Chapter 4: The Choice
The dance with Frankenstein had changed the rhythm, but the song, it seemed, wasn't over. Alex spent the next day in her studio trying to drown the coordinates out with work. Her hands moved with a frantic, mechanical precision over the drafting tablet, rendering seamless patterns for a bullet-resistant silk lining, but her mind was a broken record stuck on 2300 hours.
The sleek space, with its silent mannequins in armored bodices, usually felt like a sanctuary. Today it felt like a very pretty cage. Every glance at the minimalist clock on the wall was a gut-punch. 4:17 PM. 7:02. 8:45.
“Earth to Alex.” Tao’s voice cut through her fixation, accompanied by the rustle of a paper bag. He leaned in the doorway, holding up containers of Thai food. “You missed lunch. And, like, all human interaction. You’re doing that creepy zone-out thing.”
She blinked, forcing her eyes to focus on him. “Sorry. Just a complex stitch pattern.”
“Bullshit.” He walked in, clearing a space on a worktable cluttered with carbon fiber samples. “You’ve been staring at the same schematic for an hour. The Takeo Special again?” He said the name lightly, but his eyes were careful.
“Don’t start, Tao.”
“I’m not starting. I’m observing. And I’m observing my best friend looking like she’s waiting for a bomb to go off.” He popped open the containers, releasing scents of lemongrass and chili. “Eat. Talk. Or just eat. But stop vibrating.”
She took the chopsticks he offered. The food tasted like cardboard. Her fork trembled slightly as she pushed noodles around. 9:30 PM. The coordinates were a pulsing point on a mental map, a beacon in the industrial sector by the river.
“He left you a message, didn’t he?” Tao asked around a mouthful of Pad See Ew. “A time, a place. The usual secret squirrel stuff.”
She didn’t deny it. Silence was confirmation enough.
“And you’re not going.” He stated it, watching her face. It wasn’t a question.
Alex put her chopsticks down. The finality of the click against the container was startling. “Frankenstein knows, Tao. He called it a probe. He’s using me to test Takeo’s loyalties.” She repeated Takeo’s own warning, the words ash in her mouth. “It’s quicksand. If I go, I’m playing right into it.”
“And if you don’t go?” Tao asked softly.
That was the real question. She saw Takeo’s face, the raw panic in the hallway, the desperate shape of his body in her sheets. He would be there. In the cold, by the river, waiting. The thought of him standing alone in the dark, watching the minutes tick past 2300, was a physical pain sharper than any fear of Frankenstein.
“He’ll understand,” she whispered, unconvinced.
“Will he?” Tao sighed, gathering the empty containers. “Or is that just the story you’re telling yourself so you can sleep?”
He left her with the silence and the ticking clock. 10:15. The studio felt vast and freezing. She paced, her boots soundless on the polished concrete. She could go. She could take a taxi, be there in twenty minutes. She could have his hands on her again, his mouth, that brief, terrifying peace.
She saw Frankenstein’s smile instead. The calculating gleam. A queen, not a pawn. Going tonight wouldn’t be rebellion; it would be confirmation of her usefulness as a tool, a lever to apply pressure to his favorite weapon. Takeo was right. It was quicksand.
At 10:48, she made her choice. She powered down the drafting tablet, shut off the lights, and left the studio. She didn’t head toward the river. She went home. The penthouse was a tomb of remembered warmth. She didn’t change out of her clothes. She just sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, watching the digital clock on the nightstand.
22:59.
23:00.
23:01.
Each passing minute was a surgical cut. She imagined the wind off the river, the gritty feel of abandoned concrete underfoot. She imagined the exact moment his hopeful watchfulness would harden into understanding, then into something worse. Abandonment. Betrayal. Her stomach coiled tight. She had chosen the strategic play, the only move that didn’t hand Frankenstein more ammunition. So why did it feel like a fatal mistake?
23:17.
Her personal tablet, lying on the duvet, lit up with an incoming video call. Not an encrypted line. Her public, professional ID. The caller was a blocked number. Her blood went cold. She knew. Swallowing a throat full of sand, she accepted.
Frankenstein’s face filled the screen. He wasn’t in his lab or office. He appeared to be in a vehicle, dark leather upholstery visible behind him, the city lights a smooth blur past the window. He looked amused.
“Alexandra. I’m glad I caught you in. I was concerned you might be out. It’s a dreadful night for a stroll by the river.”
The casual cruelty of it stole her breath. He’d been watching. He knew she’d stayed away. This call was his victory lap.
