ARIELLE

PROLOGUE

They came for her memories.

Carlos didn’t see the procedure. He had already been banned from any direct contact with the family wing after the failed extraction, but he heard enough.

“Phase Three, Profile A,” a clinician said once, in a corridor he wasn’t supposed to be close to. “Full identity reassignment, parental figures removed, and bonds with other subjects recalibrated. It’s ambitious, but the board wants a clean case before we go dark.”

Clean case. Sick.

He had pressed himself against the wall, his heart pounding, listening as they discussed her like a lab specimen.

When it was all over, a new file appeared. A new name. A new destination.

They used a social worker for the transfer. Subtlety mattered now because the program was under scrutiny. A woman with kind eyes and a clipboard arrived one morning, wearing a badge bearing a government department Carlos didn’t recognize, but trusted less than the old security logos.

He found the one place he could still see her without being seen: a narrow stairwell window overlooking the exit loop. And from there, he watched.

He saw her— looking smaller than she should have, hair neatly brushed, clothes too new—walk out between two staff members and the social worker. Her gaze was unfocused, as if she’d just woken up from a too-long sleep. She didn’t seem conscious of her surroundings. Her steps were obedient and careful.

When her gaze slid briefly to him, he looked for recognition. For any flicker that said she remembered the boy pressed against the glass, hands flat, and throat burning with unscreamed words.

There was nothing.

The social worker opened the back door of a plain sedan, guided her in, and buckled her seat belt with professional efficiency. Papers changed hands, and the adults in charge moved with the smooth choreography of people who had done this before and would do it again.

Then the car pulled away.

Carlos’s palms left prints on the glass. He didn’t realize he’d been leaning that hard until he saw the smears later.

He had always thought, in some corner of his mind, that if the worst happened, he would do something dramatic like throwing himself in front of the car. He thought he would make enough of a scene to force the world to notice.

Instead, he stood there: fourteen, furious and helpless, and watched her go.

Carla found him screaming at the guards after the car had long since disappeared.

“They wiped her,” he said, voice hoarse. “She looked right past me.”

“I know,” Carla answered. Her face looked like someone had scraped all the expression out of it with a dull blade.

He turned on her then, rage more grief than accusation. “We promised,” he hissed. “You promised—”

“I know,” she said again, louder. “You think I don’t hear him in my head every time I breathe?”

They stared at each other, both of them brittle and broken in ways the program would have considered useful data.

“What do we do now?” he asked, the words tasting like ashes.

“Now, we make sure that wasn’t the last time you ever see her. They think they’ve erased us from her, not the other way around. That’s their blind spot, and we’re going to use it.”

“How?” he demanded.

She looked out through the window then, as though following the ghost of the car along the distant road.

“We find where they put her and wait for the program to implode under the weight of its own lies. Then,” she added, her eyes hardening, “we go get her. One way or another.”

It took years.

Contracts ended, and the facility rebranded before quietly closing down. The staff went their separate ways, and files were either boxed up, shipped, or ‘misplaced.’ Carla and Carlos traded their uniforms for consultant badges and eventually, civilian clothes, all while keeping track of adoption records, scholarship programs, and suspiciously blank backstories in university applications.

The timeline in that stairwell window, however, remained unchanged.

That was the moment that never stopped replaying for Carlos: her walking toward a car with a stranger, his breath fogging the glass with his fists clenched uselessly at his sides. It was the first time he experienced loss, not due to death, but by design.

Years later, when he stood on the campus grounds and watched her cross the quad with a bag full of paintings and a new name, that memory collided with the present so hard it stole his breath.

She didn’t remember him.

He remembered everything.

And the promise he’d made to himself—that if he couldn’t stop them from taking her, then he would spend whatever was left of his life finding her again—was the only part of the program’s story he still believed in.