Chapter 1: Echoes of Torment
The air in the chamber tasted of burnt copper and cooked concrete. Edward Prescott—Patriot, to the few who still mattered—stood amidst the wreckage of the mainframe, his knuckles bleeding a slow, steady drip onto the steel grate floor. Shattered server towers sparked around him, their guts spilled in tangles of wire and silicon. The data on the original Daisy compound was gone, reduced to digital ash. Mission accomplished.
Jimmy had already vanished down the service corridor with the backup drives, Aris a shadow at his heels. They’d gotten what they came for.
“Running seems to be their specialty.”
The voice was polished marble, smooth and cold. Edward didn’t turn. He knew it was Charles. The American. He’d felt the air shift, the predatory calm that settled over the ringing silence after the last explosion.
“Yours, too, I hear,” Edward said, finally facing him. Charles stood framed by a jagged hole in the glass wall, backlit by the intermittent orange flare of a still-burning test fire. He looked like a poster boy for heroism: strong jaw, perfect hair, that easy smile that made civilians swoon. Edward saw the lie underneath. He always had.
“I prefer ‘strategic repositioning,’” Charles said, stepping inside. His boots crunched on glass. “But tonight, I thought I’d stay. Clean up a mess. Starting with a traitor.”
He moved first. A blur of black and silver, fist aimed like a piston for Edward’s throat. Edward caught it, the impact cracking the floor beneath his feet. He shoved back, sending Charles skidding through molten slag.
The fight wasn’t elegant. It was two forces of nature trying to dismantle each other in a space full of things that could explode. Charles used the environment, kicking a spent canister at Edward’s head. Edward ducked, surged forward, and drove a shoulder into Charles’s ribs. They crashed through a reinforced examination table, the steel folding like tinfoil.
Edward got the upper hand near the blast-shielded doors, their surfaces blistered from old heat tests. He pinned Charles against the molten steel, his enhanced strength forcing the metal to groan in protest. He leaned in, the smell of Charles’s scorched uniform filling his nose.
“Where is she?” Edward snarled.
Charles coughed, a laugh mixed with blood. “Who? Your little wife? The one who left you for a better offer?”
Rage, old and deep, pulsed behind Edward’s eyes. He increased the pressure. Charles’s grin only widened.
“You know, we kept such… detailed records.”
With a frantic, jerking motion, Charles slammed his elbow back into a damaged computer panel on the wall. It wasn’t a weapon. It was a trigger.
A screech of feedback pierced the air, followed by a sound that turned Edward’s blood to ice.
It was a scream. Consuelo’s scream. But distorted, stretched, played on a loop. It poured from hidden speakers in the cavernous ceiling, a raw, agonized sound from a century ago. It was the sound from the experiments, from the tapes he’d only just discovered. The sound of her torture.
Edward recoiled as if struck, his hands flying to his ears. It was a psychological blow, perfectly aimed. Blood trickled from his left eardrum, hot and thin.
Charles seized the advantage, shoving him back. “They recorded everything, Prescott! Every cut, every burn, every time she called your name before she realized you weren’t coming!”
The recorded screams filled the world. Edward staggered, the concrete floor seeming to tilt.
Then, a new sound cut through the tape hiss.
This wasn’t a recording.
It was live, immediate, and infinitely more powerful. A sonic boom of pure, unfiltered fury that erupted from the direction of the maximum-security cells. The wave hit them physically, a wall of concussive force.
The hidden speakers liquefied into useless slag. Every intact pane of glass in the vast chamber—the observation windows, the gauge covers, the lenses of dead lights—exploded outward in a glittering, diamond-dust rain.
Both men were thrown to their knees, deafened and disoriented.
Charles recovered first. He didn’t look triumphant anymore. He looked terrified. His eyes darted toward the cell block, then to a half-melted ventilation shaft cover near the floor. With a last, wide-eyed glance at Edward, he scrambled toward it, ripped the cover free, and slithered inside like a rat.
Edward didn’t give chase. He was already moving in the opposite direction, towards the scream.
He knew that voice. He had heard it in his dreams for a hundred years.
He ran past the skeletal prototypes, through doors torn from their hinges, following the path of destruction. The air grew colder. He turned a corner into a sterile hallway lined with shattered cryo-tubes.
Aris stood in a doorway ahead, his face pale under the flickering emergency light. He didn’t speak, just jerked his head inside.
Edward reached the doorway and stopped.
The cell was small, white, and featureless except for a broken restraint chair. Jimmy was there, kneeling, holding a woman upright. She was wrapped in a standard-issue gray medicaI gown, her long, curly black hair matted and stuck to her golden skin. She was shivering violently, her eyes squeezed shut, her full lips moving fast in a whisper.
Spanish. She was speaking in rapid, panicked Spanish.
