Chapter 2

The sound of the key in the front door made my entire body tense. I wiped my face, took a deep breath, and arranged my features into a welcoming smile. Years of focusing on complex equations had taught me control. Now, I would use it to survive.

Clay walked in, loosening his tie. He looked tired, but his eyes lit up when he saw me. The same way they always did. It was an act. It had always been an act.

"There's my beautiful genius," he said, pulling me into a hug. His arms felt like bars. I forced myself not to flinch when he kissed me. The scent of his cologne, once a comfort, now made me feel sick.

"Long day?" I asked, my voice a perfect imitation of a concerned wife.

"The worst. You were right to stay home. How was your day? Did you get anything done in the lab?"

I lied about a minor breakthrough, something plausible that would satisfy his need to feel involved. He listened, nodding, his expression one of proud admiration. He was a fraud, but he was a masterful one.

I feigned a headache, an excuse to retreat to our bedroom early. He brought me water and kissed my forehead, his touch now feeling like a spider crawling on my skin.

"Get some rest, honey. Big week ahead. The IPO is almost here."

The Initial Public Offering. The culmination of our work. His grand prize. It was less than two weeks away.

Lying in the dark, I listened to the sound of his breathing beside me. It was a steady, peaceful rhythm. The sound of a man with no conscience. My mind raced. Abel was alive. Clay had a secret family. They had lied to me for five years. Why?

The answer was simple and brutal: TerraGen. My work. My intellectual property.

I waited until he was deeply asleep. Then, I slipped out of bed. Clay was arrogant, but he wasn't stupid. He wouldn't keep evidence in plain sight. I started in his home office. I went through his desk, his files, his laptop. Nothing. It was all professional, clean, exactly what you' d expect from the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company.

He was too careful. But Abel... Abel was not. I remembered something from our days in the university lab. Abel was paranoid about data security. He didn't trust the cloud. He had a custom-built, triple-encrypted solid-state drive. It was his prize possession, housed in a small, lead-lined case to protect it from electromagnetic pulses. He called it his "Rosetta Stone."

Where would Clay keep something like that? Something that needed to be charged but kept hidden?

My eyes scanned the office. Bookshelves, a leather sofa, a high-tech media console. Behind the console, a mess of wires fed into a surge protector. But one cord was different. It was a heavy-duty, shielded cable that snaked behind a built-in bookshelf.

I pulled the bookshelf away from the wall. There, in a specially carved-out recess, was a small, black metal box plugged into a dedicated outlet. It was a Faraday cage, a charging station. And inside, sitting snugly in its custom foam slot, was Abel' s "Rosetta Stone."

My hands trembled as I took it out. It was connected to a small, burner phone. I tried to unlock the phone first. It required a passcode. I tried Clay' s birthday. His mother' s birthday. The date we founded TerraGen. Nothing.

I stopped, forcing myself to think like him. What was Clay most proud of? What defined his entire sense of self? It wasn't me. It wasn't his fake family. It was his ambition. His ascent.

I looked at the drive. On the back, almost invisible, was a tiny laser engraving I had never noticed before: Project Icarus.

Icarus. The boy who flew too close to the sun. It was the codename for our next-generation technology, the work built on my original patents. The work they were developing in secret.

A date. It had to be a date. I thought back. The lab fire. The day my world changed. The day my guilt began. The day their new life started.

I typed in the six digits. The date of the fire.

The phone unlocked.

The screen lit up with a gallery of photos. My breath hitched. There was the woman from the market, pregnant. Her stomach grew in a series of pictures, Clay' s hand resting on it protectively. Then, a photo of her in a hospital bed, holding a newborn. The date stamp on the photo was exactly one week after the lab fire.

I scrolled, my thumb moving mechanically. There were hundreds of photos. The boy' s first steps. His first birthday, with Clay' s parents smiling beside a cake. My own in-laws, who told me they loved me like a daughter, were part of the lie. His third birthday, with Josiah Klein and Caroline Peters, our primary investors, holding gift-wrapped presents. Everyone was in on it.

Then I found the videos. I clicked on one. It was Abel and Clay, sitting in a lab that was far more advanced than my own at TerraGen.

"She's getting close to the Icarus catalyst," Abel said, his voice laced with resentment. "She's still brilliant. It's annoying."

"Just keep her focused on the current-gen tech," Clay replied, his voice cold. "We need her to keep the company profitable until the IPO. After that... we move on to the contingency."

"And if she finds out before then?" Abel asked.

Clay leaned back in his chair, a cruel smile on his face. "Then we enact the contingency sooner. Francine has the paperwork ready. A few well-placed testimonies, her history of 'emotional distress' after your 'death'... A conservatorship will be easy. She' ll be declared mentally incompetent. We get control of her, we get control of her IP. All of it. She'll just be a valuable asset we need to manage."

The phone slipped from my grasp and clattered to the floor.

A conservatorship.

They weren't just going to steal my work. They were going to steal my mind. My freedom. My very self.

A violent retch tore through me. I barely made it to the bathroom before I was sick, my body convulsing as five years of lies and betrayal poured out of me.

As I knelt on the cold tile, the burner phone on the floor buzzed. A new message had appeared on the lock screen. It was from Abel.

The message was a photo of me, taken from a distance, at the farmers' market that afternoon. I looked lost, confused, my face pale with shock.

Below the photo was a single line of text, sent to Clay.

"Looks like your little asset is malfunctioning."