32. Valaria
Valaria
Ivomit into the ocean.
Land is on the horizon.
I’m still groggy when they intercept us twenty nautical miles out.
A blast of electromagnetic energy.
Engines dead.
Then—
A helicopter.
Masked men.
Chloroform.
Darkness.
I wake in a white room.
No windows. One camera.
One table. Two chairs.
A woman older than my dim memories sits across from me.
But I recognize her.
Red streak in her braid.
“Hello again, Crimson Oracle,” she says.
My throat burns. My wrists are cuffed to the chair.
“I’m not your damn oracle,” I croak.
She smiles. “You are—you’re not a myth.”
“I was confirmed as a deviated subject!”
She doesn’t react—lays out a file.
“Reprogramming is necessary.”
My mother’s name.
Dates. Photos. Transcripts.
I strain in my chair to see my mother’s face.
“She was a programmer,” the woman says. “She volunteered you. You are her legacy.”
Something flutters inside me, then falls still.
“As the lead programmer of the Crimson Oracle Initiative, she wrote the source code for conditioning. She built you.”
No. That can’t be true.
I shake my head. “You’re lying.”
She leans forward.
“We’re offering you a choice. Continue the path you’re on—alone, haunted, useless. Or return. Finish what your mother started. Become what you were designed to be.”
“I’m not your weapon.”
“No,” she says softly. “You’re the future.”
And in that moment, I feel the weight of it all—my mother’s silence, my buried memories, the voice inside me that wants answers.
The woman waits, her gloved hands folded neatly over the file, as if she has all the time in the world to watch me unravel. I swallow, the taste of chloroform still bitter on my tongue.
My wrists ache against the restraints. A dozen thoughts riot behind my eyes—my mother’s laugh, the way she used to braid my hair, the nights she stood by my bed whispering stories about a better world.
Stories that were nothing but a script.
My voice scrapes up from somewhere raw. “If she built me, why didn’t she stay?”
“She tried,” the woman says, almost gently. “She decided to reverse your programming before she died. But she only got so far. You’ve been…incomplete. Adrift.”
The word clings to me. Incomplete.
“How’d she die?”
“Poisoned.”
“Who?”
“Us.”
Bile rises into my throat. I vomit. It dribbles down my chest into my lap. Red Braid woman wipes me clean.
“I hate you.”
“You won’t when you are complete.”
It explains everything—the hollow ache I could never name, the way every undercover assignment for the carabinieri felt like a borrowed purpose, the way I kept searching for something to tether me.
I think of Pietro—his hands on my shoulders, steadying me when nothing else did. The way he looked at me like I wasn’t a weapon or an asset but something precious.
But the woman is still talking, her voice a careful blade—slicing me into fine slivers.
“We can give you what she wanted for you,” she says. “Closure. Belonging. Purpose.”
“You said she changed her mind.”
“Only briefly. Let us take your pain away.”
I close my eyes, fighting the heat that stings behind them.
Because something inside me wants to believe her. I want the ache to end. I want to stop feeling like a fracture that never healed. Even Pietro has not reached my deepest wound.
When I open my eyes, she’s watching me with something like pity.
“You were never meant to be alone,” she murmurs. “That was your mother’s greatest failure—not programming the final code for you to be triggered.”
“Triggered?”
“Yes, her plan was for you to save the world. Bring peace to the people.”
“Peace. That’s not what you want, is it? Your agents attacked me. Pietro. Attempted assassination.”
She watches me—not reacting.
“A failed extraction by us. A failed attempt by someone else to kill you.”
“Why?”
“Evil people want to capture the myth. Use you for evil purposes. Your mother placed all her hope in you for a better world.”
“So why did she change her mind?”
“Strange, that. We’ll never know.”
“What is a better world?”
“One we control. You will be invincible.”
The words burrow deep. Deeper than I want to admit. But something in her voice alerts me. Doubting she has the same goal for me as my mother did. Knowing deep down, she is the evil side of what she describes.
“Where is Pietro?”
“He’s far from here. Safe—if you cooperate.”
I can’t save myself, but I can save Pietro. Slowly, I exhale. “If I agree…if I let you finish the programming…what happens to the rest of me?”
She tilts her head. “What part?”
“The part that remembers him.”
A small smile ghosts across her mouth. Something reptilian watches me like prey. “You won’t miss him. He will try but he will fail to reach you.”
And in that moment, I feel the last thread inside me pull taut.
“I have one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t kill him.”
“You will see him again.”
“Do it.”
Her hand brushes mine as she unclasps the restraints. “Welcome home, Oracle.”
I tell myself I don’t care what I’m losing. I tell myself I was never whole to begin with.