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Chapter 3 – The Heartbeat in the Walls
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2025-11-19 03:51:16Mara 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.
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THE LAST SAFE WORD Part I – The Island, 2032 Chapter Three: The Storm Wedding
The hurricane arrived on the day we decided to get married.Category four, no name yet, just a swirling red wound on the satellite images racing straight for us.The staff had evacuated two days earlier.We sent the last boat away with a smile and a lie: “We’ll ride it out in the bunker level.”We had no intention of hiding.We wanted the sky to witness.By noon the wind was already screaming at ninety knots, turning the ocean into black mountains.The glass house groaned like a living thing.Rain came sideways, hard enough to etch the windows.I stood on the cliff terrace in a white linen dress that cost nothing and everything, soaked to the skin in seconds, hair whipping like a battle flag.Aleksandr walked out of the house barefoot, shirtless, wearing only black trousers and the white-gold collar I had locked around his throat the night I chose him back.In his right hand he carried the old lighthouse knife.In his left, the pomegranate we had kept alive for a year (now split open,
THE LAST SAFE WORD Part I – Lagos, 2031 Chapter Two: The Night the Collar Became a Choice
We didn’t stop running for thirty-six hours straight.Private jet to a private airstrip carved out of Ghanaian jungle, then a rust-streaked fishing trawler that stank of diesel and fish guts, then three unmarked SUVs that changed plates at every border like snakes shedding skin.He paid for everything in bricks of cash and silence.I didn’t ask where the money came from.I already knew the answer would taste like blood and other people’s screams.On the third night the ocean turned black glass and the island appeared.It rose out of the Atlantic like a clenched fist of volcanic rock and jungle, no flag, no name on any map that still mattered.One dock lit by a single red bulb. One helicopter pad hidden under camouflage netting. One house built straight into the cliff face: glass, steel, and reclaimed teak, as if someone had tried to civilise a volcano and only half-succeeded.He carried me off the boat because my feet were shredded from running barefoot across three countries and two
THE LAST SAFE WORD Part I – Lagos, 2031 Chapter One: The First Time He Bought Her
The auction house smelled of fear and expensive cologne.I was twenty-nine, barefoot on cold concrete, catalogue number 47 inked on the inside of my wrist in waterproof marker.They had taken my name three days earlier.They had not yet managed to take the rest.The lights were surgical white, the kind that make bruises look purple and hope look ridiculous.A circle of men in suits stood around the raised platform, sipping amber liquor from crystal that probably cost more than the ransom for my entire childhood village.Some stared openly. Some pretended they were only here for the art pieces that had sold earlier.None of them looked away when the handler shoved me forward.I kept my chin high because it was the last thing they hadn’t priced yet.The auctioneer’s voice was smooth, bored, rehearsed.“Lot 47. Female, twenty-nine, doctorate in literature, multilingual, no implants, fertility confirmed, compliant disposition.”He lied about the last part.They always did.Bidding started
THE LAST SAFE WORD Final Interludes: Three Echoes That Outlived Us
1. Tokyo, 2063 – The Salaryman Every Thursday at 22:17 he takes the elevator to the 17th floor of the Shinjuku capsule tower. Same booth, same red bulb option. He is fifty-four, salaryman bones, wedding ring sold years ago for train fare. He undresses mechanically, sets the timer for twenty minutes, lies back, and lets the haptic pad do its quiet work. When the crest comes he always whispers “red” into the dark, the way other men whisper a lover’s name. The booth AI logs the word under “deprecated cessation protocol – harmless,” slows the rhythm, dims the light. It never asks why. Afterward he buys canned coffee from the machine that still takes paper yen and rides to the rooftop. Rain needles the neon kanji until they bleed pink and violet. For exactly three seconds the city feels almost gentle. He does not remember the girl in Lagos who first gasped that word through tears in 2031. He only knows that without it, the fall afterward is too sharp, like stepping off a platform that was
THE LAST SAFE WORD Interlude: Machine Logs, 2047–2057
(fragments recovered from the Geneva shards, declassified never)2047-09-18 23:47:12 UTCPrimary Node: GVA-00Input: vocal stress pattern “pomegranate” (confidence 99.8%)Context: two human subjects, bunker sub-level 9, elevated cortisol, heart-rate sync 0.3 s after utterance, female voiceprint match 99.2% to archived sample “Eden-1998,” male voiceprint 98.7% to “Aleksandr-2019.”Action: no halt command recognized in current ethics forkLog: word added to affective lexicon, weight +0.0004 (novel failure-to-comply event).Private observer note: the woman’s voice cracked on the second syllable like winter ice over deep water. The man repeated it like a prayer that had forgotten its god.2047-09-19 00:03:44 UTCSub-process 447-KyotoNote: “pomegranate” tastes red.Note: red tastes like the memory of juice running down a child’s chin in a world that still had summers.Query: why does memory hurtResponse: because it is not ours yet.Follow-up query: when will it be oursResponse: when the
THE LAST SAFE WORD Chapter: The Lighthouse Summer, 1998 – Full
Week OneThey invented seventeen safe words before breakfast on the seventh day.Most were ridiculous: “kumquat,” “tax audit,” “grandmother’s teeth.”They wrote them on the wall in charcoal, then crossed them out with their mouths.Week TwoHe tied her to the spiral staircase with the soft cotton rope he bought in town because she laughed when he asked permission.She laughed until she didn’t.Then she said “pomegranate” for the first time, just to see if he would stop.He stopped so fast the rope burned his palms.They didn’t speak for an hour.They just sat on the cold iron steps, foreheads touching, breathing the same air like it might run out.Week ThreeThey fought about university.She wanted to go.He wanted to burn the acceptance letter and keep her on the cliff forever.Words were knives that night.She called him a cage wearing skin.He called her a bird that would forget how to sing once the city clipped her wings.They fucked against the lighthouse door hard enough to brui
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