Because the alternative was looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger and knowing, with absolute certainty, that I would never recognize the woman staring back.
"You're ready."
For what?
For this.
For the hunt.
For the blood and the bodies and the long, empty hours between kills when I sat in cheap motel rooms and tried to remember who I was.
"He'll never love you."
The girl who wasn't there.
Batch 39.
S or M.
Sarah.
Mona.
No one.
She was no one.
I was no one.
We were all no one, in the end.
The city swallowed me whole, and I walked toward the address, and somewhere behind me—in the shadow of an awning, at the corner of an empty street—a figure watched me go.
4
The Blood Arithmetic
The basement smelled like fear and old laundry.
I'd been standing in the shadows for eleven minutes—I'd counted, because counting was the only thing keeping me from shaking apart—watching the light spill through the gaps in the floorboards above. The house was a duplex in a neighborhood that had once been working class and was now mostly abandoned. The man I was hunting lived in the bottom unit. He'd been a guard at the Institute. I'd found his name in a file I didn't remember stealing, on a page I didn't remember reading, in a language I didn't remember learning.
Former Institute security. Batch 42 through 46. Terminated after facility shutdown. Current address on file.
The words had been there when I woke up. Typed into my phone. No sender. No context. Just an address and a name and the certain knowledge that this man had watched girls like me and done nothing.
His name was Harold.
Or maybe David.
Or maybe something else entirely.
I couldn't remember. The name kept slipping, changing, rearranging itself into different letters. I'd stopped trying to hold onto it. Names didn't matter. Faces didn't matter. Only the information mattered—what he knew, what he'd seen, where Gabriel had gone.
"You're ready."
For this.
For basements and blood and the slow, methodical work of breaking a man open until he told you everything.
