Chapter 10 St. Cloud’s
The rain hadn’t stopped since dawn. It was the kind that blurred the city’s edges, turning everything into a reflection of something half-remembered. Selena drove through the downpour with her headlights cutting through the mist, every streetlight bending into twin halos on the windshield.
She hadn’t told Vera where she was going. After the recording on the rooftop, Selena knew she couldn’t. The agent’s cool, measured tone, her access to classified material all of it now felt wrong. Too calculated. Too convenient.
The voice on that tape her sister’s voice was the first thing in years that had sounded real.
She followed it to the only place that made sense: St. Cloud’s Psychiatric Institute.
The building rose at the edge of the city like an old wound that refused to heal. Once a mental health facility for veterans, it had long since been repurposed into a private research center. Officially, it was closed to the public. Unofficially, its halls still hummed with secrets.
Selena parked behind the overgrown garden wall and approached the service entrance, rain dripping from her hood. She used her old badge to trigger the secondary lock. It didn’t register, but the door clicked anyway already unlocked.
Her instincts tightened.
Inside, the air was cold and sterile, carrying the faint smell of bleach and dust. The walls were lined with outdated posters on neural therapy and trauma correction. Lights flickered weakly overhead, and the echo of her boots carried farther than it should have.
Every sound felt like a test.
She reached the old records wing half-sealed behind plastic tarps and “UNDER RENOVATION” signs. Her flashlight beam cut through the gloom, revealing boxes of patient files stacked floor to ceiling.
She found the section marked 2014 – 2015.
Her heart pounded as she flipped through the faded tags until she saw it:
> WARD, MARA – SUBJECT 06.
And beneath it
WARD, SELENA – SUBJECT 07.
Her hand trembled as she pulled both files from the box. Inside were pages filled with data she barely understood neurograph imprints, memory mapping scans, charts comparing “emotional retention between twins.”
Her stomach turned.
One page was stamped “TRANSFER COMPLETE.”
Another bore her sister’s signature jagged and uneven, like it had been written under duress.
“They say I’ll remember everything she forgets.”
The words blurred through Selena’s tears.
Her light flickered. Somewhere down the hall, a door creaked open.
Selena’s head snapped up. “Who’s there?”
No answer.
She drew her weapon, moving slowly toward the sound. The corridor stretched long and narrow, the end swallowed by shadow. Another flicker and then she saw it: a silhouette standing just beyond the final doorway.
Tall. Still. Watching.
“Show me your hands!” she shouted.
The figure stepped back into the dark.
Selena ran forward, pushing through the door into a large, abandoned therapy room. The walls were lined with shattered mirrors, the floor scattered with broken equipment. In the center stood an old examination chair, its restraints still intact.
On it sat a single item: a music box.
Her breath caught.
The same melody began to play slow, haunting, the lullaby from her childhood.
She raised her gun. “Mara?”
Something shifted in the reflection of the cracked mirror a face half-hidden, watching her from the corner.
“Don’t,” the voice whispered.
Selena turned slowly.
The woman standing there looked like her not identical, but close enough to twist something deep inside. Same eyes, same mouth, but a streak of white ran through her hair, and her skin looked pale, almost translucent.
“Mara,” Selena breathed.
Her sister’s lips trembled. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
Selena lowered her gun slightly, heart in her throat. “I’ve been looking for you for ten years.”
Mara stepped closer, every movement fragile, uncertain like someone learning to walk again. “You weren’t supposed to remember. They erased the link after the fire.”
“Link?”
Mara’s eyes filled with tears. “Project D.A.M.E. wasn’t about memory transfer. It was about division. They split our neural patterns one half into me, one half into you. Every time you forgot something, I remembered it.”
Selena’s breath faltered. “That’s impossible.”
Mara shook her head. “You’ve felt it, haven’t you? The gaps. The dreams that don’t belong to you. The déjà vu.”
Selena’s knees nearly buckled. Memories flashed behind her eyes the burning house, voices screaming her name, a mirror image pulling her away from the flames.
“I saw you die,” she whispered.
Mara’s expression softened. “They made you believe that. It was easier to hide me that way.”
A shadow moved behind Mara and for a moment, Selena saw something else. A figure standing in the corner, tall and still, wearing a smooth white mask.
The Pale Man.
“Mara!” Selena shouted.
But the masked figure moved fast grabbed Mara by the arm and dragged her backward toward the doorway.
Selena fired the bullet shattered glass, but the light flickered again, and they were gone.
“Mara!”
Her scream echoed through the empty halls.
By the time she reached the exit, sirens were already blaring in the distance. Someone had triggered the alarm.
She burst into the rain, clutching the files to her chest. Her car was still where she left it, but something on the windshield made her stop cold.
A single Polaroid.
She picked it up.
It showed her standing inside that same therapy room gun raised, staring at the chair but no one else was there. No Mara. No masked figure.
Written in red ink at the bottom were the words:
“Memory is the truest lie.”
Selena’s hands shook as she backed away.
Her phone buzzed. One new message. No number.
“You saw her because I let you. Stop now, or you’ll forget too.”
The screen went black.
Thunder rolled overhead as she stood in the rain, her reflection mirrored in the puddles beneath her feet doubled, fractured, and fading at the edges.
For the first time, Selena wasn’t sure if she was chasing her sister… or her own shadow.