“What do you want?” Her voice was strained.
“Merely to thank you.” He smiled, a thin, professional curve of his lips. “Your discipline tonight was instructive. It provided the control variable I needed for my assessment. His reaction to your absence was… remarkably vivid data.”
A cold, sick dread poured into her veins. “Where is he?”
“En route. We had to collect him. The parameters of his distress were becoming a public concern.” Frankenstein adjusted his cuff, his gaze piercing through the screen. “The job offer remains open, Alexandra. Your value is becoming increasingly clear to me. Sleep well.”
The call disconnected. The screen went black.
Alex sat frozen, the tablet a dead weight in her hands. He’d used her, all right. But not in the way she’d feared. Her absence had been the real probe, a more brutal test than any rendezvous could have been. And Takeo had failed it, publicly, completely. They’d had to collect him.
The silent penthouse pressed in on her. She had wanted to protect him, to protect them. All she’d done was deliver him right back to his maker, broken and predictably human. The coordinates still burned in her mind, a ghost of a meeting that never happened, now a crime scene.
She had chosen the board over the piece. Now the piece had been taken, and the game was Frankenstein’s alone.
Now the piece had been taken, and the game was Frankenstein’s alone. Alex stared at her reflection in the dark tablet screen. The woman looking back was hollowed out, a shell of sleek platinum and calculated elegance. A cool, clinical fury began to displace the dread in her veins, a chemical reaction born of utter futility. She was done.
She stood up, the movement sharp. She walked to her closet, not for comfort, for armor. She selected a tailored black jumpsuit, knife-pleated trousers, severe lines. She applied her makeup with a merciless hand, defining her eyes into chips of green stone. Each action was a deliberate reclamation of a surface. If she was a toy, she’d be a goddamn expensive one, one with sharp edges.
She didn’t call a taxi. She took her own car, a low-slung electric coupe, and pushed it silently through the rain-glossed streets toward the city’s oldest, most guarded hill. The iron gates of the estate appeared, monolithic and familiar. The retinal scanner glowed crimson as she pulled up. It accepted her old clearance after a hesitant whirr, a ghost accessing a haunted house.
The gates parted. She drove the winding approach to the stark, modernist mansion, its windows like black ice. She killed the engine and stepped out into the humid night air, the scent of cultivated earth and ozone from the perimeter fields hitting her. Two figures detached from the shadows of the portico. M21, a mountain of taciturn muscle, and beside him, Tao.
“Alex,” Tao said, stepping forward, his usual levity gone. His face was tight with concern. “What are you doing? You can’t just drive in here.”
“I just did.” Her voice was flat, carrying in the stillness. “I need to see him. Now.”
M21 shifted his weight, a subtle block. “The Doctor is not receiving.”
“Tell him his ‘gravitational pull’ is here.” Alex didn’t break stride, walking right between them toward the engraved bronze doors. “And if he doesn’t receive, I’ll start screaming about probe anomalies and compromised perimeter data on every channel I’ve still got access to. It’ll be tedious for everyone.”
M21 and Tao exchanged a glance. A soft click echoed from the door’s mechanism. It swung inward silently. They followed her in, not as escorts, as witnesses.
The interior was as she remembered: cold marble, diffused light, the sterile smell of filtered air and latent power. She didn’t wait for guidance. She moved through the halls on memory, her heels clicking a precise rhythm on the stone, straight to the double doors of his private study. She pushed them open.
Frankenstein stood at a bank of monitors, their glow painting his sharp features in monochrome. He turned, not surprised. On one screen, she saw a static feed of an empty concrete bay. A holding cell. Her heart squeezed, but her expression didn’t flicker.
“Alexandra. This is precipitous.” He gestured to the room. “You’ve brought an audience.”
“They’re just remembering how this works,” Alex said, stopping in the center of the room. She felt Tao’s anxious presence behind her, M21’s stony silence. “I have a proposal.”
Frankenstein’s eyebrow arched a millimeter. “I’m listening.”
“You win.” The words were acid, but she spat them out cleanly. “Your little test worked perfectly. I stayed away, he broke, you got your data. Bravo. Now you’ve got a emotionally compromised asset who needs recalibration and a former one standing in your study who’s sick of this chessboard bullshit.”
She took a breath, locking her eyes on his. “So here’s the deal. You want me? You want your favorite soldier? Fine. I’ll come back. I’ll move into the mansion. With him.”
Tao made a small, choked sound behind her. Frankenstein said nothing, his gaze utterly focused.
