All Chapters of His To Take: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The plane landed on an abandoned airstrip near the northern Estonian coast, the wind ripping sideways through the pines. It was nearly midnight. The cold was relentless, and the trees whispered like they were holding secrets.Ava stepped onto the tarmac with Luca behind her, Subject 03 flanking the opposite side. No one spoke.The coordinates pulsed faintly from her tablet close. Within half a kilometer. Moving.Whoever the girl was, she wasn’t hiding in place.She was running.And not from them.The drive inland was short. A rough, tree-lined road that ended near a collapsed observation tower and what looked like the burned-out remains of a research trailer. Subject 03 scanned the perimeter before Ava even opened the door.“She passed through here,” 03 said.“Alone?”“No,” she added. “But she left alone.”Ava stepped into the half-ruined structure, flashlight cutting through the dust and silence.That’s when she saw it scratched into the concrete wall near what used to be a comms rac

She didn’t sleep.Ava knew the signs before sunrise even touched the windows.The girl still unnamedlay motionless on the cot in the spare room. But her fingers twitched every few minutes. Her eyes never fully closed. She was still in flight mode, even though her body was no longer moving.Ava stood in the doorway for a while, just watching.She wasn’t looking for a weakness. She wasn’t looking for trust.She was listening for the moment the silence cracked.It came just after 6:00 a.m.“I had a brother.”The girl’s voice was raw. Like it had been scraped from the back of her throat.Ava stepped closer but didn’t enter the room. “What was his name?”“I don’t remember.”She swallowed hard.“They told me I didn’t need that memory. They said it wasn’t relevant to my profile.”“Do you remember his face?”The girl nodded.“Then he’s real.”Later that morning, Subject 03 ran diagnostics on the girl’s cognitive recovery levels.She wasn’t looking for trauma.She was looking for tampering.“H

They climbed for hours.The terrain was a brutal unforgiving mix of craggy frost, sharp inclines, and wind that howled like it carried warnings from women long gone. Each footstep crunched against the frozen earth like a clock ticking toward something Ava could feel but couldn’t yet see.Every mile deeper into the mountains felt like slipping into history no one had written down.No one except her.And maybe one other.The coordinates came from a mirror VX archive that should have self-wiped. It hadn’t.The digital path had been hidden beneath years of misdirectionobscured facility names, false closures, corrupted medical logs.But the data didn’t lie.And when Subject 03 finished decrypting it, one tag stood out in blinking red:PROTOTYPE_0.0 STATUS: INERT LOCATION: SITE ECHO.No camera feeds.No live files.Just a heartbeat. Tracked weekly. Verified.She was alive.It wasn’t just curiosity driving Ava anymore.It wasn’t even vengeance.It was something heavier. Recognition. Like

The Foundation Echo Gala was held at the Sofien Hall in Viennaa restored 19th-century concert space turned modern exhibition venue, all steel beams, glass domes, and white marble floors that echoed like a church.The branding was seamless. Every corner tastefully lit. Every screen looping clean, minimalist footage of hands touching, smiling faces, children laughing in classroomsall part of the campaign.“Empathy Engineered.”That was their headline.Their lie.Ava stood just beyond the perimeter of the crowd, dressed like a sponsor’s assistanthair pulled back, makeup light, expression unreadable. Her badge had been replicated by 03 the night before, encoded with a forged access tier just high enough to get her into the staging area but not so high it would trigger a check.She moved calmly, arms at her sides, eyes never lingering.No tech. No comms. No team.Just herself.Because this wasn’t an extraction.This was contact.Sera was scheduled to speak in the final segment “Emergent In

The sky was grayer than she expected.Not dramatic. Not stormy.Just real.The way colors looked when no one was trying to market them.Sera stepped off the transport in the early hours of morning, boots hitting gravel instead of polished tile. There were no handlers. No prep teams. No soft lighting. Just a thin trail of mist in the air and the crunch of dirt beneath her shoes.She pulled the hood of her jacket tighter around her face, even though there were no cameras. No interviews. No watchful eyes were trying to turn her into something they could package.Just her.And the weight of what she’d left behind.The coordinates Ava had sent weren’t for a facility. Not even a safe house.They were for a decommissioned relay station tucked into the base of a wooded ridge outside Lyonstone, steel, and broken satellite dishes rusting in silence. A long-forgotten patch of government waste repurposed into something more valuable than any official compound:A place to exist without permission.