24. Valaria
Valaria
The room is white—too white. Silent. Blinding and endless, like a lab spinning in a tunnel. No corners. No shadows. Just light that hums like it knows me.
I try to move. Can’t.
My wrists are bound to the arms of a chair. My legs shackled. My body is heavy, as if memory itself has mass.
I want to scream, but my voice feels locked in someone else’s throat.
Then I see her.
A woman floating with a braid streaked with red hanging like a kite string. She sits across from me, unblinking. Familiar in a way that makes my skin crawl.
She speaks, but her voice is distant, muffled like she’s underwater.
“You’re the failsafe,” she says.
Failsafe.
Like a buried code.
A kill switch?
Or a beginning?
She slides a folder across the table. It opens on its own.
Inside—my life.
Photos of me as a child I don’t remember. Reports. Coordinates. Neural maps in red ink. A signature I know instinctively belongs to my mother, though I’ve never seen her handwriting.
The woman’s voice sharpens. “You were never meant to be ordinary.”
A memory flashes?—
A corridor of glass.
My bare feet echoing.
Someone screaming my name.
Not Valaria.
Something older.
Forgotten.
The corridor melts. Walls dripping like liquid glass. The ceiling blinks. The woman’s face flickers—replaced by Pietro’s for a split second.
“Wake up.”
I jolt?—
Gasping.
Soaked in sweat.
Back in my bed.
The sheets twisted around my legs like restraints.
The sun hasn’t risen. The only sound is my heartbeat—furious in my chest.
It was just a dream.
But not just.
Because the red braid, the folder?—
The red ink?—
The word failsafe?—
Those weren’t invented by my mind.
They were remembered.
And if I dreamed it…
Someone once showed it to me.