I didn't know how long I'd been moving. My legs ached. My boots had worn new blisters over the old ones, and I could feel the skin rubbing raw with every step. The warehouse district rose around me like a graveyard of industry—skeletal cranes against the pale dawn, loading docks gaping like missing teeth, windows shattered and boarded and shattered again.
How did I get here?
I couldn't remember driving. Couldn't remember parking. Couldn't remember the moment I'd decided to come to this part of the city, to these streets, to this specific corner where the buildings leaned together like conspirators.
The phone was still in my pocket. I'd looked at it an hour ago—or maybe two, or maybe five—and the address was still there. Adams Street. The warehouse. The man inside.
Someone who might know.
I didn't know who he was. I didn't know who had sent me his name, or why, or if I'd found him on my own or if someone had guided me here while I slept. But my body knew what to do. My body had been trained.
Gabriel's voice, distant as a radio signal through static: "When you don't know where to go, let your feet decide. Your body remembers what your mind forgets."
I'd been walking for hours. Maybe my feet had decided.
The office was attached to the side of the warehouse like a tumor.
Small. Windowless. A steel door with a hasp that had been recently oiled. The building around it was dark—no lights, no movement, no sign of life except for the thin trail of smoke curling from a vent near the roof.
Someone was inside.
I pressed myself against the wall and breathed. In through the nose, hold for four, out through the mouth. Gabriel had taught me that."Controlled breathing controls the heart. A calm hunter is a living hunter."
My heart was not calm.
I could feel it hammering against my ribs, a trapped bird throwing itself at the bars of its cage. My palms were sweating. The knife in my hand was cool and steady, but my hand was not.
Another girl.
The memory surfaced like a body rising from deep water.
Blonde. Young. Hollow eyes like mine. She sat across from me in a room that might have been pink or might have been grey. We whispered at night—not words, just sounds, just the reassurance that someone else was there. She told me her name once. It started with an S. Or maybe an M. I could almost hear it: Sasha. Mona. Sarah. Something soft, something that tasted like rain.
Or maybe I imagined her.
Maybe I was alone the whole time.
Maybe the Institute kept us separate, never let us touch, never let us speak. Maybe the girl with the blonde hair was just a dream I'd had, a fantasy of companionship my broken mind had invented to fill the silence.
"There's no one else." Gabriel's voice, cold and certain. "You're the only one who survived. The only one who mattered."
Or maybe he'd said something else entirely.
I couldn't trust my memories. They shifted and slid like water through my fingers, impossible to hold, impossible to verify. Every time I reached for a moment from the Institute, it came back different. New details. Missing details. Faces that changed and clothes that changed and words that rearranged themselves into different sentences.
The girl. The blonde. S or M.
She was real.
She wasn't.
I was alone.
I was never alone.
The knife slipped in my sweaty palm, and I tightened my grip until the pain brought me back.
The door was unlocked.
