Chapter 10
Clare
Six flights up, Clare’s legs finally gave out on the landing.
She caught herself on the banister, breathing hard. Glanced at me and pushed away when I tried to help. Stubbornly, she gathered herself and kept going.
My body screamed with every step, needing rest. The key stuck in the lock three times before it finally turned.
We stumbled inside like survivors of a shipwreck, all elbows and exhaustion and relief we couldn’t quite voice.
The warmth hit us immediately. Radiator hissing in the corner, space heater glowing orange near the bed. After hours of freezing in a stolen car with broken heating, buses that felt like refrigerators, walking through Lyon with wind cutting through our coats, the heat was almost painful.
Clare dropped the backpack by the desk. Didn’t sit. Didn’t even remove her coat.
I stood near the door, one hand still on the lock. Couldn’t make myself move further into the room.
We’d been in the same three-foot radius for hours and hadn’t talked about it. The alley. The killing. How easily I’d done it.
Now alone in a room barely bigger than a closet, silence pressed down on us.
Outside, a car horn echoed through narrow streets. Voices in French and Arabic drifted up from floors below. The world continuing. The manhunt continuing. But in here: us and the question neither of us wanted to ask.
Clare pulled off her coat. Hung it on the back of the chair. Positioned the chair between us. Maybe unconscious. Maybe not.
Her throat worked like she was trying to find words.
“In the alley.” Rough, careful. “When it happened. Did you remember anything?”
I stared at her. Understanding what she was really asking.
Did you remember WHO you were? WHAT you were? Where that training came from?
She leaned against the desk, arms crossed. “Any flashes? Anything?”
Her words trailed off. She couldn’t say “what you are” but we both heard it.
I pulled the notepad from my back pocket. First time I’d used it since we ran. Wrote: No memory. Just reflex. Automatic.
Held it up where she couldn’t avoid seeing.
Something in her expression shifted. She’d hoped for answers.
She realized I was as lost as before. Maybe more lost. Because now I KNEW I was capable of killing but didn’t know WHY I was capable of it.
She turned away, shoulders drawing in. Protecting herself.
From me.
The realization hit harder than it should have.
And I couldn’t move past the threshold.
Automatic. That’s what I’d told her. That’s what it was.
But what did automatic mean?
My body knew. Throat. Neck. Precise points. Exact pressure. Dead before hitting ground.
I’d done this before. Enough times that thinking wasn’t required.
Who was I? What was I? What did they make me?
Knuckles white on the doorframe. The pain in my shoulder pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
Should feel something. Horror. Guilt. Remorse.
Nothing there. Empty space where reaction should be.
That was the problem. Not just that I killed them. That I felt nothing about killing them.
Across the room, Clare gripped the desk edge. Keeping distance. Keeping barriers.
Feel nothing about them. Feel everything about her.
Wrong. Inverted. Should care about taking lives. Care about her instead.
What did that make me?
I forced myself to move. One step. Another.
She watched me approach. Didn’t back away but didn’t relax either.
Pulled out the notepad. Wrote slowly, deliberately. Held it up.
Are you afraid of me?
Her eyes widened.
Something flickered across her face. Pain, maybe. Or understanding.
She didn’t answer immediately. Just stared at the words like they were a riddle she needed to solve.
The silence stretched. My chest tightened.
Finally, she looked up. Met my gaze directly.
“What you did...” Quiet. Raw. “In the alley. How fast you moved. How easily you...” She swallowed. “Two men. Dead before they hit the ground.”
I didn’t look away. Couldn’t.
“I watched you go from gentle to lethal in half a second.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Like flipping a switch.”
My throat worked uselessly. Wanted to explain. Defend. Apologize.
Nothing came.
“So yeah.” She exhaled slowly. “I’m afraid of what you can do. What you were trained to do, it seems. What they made you into, even if you don’t remember.”
The words hit like physical blows. Confirmation of what I already knew. What I was.
Monster. Weapon. Killer.
“But afraid of you?” She shook her head. Stepped closer. One step, then another, closing the distance I’d created. “No.”
I stared at her. Not understanding.
She leaned forward, golden eyes intense, unblinking. Close enough that I could smell the faint scent of her shampoo, see the exhaustion bruising the skin beneath her eyes.
“As long as your brain holds up.” Absolute certainty in her voice. “As long as you still remember me. Still know who I am. Still recognize...” She gestured between us. “This. Whatever this is.”
