Chapter Seventy-Eight
Raine
I pour the last of the French press into my mug.
Ellen’s folder is done. Inara sent the audio file from the hospital while I was sleeping.
Hearing Ellen describe her corrections, her pain, her fear…
it was too hard. I only made it through fifteen minutes of the hour-long recording.
Enough to confirm her account was coherent.
Believable. And that the past three days hadn’t broken her completely.
I close her folder and start building mine.
Logs. Vitals checks. So many videos. I don’t watch any of them. Working on my affidavit will be hard enough. I don’t need to see what they did to me in high definition.
At the bottom of the search results, there’s a single document that’s out of place. Not a log or a video.
I slide Asher’s challenge coin into my palm, then open it. It takes me a moment to fully comprehend what I’m looking at.
Paperwork. My paperwork.
Detainee ID: 3F-207
Status: Compliance failure
Disposal: Scheduled
If medical complication does not occur within the standard post-calibration window, approval is granted for manual disposal.
—Julian Voss
Post-calibration window. Manual disposal.
My pulse hammers hard enough, I might want to throw up. The screen blurs at the edges. I blink, and read the memo again.
Voss ordered my death with a single sentence of bureaucratic nonsense. And he’s the one with Asher’s fate in his hands. Who’s deciding—maybe at this very moment—how long Asher survives.
I sit with that for exactly as long as I can afford to. Then I copy the file, label it, and move it into a separate folder. My final play. The one I don’t make until everything else is already on the table.
It’s labeled with a single word.
Voss.
I pick up my mug, curling my fingers around the porcelain. The coffee’s gone lukewarm. I drink it anyway, then go poking around the flash drive to see if my disposal order was stored with any others.
It was.
When I open the folder, shock drains all the heat from my limbs. There are almost a hundred files here.
I work through them one at a time. So many names I recognize from the past few days. A few I don’t. The oldest disposal order is from only a month after Voss officially created Coherent Path.
Checking off each name one at a time in my notebook, I continue to click file after file.
Until a video pops up on the screen.
“What are you doing? This…no. This isn’t right!”
Four men muscle a woman into a room with a narrow, stainless steel table in the center.
She fights them, but her wrists and ankles are locked in thick restraints.
It takes less than thirty seconds to strap her down.
A man in a white lab coat takes a handful of her thick black hair and pulls it away from her face.
Oh, God.
Marisol.
I once watched her stare down a room full of hostiles in Bucharest like they were unruly toddlers who needed a nap. Like danger was something that happened to other people.
Electrodes.
Mouth guard.
Marisol screams. Her body jerks and flails against the straps. Tears stream down her temples.
“Response minimal. Increase amplitude.”
The second burst of electricity ravages Mari’s body. She’s not screaming anymore.
“Cardiac instability noted,” one of the contractors says from off camera. “Monitor for five minutes.”
Marisol cries softly. Her eyes are open, but I don’t think she’s seeing anything.
In the video, the rapid beeping from the heart rate monitor starts to skip. Then slow.
I…can’t. I can’t.
The room disintegrates in pieces. The laptop fades into nothing more than the glow of the screen. I can’t feel the chair under me. Or my hands on the table. My body…isn’t here. Isn’t…anywhere.
Pressure builds behind my eyes. I’m breathing wrong. Too fast and too shallow and too loud. I can’t slow it down. Can’t find where the inhale ends and the exhale begins.
The coin falls from my hand. I don’t hear it. I don’t hear anything.
Something pulls at me. It’s tiny, but real. And cold.
I’m on the floor, my back against the cabinet, knees drawn up, with the world returning an inch at a time. First, sounds. The dull buzzing from the fridge. The slow soothing music from the living room. The long, harsh tone piercing my ears from the laptop speakers.
I try to reach for the trackpad, but my arms won’t listen to me. I need it to stop. I have to make it stop.
It does. Two seconds later.
“Subject expired at 18:02. Send the body for incineration.”
The cold, clinical tone from the asshole on the laptop screen does what nothing else could.
It brings me back. And splits me open.
The sobs come before I can stop them. Quiet and desolate, grief that’s been waiting three years to find me.
Mari. Sarcastic, funny, brave Mari. Strapped down, her last moments filled with such fear and pain, I can still see the tears in her sightless eyes.
I let myself have sixty seconds. I count them. Every shaking breath, every tear that drops onto the kitchen tile, every second of grief I never knew I owed her until now.
Then I pick up the challenge coin, press it to my sternum, and shed one final tear for Asher. For what he’s going through.
I stagger to my feet and reach for the coffee grinder. Making myself a pour over this time, I get back to work.
With my log file on one side of the screen and the Procedure Index on the other, I use Asher’s tablet to open the affidavit file I started the other day.
The first lines of codes cover only fourteen minutes. Less than a quarter of an hour to strip me of everything I thought was mine.
A sip of coffee steadies me enough to revise the opening of my affidavit.
Day One - Intake and Initial Containment
The codes timestamped from 1704 to 1718 covered my intake. The process took approximately fourteen minutes.
