Sunnycrest Asylum is as close as it gets.
I’m not in the same room Dad usually locks me in. I’m somewhere new. It’s an operating room with sterile, white walls and an antiseptic smell. I’m strapped to a table, my ankles and wrists locked in position.
Dad peers down at me. At his side, a doctor with horn-rimmed glasses frowns.
“Are you sure about this, Magnus?” the strange doctor asks.
“Am I paying you to question me, Warner?” Dad spits. “We’re running out of time. Memories have a short lifespan.”
I rattle my restraints.
“Should we sedate her again?” Doctor Warner asks, playing with the lanyard around his neck nervously. “She’s coming around.”
“No,” Dad snaps. “We need her awake to improve the transfer outcomes.”
“But—” Doctor Warner objects,
“I didn’t bring you here to question me,” Dad snarls. “You’re here to work.”
I catch Doctor Warner’s gaze. He looks away, refusing to meet my pleading stare as he inspects the wires feeding into my body. There are so many of them, red, yellow, green…
I attempt to look around, but a metal brace locks my neck in position. I open my mouth to yell, but I can’t. My entire face is paralyzed, except for my eyes that flit side to side.
“Switch one,” Doctor Warner says. “On.”
An electric shock ripples through my head, accompanied by a grating, high-pitched noise that vibrates my bones and causes my limbs to seize.
What the fuck? It stops for a second, giving me a brief reprieve to inspect my surroundings again. I follow the wires. They lead to a machine that’s being monitored by Doctor Warner. Strange symbols flash on its small black screen. He taps away on a keyboard, a frown on his face, clearly unhappy at whatever he’s seeing.
More wires come out of the machine on the other side. They stretch across the room like long shiny tentacles. I follow them. What the…
It takes a second to realize that I’m not having an out-of-body experience when I see where they lead to.
I choke down vomit.
Erin.
She’s lying on an identical operating table. However, unlike me, she’s completely motionless. Her lips and fingers are a ghostly bluish shade. Her chest is still, and her head is twisted at an impossible angle, tilted in my direction. Her gaze is dead and glassy, fixed in a permanent state of unblinking terror.
If seeing my sister’s dead body isn’t horrifying enough, it gets worse. Someone has drilled holes into her temples and poked wires into the sides of her head. Wires that connect the two of us through the alien machine.
What the fuck have they done to her?
“Switch two!” Dad cries before I have properly processed what I’m seeing. “On!”
A buzz fills the room, like an angry swarm of bees battling their way through a cloud of static. The binds around my ankles and wrists heat up and make my skin prickle uncomfortably. Suddenly, a second surge of electricity whips through me, causing my legs to twitch and spasm uncontrollably.
“Seizures shouldn’t happen,” Doctor Warner says. “I think we should stop. It’s not working.”
“Do I need to remind you that it was your paper that provided the theoretical basis for this procedure?” Dad snarls. “You will bring her back to me.”
“The thesis was purely theoretical. Memory implantation is unreliable at best. This technology is still in its infancy. We don’t know the long-term effects. It’s not safe,” he says. “You could kill her.”
“My daughter’s already dead,” Dad says. “What have I got to lose?”
Me!I want to scream.I’m your daughter, too.
“We could try conditioning. It’s a gentler approach,” Doctor Warner says. “We have Erin’s memories stored in the machine. If we use them in tandem with your new influencing formulation, we could hope to achieve similar results. The drugs worked well on your first two subjects. We can force Sarah to accept a new version of herself, as long as she keeps taking the medication. Trying to erase a lifetime’s worth of memories and replace them is far more complex. We’restretching the realms of what’s possible. We’re years off being fully ready.”
