The pressure snaps outward. I’m thrown backward. The chamber erupts in white light and screaming alarms.
When my vision clears, the organism is unraveling in rapid decomposition, collapsing inward on itself like a dying star. My sister’s face flickers one last time.
Then she’s gone.
I wake in a medical ward in silence so deep it feels unreal. Roy sits beside the bed. His eyes are red.
“It’s over,” he says. “Completely neutralized. No residual threat.”
My voice cracks. “And my sister?”
He hesitates. Then softly, “She died the moment it left her.”
Grief strikes like a physical blow—but beneath it, a strange, steady relief. She isn’t trapped anymore. And whatever she became didn’t survive to become someone else’s nightmare.
Weeks pass in quiet reconstruction. Reports. Debriefings. Psychological evaluations. The story never reaches the public in full. It never will.
On my desk at Fort Peterson, months later, there’s only one reminder left. A small, neatly folded piece of tape with a diagonal pattern. Recovered from the original box before destruction.
Not as evidence.
As a warning.
And as a reminder that some gifts arrive too late to be saved—but not too late to mean something.
For the first time in years, when my birthday comes again, I don’t dread it.
I breathe.
I remember.
And I live.