I arrived already restrained. I was hooded, then given a pat down over my clothes.
After that, my jacket, shirt, pants, bra, and underwear were cut off me.
My socks and shoes were taken. A more thorough—yet still clinical—pat down followed.
My personal effects were removed: one ring from my left index finger.
A small gold hoop earring from each ear.
The restraints around my wrists were unlocked, and I was instructed to put on a set of scrubs. Short sleeves. Thin fabric. The hood was not removed for this process. I asked about shoes and was told no.
Heavier restraints were used to secure my wrists behind me. Ankle restraints applied with a connecting chain, weighted enough that walking required concentration. I was then transferred to a holding cell for fifty-three minutes.
I stare at the three paragraphs for a long moment. The language is so dry, so deliberately bloodless, it reads like it happened to someone else. I need that detachment. That distance. If I let it be personal—if I let it be real—I won’t get through it.
All of it—everything I remember—goes on screen.
The concrete floor. How it leached warmth from my bare feet until the cold stopped being sensation and became the one constant in that place.
How I lost hope of ever being warm again.
How long it took after I escaped before I stopped bracing against cold that was no longer there.
The photographs get their own documentation.
My ulnar nerves. Brachial nerves. The standing restraint configuration that gave them the excuse they needed to dislocate my shoulder.
Each one cross-referenced with its code, its location in my log file, its place in the sequence of things they decided to do to me.
I write all of it. All the way through the electroshock treatments—three rounds—and the waiting. The silence. Being left alone to die by degrees in a room with no cameras and no sound and no way to measure time.
When I finally close the document, it’s so much longer than I expected. But it’s done. Now…they need to hear my voice.
I make a cup of tea, add a generous spoonful of honey, and stare at the kitchen table. My body aches—too little sleep and too much time in a chair not built for comfort.
I can’t let the recording give GSD any clues to my location. Launching the video recorder, I cringe at the image on screen. The dark circles under my eyes look so much worse than I thought. And there’s a sliver of Bellevue visible in the window behind me.
Angling the computer forty-five degrees puts a blank wall in the frame. But in this position, I can’t see the door.
A brief, sharp slice of panic drives the breath from my lungs. I inhale deeply, hold, and release a slow, controlled breath out. I can do this. I’m safe here. No one knows where I am. No one will know where I am.
One more sip of tea to calm my nerves and soothe my throat, and I press record. My mouth opens, but what comes out is only a broken, half-syllable of sound.
I stop the recording, delete it, and press my hands flat to the table.
Asher is locked in a room somewhere, waiting for me to finish this. The door is forty-five degrees to my left and I’m safe and I have work to do.
I try again.
“My name is Raine Calder. I am a former field operative and analyst for the Global Security Directorate, Clearance Level Delta.
Seventeen days ago, I was renditioned without warning to a GSD program called Coherent Path and held for eight days.
What follows is the truth. They kept very detailed records.
“Coherent Path is an off-book GSD program with no official existence, no oversight, and no accountability. Agents are renditioned without warning, without charges, and without legal due process. The stated purpose, documented in Coherent Path’s own operations manual, is belief modification.
The actual purpose is the systematic destruction of anyone GSD considers a liability. ”
I pause, take a breath, then a sip of tea. My hands are steady. So is my voice. That matters.
“During the eight days I was held by Coherent Path, I was kept hooded and restrained constantly. Every minute of every day. The program consists of sensory deprivation, stress positions, pressure point corrections, and—if you don’t accept their version of truth—three rounds of high-amplitude electroconvulsive therapy.
"They claim it’s belief modification. It is actually the deliberate, systematic erasure of a person. Not compliance. Not rehabilitation. Erasure. They wanted me to stop being myself. They nearly succeeded.”
I take another breath, but don’t reach for my tea. I won’t let them see the tremor in my hands.
“The photographs included in this packet were taken the day after I escaped. As you can see from this video, the bruises are fading. But I have ongoing nerve damage that is likely permanent.”
I force myself to swallow and press my thumb against the coin clutched in my palm.
“What they did to my relationship with my own body isn’t something a camera can see.
They conditioned me to associate touch with pain.
Every time someone at Coherent Path touched me—to adjust the restraints, to correct me if I made a single sound, or to move me from one stress position to another—there was pain.
I couldn’t separate the two. I still can’t. ”
I let that sit for a second. Because what I’m about to say next will keep Asher alive. I hope.
“A man helped me escape. He had no connection to GSD, no stake in what happened to me, no reason to walk into that facility and walk back out with me. He did it anyway. And after—” My voice does something I don’t entirely control.
I let it. “He documented my injuries. He stayed. He helped me remember that wanting things was allowed. That having needs didn’t make me a problem to be managed. That I was a person.”
I pause again, my gaze steady on the camera.
“He is the only person whose touch I can tolerate. I want that on record. Not because it’s relevant to the case. Because it tells you what they took from me and what it cost—what it’s still costing me—to get any of it back.”
With one final, unsteady breath, I stop the recording, add it to the second release packet, and hit send.