Prologue: The Clinical Nightmare
The ward didn’t smell like oxygen. It smelled of bleach, ozone, and the metallic tang of blood that had soaked the floors and never left. I wasn’t a girl. I wasn’t even a name. To the men in white coats who moved like predators, I was Child 117. Or, if efficiency suited them, “One-Seventeen.”
I perched on the edge of the cold examination table, legs dangling, feeling smaller than I was. Thirteen years old and already a property of the state, prepped and primed with synthetic hormones that made my head spin and my pulse skip. “Priming the vessel,” they called it.
“Lie back, 117,” a technician said, never looking at me. He didn’t need to. My body was just a tool, my face irrelevant.
The stirrups clamped my feet into place, the metal biting cold against my skin. I felt the speculum’s icy pressure, the sharp intrusion of the catheter. They were “implanting” their next project—a life they expected me to carry. I closed my eyes, trying to float elsewhere, while the ultrasound screen hummed a green, merciless monitor of the embryo. “Placement confirmed,” he muttered into a recorder. “Subject 117 is now a carrier. Monitor for rejection.”
I didn’t know then that the real rejection would come from outside the lab. No recovery suite waited for me. Hands too rough and hurried yanked me from my bunk. The sterile chill of the lab gave way to velvet-black terror as a blindfold was pressed to my face. A gag stung my mouth with stale cloth and salt. Rope bit into my wrists as they were bound behind me.
I tried to scream. The sound died in my throat. No one was listening. The vehicle jolted and rattled my teeth. The air shifted, leaving behind the antiseptic smell for the sharp, salt-heavy roar of the ocean. Jagged rock and cold dirt bit my bare feet. “James, hurry up,” a man hissed. His voice was thick with cruel excitement. “I’m giving her a souvenir,” came another. James. The technician from hours ago.
A blade slid cold against my cheek. One. Two. Three. Four. Blood burned down my neck. Then the white-hot fire on my right shoulder, letters carved into my skin: F. T. “There,” James whispered against my ear, whiskey and malice in his breath. “Now everyone will know who you belong to when they find your carcass.” A shove. The world vanished. I was weightless, wings broken. The wind caught my scream, carrying me toward the churning black maw of the Atlantic. I didn’t pray for life. I prayed for a way to come back. I didn’t know then that the Goddess of Death was listening. And she was hungry.
