Chapter Seventy-Four
Raine
The apartment is too quiet. My eyes feel like sandpaper. I’ve been staring at the laptop for ten minutes, trying to work up the courage to open the flash drive Ellen gave me.
I put the music on as soon as I got back.
A track called “Wind Down.” It reminds me of Asher.
Maybe it’s the steadiness—the way it chases the silence into the far corners of the room.
Or maybe it’s the first one he put on for me so many days ago and it created a permanent space for him in my mind. I can’t remember now.
Or maybe I’m only thinking of him because I can’t take off his sweatshirt. It’s huge on me. The sleeves hang past my fingertips, the shoulders are too wide, and it’s too long. But it smells like him. Woodsy and safe and…mine.
I close my eyes for a second longer than I should. My body wavers in the chair, tilting slightly in a way that feels wrong. Off-kilter.
My thoughts drag. Time thins at the edges. It’s almost one a.m. They’ve had Asher for fourteen hours now. He’ll be sleep deprived and exhausted and in pain.
Because of me. Because he wouldn’t let Ellen—a woman he’s never met—die. He chose to be the lever GSD pushed instead.
I have to find out what’s on the drive. Once I know, I can lie down. Give myself two hours. Maybe three. That’ll be enough for the noise in my head to settle into a rhythm. Into something usable.
The directory tree fills the screen. An entire terabyte of data broken down into clean, sterile folders. Detainee logs, security footage, financial information, and one marked Reference. I click on that one first.
The Procedure Index sits at the top of the list. I open it, and my eyes glaze over. Pages and pages of codes, broken down by category. A road map of what they use to dismantle people like me, translated into language anyone can understand.
I force myself to blink, hard. Thirty seconds is all I can spare on this spiral. I’m strong enough to face the truth. I have to be.
SP-01 - Stress Position 1. Detainee positioned with hands secured behind them, forcing the shoulders fully open.
There are so many of them. An entire page of positions with links to diagrams.
SC-01 - Sleep Conditioning 1. Detainee restrained prone, left for eighteen minutes.
The codes here range from nine minutes of “rest” to fifty-seven. Never more than that.
I scroll to the next group.
AF-CYC-01 - Airflow cycling, temperature threshold one.
My pulse stutters.
The ventilation races over my skin in uneven waves, so cold I think hypothermia is about to set in.
The heat kicks on in the apartment, and the sound drags me back to the present. Where I’m warm and wearing Asher’s sweatshirt and desperate to feel his arms around me.
My hands are shaking. But I can’t fall apart like this. Not right now. I’ll lose time I don’t have—time Asher doesn’t have.
Later. I’ll try again when I’m steadier. Document what happened to me in words, not indecipherable codes that let pain hide in a spreadsheet.
Before another memory can surface, I close the file and move to the directory marked Security Footage.
The latest video is time stamped only a few hours ago. It has to be Ellen.
The room is smaller than I expect. Plain, dark gray concrete. A single metal chair bolted to the floor. Ellen’s seated, hood on, wrists fixed to the arms of the chair. Ankles locked to the legs. Alone. Shaking.
For a full minute, nothing happens. The door opens almost silently, and two men enter. They’re dressed just like the contractors who handled the compliance review yesterday. They look…bored.
With a practiced efficiency my body remembers, they change the restraint configuration. Wrists locked in front of her. Ankles chained so tightly together, the bones of her feet grind against one another. Then they guide her to the floor.
She struggles, shakes her head, and makes a tiny, weak sound that might be, “No.”
The correction is immediate. The man holding her ankles presses two fingers along the nerve. Her entire body jerks, she whimpers softly, then stills. They’re gone in seconds.
My hands are clenched hard enough my knuckles turn white. The video keeps playing for another thirty seconds before it glitches and turns to static.
Eight other videos from the past thirty-six hours carry Ellen’s Detainee ID in the metadata. I move them into a new folder with her name on it. She’ll never be reduced to a number again.
Neither will I.
A spark of anger flares in my chest. It banishes the last of the chill from my fingers. If I hold onto it long enough, it’ll carry me through to the end.
The file names start to blur as I search for Tessa’s intake video. Or…was I looking for Ellen’s? I can’t remember anymore. I know I’m pushing myself too hard. That I should sleep. But even thinking about rest feels like a betrayal.
They won’t let Asher sleep.
The thought sends me back to the list, but now the screen has dissolved into a glowing black and white blob. My eyes ache. My hands aren’t mine anymore, disconnected from my body in a way that should scare me.
Two hours. I can give myself two hours. That’s long enough to dream. Long enough to claw back a bit of clarity.
The hallway light is too bright. Without Asher, everything is too bright. Too loud. Too much.
In the bathroom, I stare at my reflection as I brush my teeth. The woman in the mirror had just started to look more like me the past few days. Now…she’s practically a stranger again.
I let my eyes unfocus, my hand on autopilot. Top left. Center. Right. Spit. Move to the bottom teeth. Repeat. Put the toothbrush back in the cup with Asher’s. My eyes start to burn.
A flash of yellow catches my eye before I turn off the bathroom light. A square of paper on the floor. I pick it up and turn it over.
Don’t forget to sleep - Asher.
My throat closes so fast it hurts. In the next second, I’m on the floor, my entire body shaking.
A sound I don’t recognize fills the room. Part sob, part scream, part pure, raw grief. It tears at me, shatters any semblance of strength I thought I had left.
I clutch the note to my chest like it can somehow reach him. Like if I hold it hard enough, he’ll feel it.
“I choose you,” I whisper, and my voice fails halfway through the sentence. “I choose you.”
The tile leaches the heat from my legs, threatening to send me somewhere too dark to come back from. I can’t allow that to happen. Using the counter for support, I pull myself up and stagger into the bedroom.
His pillow sits at a slight angle. Right where he left it. I crawl under the covers and hold it to my chest, burying my face in the soft cotton. The scent of him has already started to fade and that small, quiet loss—it undoes me.
My shoulders shake. Tears soak into the pillow case. I can’t save him yet. But I can do this one thing. I can let myself sleep long enough to save him in the morning.
The last thing I feel is the note crumpled in my fist.
The last thing I see is his face.
The last thing I hear is his voice. “I choose you, too.”