Chapter 7 Jinx
Chapter Seven: Jinx
I dream of blood.
Not the quick kind, the kind that comes from a clean kill. This is the slow kind. The kind that pools and spreads and stains everything it touches. In the dream, I'm lying in a field of red, and the sky above me is the same color, and somewhere in the distance, Asher is calling my name.
But I can't move. Can't speak. Can't do anything except lie there and bleed while the world turns crimson around me.
Then the dream shifts.
I'm eight years old.
The table is cold against my spine. They stripped me down to shorts and strapped me to stainless steel that leaches heat from my body until my teeth chatter.
The room smells like antiseptic and copper and fear.
My fear. It's coming off me in waves, and I can see the technician's nostrils flare as he catches it. He likes the smell. They all do.
"Subject H3 is prepped for Protocol Seven," someone says. A woman's voice. Calm. Clinical. Like she's ordering coffee instead of my destruction.
I try to turn my head, try to see her face, but the strap across my forehead holds me in place. All I can see is the ceiling. White tiles. Fluorescent lights. A water stain in the corner that looks like a screaming mouth.
Electrodes press against my temples. My chest. The base of my skull. Each one is a cold circle of metal that promises pain.
"Heart rate elevated. Cortisol levels optimal." The technician's voice is closer now. I can smell his breath. Coffee and cigarettes. "Ready for stimulus injection."
The needle slides into my neck.
I've been injected before. Vaccines when I was small, but this isn't medicine. This is fire. Liquid fire that spreads through my veins, up into my brain, down into my spine. Every nerve ending lights up at once, screaming, and my body arches against the restraints hard enough to bruise.
I don't scream. Not yet. Screaming is weakness. They taught me that in the first week.
"Subject is responsive. Begin audio integration."
The voice floods through speakers I can't see. It's everywhere. Inside me.
You are not a person. You are a tool.
The words hammer into my skull in time with my heartbeat.
Tools do not feel. Tools do not want. Tools do not love.
The electricity starts. Low at first, a buzzing current that makes my muscles twitch involuntarily. Then higher. My back arches again. My hands clench into fists so tight that my nails slice into my palms, blood welling up and dripping onto the steel.
Pain is instruction. Pain is the path. Pain is the purpose.
"Subject H3 shows increased aggression response." The woman's voice cuts through the electricity, through the agony. "Recommend escalating the fear protocol."
The lights go out.
In the darkness, something moves. I can hear it. Breathing. Shuffling. Getting closer. My heart slams against my ribs so hard I think it might break through. The chemicals in my blood turn the fear into something physical, something alive, a creature crawling through my veins.
"What you fear is what you will become." The woman's voice is soft now, almost tender. "Fear is transformation. Embrace it."
The thing in the dark touches my foot.
I scream.
I don't stop screaming until they shock me unconscious.
When I wake up, I'm in a different room. Smaller. A cell. The walls are padded and there's a drain in the center of the floor. I know what the drain is for. I've seen them hose out other cells, wash away the blood and piss and shit of children who broke too fast.
My body aches everywhere. The injection sites on my neck throb. My hands are bandaged, but blood is already seeping through the white gauze. When I try to move, my muscles spasm and refuse to cooperate.
The door opens.
She walks in.
Silver hair swept back from a severe face. Ice-blue eyes that assess me like I'm a specimen under glass. She's wearing a gray suit, perfectly tailored, and she carries a tablet in one hand and a small device in the other.
"Good morning, H3." Her voice is the same one from the procedure room. "How do you feel?"
I don't answer. Words feel far away.
"That's expected. The first session is always the most disorienting." She checks something on her tablet, makes a note. "Your neural plasticity is impressive. You responded to the conditioning faster than most subjects your age."
She says it like it's a compliment. Like I should be proud of how quickly my brain bent to their torture.
"I'm going to ask you some questions now." She sits on a small stool near the door, out of reach but close enough that I can see every detail of her face. "Answer honestly. If you lie, I'll know, and we'll have to repeat the session."
My stomach clenches. I can't do that again. I can't.
"What is your name?"
The question catches me off guard. My name. I have a name. It's... it's...
The memory slips away like water through fingers. I try to grab it, try to hold onto the shape of it, but there's nothing there. Just static where a name should be.
"I..." My voice cracks. "I don't remember."
She makes another note. "Good. What is your designation?"
