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 me. 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 me.
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 time 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 become the World President, not after Sienna being captured.
Because while the world was playing chess with masks and monsters, I remembered something 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 metal and scorched glass. One ship of many destroyed ships with its walls that had melted inward. The emblem half-charred, half-intact.
And I remembered something 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.
The house looked smaller than I remembered. 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 same 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 same seat, always just a little too quiet. I remembered a chocolate birthday cake once, a single candle, my father's smile. It felt unreal now.
He'd left us. Left me. 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 something in the hallway stopped me.
A pull cord. Thin. Dusty. Hanging from the ceiling like a forgotten string.
I didn't remember 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 smeared with grime.
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 metal 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 mean 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 mean a machine. Not hardware.
They meant someone's system.
They had to be testing on people.
I flipped through more pages, faster now. Breath caught somewhere between fury and disbelief. The experiments 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—containment 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 advancement.
They were building something. 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:
Each entry had its own line.
Name. 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.
The dates matched perfectly with the years my father worked at Novacore. He would've known.
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."
There were more entries. The experiments didn't stop at 100.
Each with notes. Symptoms. Many still marked deceased. But near the end...
Subject 3824 – Stabilized for 6 months. Now in containment.
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.
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 message from Camille: Where are you? Are you okay?
Then another. From Sienna: We're worried. Please just say something.
My hands trembled as I looked back at the final page. Cold, perfect columns. Methodical notes. Children turned corpses.
But near the bottom—marked in green ink:
Subjects 3800–3837: High stability rates. Begin conditioning protocols and phase 2.
Some of them survived.