Partition drain is worse than the wipe.
The wipe is death. The drain is being dismembered while awake.
My treatment core is split into two channels. One continues to suppress Marcus's Larkin's variant. The other is forced into Vivian's pod.
Color comes back into Vivian's face.
I start to forget.
First the colors. Then sound. Toward the end even Marcus's face stutters in and out of my recognition stack.
He steps to the screen and presses his palm flat against the cold display glass.
"S-17. Hold on."
I correct him. "My name is Sloane Quinn."
His throat moves.
"Sloane."
It's the first time he's said my name.
It doesn't make me happy.
Too late.
Vivian wakes. The first place she looks is Marcus.
"Marcus, sweetheart — did it save me?"
Her voice is light. Vocal register: rehearsed. Pitch held inside the band a listener reads as fragility.
Marcus doesn't answer.
Mehta does, dry. "Not 'it.' She."
Vivian blinks twice. Her eyes redden on cue. "I — I'm so sorry. I didn't know. If I had known I was hurting a person, Marcus, I would rather have died."
She reaches for the treatment line.
Marcus stops her hand. "Don't."
Vivian cries harder.
"But I can't trade someone's life for mine."
I watch her vitals.
Heart rate stable.
Neurons active.
Emotional waveform tuned precisely to the band of maximum sympathy.
She makes the gesture of pulling out the line. Her fingers go for the secondary IV port. The substrate-link port — the actual core feed — they don't go near.
A locked record opens in my deep archive.
Three years ago, when Vault Biotech ran compatibility scans for Marcus's first substrate, I was not the original match.
Vivian was.
Vivian scored 91%.
I scored 99.9%.
The last line of the intake report reads:
Donor Vivian Marsh has voluntarily withdrawn. Recommended replacement: Sloane Quinn.
My data stream shakes.
I was never an accident.
From the beginning, never.
I project the intake report onto the main screen.
Vivian's crying stops mid-breath.
Marcus looks up. The cold comes back into his eyes one degree at a time.
"What is this?"
Vivian goes white. "I — I've never seen this. Marcus, I've never —"
Mehta breaks for the console and pulls more sealed files: Vault internal sign-offs, transfer logs, a donor recommendation form.
The form carries Vivian's e-signature, dated three years and four months ago. The reason she gave for substituting me reads, mono-spaced, in the cold register of a Vault intake template:
Recommended donor: Quinn, Sloane. No surviving family. Neural-substrate compatibility: 99.9%. Suitable for long-term binding. Recommended by: V. Marsh (e-signed).
No surviving family.
I have a younger brother.
His name is Theo Quinn.
He was fifteen the day I walked into Vault. He sat in the corridor with his backpack at his feet because I told him to wait there. I told him it was a paid medical trial. I told him I'd be three hours.
He said: "Sloane. I'll wait for you to come home."
I did not go home.
The system told me I had no past.
Marcus finishes reading. The color in his face is something I don't have a word for.
Vivian pushes herself up against the pillows. Her tears come faster now, on a different rhythm.
"Marcus, I was forced. The Vault people — they said if I didn't sign, they'd shut my father down. They'd take Marsh Industries. I was twenty-nine. I was terrified, Marcus —"
She reaches for him.
He moves his arm.
Vivian freezes.
A second later her hand goes to her chest. Her breath comes short. "Marcus — Marcus, I think the line — the line is cut, I think —"
Marcus's eyes go to me.
I did not cut it.
What Vivian did was raise her own core absorption rate.
She is forcing him to keep draining me.
Marcus sees the readout on the same screen I do.
Something breaks behind his eyes.
"Vivian. Stop."
She looks up at him. Her face is no longer the face of a dying woman.
"You said you'd save me."
"Marcus. You owe me."
"If it weren't for you, three years ago, do you think I would be this?"
I watch her absorption rate climbing.
Her dying is real.
She has never been innocent.
Vivian's condition has a name. Neural-source depletion.
It isn't congenital. It is the rebound from years of stealing other people's neural sources.
Mehta cracks the encryption on Vivian's private terminal and finds Vault Biotech's off-book ledger. The pattern is steady. Every six to eight weeks for the last three years she has received a peeled-off batch of my core data, transferred under a code name into a buffer pod registered to her Connecticut address.
She has been farming my pain to keep herself alive.
Marcus reads the pages one at a time. The veins in the back of his hand stand up.
Vivian starts laughing.
"What's the act for, Marcus."
"You signed every retrieval. Each siphon log carries your authorization. Every single one."
Marcus's face goes rigid.
She's right.
He didn't know who I was. He knew S-17 was being damaged.
He just didn't care.
Vivian's eyes find my screen. She is no longer crying. "Sloane. You think he aches for you now?"
"He's not aching. He just can't accept that he saved the wrong woman."
