The moment the tactical team burst in, Sienna's body moved before her thoughts caught up. She grabbed the scalpel from her bag, twisted, and sliced a man's wrist as he tried to restrain her. Blood sprayed. Silas disarmed another, but they were surrounded.
Then—
A blinding flash.A deafening crack.
The power grid shorted.
Darkness.
Sienna heard Silas curse under his breath. Then the entire room lit up again—but this time in red.
Emergency protocol lighting.
The invaders had underestimated the building's failsafes. Sterling Pharmaceuticals' safehouses were wired like military bunkers. One cut to the wrong conduit, and the building locked down.
Metal shutters dropped from the ceilings, slamming down over the windows. The apartment sealed like a vault.
And for the next three minutes, they had peace.
Or something like it.
"You okay?" Silas asked, breathless, wiping a cut from his brow.
"Nothing that won't scar," Sienna muttered, checking her side. Bruised. Not broken.
"Same."
They both stood still for a beat, chests rising and falling in time.
Then he walked to a panel in the wall—one she hadn't noticed before. Swiping his fingerprint, he triggered a hidden mechanism.
The wall slid open.
Behind it: a room she hadn't known existed.
Floor-to-ceiling boards.
Dozens of them.
Photos, maps, red string.
And at the very center of it all—
Her master.
Dr. Minghao Chen.
Pinned like the sun in the center of a constellation of shadows.
Sienna walked forward as if sleepwalking. Her fingers trembled slightly as they touched the grainy photo of her master in his lab coat, dated a year before his death.
"He wasn't just your master," Silas said softly. "He was mine too. In a way."
She turned sharply. "You remembered?"
"Fragments. Dreams. Needle placements. The way he said my name—Sterling, not Silas. I thought I made it up. Until I broke into a Sterling data vault in Prague and found the footage."
He tapped the monitor beside the board.
The screen flickered, then played.
A boy—barely ten—strapped to a chair. His eyes were terrified, but his posture was disciplined. A hand reached into the frame. A voice spoke Mandarin softly.
"You must remember every needle, child. They are the key to your freedom."
Sienna's throat went dry.
"That's his voice," she whispered. "That's my master."
Silas paused the video. His hand trembled.
"He saved me from becoming what they designed me to be. But he couldn't stop what came next. They wiped him. And tried to wipe me."
Silence.
The weight of shared history threatened to collapse the air between them.
Sienna stepped forward, pulled a tack from the board, and pinned her own memory into the web—an old photo, torn at the edge. She had kept it in her necklace for years.
A girl—herself at age seven—kneeling by a koi pond. Her master's shadow falling across the frame.
"I thought I buried him once," she said. "Turns out I buried the truth instead."
Silas nodded.
"We've both been pieces in a game neither of us agreed to play."
Then the alert flashed again.
WARNING: Typhoon advisory in effect. Satellite uplink compromised. Communications offline.
A storm was coming.
Outside, the wind had picked up, shaking the shutters against their reinforced locks. Rain lashed in sheets, horizontal and violent.
Inside, something else cracked.
A final wall.
Silas moved toward her slowly, not with heat this time—but with gravity.
"No more secrets," he said.
"No more testing each other," she replied.
He touched her cheek. His fingers still smelled faintly of copper and electricity.
"I don't care who made me," he said. "But I care what you make me now."
She kissed him—not with desperation, but decision.
They sank to the floor, tangled between shadows and strings of memory. Beneath the eyes of their shared past.
And outside, the storm howled.