Chapter 47

Then I changed my mind, I need to see what's inside right now even when I decided not to before. Let hell let loss.

“Asher, open the file...” I said finally, my voice like it belonged to someone else.

He flipped the case open again and powered the laptop. “We’ll just peek,” he said, but his eyes cut to mine asking for permission anyway.

“Do it,” I said.

The drive clicked into place, the directory tree blooming back to life. Asher selected TRAINING_MODULE_03.mp4

The screen went black then bled into color. A room with white walls, the kind of sterile that makes your teeth ache. A chair is in the center and a boy strapped into it, maybe fifteen or older. His head was shaved and has a sunken eyes.

A voice off-screen said, “Begin module.”

Static cracked. A word appeared on the wall in bright projection, WEAKNESS.

The boy flinched.

The off-screen voice said: “Erase weakness.”

The lights flashed. A sound, low and thrumming, rattled the laptop speakers and the boy whimpered like it was inside her bones.

The screen cut, jumped, then came back. The same boy, days later maybe with straight posture and glassy eyes. He repeated it on cue, “Erase weakness.”

Damien went rigid beside me. His hand curled into a fist on the counter but he didn’t speak.

Asher muted the audio. "An experiment,” he said. “Your model pressure, repetition, stimulus-response.... but cranked until they fracture.”

I wanted to look away but I didn’t. The boy kept whispering the phrase until his voice gave out.

“That’s Damien’s dream,” I said, the words came catching.

Damien’s eyes were still on the screen, very dark and unreadable. “It wasn’t a dream,” he said. “It was memory.”

The folder ticked on, full of more modules. More boys and voices.

Asher closed the player. “We don’t watch them all here. Not safe.”

“Asher, that’s my model being used to burn kids alive from the inside.”

“Not yours,” Damien said, finally looking at me. “Twisted. Warped into something it was never meant to be.”

I pressed my hands to my face but the images still burned. “Ivy… or Elise...” My voice broke on her name. “must have seen this. She must have tried to pull someone out or stop it or...”

Asher shut the laptop, firm. “That’s why they vanished and died. She brushed the edge of this program and they made sure they disappeared just like what they do to others and wants to do to me now”

The silence that followed was heavy enough to choke on.

“Open the PDF,” I said at last, my throat raw.

Asher hesitated. “Camille...”

“Open it.” I said firmly.

He did. RECRUITMENT_PIPELINE.pdf filled the screen. Names, codes, volumes for age, intake date and evaluation status. Some names had red slashes through them while others had checked marks, halfway down the page, in cold black font, IVY HAYES.... intake deferred.

My knees went out from under me. Damien caught me before I hit the floor, his arms were solid, anchoring me against the storm rising in my head.

“She was on the list,” I whispered. “She was marked but they didn’t take her the way they took the others. Deferred..... what the hell does that mean?”

Asher’s jaw worked. “It means she wasn’t a candidate. Maybe resistant or something but she knew enough to get killed for it.”

I shoved free of Damien, my chest on fire. “No. If she was deferred, maybe she lived longer. Maybe she was hidden, moved or something. Don’t you dare tell me it’s a code word for death.”

Damien stood in front of the screen blocking it, his voice low but steady. “Camille. This isn’t the end of her trail. It’s the start.”

I shook my head, the tears stinging and unwelcome, I couldn't hold them. “She never came home.”

“But maybe she didn’t die the way you think,” he said. “Deferred means we keep digging. It means she could still be out there, caught in their system.”

"But I saw her corpse" I said.

"Maybe it wasn't hers or it's hers, we can't say until we dig deeper into all this.

Asher looked between us but didn’t argue. He closed the PDF, pulled the drive and sealed it. “We stop here for tonight. We regroup before we put our eyes on anything else.”

But I barely heard him. The word 'deferred' pulsed in my skull like a brand.

Ivy had been closer to the heart of this than I ever imagined and if she had been pulled into their web, even for a moment then the girls on that list are proof.

~

I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the boy strapped in the chair, his mouth opening on a word that wasn’t his and behind it, Ivy’s name on the list, glowing like a curse.

By morning, the house felt airless. Damien hadn’t moved from the couch. Asher had passed out in his chair with the laptop closed like a shield on his knees.

It came with a phone vibration against the counter.

A voicemail.

My stomach dropped when I saw the name: Dr. Crane.

For a second I couldn’t move. Then I pressed play.

“Camille hello. I’m sorry I’ve been absent. I had… an episode, a medical thing. A fever and some memory gaps. I’ve only just gotten home. I want you to know I’m safe. I want you to call me when you’re ready.”

The message ended, just like that.

Damien sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Who is that?"

"Dr Seraphina Crane." I answered still shocked.

“She’s alive?” He asked.

“Apparently,” I said, though my throat was tight.

Asher straightened too, alert in an instant. “I heard she said memory gaps?”

“Yes.” I answered.

“Too convenient,” he muttered.

I didn’t argue, my pulse had already started hammering. Dr. Crane, gone for days but suddenly back. Alive, calm, apologetic, claiming fever and memory loss. I could almost hear her smooth therapist voice, trying to iron the wrinkles out of my suspicion.

But my suspicion wasn’t a wrinkle, it's a wound.

I called her back.

She answered on the second ring, her tone warm, practiced. “Camille. Thank you for calling. I was worried you might think I’d abandoned you.”

“You disappeared,” I said flatly.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I was unwell and...” She paused. “I have gaps, holes really. They told me it was a fever dream. I must have been delirious.”

“They?” I asked.

“My neighbor. She said she found me collapsed in my kitchen and called an ambulance. I spent two nights at the hospital. The doctors said it could be stress-induced amnesia, a psychosomatic response to illness. I barely remember it.”

I pressed my palm to my forehead. Stress-induced amnesia and psychosomatic response. They sounded like words she’d hand to a patient and not use on herself.

“You don’t remember anything?” I asked.