Chapter 3
The Girl Who Wasn't There
The jukebox was playing something sad and country, the kind of song that mentioned trucks and rain and women who'd left without saying goodbye.
I'd been sitting in the booth for an hour.
Maybe two. The waitress had stopped coming by, which meant either she'd given up on me or she'd forgotten I existed.
Both felt equally possible. The french fries on my plate were cold—had been cold for a while, the grease congealing into something that looked almost solid, almost edible, almost like food I'd chosen to eat rather than something I'd ordered because my body was screaming for calories and I couldn't remember the last time I'd listened.
When did I last eat?
I couldn't remember.
When did I last sleep?
I couldn't remember that either.
The coffee was bitter. I'd been drinking it black because I didn't know how I took it anymore—cream?
sugar? something else?—and every sip was a reminder that I didn't know myself the way I used to.
The woman I'd been before the Institute, before Gabriel, before the pink room and the collar and the lullaby—she would have known how she liked her coffee.
She would have known where she lived, what she did, who she was.
I knew none of those things.
But I remembered the apartment.
My apartment.
I'd found it two weeks ago—or maybe three, or maybe five, time had stopped meaning anything—and I'd paid cash for six months upfront.
The landlord hadn't asked questions. The neighbors hadn't introduced themselves.
It was small and dark and smelled like the person who'd lived there before me, someone I'd never met, someone whose furniture I'd thrown out and replaced with nothing.
I should go back there.
Sleep.
Shower.
Try to remember who I was before I started waking up in motel rooms with blood on my hands.
But I didn't move.
The french fries sat on the plate. The coffee sat in the cup. The jukebox played its sad song, and I stared at the window and watched the darkness press against the glass and tried not to think about Gabriel.
"He'll never love you."
The memory came without warning, sharp as a blade slipped between ribs.
Batch 39.
The girl was young—younger than me, maybe, though I couldn't tell anymore. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A scar on her lip that she kept touching, like she was checking to make sure it was still there.
We were in a room I didn't recognize. White walls. No windows. A table between us, metal, the kind they used in medical exam rooms.
"He's dangerous," she said. "He doesn't care about you. He cares about what you can become. That's not the same thing."
"You don't know him." My voice, but younger. Softer. Still capable of believing.
"I know what he did to Batch 38. I know what he did to Batch 36. I know what he's going to do to you."
She leaned forward, and her eyes were hollow in a way that made my stomach turn.
"You're not special. You're just another experiment. And when he's finished with you, he'll throw you away like the rest of us."
I blinked.
The diner came back.
The jukebox had changed songs—something about trains, something about leaving, something about tracks that led nowhere. The french fries were still cold. The coffee was still bitter. The waitress was still ignoring me.
Batch 39.
Had I ever met her?
I tried to hold onto the memory, to examine it, to find the edges where it met the real world. But it kept slipping—her face shifting, her voice changing, the scar on her lip moving from one side to the other.
Maybe she was real.
Maybe I'd dreamed her.
Maybe Gabriel had planted the memory to keep me compliant, to make me afraid of leaving, to remind me that the world outside was full of people who would hurt me worse than he ever had.
"There's no one else."
His voice, cold and certain.
I pressed my palms against the table and forced myself to breathe. In through the nose, hold for four, out through the mouth. The technique he'd taught me. The technique that was supposed to ground me in the present, to remind me where I was, to pull me back from the edge of the spiral.
Where was I?
A diner.
Somewhere in the city.
I didn't know the address. Didn't know the cross streets. Didn't know how I'd gotten here or how long I'd been sitting in this booth or why I'd chosen this diner instead of the thousand others I'd passed.
The french fries were cold.
I ate one anyway. The grease coated my tongue, and I chewed mechanically, and I tried to remember the last time I'd had a meal that wasn't eaten in a diner at three in the morning, alone, with blood under my fingernails and a gun in my jacket pocket.
I couldn't.
The man at the counter was watching me.
I'd noticed him when I walked in—middle-aged, grey at the temples, wearing a jacket that was too warm for the season. He'd been drinking coffee and reading a newspaper, and I'd dismissed him as harmless, as no one, as background noise in a city full of strangers.
But now he was looking at me.
Not staring—not quite. Just watching, his eyes flicking to my booth every few seconds, his head tilted slightly, like he was trying to place my face.
Did I know him?
Had I killed someone he loved?
