I should probably feel guilty about that. Should feel something for this woman I’d called out for during a seizure, whose name had surfaced from the wreckage of my conditioning. Should question what it meant that I felt nothing when I thought of her except distant recognition. A building I’d once walked past without going inside.
I felt nothing.
Just absolute certainty about the woman currently walking the frozen grounds outside, trying to convince herself she was making the wrong choice by staying. Trying to protect herself from what might happen if she let herself care too much about a dying man who couldn’t promise her tomorrow.
She was wrong.
I just needed to survive long enough to prove it.
“Xavier.”
Havoc’s voice cut through my thoughts. He’d moved from the pommel horse, was standing beside Hellhound now. Both of them watching me with the same calculation. The look of men deciding whether I was an asset or a liability they couldn’t afford.
“Geneva. CuraNova headquarters. Twenty-four hours from now.”
My pulse kicked up automatically. Combat response, muscle memory I couldn’t suppress.
I tested my voice carefully, feeling the words scrape up my damaged throat. “Why... twenty-four?”
Each word hurt. But they held together. Mostly.
“Security protocols change every forty-eight hours.” Hellhound pulled a tablet from the equipment bag near the bleachers. He brought up building schematics. Twelve floors of reinforced concrete and biometric security systems. “We have a twenty-four-hour window before the next rotation. After that,access codes are worthless. We miss this window, we wait another two days.”
He didn’t say the rest.
Didn’t need to.
You don’t have three days to spare.
I studied the schematics on the tablet screen. CuraNova headquarters looked exactly like what it was. A fortress disguised as a pharmaceutical research facility.
And somewhere inside those walls: servers containing deactivation codes for every chip Dresner had ever implanted in a human skull.
Including mine.
“Three-person team.” He zoomed in on the lower levels. “You, me, Havoc. We go in during shift change at oh-six-hundred. Maximum chaos, minimum visibility. Guards are tired, distracted. Security’s weakest then.”
I tried the next question, forcing the words out one syllable at a time. “My... role?”
Two words. Clean enough. Progress.
“Muscle memory.” Havoc’s voice was blunt. No sugar-coating, no gentle phrasing to soften the reality of what they needed from me. “You’re Quinta generation. Dresner gave you free rein of that facility. Even if you don’t consciously remember, your body knows the layout. The routes. The shortcuts nobody’s supposed to know about.”
My hand stilled against my thigh.
They needed me because my subconscious remembered what my conscious mind had been wiped clean. Because somewhere in the dark spaces of my brain, pathways still existed. Routes I’d walked a hundred times, doors I’d opened without thinking, corridors I’d navigated on autopilot while my mind was locked away behind conditioning protocols.
The chip had stolen my memories. But it couldn’t steal how my feet knew where to go. How my hands reached for doors that should be unfamiliar. How my body moved through spaces my conscious mind had never seen.
“Dresner compartmentalized his operatives for security reasons.” He traced routes through the building’s lower levels on the tablet screen. “I knew some areas from my time as his second. Havoc knows others from active missions. But Quinta assets? You had unrestricted access. Training facilities, medical labs, server rooms, places even I wasn’t cleared for.”
“You’re our map.” Havoc’s tone stayed flat. “Even if you can’t tell us where to go, your body will take us there automatically. Muscle memory doesn’t lie.”
The logic was sound.
Also terrifying in ways that made my chest tight and my hands want to curl into fists.
What else did my body remember that my mind had forgotten? What had I done in those halls while my conditioning kept me locked in obedience? Who had I hurt? Who had I killed on Dresner’s orders while my conscious mind slept through it all, while someone else operated this body programmed for violence?
