28. Ellie
ELLIE
I don’t dream anymore.
Or maybe I’m always dreaming. The difference doesn’t matter. Nothing happens in my body without permission. Even waking up.
When my eyes open—I don’t choose to open them, they just open—the world is shapes. White. Silver. The burn of lights I can’t name.
Someone’s screaming. Far away. Getting closer.
It’s me.
The cold finds me first. Metal. Steel. I know this. My skin knows it. The way my thighs know Reed’s hands. The way my throat knows screaming.
I’m strapped down. Again. Always strapped down. The restraints are heavier this time.
Or I’m lighter.
Hollow.
A shell of a woman on a cold metal reclined chair, and somewhere Grace is watching. She’s always watching. Even when I close my eyes, she’s there. In my blood. In my head.
She stands across the room. Platinum hair catching the light.
Grace.
The name forms, but I don’t say it. Words cost too much now. Everything costs too much except counting. Counting is free.
One. She’s preparing something.
Two. Her back is to me.
Three. She knows I’m awake anyway.
Four. She always knows.
Her voice, when it comes, makes my stomach clench.
“Ah, you’re with us again.”
I’m not with anyone. I’m nowhere. But my body responds before I can stop it. A flinch, small and automatic. The twitch of prey.
She’s trained that into me. The flinch. The fear. The way my pulse spikes when she gets close.
I’m counting tiles when my skin starts crawling.
Seventy-four. Always seventy-four. I’m on number twelve when…
My body knows.
Before I smell him. Before I hear him. My body remembers what my mind won’t let me think about.
The restraints suddenly feel different. Not cold metal. Warm hands. Holding me down. Spreading me open. My skin is lying to me.
No. Don’t go there. Count.
Thirteen. Fourteen.
My body is convinced it's happening again.
Fifteen.
But I can feel it anyway. The vile sensation. His weight. The tear. The way he—
Sixteen. Seventeen. Don’t think. Just count.
He’s by the door. I don’t look. Can’t look. If I look at Reed, I’ll see his hands, and if I see his hands, I’ll feel them, and if I feel them…
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.
Grace is talking to him. Their voices blur together. I focus on the tiles instead. Better to count dead things than to think about living ones.
Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
Reed shifts his weight. His boots creak.
My body tenses. Automatic. Trained response. Like a dog that’s been kicked.
Twenty-three.
Please don’t let him come closer.
Twenty-four.
"Now we complete what your father started, Eleanor." She approaches with a syringe filled with clear fluid. "Project Ghost comes full circle. ”
Grace is talking. Explaining. Using words like “processing” and “reconstruction.”
I should ask what she means. Should fight. Should care.
Caring takes energy. I don’t have energy. Just the bare minimum to count. To breathe. To not die yet.
Grace mistakes my silence for attention. She keeps talking.
On the monitor above me, my vital signs flash: heart rate 142 and climbing, blood pressure spiking. Another screen displays what looks like brain activity.
"Your father called it healing," Grace continues, sliding the needle into my IV line. "We call it reconstruction."
Cold spreads through my veins, a thousand tiny needles of ice spider-webbing toward my heart. My thoughts slow. Stop. Start again in the wrong order. In the distance, something that doesn't belong in this sterile environment. A muffled explosion. Then gunfire.
Grace's eyes flick toward the ceiling, a momentary break in her composure. She moves more quickly now.
“It seems our timeline has accelerated.” She turns to Reed. “Secure the corridor.”
Reed moves toward me.
Everything in my body screams. But my body doesn’t belong to me anymore. It knows what to do. Go still. Go quiet. Make yourself small. Count.
His footsteps are heavy. He wants me to hear him coming.
Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.
He passes close enough that I smell him. Coffee. Sweat. That cologne that will never mean anything but—
Twenty-eight. Don’t think about it. Twenty-nine.
He reaches the door. Stops. Turns back to look at me one more time.
His smile promises: Later.
Reed nods to Grace, drawing a Glock from the holster at his hip.
“And if they breach?”
"Delay them." Grace's voice is ice. "I need three minutes for the initial bonding. After that, even Killian won't be able to undo what's been done."
Reed seals the door behind him. The distant sounds of combat grow louder. Automatic weapons fire, men shouting, something heavy crashing. Hope flares in my chest. Grace kills it with her next words.
"He's too late, you know." She prepares a second syringe with a milky substance. "This is the culminating moment I've planned for since the day your father died. Every contingency accounted for, every variable calculated."
