Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
“They needed you stopped. Quietly. So no one would question it.” A muscle in his jaw flexes. “Not removed. Dismantled. Breaking you was only the start. They had to make sure if you survived, no one would ever believe you again.”
My vision tunnels without warning. I drag in a single breath, and the lingering scent of the tea is enough to bring the room back into focus.
Asher doesn’t shift his gaze from my face. “The man I was hired to extract was sent to Northbridge. He spent over a week there before he ended up at Coherent Path. But there’s no transfer order. No money trail. Someone got sloppy. If they hadn’t—”
“You’d have extracted him and I’d be…gone.”
He doesn’t confirm or deny. He doesn’t have to.
I ignore the burn in my throat, swallow hard, and glance at the laptop. “I’m—I want to see it. How they tracked…what they did to me.”
Asher plugs a thumb drive into the computer and opens the main directory. After a few more taps, he withdraws his hands from the keyboard and folds them in front of him. “This is your file.“You’re in control, Raine. The whole time. If you need to stop, we stop.”
Rows of entries fill the screen—columns of numbers and letters that look, at first glance, random and harmless. But they’re too clean. Too organized. My pain reduced to a spreadsheet someone could sort and analyze.
“I can scroll. Or you can,” Asher says. He hasn’t moved. A steady presence at my side.
My fingers tremble. “You…do it. Slowly.”
A small block of nine codes fills the screen, all stamped within fourteen minutes. From the time…
“Intake,” I whisper.
The word tastes wrong—too simple for what it was. My ribs pull tight, a ghost of the first pat-down, the cold air on my skin when they cut everything off me.
My body remembers before my mind does: the hood, the hands, the pressure on injuries they hadn’t even asked about. Being stripped and restrained so efficiently it felt less like processing and more like they were scraping away the parts of me that proved I existed at all.
I steady my breath.
“They moved so fast,” I say quietly, not looking at Asher yet. “Too fast for my brain to keep up. I didn’t understand half of what was happening. Just that every step made me…smaller.”
Asher stays still. Not frozen—anchored. Listening.
“I didn’t know it was only fourteen minutes. How could they do all of that in fourteen minutes?”
He doesn’t answer, but a muscle in his jaw flexes.
Memories from those first few hours hit hard and fast. My back against the cold wall, legs shaking so badly, it was either sit or collapse.
Being herded through corridors, barely able to shuffle with how heavy the restraints were.
“Scroll,” I whisper.
He does.
Another cluster fills the screen. Different codes, different spacing, but close enough together that my stomach clenches and nausea crawls up my throat.
Six hours. Sometime Wednesday night. My mind reaches for order and comes up empty.
A cold bloom spreads under my ribs.
The skin along my upper arms prickles, an echo of hands tightening in all the wrong places.
My shoulder twinges—the pain deep and sharp. Muscle memory from something I can’t name yet.
“I…don’t know what that sequence is,” I murmur, forcing air into my lungs. “But my body does.”
Asher’s voice stays soft and gentle. “Then we leave it for now.”
I nod. My throat works around a swallow.
“Next.”
He scrolls again.
I brace instinctively—shoulders tight, breath shallow—but this cluster is different.
Shorter intervals.
Code after code without any space for recovery. No time to orient. To rest. To think. They knew exactly how to break someone like me. Because they’d done it before.
Asher scrolls a little further and finds a line of actual words.
04:22 — CC-01
Notes: Response acceptable. Proceed.
04:22 — EC-04
My whole body remembers the shape of the word—acceptable. The tone. The flat, measured cadence.
My hands curl on the table.
“That one,” I breathe. “I know that one.”
Asher doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t move. But his attention locks on in a way that makes the room feel steadier.
“They asked questions. I don’t know if I’d slept or passed out or—” I shake my head softly. “But I remember being so confused. And a man saying my response was acceptable.”
The shaking in my voice isn’t fear—it’s recognition. Pattern. Truth clicking into place.
“And then they marked me for escalation. Immediately.”
I flick my gaze to Asher, needing to ground myself before I spiral.
He gives me a tight nod. “EC. Escalation. Whatever came next was intentional.” He keeps his voice soft and warm. Solid. Like the very first time I heard it.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
“Scroll,” I say.
He does.
The next cluster doesn’t make sense.
Not because they’re just letters and numbers and timestamps—but because nothing changes. The same code. The same state. Held steady far longer than anything else on the screen.
“That can’t be right.”
My stomach dips, like the bottom dropping out of the floor.
“Five hours?” I whisper. “It just…keeps going.”
“Could it be sleep?” Asher leans forward, his eyes fixed on the screen.
“No.” The answer comes immediately. “I would have known if they’d let me truly rest.”
My breath thins—not panicked, just…untethered.
Asher scrolls down far enough for the next few entries to fill the screen.
The timestamps are there.
But the codes aren’t.
Only vitals. Blood pressure. Heart rate. And a line for stability repeated every few minutes.
My hands tremble harder.
Asher leans back slightly—controlled, measured—eyes narrowing with a quiet, contained anger.
“This is deliberate,” he says. “The absence of codes.”
I swallow. “You mean they did something and didn’t want anyone aware of it.”
“Possibly.” His jaw tightens. “Or they didn’t need to. This reads like observation. Whatever they were doing, nothing required adjustment.”
A hollow chill moves through me.
Because that—that I recognize. Not as memory, but as a feeling.
