12. Thandiwe
Thandiwe
Matthias
Bliss sleeps in the creative integration room with her head resting on a folded towel and red paint still drying along one wrist.
I should move her back before Nurse Larkin returns.
I should restore the cabinet lock, clean the glass from the floor, hide the canvas, and reduce every visible sign that a woman just clawed her way back through seven weeks of chemical violence.
Instead, I sit at Strauss’s workstation with his credentials open on the screen and search for my sister.
Thandiwe Cross.
No result. I expected that.
Expectation doesn’t make the empty field easier to look at.
I search variations next. T. Cross. Thandi Cross. Thandiwe Mbeki, our mother’s surname. Old addresses. Cape Town. London. Rotterdam. Every alias I ever found in a shipping manifest, medical transfer record, or shell-company invoice connected to Meridian’s early European routes.
Nothing.
Behind me, Bliss shifts in her sleep, and I turn immediately.
She doesn’t wake. Her breathing stays uneven but steady, her hand curled loosely near her face, paint drying on her hands like proof. Strauss would call the episode dysregulation. I’d call it recovery with teeth.
I return to the screen.
The archive is larger than anything I expected to find inside one facility. Hundreds of records. I start the encrypted upload to HAVEN before opening the first file and let Grayson know through my comms. If Strauss walks in five minutes from now, I refuse to let this disappear with me.
Intake assessments, medication schedules, cognitive review notes, donor-coded funding categories, discharge summaries that don’t name destinations. Women processed through language designed to make disappearance sound clinical.
Adaptive compliance.
Attachment reorientation.
Memory-response reduction.
Companion readiness.
My hands pause over the keys.
There are monsters who know they’re monsters.
Strauss is worse. He built forms for it.
I open the oldest dated file. Eight years ago. Too recent. Thandiwe was taken ten years ago, before Meridian Memory Institute existed, before Strauss had this building and Holt had these compounds and the Rothmans had turned grief into formulation.
I knew that too.
I still searched.
Because grief is not scientific. It makes bargains with impossible things and calls the bargaining evidence.
The files tell another story instead.
This place isn’t where Thandiwe disappeared.
It’s what Meridian built after people like her taught them what worked.
My sister isn’t in these records because she belonged to an earlier version of the machine. Rougher. Less polished. More physical. Fewer consent forms. Fewer white walls. The same outcome hidden under cruder language.
A line catches my attention.
Subject response failure.
I open the file.
Not Thandiwe.
A woman from Oregon, twenty-six, transferred after six weeks because emotional attachment could not be redirected toward the assigned client.
Another. Protocol escalation approved.
Another. Family contact severed.
Another. Identity resistance persists.
The encrypted upload completes.
“Got it,” Grayson says. “Now put a copy on your hidden drive too. One copy is optimism.”
I take the encrypted drive from the concealed pocket inside my jacket, slide it into the workstation, and begin the transfer.
File after file copies across. If I can’t find my sister here, I can at least take the names of women this institute tried to erase.
Bliss stirs again.
“Matthias?”
I close the archive window before turning.
“I’m here.”
Her eyes open, unfocused at first, then clearer as she finds me. “Did you find her?”
I don’t ask how she knew who I was searching for.
“No.”
Her gaze softens in a way that hurts more than pity would.
“She wasn’t here?”
“No. This facility came later.”
Bliss looks past me to the darkened screen.
“But it’s connected.”
“Yes.”
She pushes herself upright slowly, still pale, still exhausted, but present enough to understand the cost of what I’ve found.
“They learned from her,” she says.
The words reach places I’ve kept locked for ten years.
I look back at the archive, at the hundreds of stolen lives organized by date, protocol, and outcome.
“Yes,” I say. “I think they did.”
Voices carry somewhere beyond the corridor junction.
Bliss reaches for the edge of the table and stands, unsteady but determined.
“Then take everything.”
I meet her eyes.
“I am.”
This time, when I turn back to the records, I’m not searching for Thandiwe.
I’m gathering evidence for every woman who came after her.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1545 hours
The Phase 1 folder sits three directories below Strauss’s active patient archive.
It shouldn’t be here.
The naming is too old, the formatting different, the file structure carried over from another system and buried beneath years of cleaner clinical language. Strauss didn’t build these records from scratch. He inherited them, refined them, and hid the older work where no casual audit would look.
My hands still over the keyboard.
Phase 1 trials.
I open the first correspondence file.
Aaron Strauss to Rothman Neuropharmaceutical Research Division. Twelve years ago.
