Chapter 3 Jagger #2
He holds my gaze for a long moment. The tapping foot slows, then stops. The bravado falls, and then he shrugs.
"Fine. Show me your pictures. Let's see what's left in the wreckage."
I start with baseline images. Generic photographs with no connection to his investigation or The Silent.
A city skyline. A coffee shop. A crowded subway platform.
A few different universities. A cop shop.
His responses are normal, his body language unchanged.
The control set establishes his default state.
I make notes. Heart rate steady. Breathing normal. Pupils reactive but not dilated. He watches me write, curious despite himself.
"You're very thorough," he says.
"It's my job."
"Is it? Because this doesn't feel like standard interrogation procedure. Usually there's more screaming. More blood. Less..." He gestures at the tablet. "Clinical observation."
"You want screaming and blood?"
"I want to understand what you're doing." He leans forward, elbows on his knees. "Because right now, it feels like you're studying me. Not extracting information. Studying. Like I'm some kind of science experiment."
"You are."
The bluntness surprises him. I see it in the slight widening of his eyes, the brief pause in his constant motion.
"Well," he says finally. "Points for honesty, I guess."
Then I shift to the real material.
"Westpoint Academy," I say, and show him a photograph of the building before the fire.
His body tenses. The tapping foot goes still. His pupils dilate, and I watch his breathing speed up, shallow and fast.
"I know that place," he says, and his voice has lost its mocking edge.
"I was there, before. Outside, I mean. Taking pictures.
There was a fence… no, no a church, and guards, and.
.." He presses his palm against his forehead.
"Children. There were children going inside.
In uniforms. They looked wrong. Too quiet. Too... controlled."
I make a note on the tablet. "What else?"
"I don't know. It's just flashes. The building. The cross. A feeling that something was very, very wrong." He drops his hand, and his eyes are slightly unfocused. "Why do you have pictures of a college?"
"It's connected to what you were investigating."
"No shit." The sharpness is back, defensive now. "I figured that out from the way my brain is trying to crawl out of my skull. I'm asking why you care."
I don't answer. Instead, I pull up the next image.
"The Pineridge boys."
The reaction is immediate and violent. He lurches forward, hands gripping the edge of the desk, face draining of color. His breathing goes ragged, almost hyperventilating.
"Jonah."
"I know that name. I know it, I know it, there were files, there were—" He squeezes his eyes shut.
"Boys. Young men. They were trained to take over the Board and then they... they turned when it was their turn to hunt. They killed people. Important people. And after that, something changed. Everything got murky… it sped up. Project Omega. Ugh, why can’t I remember what it was about? Something—"
He stops. Opens his eyes. Stares at me with an expression I can't read.
"Harrison Protocol," he whispers. "That was in the files. Harrison. Like you."
My chest goes cold. "What do you remember about the Harrison Protocol?"
"Nothing. Just the name. Just..." He shakes his head, hard, like he's trying to dislodge something. "It was connected. Pineridge, Westpoint, Harrison. They were all connected. And there was links to Project Omega.” He makes a sound, low and pained, and his hands come up to cradle his head.
“What else?”
"Stop," he gasps. "Please. I can't—it's too much, it's all coming at once, I can't—"
His hands are shaking. His whole body is shaking. I can see the whites of his eyes, the rapid pulse at his throat, the way he's one breath away from a complete psychological break.
I should push. This is exactly the kind of breakthrough I've been waiting for. His walls are crumbling, his defenses shattered. One more trigger and he might remember everything.
The Architect would push. The weapon the Foundry created would push. That's what I was designed for—to break people, to extract what I need regardless of the cost.
Instead, I say, "We're done for today."
He looks up, surprise cutting through the pain. Tears track down his cheeks, and he wipes them away roughly, embarrassed, his chest rattling with the force of his breath.
"What?"
"The session is over." I set down the tablet. "Take the rest of the day to process what surfaced. We'll continue tomorrow."
"But I was just—you were getting somewhere. Why would you stop?"
Because you asked me to and because you said please. Because watching you break is doing something to me that I don't understand and can't control.