Was he here for revenge? For answers? For something I couldn't give him because I didn't remember the names of the dead, let alone their families?
I looked away first. Dropped my eyes to the table, to the cold fries, to the coffee cup with its ring of brown stain.
Don't draw attention.
Don't run.
Don't do anything that marks you as prey.
Gabriel's voice again, or maybe my own, or maybe something I'd read in a book I'd never owned. I couldn't tell anymore. The voices in my head were multiplying, overlapping, bleeding into each other until I couldn't distinguish his from mine from the girl who wasn't there's.
Batch 39.
Had I imagined her?
Or had I imagined being alone?
"There's no one else."
"You're the only one."
"He'll never love you."
"You're not special."
I needed to leave.
I threw cash on the table—more than the bill, enough that the waitress wouldn't follow me out, enough that no one would remember my face—and slid out of the booth.
The man at the counter watched me go. I felt his eyes on my back, on my shoulders, on the space between my shoulder blades where a knife would slide in easiest.
Keep walking.
Don't look back.
Don't let him see you're afraid.
I pushed through the door and into the cold.
The street was empty.
The diner's sign flickered behind me, casting weak light on the cracked sidewalk. The city was quiet at this hour—no traffic, no pedestrians, no sound except the distant hum of something I couldn't identify.
The shadow.
I saw it in the window of the closed shop across the street. A figure. Tall. Dark. Standing at the corner, half-hidden by the awning, watching.
I turned.
No one was there.
The street was empty. The corner was empty. The awning cast a shadow that looked like nothing at all, just fabric and gravity and the wind moving through it.
I imagined it.
I was exhausted. Starving. Falling apart.
There was no one following me.
But I couldn't shake the feeling—the prickle at the back of my neck, the weight between my shoulder blades, the certainty that someone was there, someone was watching, someone was waiting for me to lead them somewhere.
Gabriel?
No. Gabriel was gone. Gabriel had left. Gabriel didn't want to be found.
Someone else, then.
Someone who knew what I'd done.
Someone who wanted me to pay.
I walked faster.
The city unfolded around me in fragments—a closed convenience store, a row of darkened apartments, a church with a broken steeple.
I didn't look back. I couldn't. If I looked back, I'd see the shadow again, and if I saw the shadow, I'd have to admit that it was real, that someone was following me, that I wasn't as alone as I'd thought.
Or maybe I'd see nothing.
Maybe I'd look back and see empty street and empty corner and empty air, and I'd have to admit that I was imagining things, that I was paranoid, that I was losing my mind.
I didn't know which was worse.
The phone buzzed in my pocket.
I almost didn't look. Almost kept walking, kept my eyes forward, kept pretending that the world wasn't collapsing around me. But my hand moved before my mind could stop it, pulling the phone out, bringing the screen to my eyes.
New message.
Different number.
An address on the other side of the city. A name I didn't recognize. A time that was already passing.
Julian Cross.
Another lead.
Another man who might know something about Gabriel, about the Institute, about the network of buyers and sellers and handlers who'd turned human beings into inventory.
I stared at the name.
Cross.
Something about it felt familiar. Something about it made my skin prickle, the way the shadow had, the way the man at the counter had. Like I'd heard it before. Like I'd seen it written somewhere, in a file I shouldn't have opened, in a document I couldn't remember reading.
Cross.
Did I know a Cross?
Had I killed a Cross?
Was the shadow following me named Cross?
I couldn't remember.
I couldn't remember anything.
The phone screen dimmed. The address faded into sleep, waiting for me to wake it, waiting for me to decide whether to go or stay or disappear into the city and never come back.
I went.
I always went.
Because the alternative was sitting in a diner at three in the morning, eating cold french fries, trying to remember the face of a girl who might not have existed.
Because the alternative was admitting that Gabriel wasn't coming back.
Because the alternative was looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger and knowing, with absolute certainty, that I would never recognize the woman staring back.
"You're ready."
For what?
For this.
For the hunt.
For the blood and the bodies and the long, empty hours between kills when I sat in cheap motel rooms and tried to remember who I was.
"He'll never love you."
The girl who wasn't there.
Batch 39.
S or M.
Sarah.
Mona.
No one.
She was no one.
I was no one.
We were all no one, in the end.
The city swallowed me whole, and I walked toward the address, and somewhere behind me—in the shadow of an awning, at the corner of an empty street—a figure watched me go.