“These are recordings,” Baylin said. “From Susan. And from your father.”
Liora’s breath caught. “My father?”
“There’s a playback device in the wall. I watched some of them last night.” He paused, his eyes searching her face. “But I think you should see them yourself. I can explain after, if you want.”
She took the crystals from his hand. Her fingers trembled slightly as she crossed to the device he’d indicated and inserted the first one. Susan’s face appeared on the screen.
She watched them. Watched the clinical observations about healing rates and cellular regeneration and the “unprecedented properties” of her blood.
When she reached her father’s message—the young, grief-worn man with eyes like her own—she had to stop the playback twice because her hands were shaking too hard to operate the controls.
Her mother had the same trait. A genetic mutation, incredibly rare.
They killed her. My wife. My beautiful, brilliant Andrea. They killed her trying to take her.
I chose isolation over torture. I chose loneliness over suffering.
The final recording ended, and she stood in the white room, surrounded by equipment designed to study her like a specimen, and felt her entire understanding of her life rearrange itself into something unrecognizable.
Baylin hadn’t moved from his position near the door. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite identify.
“My blood,” she said slowly. “It heals things.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why your wound closed so fast. When I accidentally cut myself, and my blood mixed with yours.”
“Yes.”
She turned back to the blank screen, her mind already racing through implications. “The plants. In the greenhouse. I’ve always been able to revive specimens that should have died. Wilted seedlings, damaged cuttings. I thought I was just... good at caring for them. But if even a trace amount of my blood in the soil could trigger regeneration...”
“Liora—”
“And when I was twelve, I cut my hand badly on a broken beaker. It bled everywhere. But by the time Susan arrived, it had already stopped. I assumed I’d overestimated the severity of the wound, but what if it had actually healed itself in the time it took her to reach me? What if?—”
“Liora.”
The sharpness in his voice made her stop. She looked at him, really looked, and saw the tension in his shoulders, the careful way he was holding himself still.
“You’re analyzing,” he said. “Like it’s an experiment.”
“That’s what I do. When I don’t understand something, I study it. I document observations, form hypotheses, test?—”
“This isn’t an experiment. This is your life.”
The words washed over her like a wave of cold water. She opened her mouth to argue, to explain that understanding the mechanism was the first step towards understanding the implications, and that science had always been her refuge when the world felt too big and confusing?—
But then she saw his face.
He wasn’t angry. He was afraid for her. Afraid of what she would feel when she stopped thinking like a scientist and started thinking like a person.
And just like that, the analytical framework she’d been constructing collapsed.
“They hid me,” she whispered. “Susan and my father. They knew about my blood, and they hid me away.”
Baylin nodded slowly.
“They told ARIS to keep me here. To never let me leave. Because people would want to take me.”
