The alley narrowed behind her, littered with broken crates and the faint stench of damp metal. Somewhere above, a siren wailed, too distant to matter. Gene moved quickly, shoulders hunched, one hand brushing the knife in her coat pocket, not because she planned to use it, but because it reminded her, she still had choices.
Each footstep echoed off the brick, too loud. Too alone.
Then, a memory surged.
Not real, not lived, viewed. She had seen it years ago, buried in a training archive the White Angels never meant for her to linger on. It surfaced now with sudden, sickening clarity.
A sterile observation room. White walls tinged yellow by the flicker of an old screen. Gene had sat alone at a terminal, half-bored, skimming through outdated experimental logs.
Most of it was junk, training modules, and behavioral conditioning reports, but one clip had stuck with her longer than it should have.
The recording began with silence.
On the other side of reinforced glass, a teenage boy, barely fifteen, maybe younger, was strapped to a surgical frame. Wasted-thin, trembling, but still fighting the restraints. His eyes were wide, furious, and fully aware of what was happening to him.
A voice crackled over the intercom in the clip. Calm. Feminine. Selene Marrow.
Gene remembered how she had leaned closer to the screen then, curiosity overtaking her. The video's angle obscured Selene's mouth, but her body language was unmistakable, a predator whispering just softly enough to be missed by the room's audio feed. Only the boy's reaction gave her away.
He went still. Not calm, silent. Hollowed out.
That was the moment she should've closed the file.
Instead, she'd stared at the boy's face for nearly a minute after the feed ended, disturbed by the sudden shift in his expression, how his eyes lost all fight. It haunted her for weeks back then. Until it stopped.
She hadn't known his name. Just a label on the clip: SUBJECT 08.
Now, walking through the alleys with her hands buried in the pockets of a stolen jacket, Gene felt her breath catch in her throat.
That boy.
It was him.
Igor.
Her steps slowed. Her heartbeat didn't.
An old guilt uncoiled like a wire pulled taut.
Back in the hostel, Gene slid the door shut behind her and double-locked it out of habit.
The rusted deadbolt scraped louder than she wanted, but it clicked into place with a small measure of reassurance. She set the chair back under the knob, even though she knew it wouldn't stop anyone who wanted in.
The room was no quieter than the alley. Rain tapped against the thin ceiling like static on a heartbeat monitor. A fluorescent strip above the mirror buzzed, sputtered, and then dimmed. Gene stared at the flickering light, one hand resting on the wall like it might calm the pulse in her wrist.
Then came the sound: faint, tinny, like an old radio tuning through fog.
Her comm device.
It hadn't made a sound in days. She'd disconnected it from every White Angels relay she could think of, rerouted it through dummy satellites and false flags. It should've been dead.
But it was whispering.
Gene stepped toward the nightstand, every muscle tight with suspicion. The screen glowed faintly, blue and pulsing. A low whine hissed from the speaker, just under audible range, like the device itself was in pain.
She snatched it up and jabbed the power button. Nothing. No shutdown prompt. The glow remained.
And then the text appeared.
A single line, distorted and stuttering as if typed by a shaking hand:
SUBJECT EIGHT: WAKE
Her blood ran cold.
Not because she didn't know where he was.
She did.
He was at the Lennox estate. Wearing a collar. Serving drinks. Moving like he wasn't all there, like something was missing behind his eyes. A crack in the glass that no one else noticed.
But someone had noticed.
Someone had waited.
And now they were activating him.
Gene stared at the screen, her thoughts a roar of conflicting instincts: fight, warn, run. She didn't know who sent the signal or what came next. Only that it was already too late to stop it.
Igor wasn't asleep anymore.
And if he woke the wrong way, none of them would be safe.