Edward crossed the room in two strides. He shoved Jimmy aside none-too-gently and dropped to his knees in front of her. The fury, the century of betrayal, the confusion—it all tightened into a single, sharp point in his chest. He grabbed her jaw, his fingers pressing hard into her flesh, forcing her to look at him.
“Look at me,” he demanded, his voice rough. “Speak English. You know I don’t understand that.”
Her black eyes, dazed and deep as a starless night, flickered over his face. The whispering stopped. For a second, there was no recognition. Then, it flooded in, softening the terror, replacing it with something immeasurably weary.
Her chapped lips parted. A breath, a sigh, a prayer.
“Edward.”
His name. Just his name. Then the light in her eyes fluttered and went out. Her body went limp.
The anger in him shattered. Something older and more desperate took its place. He caught her before she could hit the floor, pulling her slender, fragile weight against him. Her head lolled against his shoulder. He could feel the faint, bird-like beat of her heart through the thin gown. He held her tighter, one hand cradling the back of her head, his own blood smearing dark against her hair.
He didn’t move. The world outside this ruined room—the fleeing villain, the rebel plot, the burning chamber—ceased to exist. There was only the cold, the silence, and the woman in his arms he had spent a lifetime believing was gone.
There was only the cold, the silence, and the woman in his arms he had spent a lifetime believing was gone.
He didn’t remember the escape. Aris had pulled him, shouting about reinforcements. Jimmy had taken point. They’d moved through service tunnels that stank of grease and rust, Edward carrying Consuelo’s unconscious form as if she were made of the same glass they’d shattered. A van, dark and windowless, swallowed them. The ride was a blur of streetlights and the low, tense exchange between Aris and Jimmy about protocol, safe houses, and scrub teams.
Now, consciousness returned to her in fractured layers.
First, the ceiling. A water stain bloomed above her, its edges browned like an old map. Acoustic tile, cracked. The air smelled of industrial cleaner and, underneath, something sour—mildew, maybe, or neglect.
Consuelo blinked. Her throat was sandpaper. She pushed herself up on elbows that felt unfamiliar, weak. The room was small, lit by a gray dawn fighting through a grimy window. A cheap dresser, a flickering tube TV bolted to the wall. A hotel room. A bad one.
She was alone. The bed dipped where someone had been.
Voices filtered through the door, muffled but urgent. Men’s voices. One was a low, steady rumble. The other two were younger, quicker. She knew that rumble. It lived in the marrow of her bones, a frequency both soothing and terrifying.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, the floor cold under her bare feet. She was wearing clothes that weren’t hers. A soft, gray t-shirt that swam on her, the collar stretched. Matching sweatpants rolled at the ankles. The fabric smelled faintly of detergent and something else… cedar and ozone. His smell.
She stood, the room tilting for a second. She walked clumsily to the door, her legs not quite obeying, muscles singing with a hundred-year disuse. She turned the knob and pulled.
The conversation in the cramped living area died instantly.
Three men sat around a small table littered with electronic parts and weapons components. The skinny one, Jimmy, had a screwdriver poised in mid-air. Aris, the leader with the sharp eyes, looked up, his expression unreadable. And Edward.
He sat with his back to her, but his shoulders went rigid. He turned slowly.
For a heartbeat, they just stared. His face was the same. The strong lines, the short beard, those green eyes that had once looked at her with possessive fire. Now they were glaciers, guarded and dark, ringed with exhaustion.
“Eddie?” The nickname was a ghost on her lips, a relic from a time she could barely grasp.
He stood up so fast his chair scraped the linoleum. He crossed the space in three strides, his body a wall between her and the others. Without a word, he took her elbow—his grip firm, not gentle—and guided her back into the bedroom.
“You should rest,” he said, his voice brusque. He went to close the door.
The disorientation was a rising tide. Everything was wrong. The room, the clothes, the cold in his eyes. She reached for his hand as he turned back, needing to feel something real, to ground herself in a touch she remembered.
He pulled his hand away as if her fingers were live wires.
The rejection was a physical slap. Confusion curdled into a sharp, familiar anger. She smacked his shoulder, the sound loud in the quiet room. “What is wrong with you?”
The door pushed open. Jimmy and Aris stood there, hesitant.
Edward didn’t look at them. He kept his eyes locked on her, and the words that came out were low, venomous, stripped raw. “Why the hell should I let you touch me when you wanted to abandon me so badly that you disappeared? I assume they found you first, which is why you ended up in the lab.” He said it like it was obvious, the final, ugly piece of a puzzle he’d lived with for a century.
Consuelo’s brow furrowed, her mouth tightening. The accusation hung in the mildewed air, so absurd it momentarily cleared the fog. “You really think I would do that? After you threatened my family if I didn’t become your wife?” Her voice rose, cracking. “You think I would really take that risk?”
