"I know what he did to Batch 38. I know what he did to Batch 36. I know what he's going to do to you."
She leaned forward, and her eyes were hollow in a way that made my stomach turn.
"You're not special. You're just another experiment. And when he's finished with you, he'll throw you away like the rest of us."
I blinked.
The diner came back.
The jukebox had changed songs—something about trains, something about leaving, something about tracks that led nowhere. The french fries were still cold. The coffee was still bitter. The waitress was still ignoring me.
Batch 39.
Had I ever met her?
I tried to hold onto the memory, to examine it, to find the edges where it met the real world. But it kept slipping—her face shifting, her voice changing, the scar on her lip moving from one side to the other.
Maybe she was real.
Maybe I'd dreamed her.
Maybe Gabriel had planted the memory to keep me compliant, to make me afraid of leaving, to remind me that the world outside was full of people who would hurt me worse than he ever had.
"There's no one else."
His voice, cold and certain.
I pressed my palms against the table and forced myself to breathe. In through the nose, hold for four, out through the mouth. The technique he'd taught me. The technique that was supposed to ground me in the present, to remind me where I was, to pull me back from the edge of the spiral.
Where was I?
A diner.
Somewhere in the city.
I didn't know the address. Didn't know the cross streets. Didn't know how I'd gotten here or how long I'd been sitting in this booth or why I'd chosen this diner instead of the thousand others I'd passed.
The french fries were cold.
I ate one anyway. The grease coated my tongue, and I chewed mechanically, and I tried to remember the last time I'd had a meal that wasn't eaten in a diner at three in the morning, alone, with blood under my fingernails and a gun in my jacket pocket.
I couldn't.
The man at the counter was watching me.
I'd noticed him when I walked in—middle-aged, grey at the temples, wearing a jacket that was too warm for the season. He'd been drinking coffee and reading a newspaper, and I'd dismissed him as harmless, as no one, as background noise in a city full of strangers.
But now he was looking at me.
Not staring—not quite. Just watching, his eyes flicking to my booth every few seconds, his head tilted slightly, like he was trying to place my face.
Did I know him?
Had I killed someone he loved?
Was he here for revenge? For answers? For something I couldn't give him because I didn't remember the names of the dead, let alone their families?
I looked away first. Dropped my eyes to the table, to the cold fries, to the coffee cup with its ring of brown stain.
