Chapter 22 · Reset Protocol - Chapter 22: Vera Is the Key

"Mark, get back."

Vera's voice came out wrong. Too low. Too steady. Like someone else was using her throat.

Mark froze three steps from the observation room's center console. The vault door behind him had sealed the second they crossed in. Lucas was still on the floor near the entrance, breathing hard, one hand pressed to the burn stripe across his ribs.

Vera stood in the middle of the room, under the cone of white light pouring down from the ceiling grid. Her right arm hung at her side. The skin from elbow to wrist was splitting open in thin black lines, geometric, precise. Not blood. Not veins. Something else pushing through.

"What's it doing to you?" Mark said.

"Indexing." She looked at her arm like it belonged to someone else. "It wants my neural map. Every decision I made in the last seventy-two hours. Every choice that kept me alive."

"Then we shut it down now."

"You can't." She turned her head. Her pupils were too wide. "The vault's already inside. If you try to cut the line, it'll archive me and move to the next sample. Forty thousand people, Mark.