Batch 41. Another sister I'd never met, another girl transformed by Gabriel's careful hands. I saved the contact and started cross-referencing with my existing data.
That's when the memory hit, sudden as a slap.
Cold morning air on bare skin. My feet were bleeding—when had I taken off my shoes? The highway stretched endlessly in both directions, and I couldn't remember which way led back to the pink room. Back to Daddy.
Everything felt broken inside, like someone had rearranged my organs while I slept. The collar was gone—my pretty collar—and my throat felt naked without it. Wrong. Exposed.
A truck had stopped. The driver was older, wearing flannel that smelled like cigarettes and motor oil. His eyes went wide seeing me there in just the torn dress, blood painting abstract patterns on my legs.
"Jesus Christ, miss. Are you okay?"
Was I? I couldn't tell. Daddy would know. Daddy always knew what I was feeling better than I did. But Daddy was gone, lost somewhere in the maze of what happened after the pink room became a red room.
"I'm perfectly fine!" The words came out in the voice he'd trained into me, bright and automatic. "Just a little lost!"
The trucker had called 911. Had given me his jacket. Had stayed with me until the ambulance came, and I'd smiled through all of it because good girls always smiled. The paramedics asked questions I couldn't answer. Where did I come from? What was my name? Who did this to you?
But all I could think about was finding my way back. Back to the pink room. Back to Daddy. Back to the only world that made sense.
They'd taken me to a hospital where doctors with soft voices tried to piece together what happened from the evidence written on my body. I'd given them a name—Bunny, because that's what Daddy called me—and an approximate age that might have been true. Everything else was lost in the cotton candy haze of conditioning so deep I couldn't see the bottom.
The memory faded as suddenly as it came, leaving me disoriented on my apartment floor. Six months since that morning on the highway. Six months of building this new life, this careful construction of identity that let me hunt the hunters.
I focused on the data, grounding myself in patterns and connections. The Batch 41 girl was being held in a location twohours north. The seller went by "Mercury" in the encrypted channels, but I'd traced his payments to a Gregory Marsh. Real estate developer. Married with two daughters who probably had no idea Daddy bought broken girls in his spare time.
A quick search revealed his home address, his office building, his favorite restaurant where he had a standing reservation every Thursday. Tomorrow was Thursday. How convenient!
I added Gregory to my wall map with red string, connecting him to the growing web. The map took up most of one wall now, looking like the world's most disturbing art project. Cities where Institute girls had been sold, warehouses for "processing defective products," names and faces of everyone who'd participated in the economy of broken dolls.
And in the center, always in the center, that single photo of Gabriel. Some days I could barely look at it. Other days I stared until my eyes burned, trying to decode the secrets behind those storm-grey eyes. What had he seen in me that made him choose me for Batch 47? What made me worthy of being his last masterpiece?
The sun was coming up, painting my apartment in shades of pink and gold. I should sleep. Should at least try to rest before my shift. But the patterns were speaking to me now, showing me connections I'd missed.
Three buyers had used the same transportation company. That company connected to a medical facility that specialized in "behavioral modification." The facility's board included a doctor who'd published papers on conditioning techniques remarkably similar to what I remembered from the Institute.
"Oh, you sneaky things," I told the papers. "Hiding in plain sight, aren't you?"
I was adding the new connections when my regular phone rang. Unknown number, but something made me answer anyway.
"Hello! This is Bunny!" I chirped, even though normal people didn't answer phones that way at six in the morning.
Silence. Then breathing. Then, barely a whisper: "Lilah?"
The world tilted sideways. Nobody knew that name. Nobody alive.
"I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number!" My voice stayed bright even as my hand tightened on the phone. "This is Bunny!"
"I know what he did to you." The voice was female, young, scared. "I know because he did it to me too. Batch 39."
My heart hammered hummingbird-fast. Another sister. Another survivor.
"Who is this?"
"Are you looking for him? For Gabriel?"
"Yes." The word came out breathless, all pretense dropped. "Yes, I need to find him. I need—"
"Stop." Her voice cracked. "Just stop. You don't understand what you're looking for. What he really is. The Institute wasn't about training us. We weren't products. We were—"
