Episode 7: What Was Taken
730 Words
The gunshot rang out like a thunderclap.
Zara screamed.
Adrian staggered, grabbing his shoulder as blood bloomed through his white shirt. The guard who shot him stepped forward, raising the silencer again but Graves, injured and furious, launched himself across the room.
The second shot missed.
Graves slammed the traitor into the wall with a crash, wrestled the weapon from his hand, and delivered a brutal punch that left the attacker crumpled on the ground.
Adrian dropped to his knees, wincing in pain.
Zara rushed to him. “Stay with me Adrian, stay with me!”
His face was pale, his breath shallow, but he managed a tight smile. “It’s just a graze… nothing fatal.”
“Liar,” she snapped, tearing fabric from her sleeve to press against the wound. “You’re losing blood. We need a doctor.”
Graves was already calling in extraction.
But as the chaos swirled, Zara felt something shift inside her like a door creaked open in a long-forgotten hallway in her mind.
A scent.
A sound.
A memory.
The guard's face now bruised and unconscious she had seen him before.
Not as a protector… but as a shadow.
Strapped to a chair. Screaming.
The world tilted.
She was no longer in the safehouse.
She was twenty-four. In a white room. Cold. Afraid. Hooked to wires.
A man’s voice echoed through the glass:
“Subject 07 is resisting the sedative. Increase dosage.”
“No!” she cried, thrashing. “Where am I? Why are you doing this?!”
The door opened.
A figure stepped inside.
Adrian.
But not the Adrian she knew. This version was younger, harder, dressed in black, eyes devoid of guilt.
He walked up to her restrained body and said calmly:
“This will help you forget. You weren’t meant to remember this life.”
Zara gasped and blinked back in the present, sweat on her brow, heart slamming against her ribs.
“Zara?” Adrian’s voice snapped her back. “What’s wrong?”
She stared at him in horror.
“I saw you,” she whispered. “You were there. In the white room. You… you said I shouldn’t remember.”
Adrian’s face went slack.
“No,” he said softly. “No, that wasn’t me”
“It was, Adrian. You stood over me like I was some lab animal!”
He looked gutted. “I was trying to save you. My father wanted you literally erased. I interfered. I paid them to sedate you instead of erase you.”
Her voice shook. “And then you destroyed my career and walked away like I never mattered?”
“I was trying to protect you from the truth. If the Syndicate thought you remembered anything, they’d have killed you years ago.”
Zara stood, eyes burning. “You let me think I was crazy. You let me walk through life not knowing half of me had been taken.”
Graves returned. “We have to move. Celine’s people are tracing the signal. This location is compromised.”
Zara looked down at Adrian.
“I’m not running anymore,” she said. “Not from them. Not from you. I want everything files, names, dates. I want the full story.”
Adrian met her eyes. “You’ll get it. But you need to know… there’s one memory they never erased.”
“What do you mean?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a USB drive.
“Vivienne hid this before she disappeared. She recorded everything your sessions, the trials, the day you escaped. But most importantly... she left you a message.”
Later, inside a high-security safehouse under Graves’ protection, Zara sat alone in front of a laptop.
She clicked the file marked:
“For Zara Only.”
Vivienne appeared on screen. Pale, bruised, but determined.
“If you’re watching this, they failed to erase you. And that means you’re in danger again.
You don’t know who you are yet but you will.
You were the only one who resisted Project Reverie. The only one who escaped.
They called you Subject 07.
But I called you the key.”
Zara closed the laptop slowly.
She was no longer just a pawn in a fake marriage.
She was the experiment that broke the system.
And now the Syndicate wanted her back.
Alive or dead.
TO BE CONTINUED...
- Writer
