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Chapter 49(2)
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2025-05-19 15:01:41Chapter 49: The Red Room
Part 2 The house was quiet, but it wasn't calm anymore. The stillness closed around Isla like a noose, tightening with each breath.She looked at the shredded contents of the "Project Lyra" folder. Brain scan printouts, personality overlays, pain tolerance tests. Pages marked with notes like:
"Subject reacts violently to mother imagery."
"Sensory deprivation behavioral modification had some success."
"Mirror empathy almost complete—98.7% personality match." She could feel her throat tightening. Victor had not instructed her to be loved—he had instructed her to mirror."Do you think I'm still hers?" she blurted suddenly, her voice broke. "Am I still Isla? Or just. Lyra's second coming?
Christopher came to her then, on his knees in front of her, eyes black and blazing. "You are you, Isla. You burst through his programming. You still have doubts. That alone is evidence. If you were merely an echo, you would not be trembling now. You would not be fighting this."
"But what if—"
"Stop," he interrupted, placing his hands over hers. "You're not a clone. You're not a duplicate. You're a tempest. You're alive.".
His words took hold deep within her ribs, centering her in the present.
Coming up behind them, Ethan entered the room, his usual stride tinged with slowness, exhaustion clinging to him like a second skin.
"There is more," he said. "I was able to recover one last encrypted file from the Nest. It is talking about a last phase—the so-called The Reclamation Protocol."
Isla's heart skipped a beat. "What is it?"
Ethan's expression was somber. "It's a full overwrite. Victor wasn't merely attempting to shape you. He meant to erase what wasn't beneficial to him. With the correct stimulus, your memories—your choices—everything would be rewritten to whatever form he desired."
"Can it still be triggered?"
"Yes," Ethan admitted. "If he still has access to the network, he could do it from anywhere."
She felt the world spin.
Christopher's grip on her hands tightened. "Then we take his access away."
Ethan hesitated. "There's only one way to do it. We lure him out. Into the open. He'll never be able to completely sever himself from you. Not until he believes you're either his… or broken."
"So we play on his obsessions," Isla said quietly.
Christopher nodded. "Exactly. But on our terms."
—
The rest of the days were a whirlwind of preparation and psyching. Isla trained harder, both mind and body. She meditated with Ethan in the early morning hours, hand-to-hand combat with Christopher during the day, and watched every single tape Victor had left behind each night.
She no longer flinched at hearing her own younger voice.
She no longer wept when she looked at the scars her mother had tried to hide.
And then, one night, listening to a tape labeled "L.M. - Confession (Final)", something broke wide open.
Her mother's voice filled the room.
"I know you think you're making something better, Victor," Lyra panted on the tape. "But you're not. You're ruining everything that's good. You don't love me. You want to possess me."
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 get him to hear her again."
—
They sent the tape as bait.
No message. No warning.
Just the recording of Lyra's final words. Sent to Victor's secure satellite mailbox via one of his dormant accounts.
There was a response in hours.
"Clever girl."
There was another message sent through.
"Finish what we began. Arrive alone. The red room is waiting."
Coordinates were added.
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 placing it.
---
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