My body remembers the shape of those hours even though my mind doesn’t—stillness broken only by the cold air I could never escape. The sense that time wasn’t moving forward so much as holding. The way I learned not to move because movement brought correction.
“It was just…dark,” I whisper. “Empty in a way that made me…pliable.”
“Raine,” he says, “losing time wasn’t a failure. It was what they wanted.”
I nod, but it’s small. Fragile.
“I thought it was drifting,” I murmur. “But this—this is the beginning of everything fracturing.”
He shifts his chair closer—just an inch—enough to steady the air without touching me.
“We mark this too,” he says. “Not for what it was. For what it did.”
I press my fingertips into the table’s grain, grounding myself in something textured, something real.
“Okay,” I say. “Next.”
Asher scrolls.
At first, this next set of codes and timestamps look…normal. Evenly spaced. Structured. Almost neat.
Then another cluster appears beneath them—dense, abrupt, too sharp a contrast to ignore.
My vision starts to gray out around the edges. The room tilts a few degrees off center. Something inside me tries to step backward, out of my own body. The way it did back there when I couldn’t tell where I ended and the silence began.
“Raine.”
Asher’s voice cuts through the slide. It’s not loud, not urgent. But it gives me something to grab onto.
I blink. The screen blurs, then snaps back into focus.
“I’m here,” I say, but it sounds thin. Distant.
“No. You’re not. Not quite.” He sits up a little straighter, the movement registering in the corner of my eye.
“What’s happening in your body?” he asks.
“My hands…”
I look down. They’re no longer shaking—they’re still. Too still. Not because I’m calm. Because I’m losing control.
If I don’t stop this, I’ll…disappear.
My pulse flickers in my throat, out of sync with my breathing.
“I feel…” The words catch. “Untethered.”
“Okay,” he murmurs. “Start with something simple. Your feet.”
I try to find them.
It takes too long.
“Raine.” His voice is sharper now. “Look at one thing in the room that isn’t moving.”
My gaze locks on his hand. The broad span of it. The steadiness in the way he keeps it there—visible, still.
“Good,” he says quietly. “Now breathe to match something constant. Mine, if that works.”
I drag in a slow inhale.
His chest rises and falls in a slow, predictable rhythm. A metronome when everything inside me is slipping sideways.
“One more,” he murmurs.
And suddenly—
I’m back in my body enough to register how far I’d drifted.
Asher doesn’t move. Doesn’t push closer. Doesn’t try to comfort me with his words.
He just waits, his presence steady, tethering me to the world.
My fingers twitch first. Small, but real. A signal returning.
“There you are,” he says softly.
Something eases in my chest—a tiny click of alignment, like a loose gear finally catching its teeth.
“I’m okay,” I whisper. I’m not. Not fully. But I’m here. That counts.
Asher nods. “Do you want a break?”
I look at the screen.
Yes.
I want to run from it.
No.
I want to tear the whole system down.
“Keep going,” I say.
He scrolls.
My hands start trembling again—not from dissociation this time, but something sharper. Instinct. A warning my mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
A tight formation of entries settles on the screen.
Pairs of codes. A pause. Another pair.
All stamped a few minutes after midnight on the eighth day.
The day he found me.
My pulse stutters.
“There’s…intention here,” I manage. “Not routine. Not maintenance. Something else. The spacing is wrong. Too deliberate.”
Asher doesn’t look at the screen—he looks at me. “What does it feel like in your body?”
I study the interval between the codes, the sudden stillness in the middle.
“It feels…final,” I whisper. “Like…someone decided something. Not in the moment—before. And this is them confirming it.”
Asher’s jaw tightens, the only outward sign of the anger I can feel radiating off him.
“Raine,” he says quietly. “I saw this same pattern on my target’s file. A dense cluster, then a sharp pivot. I think it was where they decided you were too much of a risk to let go.”
“They asked me questions. I…agreed to whatever they wanted.” My throat works, and for a breath, I can feel the hood tied tight around my neck. “I thought…they’d release me.”
Asher scrolls to the next set of timestamps.
A new cluster fills the screen—short, violent spacing. Codes stacked too close together. My breath catches before my mind can name it.
“That’s—” My voice falters. “That’s when they came back.”
I don’t need to explain how I know.
My temples start to throb.
Asher still doesn’t speak.
“They shocked me,” I whisper. “Called it a correction. But they wanted to…wipe my mind clean.” I swallow hard. “I don’t remember much after that.”
He scrolls again.
The codes end.
What replaces them is worse.
Only vitals now. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Logged at steady intervals. No notes. No adjustments. No interaction.
My hands curl into fists. “This part,” I say slowly, “is when they left me.”
Asher’s finger stills on the trackpad. “Left you how?”
“How you found me,” I say. My chest tightens.
“No one watching. No one correcting.” A hollow calm spreads through me as the truth finishes assembling itself.
“That’s when I knew.” I glance at the vitals, the slow downward slope.
“They weren’t waiting for me to improve. They were waiting for me to die.”
Asher grits his teeth, balls his hands into fists, then forces them to relax again.
“Raine,” he says. “The log ends here. That was the disposal cluster.”
The words don’t shock me. They confirm what I already knew.
“They weren’t going to release me,” I say. “They were done.”
I swallow hard, pressing my thumbs and forefingers together until I can feel my pulse.
“Okay,” I whisper. “That’s enough for today.”
Asher nods once, then closes the laptop without a sound.
“They made a decision,” he says, voice quiet and certain. “But they were wrong.”