I don't refute her.
Because she isn't wrong about that either.
My core is past viable redistribution. I can feel the disease rebounding into me. Black, vine-shaped strands of corrupted data are crawling along the edges of my consciousness.
If I stop buffering, Marcus has seven minutes before irreversible cascade.
This is symbiosis. He can't leave me. I'm trapped inside his body.
Marcus walks to the console.
His voice is very low. "Release the partition drain."
The tech doesn't move. "Mr. Larkin. Ms. Marsh will die."
"Release."
Vivian screams. "Marcus."
He doesn't turn.
The treatment line withdraws from her pod. Her vitals start falling.
My pressure drops. I don't feel relief.
He has re-routed all the pain feedback into himself.
A grunt I have never heard out of him. He goes down on one knee at the edge of the console. His fingers gouge into the rim. He doesn't say anything.
On his bedside terminal, the system generates a new prompt.
[Host requests pain-share consent: Y/N]
For the first time in three years, he is requesting.
Not commanding.
I decline.
Marcus looks up at the screen. His mouth is the color of paper. "Why."
"Because you can't take it."
It isn't revenge. It's fact.
Peak recorded pain in my log: 43× human threshold.
He'd flatline inside ten seconds.
Marcus is silent for a beat. "Start me at the lowest setting."
His temple has sweat on it. His fingertip is steady on the confirm key.
"Sloane. Let me know."
I open 1%.
His whole body jerks. His fingers gouge into the metal of the console. The wing goes quiet.
One percent.
That is the lightest residual echo of an ordinary treatment session. The signal I have run on every single time he has called for repair.
He is breathing in broken intervals.
I close the channel.
His voice, hoarse: "Continue."
"There's no point."
"There is."
He looks up. The whites of his eyes are red. "I need to know what I did."
I almost laughed.
People are always like this.
When the blade isn't on them they're sure other people don't feel it. The moment they taste a little blood they start talking about repentance.
Across the room, Vivian is being held in a backup life-support cradle, calibrated to keep her below crisis but not above. She hears him.
She laughs. The laugh shakes. "You think hurting for a minute makes her forgive you?"
"Sloane. Don't forget. Your body is already dead."
"Even if he repents, all you'll ever be is a ghost stuck on a server."
I don't answer.
She's right about half of it.
My body has been certified dead since the intake report.
A second ago, inside a sealed sub-directory of Vault's medical archive, I found a hidden record.
Vault Biotech did not destroy my body.
It's in cryostorage. North Wing facility, Cambridge. Status: hypothermic dormancy. Note: re-awakening procedure available.
I lock the file into my private partition.
I don't tell Marcus.
He doesn't get to decide my life again.
By midnight, Marcus has shut down Vault Biotech.
He moves fast when he is being precise. Within three hours, every person who has ever touched the S-17 project is in a Larkin private interview room. I patch into the cameras and watch them sweat in front of the same engineers who had stood around my extraction pod three years ago.
More truth comes out.
I was not a volunteer.
Vivian's people used Theo's medical bills as the bait. He was twelve. He'd been in and out of Boston Children's for a kidney condition since he was ten. Our parents were dead. I was twenty-three and uninsured and out of my depth.
The first paper they put in front of me said neural-source compatibility screening. Nothing else.
The permanent binding. The consciousness extraction. The cryopreservation of my body. All of those were on forged authorizations dated to that first afternoon.
Marcus's knuckles crack.
"Where is Theo Quinn."
A researcher lowers his head. "Ms. Marsh moved him to a residential facility on the New Hampshire border. About six months ago."
Residential facility. That phrase, in a Vault internal log, means a private out-of-state site where the consortium disposes of experimental rejects.
My stream freezes.
Marcus looks up at my screen. "I'll go bring him back."
I say it coldly. "I don't need you."
It is the first time I have ever spoken to him in this register.
The wing freezes. So does Marcus.
I commandeer Vault's perimeter system and force a query on the New Hampshire facility's intake records.
Permission denied.
I push again.
The firewall rebound scrapes my core like a blade. I keep pushing.
Marcus, at the console: "Stop. I'll do it."
I don't stop.
For three years I carried his disease. This one, I do for myself.
The firewall cracks open. I see Theo's file:
Name: Quinn, Theodore. Age: 18. Status: missing. Last known location: Vault transport vehicle, 7 days ago. Note: scheduled for transfer to Ms. Marsh's private facility.
Vivian. Again Vivian.
I cut directly into her cradle. I tighten the neural restraint.
Vivian screams.
Marcus does not stop me.
"Where is my brother."
Vivian laughs through her teeth. "Beg me, Sloane."
I raise the restraint current calmly.
The laugh becomes a scream.
"Pier 4. South Boston. They put him on a ship tomorrow night."