My stomach twists. “People?”
“Yes,” she says calmly. “Living hosts.”
“What’s in the box?” I whisper.
“Something designed to stay alive,” Dr. Keller says. “And based on preliminary scans, it’s degrading.”
Roy leans forward. “And it chose this officer as the delivery endpoint. Why?”
Dr. Keller’s gaze flicks between us. “Because it’s keyed to their DNA.”
The room tilts.
“No,” I say. “That’s not possible. I’ve never been part of—”
“You share genetic identifiers with your sister,” she cuts in. “That’s close enough for this kind of targeting.”
My pulse thunders in my skull. “So what happens if it opens?”
They move the package to a remote isolation site outside the city. I’m put under temporary confinement—not as punishment, they say, but as precaution. My phone is taken. No calls. No messages. No explanations to anyone else.
Time stretches into something thick and suffocating. I replay every memory of my sister in looping fragments. Her laugh. Her stubborn streak. The way she always pulls me into her messes and calls it adventure.
Hours later, the door opens. Roy steps in alone.
“They tried to neutralize it,” he says. “Something goes wrong.”
My body goes cold. “Wrong how?”
“It reacts,” he says. “Violently. The bio-lock destabilizes. We lose three technicians.”
The room shrinks to a narrow tunnel. My lungs don’t quite work. “Is it moving?”
The image crashes into me fully formed now—something built from her choices, something alive because of her mistakes, sent to me like a final confession wrapped in cardboard and tape.
“They move the site into full lockdown,” Roy continues. “But the organism is keyed to your genetic markers. It’s trying to find you.”
A strange calm settles over me then. Heavy. Inevitable. “Then it’s never going to stop.”
“No,” he says quietly. “It won’t.”
I look up at him. “Take me there.”
Roy stares. “That’s not an order you can give.”
“It’s the only one that makes sense.”
We arrive at the containment facility under a sky the color of wet steel. Armed units line the perimeter. Inside, the air hums with power and unease. Through a reinforced observation pane, I see the remains of the containment case—split open from the inside, organic matter pulsing faintly along fractured edges.
Dr. Keller stands rigid near the glass. “It’s stabilizing now,” she says. “Waiting.”
“For me,” I answer.
They suit me up in layered containment gear, every seal double-checked. My heart pounds so hard it shakes the edges of my vision. Roy stops me at the final threshold.
“You don’t owe her this,” he says.
“I do,” I reply. “Because she sent it. And because I still love her.”
Inside the chamber, the thing stirs instantly. It’s larger than I expected. Taller. A distorted echo of human shape without real features, its surface shifting like something trying to remember what it used to be.
It reacts to me. Reaches. Not violently. Almost… desperately.
A voice crackles through my comm. “It’s syncing,” Dr. Keller says. “Neural pattern resonance confirmed.”
The thing changes again. Its surface ripples, rearranges. A face begins to form.
My sister’s face.
Not perfect. Not stable. But unmistakably hers. Her eyes open.
“I’m sorry,” she says through borrowed vocal cords. “This was the only way I could get it out.”
Tears blur my vision inside the helmet. “Out of what?”
“Out of me.”
The truth unravels in raw fragments. They implant it inside her as a carrier, a living transport system that grows around stolen biological material. She realizes too late what she’s become. She runs. She hides. She tries to remove it, but it bonds too deeply. The only way to make it separate is to send it to the closest genetic match.
“To you,” she whispers.
“And you?” I ask.
Her face falters, glitching like a broken feed. “There’s not much left.”
The organism begins to destabilize, reacting violently to her emotional surge. Alarms spike.
“It’s collapsing!” someone shouts over the comm.
My sister looks at me. Clear now. Peaceful. “You have to let it finish separating,” she says. “It can’t survive without a host. And you won’t be compatible.”
I understand. Horribly, clearly. The organism will complete the bond—or die trying. With me, it will fail.
“I’m here,” I whisper.
The thing surges forward, engulfing my suit in a cold, suffocating pressure. Pain flares through every nerve. Systems go into overload. I feel it search me—every cell, every pattern. And then it rejects me.
Violently. Continue reading…
