She had no name.
At least not one Alessia could ever say aloud.
In the program, she’d been called Mother — not out of affection, but out of obedience. An artificial authority figure designed to condition the unshaped. Alessia had been one of many discarded girls taken in, sharpened into weapons, molded to serve. Only a few survived. Fewer still walked away.
And now, that voice — that scalpel-laced whisper from her childhood — had reappeared in the audio logs, issuing commands with the same precision that once told Alessia when to breathe, when to bleed, and when to kill.
The silence in the bunker thickened.
Dana sat hunched at the edge of the cot, her wound now stitched but still leaking pain. Lorenzo paced in rigid lines behind Alessia, scanning the rest of the decrypted audio logs.
