She watches the leather coil in my hand, her throat working as she swallows. She doesn't just nod; she weighs it. I watch her mind—the one that built the most complex encryption in the world—running the numbers on her own guilt.
"Is that the measure?" Her voice is a low, wrecked vibration. "A piece of leather against my skin for a human life? Does a belt make a difference? Does it settle a score when the other side of the ledger is a morgue?"
"It's all I have," I rasp, stepping closer until our shadows merge on the concrete floor. "Unless you have a better idea of how to bleed out the guilt."
"I can only die once." Her eyes narrow with a terrifying, dark resolve. "But I can take as many strikes as it takes to settle the score. If that's the currency you accept, then I'll pay it."
"Stand against the wall," I command. "I'm restraining your hands. If you reach back to protect yourself and the belt strikes your hand, it'll do permanent damage. I'm not here to break your fingers; I'm here to mark the debt."
She turns, but before she reaches the wall, she stops. She looks at me, and the mask of the architect slips, revealing the woman beneath.
"I am sorry. I didn't know what Phoenix was doing. I believed I was stabilizing a broken system. I'm not asking for absolution, and I'm not telling you how to handle me. But I'm trying to make it right. And I am so sorry about Lily."
She takes a shallow breath. "You told me not to speak to her. I violated that. I watched her struggling with that math homework, and I-I witnessed a mind that was being forced into a box it didn't fit. She isn't bad at math. She's brilliant. She just sees the logic paths differently. I wanted to show her the tricks, the games … The way to make the scary numbers turn into something she could control. I had no right to cross that line."
I look at her for a long, silent moment. The rage is still there, but it's shifting, turning into something heavier.
"Get to the wall," I command.
She goes. She braces her hands high against the cold cinder block, her fingers digging into the mortar. I step up behind her, my chest nearly touching her back, the scent of her sweat and fear filling my senses.
"Julian Miller. Zurich. Found in his bathtub with a hair dryer. One."
I swing. The leather cracks against the back of her thighs with a sharp, clinical report. Stratton gasps, her forehead hitting the stone. A broken whimper escapes her.
"Silas Vane. Singapore. A sudden, massive pulmonary embolism in a man with no history of clots. Two."
Crack. She jolts, her knees buckling for a split second before she forces them straight.
"Cassian Drax. London. Arandommugging outside his flat. Three."
The third strike is heavy, uncompromising. Her entire frame shakes, a violent vibration that rattles the breath in her lungs. By the sixth name: Alaric Sterling. Overdose. The charcoal fabric of the shirt is pulled tight against the backs of her legs, and the skinbeneath is blooming in angry, dark swells. The bruising rises, the deep purple-red of the debt being written into her flesh in real-time.
"Lucian Frost. Seven. Heart failure. Victor Graves. Eight. Single-vehicle accident. Harry Tibold. Nine.Felldown a flight of stairs."
She is vibrating now, her breath coming in jagged, wet hitches against the stone. Her fingers are white where they claw at the mortar, her knuckles raw from the pressure of holding herself upright.
"How many more?" she chokes out, her voice a wrecked thread.
"Three more for the scientists," I whisper into her ear, my breath hot against her skin. "And then we start on the patients. We don't have the final count yet. Hundreds? Thousands? Tell me what you think the fair price is for each patient."
"As many as it takes," she gasps.
"Silas Vane. Berlin. Ten. No relation to me, but he had a son. Carbon monoxide. Elias Morton. Eleven. Found in his home with a bullet in his brain. Apparent suicide. And finally, Dr. Soren Blake. Twelve. A plane that simply fell out of the sky."
The last strike is the hardest. It leaves a mark that will last for weeks: a dark, raised testament to the first dozen. I stop. The belt hangs at my side, my knuckles white around the leather. She is a wreck of tremors against the wall, her back heaving as she tries to find air.
I pull away, sliding the leather back through my loops with a slow, deliberate rasp. The count for the scientists is done, but the air in the room is too thick to breathe, saturated with the metallic tang of the belt and the salt of her silent penance.
She stays against the wall, her forehead pressed to the stone, her shoulders shaking in a rhythmic, broken cadence. The charcoal shirt is hiked up, revealing the deep, angry weltsblooming across her thighs: a map of the dead I've just written into her skin.
"Lily. You're going to help her. Teach her those logic paths. Show her how to see the numbers the way you do."
She turns her head slowly, her cheek scraping the cinder block. Her eyes are wet, searching mine with a raw, disoriented confusion. "You said I wasn't allowed to touch her. You said I was a contamination?—"
"I know what I said," I cut her off, my hand finding the heavy steel of the door handle. "But she needs to know she isn't broken. That her mind isn't a defect. It's the only decent thing you've brought into this house, Stratton. Don't waste the time you have left with her."
I pull the door open, the hallway light spilling into the dark of the cell like a clinical intrusion. I should leave. I should slide the bolt and let the silence swallow the mess I've made of her.
