When I finally spoke, my voice came out rusted. "They had my favorite books. The women. Similar taste in literature, in poetry. He chose us from the same template."
"You're not a type, Bunny. You're a person."
"A person he manufactured. Everything I am came from his conditioning."
"No." Nathan's voice was firm. "You chose to survive. You chose to help those women. You chose to trust me. Those aren't conditioned responses—those are human choices made despite conditioning."
"I don't know where I end and his programming begins."
"Then we'll figure it out together. Choice by choice. Day by day."
"I need to see the files. The other women. The ones who didn't make it."
"Tomorrow. Tonight, just be."
"I don't know how to just be."
"Then practice. Start with breathing. Start with this moment. Start with choosing to stay present instead of disappearing into analysis."
I pressed closer to him, feeling the marks I'd left on his skin. Evidence of choice, of want, of something unscripted by anyone's design but ours.
"Light through water," I murmured. "I'll never unhear that phrase."
"Then reclaim it. Make it yours. You are light through water—persistent, finding ways through the smallest cracks, impossible to contain." His lips brushed my hair. "But you're also the water itself. Deep and dangerous and absolutely your own."
I thought about that as night deepened around us. About Elena and the others, carrying their own water-light metaphors into captivity. About the three who hadn't survived to reclaimtheir imagery. About all the women still out there, reading poetry to strangers online, not knowing they were auditioning for horror.
Tomorrow I would read their files. Tomorrow I would map the evolution of Gabriel's techniques, trace my survival through others' failures. Tomorrow I would mourn them properly, these shadow-sisters I'd never known existed.
But tonight, marked and marking in return, I chose to be water. Formless and forming. Shaped by my container but always essentially myself, no matter what vessel tried to hold me.
The distinction mattered.
The distinction was everything.
16
Evidence
The storage facility smelled like dust and forgotten crimes. Box after box of financial records lined metal shelves, each one cataloging horrors reduced to line items and expense reports. I'd been at it for six hours, eyes burning from fluorescent lights and faded ink, when I found the folder that changed everything.
"Disposition of Assets - Phase Three Trials"
My hands shook as I opened it. Inside, neat columns tracked "subjects" like inventory. ID numbers instead of names. Acquisition costs. Training expenses. And in the final column: Outcome.
S-117: Failure- Premature termination (self)
S-118: Failure - Premature termination (self)
S-119: Failure - Premature termination (accident)
S-120: Failure - Premature termination (self)
Page after page. Dozens of entries. All failures. All terminations. The clinical language couldn't disguise what I was reading—a catalog of women who'd killed themselves rather than endure what Gabriel had planned. Or the ones who'd killed themselves because they couldn't live without him.
Then I found it. S-047: Failure - Survived separation.
My designation. My number. Failed not because I'd died, but because I'd lived.
