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Chapter 49(2)
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2025-05-19 15:01:41The house was quiet again, but it was no longer peaceful. The silence wrapped around Isla like a noose, drawing tighter with each breath.
She stared at the scattered contents of the "Project Lyra" folder. Diagrams of brain scans, personality overlays, pain tolerance experiments. Pages marked with observations like:
"Subject shows strong response to maternal visuals."
"Behavioral correction through sensory deprivation achieved moderate success." "Mirror empathy nearly complete—98.7% personality alignment."She felt her throat close. Victor hadn’t raised her to be loved—he had raised her to reflect.
“Do you think I’m still her?” she asked suddenly, her voice brittle. “Am I still Isla? Or just… Lyra’s second coming?”
Christopher came to her then, kneeling before her, eyes dark and intense. “You are you, Isla. You survived his programming. You still question. That alone proves it. If you were just an echo, you wouldn’t be trembling right now. You wouldn’t be fighting this.”
“But what if—”
“Stop,” he interrupted, placing his hands on hers. “You’re not a clone. You’re not a shadow. You’re a storm. You’re real.”
His words lodged deep into her ribs, anchoring her in the present.
Behind them, Ethan entered the room, slower than usual, tiredness hanging off his body like a second skin.
“There’s something else,” he said. “I recovered one last encrypted file from the Nest. It mentions a final phase—something called The Reclamation Protocol.”
Isla’s heart skipped. “What is it?”
Ethan looked grim. “It’s a complete overwrite. Victor wasn’t just trying to shape you. He planned to erase what didn’t serve him. With the right trigger, your memories—your choices—everything would reset to whatever version he wanted.”
“Can it still be activated?”
“Yes,” Ethan admitted. “If he still has access to the network, he could run it from anywhere.”
She felt the world tilt.
Christopher’s grip on her hands tightened. “Then we take away his access.”
Ethan hesitated. “There’s only one way to do that. We lure him out. Into the open. He’ll never fully sever himself from you. Not until he believes you’re either his… or destroyed.”
“So we play into his obsession,” Isla said quietly.
Christopher nodded. “Exactly. But on our terms.”
—
The next few days blurred into a haze of planning and psychological preparation. Isla trained harder, both mentally and physically. She meditated with Ethan in the early hours, fought hand-to-hand with Christopher in the afternoons, and reviewed every single tape Victor had left behind at night.
She stopped flinching at the sound of her own younger voice.
She stopped crying when she saw the scars her mother had tried to hide.
And then one night, as she was reviewing a tape labeled "L.M. - Confession (Final)", something broke wide open.
Her mother’s voice filled the room.
“I know you think you’re building something greater, Victor,” Lyra whispered on the tape. “But you’re not. You’re killing everything that’s good. You don’t love me. You want to possess me.”
A pause.
“I made a mistake loving you.”
The tape clicked off.
Isla stared at the recorder. Her pulse was thunderous.
She could almost hear Victor’s voice reacting, enraged, betrayed, devastated. She could imagine how he would have tried to erase that recording—how much it would have hurt him to know that Lyra chose to leave him not out of fear… but out of defiance.
She turned to Christopher and Ethan, who had both entered silently during the playback.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “Ready for what?”
“To make him hear her again.”
—
They sent the tape as bait.
No message. No warning.
Just the recording of Lyra’s final words. Delivered to Victor’s encrypted satellite inbox via one of his dormant accounts.
Within hours, there was a response.
“Clever girl.”
Another line followed.
“Let’s finish what we started. Come alone. The red room waits.”
Coordinates were attached.
Christopher and Ethan stood with her as she packed a blade, a small transmitter, and a sedative syringe.
“I’ll be wired,” she said. “You’ll hear everything.”
Christopher took her face in his hands. “And if he tries to hurt you—”
“He already has. He just doesn’t know I’m not afraid of him anymore.”
Isla stepped into the night with steady feet and eyes sharp as flint.
She was not walking into a trap.
She was setting it.
---
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