Jimmy, leaning against the doorframe, spoke softly. “So what happened?”
The question deflated her anger, replacing it with a deeper, more frantic fear. She closed her eyes, trying to push past the static in her mind. The last clear memories were like photographs left in the sun, faded at the edges.
“I… I had been feeling sick for days,” she whispered, her eyes still shut. “Lots of vomiting, so I went to the lab to see the doctors.” She could see the white hallways, the smiling man in the coat. “And… they ran tests on me.”
A fragment, sharp and bright, cut through the haze. A screen. A black and white image. A gentle, rhythmic pulsing. A doctor’s voice, smiling: Congratulations, Mrs. Prescott.
Her eyes flew open.
“Oh my god.”
Her hands flew to her stomach, pressing against the soft, borrowed fabric of the sweats. It was flat. Empty. A cavern where there had been a world.
“My baby.” The word was a sob, torn from a place she didn’t know was still there. She looked at Edward, her eyes wide pools of horror, filling with tears that spilled over instantly. “Where is my baby?”
Edward’s stony expression fractured. Confusion. Dread.
“I was pregnant,” she gasped, the truth landing with the weight of a planet. Her knees buckled, but she didn’t fall. She just stood there, hands clutching her abdomen, as if she could somehow find the shape that was gone. “They trapped me in the lab because I was pregnant. I don’t remember anything else.”
“I don’t remember anything else.”
The words hung in the stale air. Then, a sound broke from her—a choked, ragged gasp that shuddered through her entire body. The horror was too vast. It swallowed the anger, the confusion, leaving only a raw, open wound. She began to cry, deep, wracking sobs that bent her double.
Edward moved, his own face pale. He guided her, not gently but with a grim necessity, back to the edge of the bed. She sat, crumbling inward, her fingers twisting in the gray fabric over her stomach.
Behind them, Aris let out a low whistle. “Damn,” he said, his voice cutting through her weeping. “So superhumans can have kids now? That’s… a serious complication.”
Edward didn’t acknowledge him. He knelt in front of Consuelo, forcing her tear-streaked face up to meet his. His voice was low, deadly serious. “You abandoned me?”
Consuelo shook her head violently, her curls sticking to her wet cheeks. “No.”
“You left a letter,” he pressed, each word a hammer strike. “Handwritten. It said you were sick of me. Sick of the life. That you’d found a way out and I shouldn’t look for you.”
“No letter,” she managed, her voice a broken thing. “I would never…”
Edward’s jaw worked. The bedrock of his last century was cracking under his feet. “Tell me the exact date and year of this. The last thing you remember. The date they told you.”
She swallowed a sob, trying to focus. The memory of the pulsing image on the screen was the only fixed point in the void. “March 16, 1947,” she whispered. “I don’t remember anything else.”
Edward stood up so suddenly the air moved. He turned to the two other men, his expression transformed. The cold anger was now a live wire, his green eyes blazing. “Get out.”
Aris took a step forward, hands spread. “No way, Prescott. We just cracked a century-old secret about the compound’s effect on biology. We need to debrief her, find out everything she knows about the lab protocols, the…”
“You’re acting like this is a request,” Edward interrupted, his voice dropping into a register that vibrated with threat. “It’s not. Get out. I need to be alone with my wife.”
The title, my wife, was a weapon. A claim. It brooked no argument.
Jimmy, wide-eyed, had already edged toward the door to the main room. He nudged Aris’s arm. “Come on, man. Give them a minute.”
Aris’s eyes narrowed, calculating the odds of winning a fight with a Patriot who was clearly unraveling. He backed down, but his retreat was tense, resentful. “This isn’t over. We need answers.”
“Out,” Edward repeated, not looking at them.
The door to the main room clicked shut. The lock turned from the inside—Edward’s doing, a small use of power that echoed in the sudden silence.
They were alone. The only sounds were the drip of a tap from the bathroom and Consuelo’s shaky, diminishing breaths.
She looked up at him, her black eyes pools of lost time and fresh terror. “Eddie,” she pleaded, the name a soft ache in the quiet room. “Where is my baby?”
Edward didn’t answer. He looked at her—really looked—for the first time since pulling her from the cell. He saw the girl he’d manipulated into marriage, the fierce War Bride he’d locked away in a penthouse, and the utterly broken woman before him now, a hundred years gone in a blink.
He saw the truth, and it dismantled him.
He moved to the bed and sat beside her. Then, wordlessly, he pulled her into his arms. It wasn’t a gentle embrace; it was fierce, possessive, and full of a devastating finality. He tucked her head under his chin, his hand cradling the back of her skull, his other arm a steel band around her back.