"H3."
"What is your purpose?"
The words come automatically, drilled into me through endless repetition. "To serve. To obey. To complete my objectives."
"And what are tools not permitted to do?"
"Feel. Want. Love."
She smiles. It doesn't reach her eyes. Nothing reaches those eyes.
"Excellent progress, H3. You're adapting beautifully." She stands, smooths her suit. "We'll continue tomorrow. Try to rest. You'll need your strength for Protocol Eight."
Protocol Eight.
I don't know what that is, but my body knows. My body remembers something my mind has already erased, and it starts shaking before she even reaches the door.
"One more thing." She pauses, looks back at me. "I know this is difficult. I know it hurts. But what we're doing here is necessary. We're making you into something greater. Something that will change the world."
She leaves.
I curl up on the padded floor and cry. Silent tears that I learned to hide in the first week, because crying out loud means punishment.
I cry for the name I can't remember. For the family that must be looking for me, or maybe isn't, maybe they're glad I'm gone.
I cry for the boy I was before this room, before the table, before the woman with the ice-blue eyes.
I cry until there's nothing left.
And then I do what they've taught me to do.
I bury it. Shove it down so deep that even I can't find it. Build walls around the pain and the fear and the desperate, screaming need to be someone instead of something.
By morning, I'm empty.
By morning, I'm exactly what they want.
By morning, I'm H3.
I wake up to white.
White ceiling. White walls. White sheets. For one terrible moment, I'm back in the Foundry, strapped to a table, waiting for the next round of conditioning. My heart hammers against my ribs. My hands clench. Fight or flight kicks in, screaming at me to move, to run, to—
"Hey. Hey, you're okay."
Asher.
His voice cuts through the flashback like a knife through fog. I'm not eight years old. I'm not H3. I'm Jinx Harrison, and I'm in a safe house, and the woman with the ice-blue eyes is somewhere in Singapore, still breathing, still making monsters out of children.
But not for long.
He's beside the bed, dark circles under his eyes, stubble shadowing his jaw. He looks like he hasn't slept in days. His hand finds mine, warm and rough, anchoring me to the present.
"Where..." My voice comes out like sandpaper. "Where am I?"
"Safe house. Different one." He squeezes my hand. "Jagger called in a favor. Black market surgeon. You've been out for two days."
Two days. The flashback lingers at the edges of my vision, the taste of that chemical cocktail still burning the back of my throat. I try to sit up, and pain explodes through my side. Asher's hand presses against my chest, pushing me back down.
"Did he take any of my organs? The fuck, I feel like I got hit by a bus."
"Don't. You'll tear the stitches."
"What—"
"Bullet nicked your liver. Surgeon had to go in and repair the damage." His voice is calm, clinical, but his hand shakes where it rests on my chest. "You lost a lot of blood. There were a few hours where we didn't know if you'd make it."
"But I did."
"You did." His eyes meet mine. Red-rimmed. Exhausted. Haunted. "You stubborn fucking bastard, you did."
The relief in his voice is raw. Unguarded. I've never heard him sound like that before, never heard him let the walls down enough to show how scared he was.
I was dreaming about her. Helena Cross. The woman who turned me into a weapon and called it a gift. The woman who watched me scream and took notes on my destruction.
"Dom," I say, because I need something else to focus on. Something that isn't the memory of electrodes and needles and a voice telling me I wasn't a person.
Asher flinches. His hand tightens on mine, and for a long moment, he doesn't speak.
"We buried him yesterday. Small service. Just us." His voice is flat now, all the emotion locked away. "Kira stayed with him until the end. She said he went peaceful. Said he was smiling."
"Asher..."
"Don't." He stands abruptly, releasing my hand, pacing to the window.
His back is to me, but the tension in his shoulders says everything his face won't. "Don't tell me it wasn't my fault.
Don't tell me I made the right choice. Don't tell me any of the bullshit people say when someone dies and they don't know how to fix it. "
"I wasn't going to."
"Then what?"
"I was going to say I'm sorry."
He turns. His eyes are wet, but no tears fall. The control is ironclad, even now.
"You're sorry."
"For making you choose. For being the reason you had to leave him." I hold his gaze, refusing to look away. "I know what that cost you. I know what it feels like to lose someone because you couldn't be in two places at once. And I'm sorry that I'm the one who's still here when he's not."