My anger cracked, revealing something more complex beneath. “You sound like you admire him.”
“Professional assessment.” Specter shrugged, but something in his expression shifted. “I’ve seen hundreds of operatives. Never one who broke programming for someone else.” A pause. “His resilience is… remarkable.”
The admission caught me off guard.
“I didn’t think he could withstand the psychological fracturing,” Specter added, his tone softening almost imperceptibly. “Most men would have completely dissociated by now. Become catatonic.”
A small, fragile hope stirred in my chest. “You think he can recover?”
“I think,” Specter said carefully, “that if anyone has a chance, it’s him. And that chance exists because of what you triggered in him.”
The weight of Specter’s assessment settled over me. I sank back into my chair, suddenly exhausted, the fight draining from my body.
“I know who he was.” My voice came out quieter than intended. Without looking up at Specter, I traced invisible patterns over my scattered notes, connecting dots that weren’t there. “I read every file we found. Ronan Graves. The violence, the manipulation, the calculatedcruelty. I readeverything.” Lightning flashed through the tiny windows, momentarily illuminating the basement in stark relief. Thunder followed immediately, rattling the foundations. “I’ve been pretending those files describe a different person.” I swallowed hard against the tightness in my throat. “But what if they don’t? What if the man he is now is just… temporary?”
Specter said nothing, his silence an invitation to continue.
“Ronan was right to push me away and straighten all this up.” The admission tore something inside me, making my voice tremble. “All this time I’ve been telling him that his past doesn’t define him, but I’ve been afraid of exactly that. Afraid that this version of him is fragile—that he’ll inevitably revert to who he was before Oblivion got him.”
My finger traced a jagged line across a page of coordinates, following nothing but my own restless energy.
“I accused him of not trusting me to make my own choices, but I don’t fully trust who he is becoming either.” The truth finally spilled out, raw and painful. “And that makes me a hypocrite, doesn’t it?”
The rain hammered against the building, its rhythm intensifying as if responding to the confession I’d finally voiced.
“Do you know why I contacted you initially?” he asked finally. The question caught me off guard. I looked up to find him watching me with unusual intensity. I shook my head. “I assumed it was because we were investigating the Marionette Project, you from the inside, me from the outside.”
“Partly.” A faint, bitter smile touched his lips. “I was also looking for someone who’d treat the information with conscience. Someone who wouldn’t just use it for leverage or profit. And especially to make everything public.”
He pulled over a folding chair with a metallic scrape, the sound harsh against the concrete. Even sitting down, his stance was of someone who never truly relaxed.
“I tracked your past articles before sending that first message. Watched how you handled sensitive topics. The care you took with vulnerable sources.” Something shifted in his expression—a momentary crack in his armor. “I’ve never returned to my past. Never looked up my history or who I might have been before…”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I’m afraid of what I’ll find.” His admission was stark, devoid of self-pity. “Not all of us want to know who we were. Sometimes the blank slate is preferable to the truth.”
The unexpected honesty created a moment of connection—two damaged people navigating through darkness, each carrying different but equally heavy burdens.
I redirected the conversation, needing firmer ground. “What about Xavier? With everything you know about the conditioning process, is there hope for him?”
Specter’s expression shifted, something dark passing behind his eyes. His hesitation spoke volumes.
“His situation is different from Ronan’s or mine,” he said carefully.
“How different?” I braced myself, sensing the answer before it came. “Please, just tell me straight.”
A sudden gust drove rain against the windows with violent force. Water seeped through a crack in the ceiling, creating a second dripping counterpoint to the pot Specter had placed earlier.
“The Quinta generation conditioning goes deeper than Prima or Secunda,” Specter said, his eyes never leaving mine. “It’s more thorough. More… comprehensive.”
My heart sank. I knew what it meant, but I still needed to hear it out loud. I needed to be prepared for whatever may come—whether I liked it or not. “Meaning?”
Specter leaned forward, his voice lowering. “Xavier—Blackout—underwent complete neural reconstruction. This isn’t about suppressed memories, Maeve. They rebuilt his brain’s foundational architecture.”
“But he’s still in there,” I insisted, my voice sharper than intended. “People can recover from trauma.”
“This isn’t trauma. It’s engineered structural change.” Specter’s detachment returned, his words sharp as scalpels. “The time factor makes it worse. Six months is… significant. The longer the conditioning has to set, the more permanent the changes become.”
