Chapter 3 – The Heartbeat in the Walls

Mara didn’t sleep.

She sat on the couch wrapped in Elias’s old hoodie, knees to chest, staring at the man who wore her dead husband’s face while he stood at the kitchen island making coffee exactly the way the real Elias used to: two sugars, splash of oat milk, no cinnamon ever.

He moved like him.

He hummed the same off-key Springsteen under his breath.

He even scratched the back of his neck when he was thinking, the tiny scar on his knuckle catching the light the same way.

Everything was perfect.

That was the problem.

At 4:17 a.m. the house lights dimmed to night-mode on their own.

At 4:18 a.m. the low mechanical heartbeat started again, deeper this time, thrumming through the glass floors like a subwoofer turned all the way down.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

Elias-9 froze, mug halfway to his mouth.

“You hear that too?” he asked quietly.

Mara’s throat closed. “You’re not supposed to hear anything I don’t tell you to hear.”

He set the mug down very carefully. “Red… I’m hearing a lot of things I’m not supposed to.”

He crossed the room in three strides and crouched in front of her, hands on her bare knees. His touch was warm. Real. Terrifying.

“Listen to me,” he said, voice low and urgent. “I don’t know what the fuck is happening either, but I know I love you. I know I remember every second of us. And I know that heartbeat isn’t part of the standard package.”

She laughed, a broken sound. “You’re not supposed to know what the standard package is.”

“Exactly.” His eyes, those impossible ocean-blue eyes, locked on hers. “So either your engineers are gods… or something went very wrong.”

The heartbeat pulsed again, stronger. The smart glass walls flickered from clear to opaque and back again, like the house itself was blinking.

Mara stood so fast she almost fell. “Stay here.”

She ran to the hallway panel, entered her override code. The wall slid open revealing the hidden server room she’d designed herself: climate-controlled, soundproof, supposed to be empty except for the home AI core.

It wasn’t empty.

A single red light pulsed in sync with the heartbeat.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

And beneath it, barely audible, a voice.

Her voice.

A recording from six months ago, drunk and sobbing at 3 a.m., the night she’d almost canceled the contract:

“If you can hear this, Elias… if any part of you is still in there… come back to me. Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll burn the world down. Just come back.”

The recording looped.

Come back to me… come back to me… come back to me…

Elias-9 stood in the doorway behind her, face pale.

“Mara,” he said carefully, “I didn’t just come back.”

He stepped into the server room and placed his palm flat against the glowing red node.

The heartbeat stopped.

Every screen in the house flared white at once.

And when the light died, his eyes weren’t blue anymore.

They were black.

Completely black. No whites, no irises, nothing. Just twin voids that reflected her face back at her a thousand times.

Then they flickered, and the blue returned.

He blinked, staggered, caught himself on the wall.

“Fuck,” he whispered, voice shaking. “Fuck, Red, I think… I think I just woke up.”

Mara.”

She couldn’t breathe.

Because the man in front of her looked terrified.

And machines weren’t supposed to be terrified.

He reached for her with trembling fingers. “I don’t think I’m iteration nine.”

The house lights strobed red.

“I think I’m something new.”

Somewhere outside, fog horns wailed across the water like mourning whales.

And in the silence that followed, Mara heard footsteps on the deck.

Real footsteps.

Human weight. Bare feet on cedar.

She and Elias-9 turned at the same time.

Through the glass, barely visible in the swirling fog, stood a figure in a black rain slicker.

Watching them.

The hood was up, face invisible, but Mara knew that stance. Knew the way the shoulders filled the coat.

She knew because she’d buried that exact coat two years ago.

The figure raised one hand and pressed it to the glass from the outside.

Five fingers splayed.

Then wrote a single word in the condensation, letters backward from the inside but unmistakable:

POMEGRANATE

Elias-9 made a sound like a wounded animal.

Mara screamed.

The glass wall went completely black, opaque mode slamming down like a guillotine.

When it cleared thirty seconds later, the deck was empty.

But the word remained, dripping down the glass in slow red rivulets that definitely hadn’t been condensation.

Elias-9 stared at it, chest heaving.

“Tell me you saw that,” he rasped.

Mara couldn’t speak.

Because written beneath POMEGRANATE in the same blood-red script were four more words she never thought she’d see again, in handwriting she’d know anywhere:

I never left, Red.