Chapter 14 - The Whispering Walls
The facility inside the mountain was a labyrinth of white corridors and hum of machinery.
I was moved from the transport to a sterile room that looked more like a laboratory than a prison cell.
My arms were still cuffed,
but the IV had been replaced by a more permanent shunt in my neck.
The room was filled with monitors,
each one displaying a different biometric feed of my daughters.
Their heart rates were synchronized.
Their brainwaves were identical.
They were two bodies sharing a single,
expanding consciousness.
“Do you hear them,
Elara?”
A voice whispered from the air vents.
It wasn't Julian.
It was a woman’s voice—soft,
frail,
and familiar.
I looked around the room,
my heart hammering.
“Who’s there?”
“Behind the mirror,”
the voice said.
I walked over to the large,
one-way glass that dominated the far wall.
I pressed my face against it,
straining to see into the darkness on the other side.
A light flickered on.
There,
sitting in a wheelchair,
was a woman who looked like a decayed version of me.
Her hair was white,
her skin translucent,
and her eyes were filmed over with cataracts.
But she was wearing the silver chain I had grown up seeing in my mother’s old photos.
“Mother?”
I breathed,
my knees nearly giving out.
“They said you were eliminated.
They said you were buried under the cottage.”
“The body in the ground was a decoy,”
she said,
her voice coming through a speaker in the wall.
“Julian couldn't let the second generation go to waste.
I’ve been here for thirty years,
Elara.
Providing the marrow.
Providing the fuel.”
I felt a surge of horror so profound I wanted to scream until my lungs burst.
Thirty years in a cage.
Thirty years of being a human battery.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
I cried out.
“Why didn't you warn me?”
“I tried,”
she said,
a single tear tracking through the wrinkles on her cheek.
“The dreams you had…
the whispers in the girls’ ears…
that was me.
I used the frequency of the facility to reach out.
But Julian’s walls are thick.”
She leaned forward,
her hands trembling on the armrests of the wheelchair.
“Listen to me,
Elara.
The transfusion isn't just about cells.
It’s about the memory of the blood.
Julian wants to use the girls to broadcast a command to every person who carries the Russo marker.
He wants to activate a global army of sleepers.”
“How do I stop him?”
I asked,
desperate.
“You have to overload the system,”
she said.
“The frequency requires a perfect balance between the anchor and the bridge.
If you introduce an impurity into the transfusion…
if you change the frequency of your own heart…
the system will collapse.”
“How do I change my heart?”
“Hate him,”
she said,
her voice suddenly gaining a terrifying strength.
“Don't let the love for your children be the only thing in your blood.
Fill it with the rage of thirty years of stolen lives.
Fill it with the fire of the Russo sisters.”
Outside the room,
I heard the heavy thud of the door being unlocked.
“He’s coming,”
my mother whispered.
“Be the fire,
Elara.
Be the storm.”
The light on the other side of the mirror went out,
leaving me alone as Julian Thorne entered the room.
He was carrying a large,
silver needle,
his eyes fixed on the shunt in my neck.
“It’s time,
Elara,”
he said.
“The girls are ready to speak.
Will you give them the voice?”
I looked at him,
and for the first time,
I didn't feel fear.
I felt the weight of my mother’s thirty years of silence.
I felt the cold mud of the cottage.
I felt the betrayal of every Russo who had ever been sold for power.
“I’ll give them a voice,
Julian,”
I said,
May you like
my voice as cold as the Arctic wind outside.
“But it won’t be the one you’re expecting.”
