Chapter 6 - THE FIRST PREGNANCY
Hospital records revealed a missing year in my medical history.
At twenty-four, I spent three months in a private wellness clinic after what my adoptive parents called a nervous breakdown.
The clinic belonged to Genesis Frontier.
I remembered medication.
White rooms.
A doctor telling me I had imagined being pregnant.
Anna watched my face as the memories returned.
A swollen stomach.
A newborn cry.
An empty bed.
I had given birth before.
Margaret’s records listed the child as Carter Subject 5.
Female.
Transferred to Walter.
Michael had been working at the clinic then.
He denied knowing me.
Ranger Morris showed him security footage recovered from an old server.
Michael wheeled me through a hallway while I was sedated.
He had met me years before our marriage.
He looked at the video and began crying.
“I don’t remember.”
Margaret laughed from the next room.
“They changed your memory too.”
Michael had also been drugged and conditioned by Genesis Frontier.
Walter used him as an assistant.
Later, Margaret placed him back into ordinary life and arranged our second meeting.
We had both been manipulated.
But only one of us had chosen violence afterward.
I told Michael that directly.
He lowered his eyes.
“I became what they trained me to be.”
“You became what you chose not to fight.”
The midnight exchange at the barn was an obvious trap.
Ranger Morris prepared surveillance.
I insisted on going because the child on the phone might be mine.
Anna came too.
At midnight, the barn doors opened.
Rachel Kim sat tied to a chair.
Beside her stood a little girl with dark blond hair and my eyes.
She was six.
She looked at me without moving.
A speaker crackled overhead.
Walter’s voice filled the barn.
“Emily, meet Grace.”
My first daughter.
The child I had been told never existed.
May you like
Before I could reach her, steel doors slammed shut behind us.
Gas began hissing from vents in the walls.
