Page 58

CHAPTER

FORTY-TWO

SARAH

My skull rattles, imploding from the weight of a lifetime of memories crashing into me like a tsunami. I remember everything. Childhood. High school. Partying. Erin and I swapping places that night, Dad finding me, and then my last recollection before I lost myself bowls me over…

I’m not dead. Not yet, anyway. Although, I may as well be in hell.

Sunnycrest Asylum is as close as it gets.

I’m not in the same room Dad usually locks me in. I’m somewhere new. It’s an operating room with sterile, white walls and an antiseptic smell. I’m strapped to a table, my ankles and wrists locked in position.

Dad peers down at me. At his side, a doctor with horn-rimmed glasses frowns.

“Are you sure about this, Magnus?” the strange doctor asks.

“Am I paying you to question me, Warner?” Dad spits. “We’re running out of time. Memories have a short lifespan.”

I rattle my restraints.

“Should we sedate her again?” Doctor Warner asks, playing with the lanyard around his neck nervously. “She’s coming around.”

“No,” Dad snaps. “We need her awake to improve the transfer outcomes.”

“But—” Doctor Warner objects,

“I didn’t bring you here to question me,” Dad snarls. “You’re here to work.”

I catch Doctor Warner’s gaze. He looks away, refusing to meet my pleading stare as he inspects the wires feeding into my body. There are so many of them, red, yellow, green…

I attempt to look around, but a metal brace locks my neck in position. I open my mouth to yell, but I can’t. My entire face is paralyzed, except for my eyes that flit side to side.

“Switch one,” Doctor Warner says. “On.”

An electric shock ripples through my head, accompanied by a grating, high-pitched noise that vibrates my bones and causes my limbs to seize.

What the fuck? It stops for a second, giving me a brief reprieve to inspect my surroundings again.

I follow the wires. They lead to a machine that’s being monitored by Doctor Warner.

Strange symbols flash on its small black screen.

He taps away on a keyboard, a frown on his face, clearly unhappy at whatever he’s seeing.

More wires come out of the machine on the other side. They stretch across the room like long shiny tentacles. I follow them. What the…

It takes a second to realize that I’m not having an out-of-body experience when I see where they lead to.

I choke down vomit.

Erin.

She’s lying on an identical operating table.

However, unlike me, she’s completely motionless.

Her lips and fingers are a ghostly bluish shade.

Her chest is still, and her head is twisted at an impossible angle, tilted in my direction.

Her gaze is dead and glassy, fixed in a permanent state of unblinking terror.

If seeing my sister’s dead body isn’t horrifying enough, it gets worse. Someone has drilled holes into her temples and poked wires into the sides of her head. Wires that connect the two of us through the alien machine.

What the fuck have they done to her?

“Switch two!” Dad cries before I have properly processed what I’m seeing. “On!”

A buzz fills the room, like an angry swarm of bees battling their way through a cloud of static. The binds around my ankles and wrists heat up and make my skin prickle uncomfortably. Suddenly, a second surge of electricity whips through me, causing my legs to twitch and spasm uncontrollably.

“Seizures shouldn’t happen,” Doctor Warner says. “I think we should stop. It’s not working.”

“Do I need to remind you that it was your paper that provided the theoretical basis for this procedure?” Dad snarls. “You will bring her back to me.”

“The thesis was purely theoretical. Memory implantation is unreliable at best. This technology is still in its infancy. We don’t know the long-term effects. It’s not safe,” he says. “You could kill her.”

“My daughter’s already dead,” Dad says. “What have I got to lose?”

Me! I want to scream. I’m your daughter, too.

“We could try conditioning. It’s a gentler approach,” Doctor Warner says.

“We have Erin’s memories stored in the machine.

If we use them in tandem with your new influencing formulation, we could hope to achieve similar results.

The drugs worked well on your first two subjects.

We can force Sarah to accept a new version of herself, as long as she keeps taking the medication.

Trying to erase a lifetime’s worth of memories and replace them is far more complex.

We’re stretching the realms of what’s possible. We’re years off being fully ready.”

“We don’t have years. We have one night!” Dad blasts. “There’s no going back now. This will work. It has to.”

Doctor Warner opens his mouth to argue, then fear crosses his face, and he nods in reluctant resignation. He might disagree, but my father scares him too much to stand his ground. Fucking coward!

“If we increase the voltage, we will have a better chance, but the results could be unpredictable,” Doctor Warner says.

“We can’t guarantee they’ll be permanent.

