The pier smelled like gasoline and dead fish. Celine kept her hood up and her hands in her pockets. Three AM. No joggers. No tourists taking photos of the bridge lights.
Just her and whoever Diver was.
She checked her phone. The pin sat at the end of the dock, past the shuttered bait shop and the boat slips that probably cost more per month than most people made. The interface buzzed once. 49:17:33. She didn't look at it.
Footsteps behind her.
She turned.
A man. Tall. Dark jacket. Hands visible. He stopped six feet away under the single working lamp and she saw his face.
Her stomach dropped.
"Ethan."
He didn't smile. "Celine."
She couldn't move. Ethan Kove. Her ex. The man she'd ghosted four years ago when Vault Bio's Series C closed and she didn't have time for anyone asking her to slow down. The ethics consultant who kept sending her articles about informed consent and neuroplasticity until she blocked his number.
Diver.
"You," she said.
"Me."
"You're the one who's been—" She stopped. Her mouth tasted like metal. "You left the door open. You gave me the files."
"I did."
"Why?"
Ethan looked at her for a long time. The water slapped the pylons. Somewhere a gull screamed.
"Because I need you to remember," he said.
She took a step forward. "Remember what?"
"Blackwater."
The name hit her like cold water. She'd seen it in the files. Volunteer rosters. Her mother's face. Her own signature. But the pieces didn't fit yet. The interface had wiped something. She knew it had.
"I don't—"
"You don't remember." Ethan's voice was flat. "Of course you don't. You made sure of that."
"What are you talking about?"
"The woman in your apartment," he said. "The one with your face and your job and your login. Do you know who she is?"
Celine's pulse hammered. "No."
"Her name is Mira Soh."
Nothing. The name meant nothing.
"She was a grad student," Ethan said. "Cognitive neuroscience. Applied to Vault Bio's early trials program because she had debt and you were paying twenty thousand per session. She signed up for Blackwater."
Celine's breath caught.
"She was the only one who survived," Ethan said.
The pier tilted. Celine grabbed the railing. "Survived what?"
"The experiment you approved." His voice didn't rise. Didn't break. "Fifteen volunteers. Fourteen dead. Your mother was Volunteer One."
No.
No.
"You're lying," Celine said. But her hands were shaking. The files. The redacted folders. Her mother's face on the intake form. The signature that was definitely hers under a button labeled APPROVED.
"I was the ethics consultant," Ethan said. "I filed six reports. I told you the interface wasn't ready. I told you the neural load would cause hemorrhaging. You said we were behind schedule. You said your mother volunteered. You said if it worked we'd save millions of people and if it didn't we'd learn enough to make the next version safe."
She couldn't breathe.
"You ran it anyway," Ethan said. "Fourteen people died in the first seventy-two hours. Your mother lasted sixteen. Mira Soh lasted all of it. When she woke up she had retrograde amnesia and third-degree scarring on her optic nerve. She couldn't remember her own name."
Celine's knees buckled. She caught herself on the railing.
"You paid her off," Ethan said. "Gave her a settlement and an NDA. Made the files disappear. Six months later the FDA approved Vault Bio's commercial interface and you went on CNBC and said it was the safest neural device on the market."
She was going to throw up.
"Mira spent two years in cognitive rehab," Ethan said. "Physical therapy. Psych eval every week. She got her memory back piece by piece. And when she remembered what you'd done she decided to take everything you had."
Celine looked up. Ethan's face was stone.
"This was never about money," he said. "She doesn't want your accounts. She wants you to feel what she felt. Erased. Replaced. Locked out of your own life."
The interface buzzed. 48:52:11.
"And when the seventy-two hours are up," Ethan said, "she's going to release the Blackwater files to every journalist and regulatory body on the continent. She'll blow up the IPO. She'll bury Vault Bio. And you'll go to prison."
Celine's throat closed. "Then why are you helping me?"
Ethan's jaw tightened. "I'm not helping you. I'm helping the fourteen people who can't speak for themselves. If you go down without remembering what you did, you get to be a victim. I won't let that happen."
She wanted to scream. Wanted to run. Wanted to pull the interface out of her skull and throw it in the bay.
"I don't remember," she whispered.
"I know," Ethan said. "You used the interface to erase it. Scrubbed your own memory the day the settlement cleared. I watched you do it."
She stared at him.
"That's why you have seventy-two hours," he said. "The interface is trying to restore baseline. It's pulling the files back up from deep storage. If you don't stop it the memory comes back. If you do stop it you lose admin access forever and Mira keeps everything."
Celine's hands were numb.
"So what do you want from me?" she said.
"I want you to watch the files," Ethan said. "I want you to see what you did. And then I want you to decide if you're going to fight Mira or face her."
"I didn't—" She stopped. The signature. Her mother. Volunteer One.
She had.
She just didn't remember.
Ethan pulled out a tablet. He tapped the screen and turned it toward her. A video file. Black screen. White text.
BLACKWATER TRIAL - DAY ONE - VOLUNTEER ONE.
"There are fifteen of these," Ethan said. "I pulled them before Mira locked the server. If you want your life back you need to know what it cost."
Celine looked at the screen. Her mother's face appeared. Younger. Smiling. Excited. She was sitting in a medical chair. A tech was fitting the interface onto her head. The same model Celine had in her skull right now.
Her mother looked at someone off-camera.
Someone who sounded like Celine.
"Ready?" her own voice said.
Her mother nodded.
"Start it," Celine heard herself say.
The screen went white.