Because for one horrible moment, I wanted to reach across the table and touch you. Comfort you. Tell you it would be okay, even though nothing about this situation is okay and I don't even know how to comfort another person.
"Pushing too hard risks permanent damage to your cognitive function," I say instead. "You're more useful to me intact."
He stares at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, that mocking smile creeps back onto his face.
"Careful, Harrison. That almost sounded like you give a shit."
"I don't."
"Sure you don't." He stands, and he's unsteady, catching himself on the back of the chair. "That's why you stopped when I asked. That's why you keep feeding me and not torturing me and looking at me like I'm amusing instead of a gnat you want to squash."
"You're reading too much into basic asset management."
"Am I?" He moves toward the door, then pauses, looking back over his shoulder. "You know what I think? I think you're scared of what I might remember. Not because it'll hurt me, but because it'll tell you something you don't want to know."
He's too close to the truth. I keep my face blank, my voice flat.
"Rest. Eat. We continue tomorrow."
"Yeah." He opens the door. "We'll see which one of us breaks first."
He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him.
I sit in the empty room, staring at the tablet, at the notes I made, at the fragments of memory he pulled from the wreckage of his mind.
Harrison Protocol. Pineridge. Westpoint. Project Omega. The Bonaccorso mafia family.
All connected. All pointing to something I've suspected for weeks but haven't been able to prove. The closest I’ve gotten is that the Pineridge boys were supposed to complete their hunts and become Board members. When they rebelled, it opened the way for a new generation. They went their own way and created a split in the way Westpoint was run. I don’t know how that connects to my brothers and I…
we are close to the same age as the Pineridge boys.
We weren't recruited. We weren't saved from the streets and given purpose.
We were made. Designed. Manufactured like weapons on an assembly line.
I have a feeling the Pineridge boys were too, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove any of this myself.
But Jonah Doe, with his broken brain and his sharp tongue and his relentless fucking defiance, might be the only person alive who can. He’s seen documents that don’t exist in our databases. At least none that I can access.
I close the file. Pull up the security feed. Watch him collapse onto the bed in the guest room, one arm thrown over his eyes.
He's right. I am scared of what he might remember.
But not for the reasons he thinks.
I'm scared because if he proves what I suspect, then everything I've built myself into—every wall, every defense, every carefully constructed identity—becomes a lie.
And I'm even more scared of how much I want him to prove it anyway.
I watch him until he falls asleep. Then I keep watching, telling myself it's surveillance, telling myself it's strategy, telling myself anything except the truth.
The truth is that Jonah is getting under my skin. Burrowing into cracks I didn't know I had. Making me feel things I was designed not to feel.
And I have no idea what to do about it.
My phone buzzes. A message from the Ministry. Routine check-in on the asset. The same asset they believe to be in the cells I head.
I type my response without hesitation: Asset stable. Memory resurgence slower than expected. Continuing evaluation. Will advise.
Lies. All of it. His memories are surfacing faster than any processed asset I've ever seen, and I have no intention of advising anyone about anything.
I'm hiding him in my house. Protecting him. Going against everything The Silent stands for, everything I've built my career on, everything I was trained to be.
And the worst part is that I don't know if I'm doing it because he might have information I need, or because of the way he looked at me in that interrogation room and called me human.
No one has ever called me human.
No one has ever seen past the monster.
I close the security feed. Force myself to stand, to move, to do something other than stare at a sleeping man like some kind of malfunctioning stalker.
The kitchen is still scattered with evidence of his presence. His coffee mug in the sink, sugar granules on the counter, a cabinet door left slightly ajar. Small disruptions to my carefully ordered space. Signs that another person exists within my walls.
I should clean it up. Reset everything to its proper position.
Instead, I pour myself another cup of coffee and stand at the window, watching the city move through its afternoon rhythms, and think about sharp eyes and broken laughter and words that cut deeper than they should.
Maybe, if I'm very careful, I'll figure out how to extract what I need from him without losing myself in the process.
But even as I think it, I know it's already too late.
Something shifted the moment I saw him in that detention center. Something cracked when he looked at me and didn't flinch.
Jonah Doe is going to be a problem.
I’m turning into Jace. Fucking hell, kill me now.