had sat in the metal chair with his earnest dark eyes and his carefully constructed arguments about what the Covenant's power could do for the world. Both times I had listened and both times I had said no.

The second time he had been less patient about it the third time he did not come himself. Instead, two of the white-coated researchers came with a different kind of equipment. 

Not the blood draw kits this time something larger, more complex, with components I recognized from neurological research settings and components I did not recognize at all.

I looked at the equipment and I looked at the two researchers setting it up with the efficiency of people who had rehearsed this and I said, "What is that for?"

"Memory recovery," the woman said, without looking up from what she was doing.

"I haven't consented to any memory recovery procedure," I said.

"We understand that," she said.

They applied electrodes to my temples and to the base of my skull in the specific positioning used for deep neurological stimulation. 

I pulled away from the first application and the male researcher held my head with the firm impersonal grip of someone doing a job.

"This will be more comfortable if you stay still," the woman said.

I stayed still because the alternative was fighting two people with clinical detachment and the physical advantage of not being restrained to a bed and coming out of a tranquilizer four days ago.

They activated the equipment.

What followed was the most disorienting experience of my life, which was a significant statement given the past several months.

The stimulation was electrical, delivered in pulses through the electrode placements, designed to activate specific neural pathways associated with deep memory storage. 

In clinical settings I had read about this technology, its theoretical applications in recovered memory work, its extremely limited and contested use in legitimate medical contexts.

The Assembly version was not limited. It was not contested. It was direct and forceful and it went into the specific pathways that the Aldric bloodline memories presumably occupied and it pushed.

I felt it as pressure at first the same quality as what Vanessa had done in the coffee shop but different in mechanism, not a Lycan going through my mind, but an electrical current going into specific neural architecture and demanding it produce something.

The pressure built images came, it was not memories, not the organized sequential recall of actual remembering, fragments of a kitchen with light I didn't recognize. 

A voice, female, saying something I couldn't hear clearly. A landscape that was not anywhere I had been in this life, an open country with a particular quality of sky. A smell that came without context, something warm and domestic that was gone before I could place it.

Then the bleeding started. I tasted it first, the copper-iron taste at the back of my throat, and then I felt it from my nose, the warm flow of a significant nosebleed that came without the usual gradual onset.

The woman noted something on her tablet. The man adjusted something on the equipment and the stimulation intensity increased.

The fragments became louder without becoming clearer, a rush of disconnected sensory information that my brain was producing not as memory but as the random firing of pathways being overstimulated. It was the neurological equivalent of pressing every key on an instrument simultaneously and calling the result music.

"Stop," I said. My voice came out wrong, the nosebleed affecting my resonance. "You need to stop this."

They did not stop, the pressure was significant now. Not pain exactly, because the neurological pathways themselves did not produce pain in the conventional sense, but a building wrongness that my body was registering as fundamentally threatening, the specific alarm signal of a system being pushed past what it was designed to do.

Blood was dripping from my chin onto the white sheet. It was more images, faster, less coherent. A hand, not mine, reaching for something. A sound that was almost words. A light that was almost a room.

My body was producing what it could find and none of it was what they were looking for because the memories were not there. Xavier had told me this. 

The memories were sealed into the Covenant. There was nothing in my neural architecture to recover because what they were looking for was not stored in my brain.

They were stimulating pathways that led nowhere and my system was hemorrhaging trying to respond to the demand.

"There is nothing to recover," I said, and my voice was steadier than I felt. 

"You know that. Xavier would have told you that the sealing was complete, the memories are not in me, you are damaging my neurological function for nothing."

The woman looked at me for the first time since they had started. Something in her expression shifted, just slightly, the composure of clinical detachment developing a small crack.