The silence had stopped feeling like silence.
Now it was pressure—a low, grinding weight that had taken root behind my sternum and pressed inward with every breath. I sat on the edge of the guest room's old bed, elbows on my knees, phone facedown beside . Mark's words clung to my skin like oil—refusing to be washed off, refusing to be forgotten.
He knew who the World President was.
And he refused to tell .
It was a strange kind of betrayal. Not surprising, since we weren't fully allies. Not even painful. Just... exhausting. I was tired—tired of waiting for people to help, tired of trusting anyone to hold their end of the thread without slicing through mine. Anthony's report on Novacore would take ti to get back, buried under layers of encrypted bureaucracy. But I couldn't sit here and wait anymore. Not after everything. Not after the crash site on Mars, not after being told to beco the World President, not after Sienna being captured.
Because while the world was playing chess with masks and monsters, I rembered sothing colder. Sharper. A detail that refused to fade.
There were dozens of ships downed that day. Only one bore that unmistakable emblem scorched across its fractured hull—silver threads spiraling into a dark, angular nova. Their insignia. I'd stood on the cracked Martian soil, suit torn, lungs burning, as the sun rose over a scrapyard of twisted tal and scorched glass. One ship of many destroyed ships with its walls that had lted inward. The emblem half-charred, half-intact.
And I rembered sothing else.
A bitter, old thought.
My father worked for them.
If he had any hand in this—if he bore even a fraction of the guilt for the things I'd seen—then I needed more than whispers. More than apologies. I needed proof.
That's when I knew where I had to go.
Ho.
The house looked smaller than I rembered. Just a squat, aging structure on the edge of a withering suburb. The paint peeled in strips along the siding. One window cracked in the corner like a spiderweb. The grass had given up years ago. But the porch still creaked the sa way it did when I was seven. It groaned beneath my step like an old man.
The door was worse—rusted shut in places, swollen in others. It didn't lock anymore. Just sat there. I nudged it open with my shoulder, the bottom scraping the floor with a tired sigh.
Inside was stillness.
Dust coated everything. Pale sheets draped over furniture like forgotten ghosts. The air was thick, every step sending motes spiraling like snow in a dead storm.
I walked through it in silence.
The living room, where my mother used to cut my hair with sharpened scissors. The kitchen, where I once tried to bake a cake and nearly set the oven on fire. The dining table where my father used to sit, always in the sa seat, always just a little too quiet. I rembered a chocolate birthday cake once, a single candle, my father's smile. It felt unreal now.
He'd left us. Left . Because Novacore shut down. Because his "project" got cancelled. He packed everything and disappeared like smoke through the cracks. No goodbye. No apology. Just silence.
I nearly turned to leave. But sothing in the hallway stopped .
A pull cord. Thin. Dusty. Hanging from the ceiling like a forgotten string.
I didn't rember there being an attic.
The ladder wheezed as I pulled it down, sending a cloud of dust into the air. I climbed slowly, every step groaning under my weight. The attic was dim, lit only by a narrow window sared with gri.
Boxes. Furniture. Shelves collapsed in the corner. A broken lamp.
I crouched low, sifting through a box—photographs, yellowing papers. Nothing useful. Then, behind a rusted fan and rolled-up blueprints, I saw it. A tal case. Dented. Latches sealed with age but not locked.
I dragged it into the light and flipped it open.
Sealed files. Each stamped with a faint emblem—Novacore Industries.
My stomach twisted. The dates on them were two years before my father left. He'd taken everything back then. Except these.
Did he forget them? Or did he an to hide them?
I opened the first file. Pages of corporate speak. Test requisitions. Internal emails. Most of it dull—until I read deeper.
"Phase-1 Neurological Sync Trials."
"System Overload Thresholds."
"Biointegration Simulation Schedules."
Then—at the back of a folder, clipped in red:
"Preliminary data indicates system resilience is lower than expected. Candidate survivability below 3% under full exposure."
I froze. My hands went cold.
The word kept repeating. "System." But they didn't an a machine. Not hardware.
They ant soone's system.
A body.
A person.
They had to be testing on people.
I flipped through more pages, faster now. Breath caught sowhere between fury and disbelief. The experints weren't hypothetical. They weren't just rumors, they'd actually happened.
Internal reports. Biofeedback logs. Heat maps of brainwave activity.
One labeled "Subject 36": Unstable integration. Increased aggression. Loss of cortical inhibition. Result—containnt breach. Terminated.
Another: Subject 42. Onset of cranial swelling within 90 seconds. Failed to stabilize.
They kept pushing. Again. Again. Again.
No remorse. No hesitation.
The goal wasn't healing. It wasn't advancent.
It was control.
They were building sothing. Testing limits. Seeing how far they could go before a person broke.
And they kept breaking.
One last file. Thicker than the rest. The paper inside was crisp, sticky from years of being pressed together.
I pried it open. The first page was a list:
"Subjects 1–100"
Each entry had its own line.
Na. Age. Compatibility score. Date of exposure. Symptoms. Termination status.
Subject 1: Age 9. System collapsed after 3 minutes. Deceased.
Subject 2: Age 14. Lasted 9 minutes. Deceased.
Subject 14: Seizure. Deceased.
Subject 47: Brief compatibility. Cranial rupture. Deceased.
All of them.
Deceased.
The dates matched perfectly with the years my father worked at Novacore. He would've known.
He had to know.
I wanted to believe he wasn't involved. I needed to believe that.
Then I reached the last page.
A note—handwritten in the margin:
"Begin Trial 101 after baseline reconstruction."
I turned the page.
There were more entries. The experints didn't stop at 100.
Subjects 101–3837.
Each with notes. Symptoms. Many still marked deceased. But near the end...
Subject 3824 – Stabilized for 6 months. Now in containnt.
Subject 3830 – Latent compatibility. Monitoring continues.
And then, the one that stopped my breath.
Subject 3837 – Phase 1 successful, Stabilization error for phase 2. Terminated
I stood there in the attic, folder clutched to my chest, bile rising in my throat.
They had done this.
He had done this.
Was my father part of this?
Was I... supposed to be one of them?
Would I have been 3838?
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out.
A ssage from Camille: Where are you? Are you okay?
Then another. From Sienna: We're worried. Please just say sothing.
I didn't answer.
Not yet.
My hands trembled as I looked back at the final page. Cold, perfect columns. thodical notes. Children turned corpses.
But near the bottom—marked in green ink:
Subjects 3800–3837: High stability rates. Begin conditioning protocols and phase 2.
They survived.
So of them survived.
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