85. Jonah
Jonah
“ H e copied your mind.”
The words hit the room like a bomb.
Sienna goes completely still beside me.
Not shock.
Not panic.
Recognition.
Like pieces of a nightmare she’s been running from are finally locking into place.
“No…” she whispers.
The woman in the pod is shaking violently now.
Fluid churning around her while neural lines spark against the glass.
The monitors keep screaming warnings.
CASCADE FAILURE
MEMORY COLLISION
CORE INSTABILITY
I don’t understand half the tech garbage flashing across the screens.
But I understand fear.
And every person in this room suddenly has it.
Kade’s breathing roughens slightly.
“She wasn’t supposed to wake up yet.”
Lance stares at him.
“You know, every new sentence somehow makes you MORE insane.”
Sienna tears her eyes away from the pod.
Slowly turns toward Kade.
“What did you do to me?”
For the first time—
Kade hesitates.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
Then he says quietly—
“You were dying.”
The room stills.
My head snaps toward Sienna instantly.
“What?”
She looks just as blindsided as I feel.
“No.”
Kade nods slowly.
“The explosion in the Zurich lab should’ve killed you.”
Memory flashes across Sienna’s face.
Pain.
Fire.
Screaming.
She stumbles backward a step.
Jonah catches her immediately.
“Hey.”
Her breathing shakes.
“I remember the fire…”
Kade’s voice lowers.
“You had severe neural damage. Memory degradation. Synaptic collapse.”
Vale looks sick now.
Like he knew pieces of this but never all of it.
“You used Oracle to stabilize her brain,” Vale whispers.
Kade smiles faintly.
“Yes.”
Cold crawls down my spine.
No.
No no no—
Sienna’s face drains white.
“You copied my neural patterns.”
“I preserved them.”
“You experimented on me.”
“I saved you.”
The fury that explodes across Sienna’s face is breathtaking.
“You turned me into code!”
The entire facility shakes violently again.
Oracle reacting to her emotional spike.
Lights burst overhead.
Sparks rain through the room.
Lily cries out over the speakers.
“Please stop fighting!”
The alarms intensify immediately.
WARNING: CORE EMOTIONAL DESTABILIZATION
My stomach drops.
Oracle is tied to BOTH of them.
Lily.
And S-01.
Jesus Christ.
The system isn’t just alive.
It’s fractured.
The woman inside the pod suddenly gasps sharply.
Then looks directly at Sienna again.
Terror fills her gray eyes.
“He split you,” she whispers weakly.
Silence crashes through the room.
Sienna freezes.
“What?”
Kade closes his eyes briefly.
Like he knows it’s over now.
The woman inside the pod starts crying.
“He copied the parts of you he needed…”
My pulse pounds harder.
No.
No—
“The empathy went into Lily,” she whispers. “The intelligence stayed with Oracle.”
Sienna looks shattered.
“And you?”
The woman’s face breaks completely.
“I got the pain.”
The room goes dead silent.
Even Lance has nothing to say.
Because somehow—
That might be the cruelest thing Kade’s done yet.
The woman in the pod isn’t a clone.
She’s a discarded fragment of Sienna’s damaged consciousness.
A living trauma archive.
Oh my God.
Lily’s tiny voice trembles through the speakers.
“She cries all the time…”
Sienna’s knees nearly buckle.
Jonah catches her harder.
Holding her against him while her entire past detonates around her.
And then—
Kade suddenly moves.
Fast.
Way too fast for an injured man.
He slams a hidden switch beneath the wall panel beside him.
Every monitor in the compound instantly flashes black.
Then one final message appears in blood-red letters.
FINAL PURGE INITIATED
Thirty seconds.
The entire facility begins locking down for total destruction.
And Kade smiles.
“If I lose Oracle,” he whispers, “no one leaves with her.”