“My job,” Alex continued, her voice dropping into a cool, transactional register, “will be to keep Takeo stable. Happy. Functional. And mine. You get his loyalty cemented through me. I get him. Out of the shadows, in a bed down the hall, not in some riverfront graveyard waiting for a ghost.”
She gestured to her own form, a sharp, dismissive wave. “Need eye candy for a funder’s gala? I’ll wear the dress. Need a designer’s touch on the next generation of tactical wear? I’ll consult. You keep both your favorite toys in one nicely decorated box. We stay protected, you keep us. Everyone’s needs are satisfied. That’s the proposal.”
The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the hum of the servers. Frankenstein slowly clasped his hands behind his back. He looked from her, to the stunned faces of Tao and M21, and back again. A slow, appreciative smile touched his lips, not warm, but deeply intrigued.
“An integrated solution,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re offering to become the permanent regulator for his human variables. And in return, you demand cohabitation and a veneer of legitimacy.”
“I’m offering to stop the cycle that’s grinding him into dust,” Alex corrected, her tone flinty. “Call it what you want.”
Frankenstein nodded slowly, his mind clearly racing through permutations and outcomes. He looked past her, to M21. “Bring Takeo to the east wing viewing room. Unharmed.” His eyes returned to Alex, the calculation in them bright and fierce. “Let’s see if the asset accepts the new parameters.”
Frankenstein’s words hung in the sterile air, a challenge and a verdict all at once. Alex didn’t wait for further permission. She turned on her heel, the severe lines of her jumpsuit cutting through the lab’s soft light, and walked out of the study. Her footsteps were the only sound, a measured counter-rhythm to the frantic beat of her heart. She didn’t look back to see if Tao or M21 followed.
She knew the way to the east wing viewing room. It was less a room and more an observational annex, a place where specimens were assessed. The term ‘unharmed’ from Frankenstein echoed, doing little to quiet the images in her mind: Takeo restrained, Takeo sedated, Takeo broken on a floor somewhere. The mansion’s labyrinthine corridors felt both alien and intimately familiar, like a childhood home repurposed into a prison.
The door to the viewing room was a slab of frosted glass. She pushed it open.
The space was cold, illuminated by the cool glow of a single, large monitor embedded in the far wall. It showed a live feed of a sterile, white cell. Takeo sat on a bare metal cot, still in his clothes from her apartment, his head in his hands. His long purple hair was a messy cascade over his forearms. He was shaking, just slightly, the tremor visible even through the digital remove. It was the shaking of a system pushed past its limits, of a machine overheating.
A figure stood beside the monitor, his hands clasped behind his back. Adam, Frankenstein’s first and most perfected creation. His flawless, ageless face was impassive. “He’s been like that since retrieval,” Adam stated, his voice devoid of inflection. “Agitated. Non-responsive to verbal commands. Doctor thought you might have a… calming effect.”
Alex ignored him, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Open the cell.”
“Protocol requires—”
“Open the goddamn cell, Adam.” Her voice didn’t rise. It dropped, becoming something hard and final. “Or I walk out that gate and you can explain to him why his new regulator quit before shift one.”
A pause. Then, a nearly silent hydraulic hiss from a door beside the monitor, one she hadn’t seen. It was an entrance directly into the cell block, bypassing the security maze. Of course. Easy access for the handlers. She didn’t thank him. She just walked through.
The cell smelled of ozone and disinfectant. The door slid shut behind her with a final sound. Takeo didn’t look up. His shoulders were impossibly tense, coiled springs held by fraying wires.
“Hey,” she said, her voice soft in the clinical silence.
His head snapped up. His eyes were wildly blue, bloodshot, pupils dilated. There was no recognition at first, just a feral, trapped-animal awareness. Then it crashed into him. “Alex?” His voice was shredded, cracked from things she didn’t want to imagine. “You… you didn’t come.”
“I know.” She took a careful step forward. “I’m here now.”
He launched himself off the cot, not at her, but past her, pacing the short length of the cell like a tiger. “He knew. He was tracking the signal the whole time. My comms, my bio-signs, everything.” He raked his hands through his hair, pulling at it. “The coordinates were a trap for me, not you. A loyalty stress test. And I failed it. I went. I waited. I… lost cohesion.”
He stopped, facing the blank wall, his back to her. His breath hitched. “I thought you’d changed your mind. About me. About everything.” The admission was torn from him, naked and wretched.
“I was trying to protect you,” she said, the words feeling hollow even to her. “I thought if I didn’t go, he’d have nothing to see.”
