He scoffs, wincing a little. “Well, I’m not that good.”
“You’re Doctor Dash. You can do anything.”
He shakes his head. “You should have read the pages, Sam.” His eyes are gray. I should have noticed it before. The green, the joy, is gone. Maybe from us both. “I’m not Dash. He’s dead. I killed him.” He sighs. “I killed him for you. It’s the only way out.”
“What?”
“I killed Ben—Dr. Dash. We were brothers. No one knew. He was the brilliant doctor, and I was the—other brother.” He swallows hard. Something dawns on me, or just repairs itself in my mind.
“You were one of the patients?”
He nods. “I was.” He licks his lips. “You and I were both subjects at Area Seven.” He looks down at the concrete, and I can tell he’s in terrible pain. There’s a glow of sweat across his brow. “You were a marine with a case of ADD, but you managed it so well. Taking yoga and doing exercises to focus your brain. You had agreed to be part of the program because it was explained to you that we would be used as operatives and in the same situations as SEALs. You wanted that, badly. You were fit and feisty and organized. Your brain was sharp.” The corners of his beautiful lips turn up. “The perfect candidate.”
“What were you?” There is a storm brewing inside me, but I need to focus on something other than myself.
“I was a doctor, just a regular doctor in the field. I followed my brother into medicine, but I didn’t think I had the patience for behavioral work or neurosciences. I had OCD, severe sometimes. I would fixate, almost like an autistic, but I could be talked down. Only my brother ever knew about it.” His voice trails off, making it feel as though we are watching his story and not hearing it. I can see everything he says, and his tone is so calming. “They used us, highly efficient people with coping mechanisms already in place, to create a program. Area Seven was a start of something profound.” Bitterness fills his face. “Then it all started. Isolation, hypnotism, exercises for inducing paranoia, detachment, and disassociation. The science behind it was genius, but the application was cruel.”
My entire body shivers as if it recalls all of those things, but I don’t.
“I killed Ben and took his place.” He looks at me with passion. “I just wanted to get you out. I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t know how to save you, so I pretended to be Ben and took you to Seattle and explained that we were doing a training exercise to try to fix your inability to detach fully. Instead, I was leading you back, doing everything in reverse. I have been taking you through the exercises, one by one. Creating a new persona was the hardest. You were truly a blank slate. I programmed you to react to certain words so that pieces of memory would find their way back to you slowly. If it went too fast it could shut down your mind altogether. It had to be slow and steady, piece by piece. Otherwise, you could end up stuck in this world.”
I lift a hand. “My father never molested those girls?”
He shakes his head. “You’re an orphan. Your parents came to America from England when you were seven. They were a loving couple, adored you. They died in a fiery crash in California, and you grew up in an orphanage. It wasn’t magical or anything to be excited about, but you were never harmed or tortured or made to be anything but a regular girl.”
A sob escapes my lips as my hands cover my eyes. Relief and sorrow fill me. “How could you?” I rock, shaking and gripping myself. “How could you make me think that?”
“I didn’t. It was there already, in your mind and waiting for the moment they needed you. Then they could activate you.”
I sob harder, clutching to my face. “I wasn’t in an accident?”
“No.”
“Angie?”
“A doctor to ensure you were adapting to the life you were told about. Adapting to become the sleeper cell in whatever city they needed you to be in.”
My heart breaks. “My aunt Pat?”
“An actress paid to be your aunt. She was told you were a victim of the life we made you believe you lived. She was paid to be your aunt and to participate in the therapy sessions you were undertaking.”
“Oh God, oh God.” I can’t take any more. I get up, looking around. I don’t know where to run. I don’t know what to do.
“Sam, wait. There’s more. Don’t run yet.”
I close my eyes, letting the whole of Paris spin around me in a violent circle, a vortex.
“There is a way back. The layers in your mind, the subconscious that has been manipulated, it can be healed, I think.”