Chapter 1

Amaya’s POV 

“Run. Just bloody run.”

I don’t know if I’m speaking out loud or if the words are trapped inside my head where everything else is screaming. My bare feet slam against roots and rocks, tearing open, but I did not stop, not even for ones. The facility’s antiseptic smell still clings to my skin, mixing with the copper tang of blood, mine, maybe someone else’s. I don’t remember anymore, I just want to get out of this place.

Branches claw at my arms, my face, my thighs through the thin medical gown that’s all they left me. Each scratch burns, but it’s nothing compared to the fire they put inside me. The injections. The restraints. The cold metal table and the faceless masks hovering over me while my body betrayed me, over and over again, burning from the inside out during those forced heats.

“Please ..no more..”

Was that me? Or was it Sera?

I stumble, catch myself against a tree trunk. Bark bites into my palms. Sera. Oh dense, Sera. Her screams are still echoing in my ears, high and desperate, coming from the room next to mine three nights ago. Then silence. The kind of silence that means they finally broke something that can’t be fixed.

My stomach lurches with something I can’t really phantom. I press my forehead against the rough bark, gasping for hair, I’m literally going crazy..

Move, Amaya. They’re coming.

I can hear them now, boots pounding earth, dogs barking, men shouting coordinates into radios. They’re close. My legs are shaking so hard I don’t know how they’re still holding me up. Every muscle in my body is screaming, exhausted from the drugs they pumped through my veins, from the testing, from the hell they called research.

Such a clean word for what they did to us. I push off the tree and run again. The forest blurs around me, green and brown and shadow. My lungs are on fire, each breath a sharp blade cutting my throat. How long have I been running? An hour or two? The sun’s too low now, sinking between the trees, painting everything in blood-red light.

There’s so much blood on my hands. Not all of it is mine. The guard at the south corridor, his eyes went wide when I grabbed the scalpel from the medical cart. I didn’t think before driving it inside his stomach.

He fell, and I ran.

“Subject 47, stop! There’s nowhere to go!”

The voice booms through a megaphone somewhere behind me. Subject 47. Not Amaya. Just a number. Just a womb they wanted to fill with their perfect hybrid offspring.

My vision swims. I’m seeing double, two paths ahead instead of one. I veer left, or maybe right, crashing through undergrowth that tears at my legs. The medical gown is mostly ribbons now, barely covering anything, but modesty died months ago in that place.

I grabbed a low branch and covered myself up. My arms are weak, shaking, but fear is stronger than exhaustion. I climb higher, bark scraping my stomach, my breasts, my thighs. Leaves close around me. I freeze, pressing myself flat against the trunk, trying not to breathe, trying not to exist.

Boots thunder past below.

“She went east! Move!”

The footsteps fade. I stay frozen, counting heartbeats. One hundred. Two hundred. My mouth tastes like salt. I run my tongue over my lips and it comes away red. Bit through my cheek without realizing what I just did.

When the forest goes quiet again, I climb down. My hands won’t stop shaking. Everything hurts, bruises blooming purple and yellow across my ribs where they held me down, needle marks dotting my inner arms like awful constellations, the deep ache between my legs from their last examination.

Never again. I force myself forward. One foot, then the other. The trees are thinning. I can hear something new now, a rushing sound that grows louder with each step. Ocean. It has to be the ocean. I break through the tree line and stop.

The cliff drops away just ten feet ahead, a sheer wall of rock plunging down into churning water below. The sun’s half-gone now, turning the waves gold and orange and violent. It’s so far down. Too far.

Behind me, a dog barks.

“There! I see her!”

No. No no no no..

I ran to the edge. Pebbles skitter over the side, disappearing into the foam and rocks below. The wind whips my hair back, my tattered gown plastered against my body. I look down at the water and I look back at the forest where flashlight beams are cutting through the dusk like searchlights.

Back to the facility. Back to the table. Back to the needles and the burning and the screams and the guards who smiled when they strapped me down. Back to being Subject 47, an experiment, a vessel, a thing they owned.

“I’d rather die,” I whisper to the wind. “I’ll never be owned again.”

The footsteps are getting closer. Voices shouting. Almost here. I close my eyes and step forward into nothing. The fall is silent in my head. Wind roars past, stealing my breath. I’m weightless, floating, free. For one perfect second, I’m nobody’s subject, nobody’s experiment. Just Amaya, falling deep down to her death maybe..

Then I smell something really intense, something cutting through the salt spray and blood. A scent, wild and male and impossibly strong, coming from somewhere on the wind. It wraps around me like invisible hands, and deep in my chest, something pulls. Tugs. Reaches. But the water’s coming up fast, and the darkness is faster, swallowing the world whole..