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Human female. Height: 170 centimeters. Weight: approximately sixty-three kilograms. Armed with a concealed Nexus P-12 pistol in a shoulder holster,the voice informed her.
She blinked, surprise rolling through her.
My mother is armed?
To her shock, the voice answered.Negative. Human female shares no facial features or bone structure with you. There is a zero percent chance she contributed any DNA to your genetic makeup.
It felt like the floor had dropped out from under her. She stared at Amanda through the window, seeing her with new eyes. The woman she’d been told was her mother was a stranger—and an armed one at that. Damn it, she should have stayed in the office so she could hear what they were saying.
Suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, she could hear the conversation inside the office with perfect clarity.
“And she still doesn’t suspect anything?” Dr. Lewis asked.
Amanda shook her head. “It’s quiet, but so far it hasn’t challenged anything we’ve established from the files.”
Jesh didn’t respond, keeping her features perfectly neutral as she reached for one of the holo-magazines on the coffee table and began to flick through it.
It.Her “mother” hadn’t referred to her as “she” but “it”… like she was a thing.
“It did look at some of its scarring earlier and then wrote in a journal,” Amanda continued. “But it was all just gibberish.”
Jesh resisted the urge to touch her pocket, where she’d hidden the page from her journal. How did Amanda know about that?
“Gibberish?” the doctor asked. “What kind of gibberish?”
“It wrote the same letters and numbers over and over again, like it was in a daze. J10-10M3E.”
Jesh didn’t stop flicking through the magazine, even as her blood froze in her veins. Theywerewatching her, even in what she thought were private moments. She risked a glance up, idly, like she was bored and trying to work out how long her mother would be.
Dr. Lewis frowned, clearly unimpressed. “It could mean anything,” he said. “Perhaps some kind of activation sequence for the extra implants that we removed from her.”
Implants? Jesh’s mind raced. What kind of implants? And why would they have been removed?
Amanda spoke again, flicking a glance toward Jesh through the window. She gave a motherly smile, as if trying to reassure her. “Is this anything me and my team should be worried about? Is it going to freak out and try to kill us?”
Dr. Lewis shook his head. “That’s highly unlikely, but there are no guarantees with experimental technology like this. Keep me updated with any progress on the memory.”
Amanda nodded. “Yes, sir.”
A chill washed over Jesh. So everything she’d been told was a lie. She wasn’t Elena Hargrove, daughter of the tech mogul, Amanda Hargrove, and she wasn’t recovering from a racing accident. She was… what? An experiment? A weapon?
Her fingers curled into fists, her nails digging into her palms. Every instinct screamed at her to run, to fight… to do something. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to unclench her hands. She couldn’t run. Not yet. She needed more information, more time to understand what was happening.
The door to Dr. Lewis’s office opened and Amanda stepped out, her face a mask of motherly concern.
“Ready to go home, sweetheart?” she asked.
Jesh nodded, not trusting herself to speak as she stood and followed Amanda out of the doctor’s office toward the elevator. She was hyperaware of every movement, every glance from the staff they passed.
When elevator doors closed behind them, Amanda reached out and squeezed her hand. “You did great today, honey. I know these appointments can be tiring.”
She forced a smile, her skin crawling at the touch. “Thanks… Mom,” she managed, the word tasting like ash in her mouth.
As the elevator began its descent, her mind whirled. Her old life, or rather the week’s worth of a lie she’d been living, shifted around her. She focused on what she knew. She wasn’t Amanda’s daughter, which meant that she wasn’t Elena. Did Elena actually exist? Had she taken her place? Or was it all a lie?
She knew things that Amanda and the people around her didn’t. They didn’t know she’d overheard them in the office… although, to be fair, she didn’t know how she’d done that either.And she had an odd voice in her head telling her things. Bad things, like ways to hurt people.
And her “mother” called her an “it.” A thing.
