Mr. Harrington is my dad?
I want to scream. I want to stand up and throw the chair at his head. Instead, I stare at the table, my hands so tight my knuckles go white.
“Perhaps you’re wondering why you’re here. Not just at Westpoint, but here, in this room, in this moment.”
He waits for me to answer, but I don’t. My tongue is a stone in my mouth.
Steele sighs. “I’ll be blunt. Your acceptance to this institution was never about academics. It was about legacy. About bloodline.”
The word lands like a curse. I want to throw it back at him, but I can’t even move.
He opens a folder, pulling out a sheet of paper covered in rows of numbers and redacted lines.
“Your mother, Eliza, was something else,” Steele says, flipping the pages. “She was one of the most successful Hunt runners we’ve had in generations. She broke every predictive model. No one expected her to win. And yet, she did. She survived. She excelled.”
He glances at Harrington, who sits back, fingers steepled, face a study in smug restraint.
“She was claimed, as you may have guessed, by Mr. Harrington. It was a match of strategic value. Brilliant, on both sides.”
Harrington’s mouth curves up, but there’s nothing friendly in it.
“But your mother made a choice,” Steele continues. “She ran. She took you, a newborn, and disappeared. It took us thirteen years to find you.”
He shuffles another page, this one a photocopy of a birth certificate with black marker slashed over most of the names. The only thing legible is my own: Eve Allen.
“We found you in Kansas,” Steele says. “Your mother had remarried, changed your name, constructed an entire new life out of thin air. It was, in many ways, impressive. If the Board were not so dedicated to continuity, we might have let it be.”
I can barely breathe.
“Unfortunately, your mother’s flight presented… complications. You see, there were those who believed that your bloodline should be integrated back into the program. There were others who viewed your mother’s actions as a betrayal. The debate raged for years. Once chosen, you are one of us and we do not take to betrayal kindly, Ms. Allen, surely you understand. Your mother pledged herself to Mr. Harrington in what was one of the most successful genetic matches we’ve had in almost three decades. Brilliant, athletic, strategic. You were going to be a prodigy of fortune and grace. Unfortunately, she took that from you. Mr. Harrington wanted to find you, but others… they wanted to end your bloodline once and for all.”
Steele pauses, watching me, as if waiting for the words to break through the shock.
“In the end, we decided to wait. We observed you from a distance. Monitored your academic performance, your psychological profile, your athletic tendencies. We wanted to know if nature would win out over nurture.”
He sets down the page, leans forward, his hands flat on the table.
“It did. You excelled, even in exile. You found your way back to us. And so, the Board decided to bring you here. To see if you would survive where your mother failed.”
My throat closes.
“She didn’t fail,” I manage. The words are small, but they’re the only thing I have left.
Steele raises an eyebrow. “She did, Miss Allen. She failed by abandoning her legacy. By attempting to rewrite her story. But you—” he looks at me, then at Harrington, “—you have a chance to do better.”
I feel the blood drain from my face.
Harrington clears his throat, then slides a thick folder across the table.
I open it, and the first thing I see is a photograph of my mother I’ve never seen before. She’s young, maybe sixteen, her hair in a tight braid, eyes blazing with a defiance I’ve only ever seen in the mirror.
There are more photos. Her at Westpoint, standing on the steps of this building, her in a uniform, her face gaunt but still unbroken. There are surveillance shots, blurry and time-stamped, of her at a diner in Missouri, at a playground in Nebraska, at a gas station somewhere in the mountains.
Each photo is labeled. Each one is a receipt.
Behind the photos, there are reports. Pages and pages of assessments, medical records, transcripts. There’s a psychological evaluation that describes my mother as “exceptionally adaptive, high-threat, likely to reject imposed authority.”
I flip the pages faster, my fingers numb.
