The Institute. Thorn. Every order. Every punishment. Every time he was told to kneel and not speak and not fight and not feel. He needed to forget it all. But he was a damn fool for thinking it could be so simple. So clean.
“What about forgetting a period of time? Years? Is that possible?”
Nyla stiffened. “You’re talking aboutchronological erasure.That’s dangerous.”
“I can handle it.”
“No,” she snapped. “You don’t get it. You’d forget everything you learned during that time,” She paused to study him. He could tell she was starting to see past his assignment facade. She knew this was personal for him. “I don’t know what you’re trying to forget but a chronological erasure would cause you to lose everything. Training, education, maybe even motor skills depending on how far back you want to go.”
He faltered. The room felt suddenly too warm. His fingers curled at his sides.
“I’d lose… everything?”
She softened slightly. “It’s all coded to time. You forget those years, you forget what came from them.”
Symond looked away.Damn it.The gears in his mind ground to a halt.
He had survived the Institute. Was shaped by it. Every lesson, every talent, every instinct that led him to joining the Hive came from those halls. If he lost that—what would be left?
But Nyla didn’t let the silence last. “There might be another way,” she said, quieter this time. “I can make you something smaller. Focused. One memory per vial. You think about it, name it, bleed into it, and it gets locked away for good. Fragmented erasure. Not everything. Just the worst.”
That might work.
“How many do you think you’d need?” she asked.
Symond looked her dead in the eye.
“Fifty.”
Nyla’s jaw worked, but she said nothing. Just nodded slowly. “It’ll take time.”
“I’ll take them in batches. Just get me some fast.”
∞∞∞
The first vial sat in the center of the table. Milky white. Innocent. Promising peace. Surrender.
Symond sat across from it, fingers curled tight around the edge of his chair. Dozens more waited in a crate at his feet. Nyla had explained how it worked. The potion was a blank slate until it was personalized. You recalled the memory. Poured it into the liquid through your blood. Only then would it know what to erase. Symond told her that sounded ridiculous but she stated that blood carried microscopic fragments of the mind. It would work.
He stared at the bottle until the glow of the MahoKi-infused base seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat.
Start small,he told himself. But nothing about this was small.
He reached for the vial. Uncorked it with shaking fingers. It smelled like nothing, just emptiness.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t even need to search his brain for the worst memories. They were always right behind his eyelids.
The new dorm room. The creak of hinges. Confusion. Dragged from his bed and forced to his knees—
His stomach twisted. He gagged, doubled over, arms braced on his knees as bile clawed at the back of his throat. Symond clamped a hand to his mouth, swallowing down the bitterness. It took minutes to still himself as the room spun and the air turned heavy. Sweat soaked through his shirt, cold and clinging.
But the memory wasthere.
He sliced his bicep and let the trickle of blood fall into the potion. It shimmered pink, then darkened. Thickened. As if it had swallowed something whole.
He fumbled for a pen, hand still trembling, and scrawled across the label:“First time.”
Then moved to the next.
