Chapter 9 - The Missing Forty-Seven Minutes
My name was followed by a date.
The night Claire fell down the stairs.
Beside it was a code: C-01.
Vanessa whispered, “What does that mean?”
Hale sat down.
“I think it means Candidate One.”
I looked at him.
“For what?”
He did not want to answer.
I made him.
“The continuity program started with performance,” he said. “Voice, posture, behavior. Adrian wanted more. He wanted to know whether memory itself could be manipulated enough that a person would follow a script without realizing it.”
My stomach turned.
“You experimented on me.”
“I did not.”
“You helped build it.”
“Years before this.”
Vanessa laughed bitterly. “That makes it fine.”
Hale ignored her.
“Your father shut the experimental side down.”
“Claire said Dad drugged me.”
“Maybe she meant someone using his access.”
I opened the folder attached to my name.
There was a medical chart.
My blood pressure.
My weight.
My prescriptions.
And forty-seven missing minutes described in clinical language.
SUBJECT RESPONSIVE TO VERBAL DIRECTIVES.
SUBJECT COMPLETED DOCUMENT EXECUTION.
SUBJECT EXHIBITED PARTIAL RETROGRADE AMNESIA.
I stopped reading.
Noah was watching me.
I closed the laptop.
“You shouldn’t see this.”
He looked angry.
“I already saw Vanessa with the cane.”
Vanessa flinched again.
He continued, “Everybody keeps hiding things and then worse things happen.”
He was eleven, and he had just described our entire family better than any adult in the room.
I reopened the file.
At the bottom was a signature.
Not Hale’s.
Not Adrian Voss’s.
Claire’s.
I stared at it.
“Why did Claire sign my treatment log?”
Hale looked stunned.
“She was there?”
The timestamp said 11:43 p.m.
Three minutes before Claire fell down the stairs.
I opened the next file.
Security footage.
Claire stood beside me in a private office.
I was seated, dazed.
She held a syringe.
Vanessa whispered, “Oh my God.”
Claire leaned toward me on-screen.
Then she injected something into my arm.
I watched my sister drug me.
The video ended before I could see why.
A text message arrived from an unknown number.
NOW YOU KNOW WHY SHE RAN.
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