“And if I refuse?” I kept my voice steady despite the fear crawling up my spine. I’d spent months searching for my brother; I wasn’t about to hand Reaper over to the man who’d broken him.
“Ms. Durham.” His voice dropped lower, any pretense of civility evaporating. “You misunderstand the situation. This isn’t a negotiation. Reaper is proprietary biotechnology. You wouldn’t steal a prototype from a defense contractor and expect no consequences, would you?”
“He’s a human being,” I said.
“A distinction without a difference in this context.” The coldness in his voice sent a chill down my spine.
I gripped the phone tighter, watching Reaper shiver on the bed.
“I’m not bringing him anywhere until you tell me about the antidote,” I demanded, desperation edging into my voice. “How do I know you’ll save him? How do I know you even can?”
A brief silence stretched across the line before Brock replied. The polished veneer in his voice dropped away, replaced by something colder, more clinical.
“Antidote?” Brock’s laugh was hollow. “There is no antidote, Ms. Durham. This compound wasn’t meant for him.”
My breath caught. “What?”
“It was designed to beginyourconditioning process.”
It felt as if all air had suddenly been sucked right out of my lungs. I stared at Reaper’s convulsing form, horror crawling through me as understanding dawned.
“Conditioning?” My voice shook despite my efforts to control it. “You mean like what you did to Reaper? To my brother?”
“Exactly.” Brock’s voice brightened, like a professor finally seeing comprehension dawn on a struggling student. “The first stage of neural preparation for acquisition. His system is not engineered to metabolize it correctly.”
I gripped the edge of the mattress, suddenly dizzy. They’d shot him with chemicals meant for me—meant to strip me down and rebuild me into something else. Something that wasn’t human anymore.
“Your ability to interrupt Reaper’s programming made you a fascinating candidate. Our research team is impatient to start. The first female Marionette would be quite the achievement. You should be proud.”
I fought the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. These people had planned to do to me what they’d done to Xavier, to Reaper—strip away my identity, my memories, my humanity.
“As for the compound’s impact on Reaper’s enhanced system,” Brock continued. “I have no idea what it’s doing.His programming is likely interacting with the compound in unpredictable ways. That’s why I need him back immediately—to observe and document these effects. And you, of course.”
I watched a bead of sweat track down Reaper’s temple. His eyes darted beneath closed lids, trapped in some nightmare. My mouth opened, then closed again. I couldn’t find any words for Brock at this moment.
“Bring Reaper back to me,” Brock urged. “His reaction is unprecedented data. If he survives, he’ll be an invaluable research subject for cross-compound interactions. You’ve created an accident of significant scientific interest, Ms. Durham.”
The casual cruelty of his words stoked a rage I hadn’t known I possessed. This man viewed Reaper—viewed all of them—as nothing more than lab rats. There was no way of knowing what he would do to Reaper once he got his hands on him. Actually, perhaps there was. He was going to ruin him, torture him, shatter him into pieces all over again. Right now, death seemed like a more merciful outcome.
If it came to that, he’d die in my arms. Peacefully. Like a man who was cared for. A human with value. Not a piece of property.
“Go fuck yourself,” I spat. “I’m not bringing him anywhere near you.”
“Such fire.” His voice dropped to a purr. “I see why he’s developed this… aberration toward you. The Prima conditioning should have prevented any attachment, and yet… The more we speak, the more fascinating I find his little… infatuation with you.” Brock’s voice dropped, became intimate in a way that made my skin crawl. “You may even become our new teacher’s pet, Ms. Durham.” I recoiled from the phone, disgusted by the implication. Reaper moaned softly on the bed, his fingers twitching. Time was running out. “Let’s cut through the chase. If you don’t arrive within two hours, with Reaper or not, your brother will be terminated. The video will be sent to you.”
My heart stopped.No, no, no.“You’re lying.”
“In case you doubt me…”
My phone buzzed with an incoming video message. With trembling fingers, I opened it.
The footage showed a stark white cell. A man sat on the edge of a metal bed, head down, shoulders slumped. When he looked up at the camera, I barely recognized him—gaunt, skin sallow, eyes hollow—but it was unmistakably Xavier. My brother’s face was thinner than I remembered, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, but I’d know those green eyes anywhere. They’d lost their defiant spark, replaced by something vacant and defeated that made my stomach twist. His head was shaved, too. It looked as if they had stripped him of anything that once made him…him.
He looked directly into the camera, lips cracked and bleeding. A disembodied hand appeared in the frame, forcing his chin up. Xavier flinched at the contact—something I’d never seen him do in all our years growing up together. This wasn’t the man who’d taught me to fight back, who never cowered even when facing the worst foster parents in the system.
The sight of him flinching from human contact hit me harder than any physical blow. Xavier, who’d once dislocated a foster father’s jaw for raising a hand to me. Xavier, who’d never backed down from anything.
My stomach rose to my throat, threatening to spill its contents.No.This couldn’t be happening.
