This was the work of a brilliant mind with nothing to do. A person who had channeled all her curiosity, all her energy, all her need for connection into the only outlet available to her. The plants couldn’t answer back, but they responded to her care. They grew and changed and bloomed under her attention, providing a semblance of the interaction she craved.
She’s been alone her entire life.
The thought crystallized with sudden, terrible clarity. The evidence had been there from the moment he entered the tower—the single place settings, the rooms designed for one, the AI’s constant monitoring. But seeing her here, surrounded by experiments that spanned years, decades?—
She was a child when this started. A baby. And they put her here, alone, with nothing but an AI for company.
“—and this one is my favorite.”
Her voice cut through his thoughts. She was standing beside a plant that looked nothing like the others—larger, with deep purple leaves and tendrils that seemed to move independently, reaching towards her as if seeking contact.
“I call her Violet,” she said, and there was genuine affection in her voice. “She was my first successful hybrid. I crossed a standard climbing vine with some seeds I found in the storage levels. I think they might have been from the original colonization supplies, maybe experimental stock that was never planted. It took years to get a viable cross, and most of the offspring didn’t survive. But Violet did.”
She reached out, and the plant’s tendrils curled around her fingers with unmistakable recognition.
“She knows you,” he said.
“I like to think so.” She stroked the purple leaves gently. “I know that’s not scientific. Plants don’t have consciousness, not in any way we can measure. But sometimes... sometimes I talk to her anyway. About my day, my observations, my questions. She’s a good listener.”
Because she has no one else to talk to.
He clenched his jaw, forcing the anger down. It wouldn’t help Liora to see his fury at whoever had done this to her. She didn’t even understand that what had been done was wrong.
Or perhaps she did, because she looked up at him, her expression troubled. “It’s strange. I’ve lived here my entire life, and I thought I knew everything about myself. My health records, my genetic profile, my capabilities. But apparently there were things Ari never told me. Important things.”
How much more is it hiding?
“What else do you think it’s keeping from you?” he asked carefully.
“I don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around herself, a gesture that made her look younger, more vulnerable. “That’s the part that frightens me. I trusted Ari completely. It was the only consistent presence in my life, the only thing that was always there. And now I’m realizing that being always there isn’t the same as being honest.”
“No. It’s not.”
She looked at him with those large blue eyes, gold flecks catching the sunlight.
“I found something once,” she said softly. “In one of the storage rooms. Old records, from before Ari’s current protocols were established. There were images of a woman holding a baby. The baby had eyes like mine. Blue with gold flecks.”
He went still. “What else was in the records?”
“Nothing useful. Just the images, and some corrupted data files. Ari said they were remnants of the previous AI system, fragments that weren’t properly deleted during the transition. It said they weren’t important.”
“But you kept looking.”
“I tried.” A sad smile crossed her face. “Ari restricted my access to those files shortly after. System security protocols, it said. But I remember the woman’s face. She looked... sad. And scared. Like she knew something terrible was going to happen.”
She probably did.
His mind was racing, fitting the pieces together. A baby with unusual genetics, hidden in a tower at the edge of nowhere. An AI programmed to maintain control, to restrict information, and to keep its charge ignorant and compliant. Years of isolation, documented like a long-term experiment. And now, the revelation of healing blood—a trait valuable enough to warrant all this elaborate containment.
Someone built this prison for her. Someone decided she would spend her life here.
I have to get her out of here.
The thought crystallized with sudden, fierce clarity. Not because of what she could do, but because of who she was. Curious, brilliant, kind. Eager for connection, starved for experience, and desperate for the life she’d been denied.
Mate,his beast insisted, but he ignored it once again.
She didn’t need to be his mate for him to know that she deserved more than this tower. She deserved to see the sea at sunset, to walk through the jungle she’d watched from above, to taste rain and feel grass and touch another person without the constant surveillance of an AI that controlled her every breath.
