Fuck—pain—everywhere—inside my bones, in my blood, behind my eyes like someone was rewriting my brain with a soldering iron and forgot to use anesthetic.
Kaison caught me when my legs gave out.
Arms around my waist, holding me upright, and I could feel him—not just his body but inside, his heartbeat against my heartbeat, his code threading through my neurons, silver and bright and wrong wrong wrong—
"Breathe," he said.
I couldn't.
Couldn't breathe couldn't think couldn't—
Data flooded my vision.
Numbers. Equations. Streams of code I shouldn't understand but did, crystal clear, like someone had uploaded a new language directly into my skull, and underneath the code I felt—
Him.
His thoughts. Fragmented. Controlled. Compartmentalized into neat little boxes labeled Mission. Protocol. Survival.
And one box. Hidden. Deep.
Labeled: Error. Do Not Open.
I reached for it—instinct, curiosity, stupidity—and his grip tightened.
"Don't." Voice strained. "That's—you can't—"
Too late.
The box opened.
And I fell—
[MEMORY: Not Mine]
White room. Sterile. Cold. Strapped to a table and I can't move can't scream the gag is cutting into my mouth and they're cutting into my skull, peeling back bone, threading silver wire through gray matter, and it HURTS—
Not supposed to hurt. The pain inhibitors should be working but they're not and I'm screaming inside my head, screaming where they can't hear, and Director Yun is watching through the glass, taking notes, and I think:
Please. Please just kill me. Make it stop make it—
But it doesn't stop.
It never stops.
They thread the chains through my spine. Fuse metal to nerve endings. Rebuild me piece by piece until I'm not—
Not human.
Not anymore.
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Not—
[END MEMORY]
I gasped.
Back in my body. Back on the pier. Back in Kaison's arms, shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
"I told you not to look," he said.
Quiet.
Devastated.
"They—" I couldn't finish. "You were—how old—"
"Fifteen." Flat. Emotionless. "First successful Warden conversion. Took six months. Most subjects died in week three."
"Kaison—"
"I don't need your pity." He let go. Stepped back. "I need you to listen. The sync is accelerating. I can feel your thoughts bleeding into mine. In approximately—"
He paused.
Tilted his head.
"—four hours, we won't know where you end and I begin. The Heartstring will complete the merge. We'll become—"
"One person," I finished.
Because I could feel it too. His presence in the back of my mind, settling in like he'd always been there, like he belonged, and part of me—the part that still smelled cinnamon and heard my mother's voice saying trust the numbers, baby, numbers don't lie—wanted to let it happen.
Let him in.
Let us become us.
"We have to get to the facility," Kaison said. "They'll have stabilizers. Suppressants. Something to slow this down before—"
"Before what?"
His jaw tightened. "Before I can't separate your survival from mine. Before my programming prioritizes you over the mission. Before I become—"
"Compromised."
"Yes."
The snow fell between us.
Silent. Heavy.
And I thought: He's afraid. Not of dying. Of wanting to live.
"What if I don't want to slow it down?"
His eyes snapped to mine. Data flooding. Calculations running. "That's the Heartstring talking. Not you."
"How do you know?"
"Because—" He stopped. Turned away. Chains coiling restless around his wrist. "Because no one chooses this. The merge. It's beautiful and it's horrific and once it's done you can't go back. You'll feel everything I feel. Know everything I know. Including—"
"The people you've killed."
Silence.
"Yes."
I should run.
Should take the grenade still heavy in my pocket and blow both of us to hell, should choose the sixty-eight hours of running over this slow drowning in someone else's mind.
But I could still feel his memory. The white room. The pain. The way he'd screamed inside his head where they couldn't hear.
"How many?" I asked.
"What?"
"How many people have you killed?"
He didn't hesitate. "Two hundred and thirty-seven. Confirmed. Estimated forty more indirect."
"Do you remember them?"
"Every one." He looked at me. "Their names. Their faces. The way they smelled when they were afraid. I remember because they made sure I would. Perfect recall. Can't forget. Can't delete. Just—"
"Carry it."
"Yes."
The cinnamon smell was fading. Being replaced by something else. Something that smelled like us—roses and gunpowder and metal and salt—and I realized:
We were already merging.
Already becoming something new.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Take me to the facility." I started walking. North. "But I want answers. Real ones. About my mother. About the Heartstring. About what we're about to become."
He fell into step beside me.
Close enough our shoulders brushed.
Close enough I could feel his heartbeat like it was mine.
"Deal," he said.
And in the back of my mind—his mind? Our mind?—I felt something shift. Like a door opening. Like trust being offered for the first time in four years.
Like maybe. Just maybe.
This was the stupidest idea I'd ever had.
Or the only good one left.
- To save his mother, he signed a contract with the devil. 28 days left on the clock—can he burn the Harvest List? Please Save to Library and support with Power Stones. Let’s witness Bharat’s defiance together.