My thoughts snag on her words like skin on barbed wire. "My father..."
"Now, Eleanor." Grace positions herself in my line of sight, holding a tablet displaying a complex molecular structure. "Do you recognize this compound?"
Grace is talking. Words spill from her mouth. I try to hold them, arrange them, and understand them.
Father. Project Ghost. Final component.
The words scatter like broken glass. I can’t piece them together. Or I won’t. If I understand, it will hurt worse.
“Your father’s masterpiece,” Grace says.
My father.
The image comes: his office, leather chairs, the way he’d smile when I brought him tea. Then the image fractures. Reed’s hands. The scalpel. Grace’s voice replacing my father’s in every memory.
“You’re not listening, Eleanor,” Grace leans close. Too close. Her perfume hits me first, cloying and sweet, like funeral lilies rotting in the sun.
“Your father hid his greatest work inside you. Those therapy sessions after your mother died? He was programming you, darling. Using your grief to bury theories in your mind.”
The words should mean something. Should hurt. But I’m already broken. You can’t break something that’s already in pieces.
“Nothing to say?” Grace asks.
I could say: There’s a bird on my wall that never lands.
I could say: Reed’s hands are larger than my father’s.
I could say: I don’t remember my mother’s face anymore.
Instead, I say nothing. Silence is safer. Words give her things to take.
She swipes to a new image, a brain scan with specific regions highlighted in vibrant reds and yellows. My brain scan, taken while I was unconscious.
"Perfect neural architecture," Grace says with genuine admiration. "Your father's daughter indeed. The ideal candidate for the procedure he never got to complete."
More distant explosions. Closer now. Grace increases the drip rate on my IV.
"Killian was our first success story," she continues, fingers flying over a control panel. "But the methodology was crude then. With you, we'll achieve perfection."
The sedatives make it difficult to hold onto a single thought.
Grace's revelations about Killian and my father swirl together with this new information, blurring at the edges. The drug’s blur everything.
What I learned during captivity, what's happening now, what might be lies Grace planted in my mind. Reality fractures.
"You already know what he is," Grace says, watching my face for reactions the monitors might miss.
"What you don't know is why your father chose you to continue his work.
" She leans closer, her voice dropping. "He didn’t have a clue what he was really doing, Ellie.
He was so obsessed with 'fixing' you after your mother died that he used his own prototypes as therapy.
He thought he was helping you, but all he was doing was leaving us a blueprint.
Those nightmares you had after your mother died?
That wasn't grief therapy. That was your father hiding his greatest work inside the one place no one would think to look: his daughter's mind.
You aren't his daughter anymore, darling," Grace continues, adjusting something on the IV drip.
"You're his unfinished research. And now, I’m going to finish it. "
She asks me a question. I hear the question mark at the end. Don’t hear the words.
My mouth doesn’t open. What would be the point? Grace already has her answers. She just wants me to say them out loud. To participate in my own destruction.
I won’t give her that.
Silence is the only thing I have left that’s mine.
"Because you're the missing piece." She leans closer, her face filling my narrowing field of vision. "The daughter of the creator, the lover of the executioner. You'll belong to the Order, just as your father's work does, just as Killian once did."
The sounds of fighting are unmistakable now. Gunfire, shouting, the distinctive crack of tactical breaching charges. Grace's movements become frantic as she prepares a third syringe.
"This should be administered in stages," she mutters, more to herself than to me. "But circumstances require adaptation."
The door bursts open. Reed staggers in, blood streaming from a gash on his forehead.
Blood. His blood this time.
Something in me wants to feel satisfaction. Wants to feel anything. But I’m too far gone. Too far away.
“They’ve breached the east wing,” he reports, his breathing labored.
Reed moves closer to the chair. To me.
No. Please no.
My body locks up. Every muscle is rigid. The sickening sensation returns. His hands, the way he—
Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
Grace is asking him questions. Reed is answering. But I’m counting. Only counting. It’s the only way to stay separate from the body that waits for him.
“Seventeen, that I know of.” Reed’s voice holds something I’ve never heard from him before. Fear. "He’s just tearing through them. It’s a fucking slaughterhouse out there."
"Then delay him," Grace snaps, turning back to me with the loaded syringe. "Whatever it costs."
Reed hesitates, looking between us. "Grace, we should—"
"Now, Reed!"
He leaves, sealing the door behind him. Grace turns to me, her mask cracking, but her determination intact.