An excerpt:

She was lying on a narrow cot, a thin blanket over her, bare feet on the cold floor as she sat up. The fluorescent tube above her flickered once, then settled into its steady, merciless hum. In the corner was a camera, black and seemingly blind, but it never was.

The door had no handle on the inside, only a smooth gray surface with a tiny slot at eye level. When she stood, something crunched beneath her heel. She lifted her foot. A speck of plaster. The floor had a hairline crack there, fine as a vein.

Outside, someone released a lock. The sound was too clean, too electronic to be old-fashioned.

The door opened without a squeak.

Reyes stepped in as if entering a conference room, not a cell. Dark suit, no tie, shirt collar open. No visible logo, nothing anyone could pin on him. In his hand was a tablet he did not look at right away.

Emily remained standing. She had wrapped her arms around herself, less for protection than because she realized she was shaking.

“You look shittier than you do in the media clips,” Reyes said. His voice was calm, not friendly, but not hostile either. More clinically interested.

Emily blinked. “So do you,” she said. “Back then, at least you still had the courtesy to hide behind glass walls.”

Something twitched around his mouth, almost a smile. “We were both younger then.”

He closed the door behind him. No key, no sound. The wall swallowed everything.

“Sit down, if you like,” he said, indicating the cot with a small, precise flick of his finger.

“I’m fine standing.” She felt her voice catch at the beginning and grow steadier by the end.

Reyes looked at her for a moment, then placed the tablet on the only chair in the room, turned it around, and sat down himself. She had never seen him like this before: lower than her, at eye level with her knees. A power play. Or maybe not. He liked doing things like that.

“Water?” he asked.

“What comes after that? A sugar cube if I sit up and beg?” Emily did not look away as his gaze drifted to the scar on her throat.

“You still do enjoy being dramatic,” Reyes said. “The water isn’t poisoned. If we wanted you dead, you would be dead.”

He let a brief pause fall. She heard the hum of the fluorescent tube like an insect.

“We?” she asked.

“You know who I mean.” He raised one hand, as if tracing the outline of an invisible building. “You’ve studied our governance model quite extensively.”

Emily folded her arms tighter. “Governance model,” she repeated. “I call it: the people who sign off when someone wakes up in a windowless basement.”

Reyes looked around, as if noticing the architecture for the first time. “Windows are overrated,” he said. “At this stage, clarity matters more than a view.”

She gave a dry laugh. It hurt in her chest. “Is that what you call this? A stage?”

“Interrogation sounds so unpleasant,” he said. “And ‘conversation’ would be too euphemistic for you. So let’s call it what it is: an evaluation session.”

“You’re evaluating whether you can use me as a test setup again.” Emily took a step closer, until she was almost touching the chair. She looked straight at him. “CANDIDATE_001.”

The expression passed over his face like a shadow. “I see some files weren’t burned after all.”

“You showed them to me yourself,” she said. “Maybe not on paper. But your system was generous with hints.”

Reyes drew a slow breath in and let it out. “You were never merely a test setup, Emily. You were an opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what? To see how many times you can rewrite the same life before it breaks?”

“To see,” he said calmly, “whether a controlled deviation increases or threatens overall stability.”

She felt something tighten inside her, like a string being turned too far.

“And?” she said. “Do you have enough data? Is my blood enough for your curve now?”