I reached toward the back of my neck. The chip. The thing they’d put inside me.
She caught my wrist. Warm fingers wrapping around the pulse point. Holding on.
“But right now?” She held my stare. Didn’t let go. “You’re not the person who scares me. That chip does. What it might do. What it might make you forget. And those awful monsters behind it, whoever they are.”
“So no. I’m not afraid of you, Xavier.” My name sounded fierce in her mouth.
I turned my hand in her grip. Not pulling away. Palm to palm, fingers threading through hers. Tentative. Testing.
She let me. Squeezed back.
Heat flooded through me. Not just warmth. Something deeper. More dangerous.
Her thumb brushed across my knuckles, the same knuckles that had crushed a man’s throat hours ago. She knew what these hands could do. Chose to hold them anyway.
Wrote with my free hand, awkward, not wanting to let go of her: Thank you.
She read it. Something shifted in her expression. Softening.
“Don’t thank me for basic human decency.” But her voice was gentle. “You’re a person, Xavier. Not just... whatever they tried to make you.”
Person. The word settled into my chest. Took root.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I could be both. Weapon and person. Killer and protector.
Maybe that was enough.
I released her hand reluctantly. Gestured to the desk. To the laptop.
She understood. Nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I need to... we need to understand what they did to you.”
Pulled the other chair closer. Sat beside her instead of at a distance.
Our shoulders touched. She didn’t shift away this time.
Clare opened the laptop. Blue light illuminated her face, made her look pale, but the tension had eased from her shoulders. The barriers were gone.
She pulled up medical journals. I watched over her shoulder, close enough to feel her warmth, see the screen reflected in her tired vision.
“Looking up neural implants,” she murmured, fingers flying over the keys. “Spinal chips. Trying to understand what they put in you.”
The research she’d been doing for hours. On the bus when she thought I was sleeping. Quick searches on the new phone. Now with a proper laptop, diving deeper.
Medical journals. Technical specifications. Images of surgical procedures.
And there: the X-ray from the clinic. My spine, vertebrae lined up in gray and white. The chip a bright spot near C7, foreign and wrong.
I reached toward the back of my neck without thinking. She caught my hand gently, pulled it down to rest on the desk. Left her hand over mine for a moment before returning to the keyboard.
The screen showed a medical journal article about experimental neural control interfaces for paralysis patients. Dense technical language explaining how electrical signals could restore movement to damaged limbs.
Clare scanned rapidly, processing, discarding. She clicked to the next tab, a study about deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s tremors. Then another article about cochlear implants.
“Standard medical applications,” she muttered, scrolling faster. “Paraplegia treatment. Motor function restoration. Seizure suppression.”
She opened a new tab. Compared the diagrams to my X-ray.
“None of these match.” Her finger traced the chip’s position on the screen. “Placement is wrong. Size is wrong. The surgery they did on you...” She shook her head. “This isn’t medical. This isn’t therapeutic.”
I leaned closer. Studied the difference between the images she’d pulled up and what sat inside my spine.
Mine looked sharper. More complex. Components the medical devices didn’t have.
She kept searching. Military applications. Experimental procedures. Classified research with redacted sections. Nothing. Pages and pages of nothing that explained me.
“I don’t understand.” She rubbed her eyes, movements clumsy with fatigue.
“There’s no documented link between spinal implants and amnesia.
Brain chips, maybe. Deep brain stimulation in specific regions.
But C7?” She tapped the X-ray. “That’s your lower cervical spine.
Motor control. Autonomic functions. Not memory. ”
She slumped, exhaustion winning. “I can’t find anything that explains what they did to you.”
Wrote: Maybe that’s the point. If it’s documented, it’s traceable.
She stared at what I’d written. Then back at the screen.
“Custom built,” she said slowly. Horrified. “They built something that doesn’t exist in any medical literature. Just for you?”
Wrote: Maybe. Or maybe for many more like me.
The thought made her go still. “Others. Jesus. How many people are out there with these things in their spines?”
Shrugged. Didn’t know. Couldn’t know.
She turned back to the laptop.
“And your memories...” Her words died. Shook her head. “I don’t know if your amnesia is due to how I found you, your trauma. Or if the chip caused it, is a side effect or if they did something else. Something I can’t see on an X-ray. But the more I look at it, the less it makes sense.”