Chapter 19: The Confession
Roger Green's pupils contracted. His body jerked upright, his back straightening away from the white leather. His hand tightened on Erin's.
His gaze snapped from her face to the cavernous room, the black stone hearth, the city sprawled below. He looked at Marcus, at Jane. He registered the bite on his neck. His free hand went to the mark.
Then he looked back at Erin.
"You're here," he said. His voice was clear now, stripped of the venom's blur, filled with a raw shock."You're solid. You're alive. I thought... when the lab went up, I thought you were gone."
Erin pulled her hand from under his. The movement was not gentle. "What were we doing there, Roger? In your mobile lab. You used my body for a beta test.Tell me."
Jane crossed her arms. Marcus held his breath.
Roger dropped his hand from his neck. He let out a sharp breath. "It was the Huntress mods." He spoke to his own hands, clasped in his lap. "From the PervyVR monster girl collection. The prototype I lifted had the developmental files. Vampire Hunter variant."
He looked up at Erin, his eyes glassy. "I was mapping the template's neural architecture. Its somatic adjustments. Your body... you had been a good test subject.Athletic. Good baseline muscle control. I thought if I could stabilize it, learn the pathways, I could use the transformation on Audra. If the template could grant hyper-coordination, hyper-awareness... those were the promises on the spec sheet. I thought maybe it could bypass her motor block. I thought it could get her back."
A low pressure built in the room, a heavy quiet.
Erin stood motionless. "You used me as a guinea pig for your sister."
"You volunteered!!" The words erupted from him. "You said yes! You were her friend. We both wanted answers. You got into the tank."
“NewYou had prepped her psyche for a specific transformation path,” Roger said, the words coming faster now. “Mobility, elasticity. A ballet mod. The hardware failed. Her mind received the intention signals, but her body…it ignored them. Trapped in the command loop.”
He leaned forward. “I thought if I could give her a new chassis, a working body with the right sensory inputs, it could complete the loop. Break the lock.” His hands sketched desperate shapes in the air. “I found your monster girl code, Malone. Your Michelle files. The skeletal models, the muscle fiber specifications. The blueprints were there.”
Marcus felt a chill prickle the skin of his forearms. “They were just Halloween costumes.”
“They were complete,” Roger’s voice had an edge of awe.“Too complete. The neutrino-phelline resin injectors, the carotid intensifiers. They weren’t game assets. They were specs for real biomods. Huntress wasn’t a costume. It was an actual implant regimen.”
Jane’s stillness became sharper.
Roger looked at Erin, at her predator’s eyes. “Her template was the closest match. The enhanced fascia, the re-slung ligaments, the vestibular rewiring. Audra’s psyche expected something like that. We thought we could funnel her through that shape, from her broken body into the new one. Erin kept running the demos, letting her consciousness hold the avatar. It looked stable. But every time we tried to force the mirror for Audra…it collapsed.”
Roger’s eyes fixed on the middle distance, seeing the memory. “On the forty-first variant transformation, the chair failed mid-transformation and Erin woke up as the Huntress.” Erin took a sharp step back, her body rigid. “She went berserk and tore the lab apart. The transformer exploded.”
I saw her standing there in the smoke, eyes changed, and wild. I ran. I thought I could come back for her later, salvage something from the wreckage. By the time I circled back, NewYou security teams had the whole block taped off.
The silence in the penthouse was a solid weight. Erin stared at Roger, her violet eyes wide and unblinking. She reached out, her fingers hovering near the bite mark on his neck without touching it.
She pulled her hand back to her chest. "I don't remember any of that," she said, her accent flattening the words. "But it is the truth. I can feel it. I know it."
Her words hung in the air between them. Roger stared at her, his face slack. The confession had drained him.
He sank back into the couch, his shoulders curling inward. He didn't look at any of them. His fingers picked at a loose thread on his pants.
The quiet stretched, broken only by the low hiss of the fireplace.
Marcus watched the man shrink into himself. He saw the raw, eroded guilt. This wasn't a criminal mastermind. This was a broken brother who'd tried to play god with stolen tools.
He moved forward, the polished concrete cool under his socks. He stopped a few feet from the couch.
"Roger," Marcus said. His voice was quiet but clear in the vast room. "We understand about Audra. We do."
Jane shifted her weight, a subtle redistribution that signaled her attention.
"How is she now?" Marcus asked. "Where is she being kept?"
Roger’s head lifted. His eyes were red-rimmed. "Upstate. Crestview Manor. It's a long-term care facility. NewYou pays the bills. Quietly."
"Is she conscious? Can she communicate?"
A sharp, pained nod. "She can blink. Yes. No. They have a light-board for letters. It takes her… minutes to spell a word. She's there. She's screaming inside that room. Every day." He looked at his own hands, the solder burns and grease. "I visit. I tell her I'm working. I tell her I'll get her out."
Another stretch of quiet. The city lights outside were a silent, indifferent witness.
Marcus took a breath. "Okay. So, the plan was to use the Huntress template as a… a bypass. A new body for her mind to inhabit."
"Yes."
"And the hardware that did this to Erin," Marcus gestured toward her, "it was from the monster girl collection. My code."
Roger's gaze met his, direct and unflinching. "Your code was the only blueprint that was complete. The corporate templates are locked down, full of fail-safes and kill-switches. Yours was… pure. A full architectural schematic. It was the only thing that could even attempt a full somatic rewrite."
A cold knot settled in Marcus's stomach. Pride and horror twisted together.
Jane spoke from her place by the window. Her tone was analytical, clean. "The plan failed because the source psyche, Audra's, could not integrate with the new template. But Erin’s psyche could."
"It didn't fail," Roger whispered. "It worked too well. The template… it doesn't just change the body. It seeks a certain mental state. A predatory focus. A will to hunt. Erin had that, somewhere deep down. Audra…" He trailed off. "Audra just wanted to dance."
Erin let out a short, sharp breath through her nose. She turned and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, placing her palms flat against the cool glass.
Marcus ran a hand over his mouth. The pieces were settling into a dreadful, coherent picture. His code, designed for a fantasy, had found a pathway to reality. It sought a specific kind of will to activate fully.
He looked at Jane, her perfect form silhouetted by the city. It sought a powerful, singular desire.
He focused back on Roger. "You said it collapsed when you tried to force the mirror for Audra. What does that mean, exactly?"
"The interface failed. The neural bridge destabilized. It was like trying to pour water into a closed fist." Roger's words were technical, detached. "The template requires a specific cognitive resonance. Erin had it. Audra does not."
Silence filled the room again, dense and humming.
Roger grew silent. He stared at his hands, empty. The fight had gone out of him, replaced by a hollow exhaustion.
Marcus stepped closer. He lowered himself to sit on the edge of the black stone hearth, the heat from the fire warming his back. He kept his voice low, level.
"Roger," he said. "How can we help Audra?"