“Two hours ago.” Specter watched me with clinical detachment. “She took the same antidote I injected you with to slow your poisoning and help your system. A potential precaution if they inject her with something, giving us a bit more time.”
My fingers trembled as I tried to get dressed. “Why would she go before I...”
The answer crystallized with brutal clarity: her hands gentle against my fevered skin, her voice pleading me to fight. To stay.
“They wanted her,” I said, the realization hitting like a blade between ribs.
“Yes. Brock contacted her directly through your phone. Threatened her brother.”
I staggered back, knees buckling beneath the weight of understanding. “She left to meet Brock. Sacrificing herself for both you and Xavier.”
Brock’s name sent electricity arcing across my synapses, making my vision fragment into shards of light. My breathing stuttered as programming and emotion collided.
“He gave her two hours to deliver you to him or he’d kill her brother.” Specter maintained tactical distance, his eyes never leaving mine. “When she realized you were too compromised to move, she injected herself with one of my last counteragents and went alone, telling me to stay with you.”
I dropped to one knee, skull threatening to split open as incompatible directives waged war inside me. Loyalty protocols activated automatically—Report to handler. Resume mission parameters—clashing violently with rage that felt too organic to be programmed.
“What… what does he want with her?” My voice fractured like ice breaking, shifting between operational coldness and raw desperation.
“The poisonwasn’t designed to kill,” Specter explained. “It’s a conditioning agent. Brock meant it for her, as he found her interesting because of how you reacted to her. That’s the only logical explanation. Your system rejected the compound because you’ve already been processed. Hers would have been… receptive.”
The implications flooded my consciousness with images I couldn’t bear—Maeve strapped to the chair, her screams echoing off concrete walls, blue liquid flowing through tubes into her veins. My stomach turned violently, a reaction no programming ever installed.
“He’s going to do to her what they did to me.” The words tore through my throat like broken glass. “To Xavier.”
Specter’s movements shifted subtly—a nearly imperceptible increase in urgency as he stepped forward, withdrawing a sleek phone, a 3D map of São Paulo with a pulsing red marker appearing on screen.
“I placed a tracking implant on her before she left. Professional courtesy—I never let assets walk into potential traps without insurance. Brock gave her a Vila Madalena address, and she went there.”
I studied the location. “Vila Madalena.”
“Yes. A local café—Café Bella. It’s a non-standard extraction protocol. Brock’s operating outside standard parameters, choosing a public location with multiple access points. He’s either desperate or confident. Good news, the ping remained in the same neighborhood.”
I planted both hands on the floor, forehead nearly touching the ground as I forced my body through recoverysequences installed at the molecular level—breath control, muscle isolation, neurological override. The techniques they programmed into me to function through extreme damage.
“She can’t become like us,” I whispered, the words escaping like a confession. “Not because of me.”
Memory struck without warning—Maeve’s naked body against mine before the poison took hold. The way she arched against me, the way she moaned my name as I claimed her as mine. She had urged me to stay with her, to stay human, to fight against the programming that forbade any intimacy without purpose. For the first time, I hadn’t been a machine. I was a man with desperate needs that only she could fulfill. The memory wasn’t filtered through programming algorithms or tactical assessments. It was raw. Real.
I remembered the weight of her leg draped over mine, her breathing steady against my chest, trusting despite everything she knew about what I was built to do. The ghost-sensation of her palm as it traced the scar across my ribs, on my back. Her head nestled against my shoulder.
For as long as I could remember, I had never felt something like that. Sure, I had slept with women before, but it was only a means to an end. A blur in my mind. Irrelevant.
She was different. She made me feel alive. The memory deepened like sinking into warm water, sensations flooding back. Her fingertips trailing down my arm. The faint sound of her inhale when my hand moved across the small of her back. How she had whispered my designation—not as a label, but as if it were a real name, something that belonged to me.
The recall of her eyes looking directly into mine—not analyzing a threat or cataloging weaknesses—just seeing me. As if I were human. For the first time ever.
With steadier balance, I pushed myself upright and went to the bathroom.
I gripped the bathroom sink, knuckles white as I forced my body to obey. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, casting harsh shadows across my face. In the steamed mirror, a stranger stared back—half-operative, half-something I couldn’t name. Water dripped from my hair down my neck, evidence of my attempts to cool my overheating system. Puddles gathered at my feet where I’d splashed cold water over my face, neck, chest—anything to eliminate that mind fog.
“Your recovery rate exceeds standard parameters,” Specter observed from the doorway, maintaining tactical distance. “The antagonist is fighting the compound, and your body is helping. However, your neural pathways have been permanently altered.”
His assessment carried the cool detachment of a scientist observing a lab specimen—I represented an anomaly in his data. Something unprecedented.
“How long until full function?” I asked, testing my left arm. The muscles responded, but with a tremor that wasn’t there before.
“Impossible to predict. Prima generation was experimental—inconsistent baselines. You shouldn’t be conscious yet, much less mobile.”