Takeo let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “He saw everything. He saw me come apart at the seams. Mission failure.” He finally turned, his gaze latching onto her, scanning her from head to toe. His eyes narrowed, the soldier’s assessment overriding the man’s panic. “Why are you dressed like that? Why are you here, inside?”
This was the moment. She took a deep breath, the antiseptic air burning her lungs. “I made a deal. With him. I’m coming back. To live here. With you.”
The silence that followed was absolute. The hum of the air filtration seemed to grow louder.
“What?” The word was a disbelieving whisper.
“He gets both of us in one place. A stable, contained asset. I get you out of the shadows. No more riverbanks. No more stolen hours. We… exist. Here.” She gestured vaguely at the white walls. “In a gilded cage, but a cage together.”
Takeo stared at her. The shaking had stopped, replaced by a terrifying stillness. “You traded your freedom. For this.” He didn’t gesture at the cell. He gestured at himself, at his own compromised state. “For a broken tool.”
“Don’t.” She closed the distance between them, her hand lifting to his face. He flinched, a tiny, involuntary spasm she felt in her own heart. “Don’t you dare. You are not a tool to me. You never were.”
He caught her wrist, his grip gentle but unyielding. His eyes searched hers, looking for the lie, the coercion. “What did he promise you? What’s the real price?”
“There is no price. It’s a transaction. My presence for your sanity.” She leaned in, her forehead almost touching his. “Our sanity.”
He was silent for a long time, his thumb stroking the inside of her wrist. She could see the calculations firing behind his eyes, the strategic cost-benefit analysis warring with raw, desperate want. The soldier versus the man. The asset versus the lover.
Finally, his shoulders slumped. The fight bled out of him, leaving only a profound exhaustion. He rested his forehead against hers, his breath warm on her lips. “I hate him,” he murmured, the words vibrating between them.
“I know.”
“I hate this.”
“I know that, too.”
He pulled her into him then, his arms wrapping around her with a crushing desperation. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, his body trembling again, but this time with a relief so deep it was indistinguishable from grief. “Okay,” he whispered into her skin, the word damp and broken. “Okay.”
From the viewing room, unseen, Adam watched the embrace on the monitor. His finger tapped once, discreetly, on a panel beside him, closing the direct audio feed from the cell. He turned and left, his report complete. In the study, Frankenstein watched a different data stream on his screens: heart rate, cortisol levels, neural activity. The violent spikes from earlier were smoothing into a steady, coherent rhythm. He allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
ALEX TRACKS THE SIGNAL.
Later, in the assigned suite that was to be their new home—a luxurious, soulless space in the east wing—Alex waited for Takeo to finish in the shower. Her personal tablet was in her hands. The mansion’s wi-fi was a fortress, but she knew its backdoors, its forgotten service tunnels from her time designing its security layers.
She couldn’t track Takeo’s direct implant signal; that was Frankenstein’s sacred domain, encrypted with quantum-level code she couldn’t crack. But she could track other things. The access log for the east wing elevator, triggered twenty minutes after she’d left Frankenstein’s study. The power spike from a sub-basement lab that corresponded with no scheduled maintenance. The anonymized data packet that fired from the mansion’s server to an external IP with a Latvian prefix, a connection that lasted exactly four minutes and seventeen seconds.
She cross-referenced the timestamps, building a shadow narrative of the night. The retrieval team’s return. Takeo’s initial processing. Frankenstein’s remote review. And that external handshake with Latvia. Her fingers flew over the screen, isolating the packet’s metadata, tracing its path through dummy servers. It was a surveillance report. A buyer’s update.
He wasn’t just testing Takeo. He was showcasing him. The emotional breakdown, the successful “re-calibration” via her presence—it was all demonstrable product data. Takeo’s anguish had been a performance for a client. Her deal wasn’t just for stability; it was a new, more compelling sales feature.
The shower stopped. She quickly cleared her screen, the ghost of the Latvian server address burning in her mind. Takeo emerged, a towel around his waist, his hair dark with water. He looked more himself, the hollow terror in his eyes replaced by a weary acceptance.
“It’s strange,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Being assigned a room here. With you. It feels like a dream.”
Alex smiled, the expression feeling brittle on her face. She reached for him, pulling him down onto the too-soft bed. “Then let’s not wake up,” she murmured against his lips, her mind still tracing the signal, a cold, new purpose settling in her bones. The game had changed again. She was inside now. And from the inside, you could learn everything. You could track every signal, until you found the source, and then you could break it.