Two years before Thandiwe disappeared.
The email is brief, professional, almost dull in the way corporate cruelty often is when written by people who trust clean formatting to disguise intent.
Early compound instability. Subject resistance. Memory fragmentation inconsistent but promising. Recommendation to continue controlled exposure with tighter environmental variables.
Controlled exposure. Subject resistance. Promising.
I read the phrases three times because some part of my mind keeps rejecting the shape of them.
Grayson’s voice enters my earpiece, softer than usual. “Matthias, I’ve got the folder on our end.”
“Open Phase 1,” I tell him.
A pause follows.
“Hell.”
Bliss stands behind me now, one hand braced on the table, paint dry along her wrist. “What is it?”
I don’t want her to see this. I also refuse to decide what truth she can survive.
“Strauss was working with Rothman twelve years ago,” I say. “Before this institute. Before the current protocols.”
Her eyes move to the screen. “Earlier subjects?”
“Yes.”
I open another file.
Phase 1 Candidate Outcomes.
No full names. Only initials, ages, origin countries, transfer codes, and response categories. Female subjects between twenty and thirty-two. South Africa. Kenya. Romania. Brazil. Canada. No clinical consent forms attached. No discharge summaries. No destinations.
My throat tightens around the air I’m trying to breathe.
There are three South African entries.
Subject SA-04-23.
Subject SA-07-25.
Subject SA-09-26.
Thandiwe was twenty-five.
Bliss reads enough to understand. Her hand covers her mouth.
“Matthias.”
I click SA-07.
The record opens slowly.
No photograph. No name. No family contact. Only observations.
High emotional attachment to sibling. Strong identity retention. Musical recall intact after first exposure. Resistance increased under isolation. Transferred to European partner site for continuation.
I freeze, staring at a single line on the screen.
Musical recall intact.
Thandiwe sang when she was frightened.
Softly. Under her breath. Old songs my mother taught us in Cape Town while rain rattled against the kitchen windows.
I close my eyes because if I keep looking at the screen, I may not stay useful.
Bliss’s fingers touch my sleeve. They rest lightly there, asking nothing except that I know she’s beside me.
I open my eyes.
“Could it be her?” she asks.
“Yes.”
The answer scrapes its way out.
“It may not be. But yes.”
Grayson speaks again. “I’m copying every Phase 1 file now. Victor’s reading it.”
“Send him SA-07 first.”
“Already did.”
Of course he did.
I search for the European partner site.
The field is partially redacted, but not well enough.
A routing code appears beneath the transfer note.
ROT-EU/THALASSA.
Thalassa. Greek for sea.
My pulse steadies in a way I don’t trust.
Bliss watches my face. “You know that word?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a place?”
“I don’t know yet.”
But the lie in that answer is thin.
It’s a route. A facility. A ship. A program. Something connected to the early Meridian network that took my sister and taught Strauss how to take women apart more elegantly later.
The voices in the corridor return, closer this time.
Bliss looks toward the door.
I download the Phase 1 folder to the hidden drive and wipe the recent access trail as fast as the system allows.
On the screen, SA-07 remains open for one final second.
High emotional attachment to sibling.
Then the file disappears beneath the blank clinical portal.
Bliss stays beside me, subdued and paint-streaked, while the hidden drive warms beneath my palm.
For ten years, I’ve searched for my sister in ports, invoices, manifests, and graves that never held her name.
Now Meridian has given me one more word to follow.
Thalassa.
And if Thandiwe passed through that door, I will tear it open.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1600 hours
Bliss cleans like a woman hiding evidence from a crime scene.
She gathers broken glass with a towel, wipes red paint from the floor, and rights the overturned tray while I finish burying the access trail.
Her movements are still unbalanced, but her eyes are clear now, tracking every visible sign of what happened and deciding what can stay.
The canvas is the problem.
It’s too loud to hide, too wet to move, and too much hers to destroy.
“Leave it,” I say.
Her hand stills on the edge of the table.
“Strauss will see it.”
“Yes.”
The answer costs me, but I need him looking at her recovery instead of the workstation. Strauss understands art as a symptom. Let him obsess over the red canvas while the real damage leaves his system through an encrypted channel.
Bliss studies me, then nods once. “As a distraction?”
“Exactly.”
She wipes black paint from her fingers and reaches for a clean cloth. “I hate that he’ll think he understands it.”
“He won’t.”
“No.” Her mouth tightens. “He really won’t.”