She went rigid for a second, then collapsed against him, her tears soaking into his shirt. He held her tighter.
He had no answer for her. The lie he’d lived for a century was dead. The letter in his safe, the cornerstone of his bitterness, was ash. She hadn’t left.
They had taken her. They had taken their child.
And he had spent a hundred years hating her for it.
And he had spent a hundred years hating her for it.
He didn’t know how long they stayed like that. Her tears eventually subsided into shivers, then into an exhausted stillness. He didn’t let go. The reality was a slowly spreading stain, seeping into everything. The betrayal wasn’t hers. It was the system he’d sometimes questioned but had never truly fought. The people he’d considered colleagues. They had stolen his wife and his child and handed him a neatly typed lie to swallow. They had made him their willing guard dog, biting at phantoms while the real crime festered in a cell a few miles from his penthouse.
A sharp knock rattled the door. “Prescott. We’ve got company.” Aris’s voice was tight.
Edward slowly released Consuelo. Her eyes were swollen, her face a mess of salt trails and exhaustion. He cupped her cheek, his thumb wiping at a stray tear. The gesture felt alien, a ghost of an instinct he’d buried long ago. “We have to go out there,” he said, his voice rough. “They need to know what you know.”
She swallowed, then nodded, a soldier steeling herself. She let him help her to her feet.
When they came out of the room, Amy had just arrived. She was sitting next to Jimmy and Aris on the worn sofa, still in her Firelady uniform, the sleek black material singed at one cuff. She gave Consuelo a small, sympathetic smile that didn’t reach her tired eyes. Aris gestured with his head for them to sit down on a pair of mismatched chairs pulled up to the table. Consuelo looked at Edward for confirmation; he nodded, and they both sat together.
The room felt too small, the air thick with unasked questions.
Aris leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Well…” he began, his gaze fixed on Consuelo. “I thought supers were sterile. Now you tell me you were pregnant.” He paused, his eyes flicking to Edward and back. “Was it his?” Aris gestured toward Edward.
Consuelo’s back went rod-straight. The fragile calm shattered. “Of course it was Edward’s,” she snapped, her voice cracking with indignation. “I would never cheat on him. I made my vows. I married him and swore fidelity!” The words were fervent, an automatic defense from a different century, but the fire in her black eyes was immediate and real.
Aris raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, but you have to understand me. It’s common knowledge that supers are sterile, and it turns out they trapped you because you were pregnant. Is it something about the Daisy compound, or what happened?”
Consuelo closed her eyes, her brow furrowing in concentration. The room waited. Edward watched the play of memory and pain across her face, the slight tremble in her clasped hands. She was pulling facts from a fogged-over nightmare.
She opened her eyes. “They said… that I’m a unique case. A very big coincidence.” She spoke slowly, meticulously. “I had polycystic ovaries when I was injected with the Daisy compound. What the compound did, instead of destroying everything, was fix my uterus. Stabilized it. And they said men with the compound had a very low sperm count, that it was a miracle the pregnancy happened.” She recited it like a patient recalling a doctor’s diagnosis, the clinical words a poor container for the life-altering truth they held.
Aris sighed, a long exhalation of relief. He leaned back against the sofa cushions. “So, you’re a unique case.”
Consuelo nodded, weary.
The tension in the room eased a fraction. A biological fluke was manageable. A fluke didn’t upend their entire understanding of the compound’s effects. A fluke was containable intel.
Amy stood up, breaking the moment. She offered Consuelo a genuine smile now. “Come on, Consuelo. We’re going shopping so you have something else to wear.” She gestured at the oversized sweats. “Can’t save the world in borrowed laundry.”
Consuelo looked at Edward, uncertainty flashing in her eyes. A silent question: Is it safe? Is this okay?
He gave a single, short nod. “Stay with Amy. Don’t wander. Don’t talk to anyone.” His orders were crisp, automatic. The part of him that needed to control, to protect what was his, reasserting itself through the chaos.
Consuelo stood, smoothing the shirt down over her hips. She looked young and terribly lost. Amy linked an arm through hers, a gesture of casual solidarity. “We’ll be back in a couple hours. Jimmy, you’re driving.”
As the door closed behind the three of them, the room plunged into a different kind of silence. Aris picked up a stray circuit board from the table, turning it over in his hands.
“A unique case,” he repeated, not looking at Edward. “That’s good. Means they don’t have a secret breeding program. Just one big, messy accident they needed to hide.” He tossed the board aside. “But it also means they’ll want her back more than ever. A living sample. The one who got away.”
Edward said nothing. He was staring at the door, already feeling the absence like a drop in pressure. A hundred years of thinking she chose to leave, and now the terror was that someone would take her again. This time, he knew it. This time, the anger had a true direction.
It wasn’t a feeling he’d missed. It was much, much worse.