Chapter 9 - The Memory Hidden Inside Subject Zero
Adrian fired at the lock.
The bullets flattened against reinforced steel.
Mara pulled the twins’ old blankets from a shelf and pressed them over the ventilation grates, but gas continued entering through narrow seams in the ceiling.
Adrian searched for a control panel.
“Celeste needed us to open the vault,” he said. “The security system must have transmitted access.”
Mara’s vision began to distort.
“What kind of gas is it?”
“Probably not intended to kill us immediately.”
“How comforting.”
A second screen activated.
Celeste appeared live from another room.
“I told you identity could be a disease,” she said. “You keep trying to resurrect a woman who should have remained buried.”
Adrian looked at the camera.
“Release the door.”
“I can’t do that until Lillian gives me what my father left inside her.”
Mara leaned against the cabinet.
“What did he leave?”
“The original Orpheus sequence.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will.”
Celeste touched a control.
The gas changed.
A sweet metallic smell filled the room.
Mara fell to her knees.
Images flooded her mind.
She was fourteen, strapped to a chair.
Gideon Vale stood beside her.
“You were found in the fire,” he said. “You have no family now.”
A younger Celeste watched through the glass.
“Why does she get my room?” Celeste asked.
“Because she needs observation.”
“She looks like me.”
Gideon smiled.
“That is why she is useful.”
The memory changed.
Mara was older, perhaps seventeen.
She sat at a piano while Gideon played a sequence of notes.
“Music reaches memory before language,” he explained. “A melody can retrieve what chemicals conceal.”
The lullaby.
It was not originally a bedtime song.
It was a key.
Mara remembered Gideon teaching her the sequence, note by note, then ordering her to forget it.
She had transformed it years later into a lullaby for her sons without understanding why.
Celeste’s voice came through the speaker.
“Sing the entire song.”
Adrian knelt beside Mara.
“Don’t.”
“She’ll let us die.”
“She needs what you know. That is the only reason we’re alive.”
Mara looked at the twins’ photographs.
“She has access to the boys.”
Adrian’s face changed.
The guards outside had not responded.
Celeste might already control the house.
Mara began singing.
Not the lullaby as she remembered it, but the notes beneath it.
Each phrase opened another locked door in her mind.
Gideon’s laboratory.
Patient files.
A child crying behind glass.
A woman screaming Lillian’s original name.
Not Lillian.
Not Mara.
“Elena,” Mara whispered.
Celeste heard.
Her expression on the screen sharpened.
“What did you say?”
Mara closed her eyes.
A woman was carrying her through smoke.
The woman had the same gray-blue eyes as the twins.
“Her name was Elena Rook,” Mara said. “My mother.”
Celeste’s composure broke.
“No.”
“She worked with Gideon.”
“No.”
“She discovered he was experimenting on children.”
“Stop.”
“She tried to take me away.”
Celeste slammed her hand against the control panel.
“She abandoned you.”
“He killed her.”
The gas stopped.
The steel door opened.
Celeste stood outside holding a gun.
Two security officers lay unconscious behind her.
“Finish the song,” she said.
Adrian moved in front of Mara.
Celeste pointed the weapon at his chest.
“I will shoot him.”
Mara stood slowly.
“You don’t want the song. You want the sequence hidden beneath it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Celeste laughed without humor.
“Because my father designed Orpheus to obey one neurological pattern. Yours. Every treatment, every reversal, every memory lock was calibrated using your brain.”
“I was a child.”
“You were proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“That identity could be rewritten and restored.”
Adrian stared at her.
“You want to restore someone.”
Celeste’s eyes filled with tears.
“My daughter.”
Mara’s anger paused.
“You don’t have a daughter.”
“I did.”
Celeste lowered the gun slightly.
“Her name was Sophie. She died eight years ago.”
Adrian said, “You told me you had never been pregnant.”
“I was nineteen. My father took her from me because he believed a child would destroy my future. She died during one of his procedures.”
Mara understood the madness beneath Celeste’s plan.
“You believe the sequence can bring her back.”
“It can restore the memory pattern stored before death.”
“Inside whom?”
Celeste looked toward the nursery door.
Mara’s blood turned cold.
“No.”
Celeste smiled through her tears.
“The twins share your neurological markers.”
Adrian lunged.
The gun fired.
Mara screamed.
Adrian struck Celeste against the wall as the bullet tore through his shoulder.
Mara grabbed the weapon.
Celeste ran.
From somewhere below, Noah screamed.
“Mommy!”
Mara raced into the corridor.
The mansion’s main doors stood open.
A black vehicle disappeared through the gates.
May you like
Ethan lay unconscious on the front steps.
Noah was gone.
