Chapter 980
Skye pulled out a lockpick set. “Give me a second.”
Her phone buzzed. A text from Parker.
SYSTEM HACKED. SENSORS OVERRIDDEN. TRIGGERING ‘ELECTRICAL FAULT’ IN KITCHEN IN 3… 2…
The fire alarm split the silence — a piercing shriek that tore through the house.
Below them, shouting erupted. The guards on the floor would be running toward the kitchen.
“Now,” Alistair said.
They burst from the closet. Alistair didn’t bother with the lockpicks. He raised his leg and drove his heel into the door frame beside the hinge. Wood splintered. He kicked again. The door gave way.
𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘴.𝘤𝘰𝘮
They scrambled up the narrow stairs into the attic’s darkness.
Skye switched on her flashlight. The beam cut through swirling curtains of dust.
The attic was a graveyard of furniture. White sheets covered mounds that loomed like sleeping giants in the shadows.
Skye moved deeper into the room, drawn toward the far corner by something she couldn’t name — a pull in her gut like a hook catching flesh.
She pulled a sheet from a large object.
It was a painting. An oil portrait.
It showed a man and a woman — her father and mother. Between them, holding their hands, stood a little girl of about five years old. She had Skye’s eyes.
In her arms, the girl clutched a doll. A ragdoll with one button eye missing.
Skye looked at the bottom of the frame. A brass plaque.
Skye Sterling, Age 5.
She gasped. The memories from her first life — the loving parents, the ordinary childhood — had they been fabrications? Or had she simply buried this in both lives?
“Why don’t I remember this portrait?” Skye whispered, her fingers grazing the canvas. “I remember the doll, but not the painting.”
“Don’t look!”
A voice crackled through Alistair’s earpiece.
“Skye, look away!” Julian’s voice was distorted by the comms, breathless and urgent. He was monitoring from the van outside, unable to make the climb due to his injuries. “The conditioning — it’s a visual trigger!”
But it was too late.
Skye turned. Behind the painting, swallowed by the deepest shadow of the eaves, was something large. Metal.
She raised her flashlight.
It was a birdcage. But enormous — five feet tall at least.
And inside it sat a small, rusted child’s bed.
The flashlight beam shook in Skye’s hand, dancing frantically over the rusted bars of the cage.
“No.”
The word wasn’t spoken so much as expelled — a physical rejection, a vomit of the soul.
The image hit her brain like a sledgehammer. The lock. The small water bowl. The scratch marks gouged into the cage floor.
She is five. It is dark. She is cold.
Let me out! Mommy!
A man stands outside the bars. He wears a mask. He holds a pocket watch.
You are no one. You are nothing. You are a vessel.
Pain. A needle in her arm. The world spinning.
Forget.
.
.