From my research, the procedure will bury her real memories deep inside her subconscious.

However, for all we know, one small event could trigger their return ? —”

“Yes, yes,” Dad says dismissively in his pompous ‘I know best’ voice. “And she’ll need to continue taking the medication. We know that works.”

“Are you certain you want to proceed, Doctor Acacia?” Doctor Warner asks. “Do you really want to risk losing them both?”

Dad strokes my cheek with a tenderness he’s never shown me before. Thank fuck. He’s finally coming to his senses.

“It’s okay, Erin,” he coos, making me recoil. “I’ll bring you back.” His eyes darken, and his lips twist into a maniacal smile as he turns to Doctor Warner. “Do it.”

The machine powers on.

A blinding light fills my vision, and I fade away…

Back in the present, I cry out and squeeze my eyes shut. My hands fly to my temples. It’s too much…

“Sarah?” Aiden squeezes my shoulders. “Do you remember?”

“Y-yes,” I stammer. “I mean, I think so. But I’m not the same, Aiden. I’m not me anymore, and I’m not Erin either. Who am I?”

The pain comes again. I crumple, falling into Aiden’s embrace and succumbing to the memories…

“Erin?”

I wake in my bed, surrounded by cuddly plushies.

“Dad?” I rub my eyes as he draws back the curtains. “What time is it? I thought you were away for the weekend at a conference.”

He tilts his head, looking at me with a strange expression. Do I have something stuck to my face? I sniff my hair. It smells weird, ammonia-like almost. Nothing a shower won’t fix, though.

“I got back early,” he says. “Have you heard from your sister?”

I check my phone. No messages. That’s not unusual, though. Sarah never tells me where she’s going. For once, I can’t remember her sneaking out, either.

“No,” I reply. “Why?”

“Sarah didn’t come home last night,” he says. “Did you see her?”

I shake my head. “No.”

His stare bores into me. “Where were you last night?”

“Here,” I say. “I watched a movie, then studied, like every other night.”

“Very good.” He smiles. “I’m sure Sarah will turn up soon enough.”

I nod in dazed agreement. It wouldn’t be the first time she stopped at a friend’s house without telling us. Although, something feels different this time. Call it twin instinct, but I can’t shake a lingering dread settling in my stomach.

A vague recollection comes to me from out of nowhere.

A phone call.

Did I speak to Sarah last night?

I should call Dad back into the room and tell him, but my gut tells me to stay quiet.

I check my call log and frown. There’s no trace of any call taking place. What the hell? Maybe I’m imagining it.

A shiver runs down my spine as I vividly recall her saying, “You don’t know what he’s capable of…”

“He used me,” I whimper as Aiden cradles me. “He…”

“We’ve been trying to help you remember,” Aiden says. “You know the truth.”

My bottom lip trembles. “Erin’s dead.”

“I know,” Aiden says. His heart thuds against my cheek, confirming that he’s not a figment of my imagination. “But now you’ve come back to us.”

“It was my fault,” I say. “I made her switch places. I saw her body…”

Although Erin and I were never best friends, she was still my sister. My twin. I always hoped we’d get closer again if she plucked up the courage to go against Dad. Now, he robbed us of the chance.

“He thought he was killing you,” Aiden says. “Never forget that.”

I pull away from him violently and wipe my eyes. The thudding in my head dulls, making way for a torrent of fury. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“We didn’t know what consequences breaking the delusion would have, and neither did Doctor Warner,” he says. “We wanted you to reconnect with your true self. It was the best way to help you remember.”

“Maybe not knowing would have been better,” I say bitterly. “At least then I had a chance of living a normal life as Erin.” I shake my head. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore.”

My thoughts are a scrambled jumble, whirring and blurring together, making it hard to wade through.

Although my old memories are coming back, I see snatches of Erin’s memories, and her thoughts mix with my own.

Whatever Dad did changed me forever. He tore down the very foundations of who I am, and Erin? She’s dead, but I can still hear her…

“We’ll help you. We’ll?—”

“How long have you known?” I snap.

Time didn’t stop when ‘Sarah’ died. Aiden, Lex, and Eli creeped into Erin’s—my—life and terrorized us.

“Lex saw your tattoo first. He thought he was imagining things until I saw it for myself the night we showed you the videos in the asylum. You had no idea who you were, so we had to put the pieces together,” he explains.

“It didn’t take much persuasion for Doctor Warner to fill in the gaps.

Before then, we all thought you were dead.

Lex saw your body in the morgue. If we knew, we’d?—”