Chapter 15 #2
I scroll through the rest, my eyes moving more quickly now as the pattern becomes familiar. The messages are all the same, short, direct, stripped down to the bare minimum. No greetings, no signatures, no wasted words. It feels ordinary or close enough to it.
But the longer I analyze it, the more it resists that label. There’s no small talk. No variation in tone. Everything reads like it was written for someone who already understands what’s being said, as if context exists somewhere else and this is only the record of it.
Tapping at the keyboard, I scroll a little further, but it’s all more of the same.
I glance at the door again, a clock ticking down in my head. I should stop now. Go back to the bedroom and wait for him.
Instead, I click the ESC button and go back to the main menu.
This time I pick the last selection: REGISTRY.
At first, it doesn’t mean much. A few titles are administrative, dry enough to be meaningless.
One references deaths, another lineage, another says active and there’s an item titled as removed.
It’s all strange, but in that clipped, institutional way strange things often do when they want to pass for normal.
There’s a bunch of last names listed as well, some of which I recognize from the news. Senators, Congressmen, Judges.
One file catches my eye.
CARR INDEX
I open it.
Rows of names fill the screen, the information arranged with a meticulousness that makes my stomach flip before I fully understand why. At first glance, it resembles a genealogical record, with birth dates, death dates, line after line of names stretching backward far further than I expected.
I notice the names.
Carr.
Every one of them.
Not Carrson. Not Carrow. Not Carrick or Carrington. Just Carr.
Over and over again, across years, lifetimes, entries.
-----------------------------------------------CARR INDEX — PRIMARY LINE — ACTIVATED 1587 -----------------------------------------------
ID NAME BIRTH DEATH------------------------------------------------
C-001 Carr 1565 1593
C-002 Carr 1587 1618
C-003 Carr 1602 1638
C-004 Carr 1630 1671
C-005 Carr 1661 1707
C-006 Carr 1690 1738
C-007 Carr 1722 1778
C-008 Carr 1755 1816
C-009 Carr 1789 1852
C-010 Carr 1821 1892
C-011 Carr 1854 1930
C-012 Carr 1887 1968
C-013 Carr 1938 1991
Pressure builds behind my ribs, creeping outward as I lean closer to the screen.
Different men?
They have to be.
I know this name already. Carrson’s father and grandfather were both named Carr, but I never thought to go back farther than that.
Now, as I continue to scroll, it’s clear I made a mistake.
The years peel back one by one, like I’m traveling through time.
1900s. 1800s. 1700s. The pattern doesn’t break.
It only deepens, each entry opening into a longer record when I select it.
That’s when I see the women.
Each Carr is followed by three female names. Always three, listed separately, as if that number is expected. Required.
I stare at the screen without understanding what I’m seeing.
Wives, maybe. Family branches. Genealogy twisted by time into a format I don’t recognize.
But even as the thought forms, I reject it.
Because the longer I go over it, the less that explanation fits.
Why would they each have exactly three wives?
Then I see the first name that’s crossed out.
Not erased or deleted. Marked.
A thin line slices cleanly through the first woman’s name in one entry. Under that, another line.
Eliza Whitcombe.
Cause of Death: Childbed Fever
My skin goes cold.
I scroll.
Another name, crossed out.
Anne Harrow.
Cause of Death: Typhoid
Another.
Lydia Holt.
Cause of Death: Complications of Childbirth
The records continue with the same awful neatness. Each entry laid out as though nothing about it is unusual. As though death itself is another category to be tracked and preserved.
They don’t remove the women.
They record them.
My pulse climbs, slow at first, then faster, harder, thudding into my throat as I keep scrolling, my eyes snagging on more dates, more causes, more names struck through with cold, administrative finality. The years keep falling away until the numbers stop reading as modern.
Until the last entry, or I guess it’s really the first. A Carr who lived 1565-1593. Above is a detail that didn’t fully register at first.
CARR INDEX — PRIMARY LINE — ACTIVATED 1587.
1587.
I tilt my head and stare at it. I know that date, but I can’t remember why. History class, I think? Back in junior high. I remember an event happened that year. It was important. Then it comes to me.
Roanoke.
The lost colony. The one that vanished.
My gaze comes back to the screen, to the neat columns and the unbroken records and the impossible, repeating line of men named Carr.
They didn’t vanish.
The thought arrives fully formed, and, once it does, I can’t unthink it.
My mouth goes dry as I scroll through the names. Dragging the years forward through the centuries. The structure doesn’t change. One man. Three women. Every time.
Only the deaths shift.
The further forward I go, the less often the women die and the longer the men last, which almost makes sense. Medicine has improved. People live longer now. Better care, better technology. That’s what we’re told.
But this isn’t gradual.
It isn’t uneven the way real life is, where some people get lucky and others don’t.
This is more ordered than that.
Each generation trends older than the one before it, the numbers stretching further, stabilizing in a way that’s less like progress and more like manipulation.
Not perfect. There are outliers. Carrson’s father stands out immediately.
Fifty-three, died from a heart attack. Too early compared to the others around him.
I scan the dates again. The men in the most recent generations don’t just live long. They live consistently long. Eighties. Nineties. Not one or two, but most of them.
A quiet, unsettling thought clicks into place.
This isn’t simply people benefiting from modern life.
My gaze runs back over the earlier entries, where the years are shorter, less predictable, where death comes quicker and without pattern, and then forward again, where everything smooths out and holds.
Like someone figured something out. And kept it for themselves.
A memory comes back to me, of hospital lights too bright, the air too sterile, the sound of labored breathing. That hacking cough. Fury spills into my veins, poisonous when I think about her.
Dead at seventeen while these fuckers live forever.
My hand jerks back from the keyboard like it’s electrocuted me. I want to rage, break something, destroy it. Pick up the computer and throw it through the window, take the chair and smash it against the desk.
Take a knife and—No. Stop.
I came here for concrete evidence, secrets I could use, and I found it. But it’s bigger than I thought. Older. More dangerous because it’s not over. Whatever they’re doing, it’s still going on, and somewhere buried with all these Carrs and all these women and all these years is him.
This is what Carrson comes from.
What does that make him?
A crashing sound from downstairs makes me jump, my pulse lurching as my head jerks toward the door. For one heart-stopping moment, I think he’s back. That I’ve run out of time, pushed my luck too far. But the handle doesn’t move. No one bursts into the room yelling, “Gotcha!”
Another crash from downstairs is followed by male voices yelling. Heart pounding, I quickly log out of the computer and turn it off. I go to the door, but before I pass through it, I cast one last glance at the computer that now sits silent and innocent on the desk.
I should let it go. Whatever’s happening here, one person can’t fight it. But the thought doesn’t hold. It fractures the minute it forms.
I’m not done chasing this.
For me. For her.
Maybe even for him.