The message echoed in her mind all night:
Ask him about the experiment.
Adelina barely slept. Her thoughts spiraled, tangled in questions she couldn't yet form. By morning, the city outside her window was glazed in gold, but the warmth did not touch her.
Nathan arrived just after sunrise, still in yesterday's clothes, the collar of his coat dusted with city ash. He looked tired. More than that—hollow. Like something inside him had started to cave.
Adelina was waiting in the atrium, back straight, hands clenched at her sides.
"Tell me about the experiment," she said without preamble.
Nathan froze mid-step. His expression didn't shift right away, but the color left his face like a slow bleed.
"What?" he asked carefully.
"You heard me," she said. "Don't make me repeat it."
He looked around the vast, echoing space. "Where did you hear that term?"
"You're deflecting."
He exhaled. Moved closer.
"I was going to tell you," he said.
"Were you?" she asked coldly. "Before or after the next press cycle? Before or after the board takes over and buries me for good?"
"Adelina—"
"No more lies."
Silence thickened between them. Finally, Nathan looked away.
"There's a project," he said slowly. "Buried under layers of code and old archives. It predates Project Obelisk. Predates even the neural interface trials."
He ran a hand through his hair. "They called it The Seed Protocol. Officially, it was a genome stabilization initiative. But off the record—it was about memory transference, cellular imprinting, cross-generational data encoding."
"Speak plainly," Adelina snapped.
Nathan met her eyes. "It was a genetic experiment. Funded quietly by the Gavrila Foundation. Designed to preserve not just DNA—but cognitive identity. Traits. Temperaments. Thought patterns. Legacy, re-coded into blood."
Her knees almost buckled. She leaned against the banister.
"You're saying… this isn't just about me."
Nathan nodded once. "It's about all of us."
They moved into the private archives. The lights buzzed above them. The scent of old paper and ozone hung in the air like ghosts.
Nathan pulled a drawer from the wall and laid out a series of genealogy charts, photos, and genetic markers.
"You ever wonder," he asked, "why so many people in the Blackstone and Gavrila lines look alike? Why our family portraits feel...repetitive?"
Adelina stared at the documents. Faces from different decades—different centuries—echoing the same eyes. The same cheekbones. The same haunted expressions.
"Replication?" she whispered.
"Not cloning," he said. "Not directly. But influence. They believed identity could be shaped biologically. That certain people—those who were gifted, brilliant, compliant—could be 'recreated' by guiding bloodlines."
"Selective breeding," she said, disgusted.
"And neural conditioning. Medical manipulation. Biogenetic targeting. It started with pharmaceuticals. Then implants. Then full genomic patterning."
She backed away. "You're telling me... I look like Adeline Blackstone because they wanted me to?"
"Because they built you to," Nathan said.
The floor felt like it tilted beneath her.
"All this time, I thought I ended up in her body by accident. A fluke. A cosmic error. But it wasn't, was it?"
Nathan looked like he wanted to lie. But he didn't.
"No. There's a theory. Elena believes... the Seed Protocol triggered a sort of quantum recall. That in the right conditions, identity could jump. Not just data—but consciousness. Mind into flesh. You. Into her."
Adelina gripped the table. "That's not science."
"It's obsession," he said. "But it worked."
She stared at her reflection in the glass frame of a dusty portrait. Her face. Her eyes.
Adeline's ghost.
"So who am I?" she asked. "Her? Me? A blueprint? A copy?"
"You are you," Nathan said. "But the path that led you here—it wasn't random. It was engineered. And now... it's accelerating."
She looked at him. "What does that mean?"
Nathan closed the drawer slowly. Locked it. Then turned to her.
"There's a place," he said. "A facility. Off-record. Not part of the vault. Not under corporate oversight. It's where the original data was stored. The earliest iteration of the Seed Protocol."
"And?"
"That's where we'll find the truth."
Adelina straightened. "Where is it?"
He hesitated.
"Romania."
She blinked. "The ancestral estate?"
Nathan nodded.
"The program started there. Before it had a name. Before the Gavrilas moved operations to the West. Everything since then—every generation—it all comes from that house."
A long silence stretched.
Adelina finally said, "When do we leave?"
Nathan didn't smile.
"Tonight."
But as they turned to leave the archives, the floor lights flickered.
Then a cold voice echoed through the overhead speaker:
"Unauthorized access detected in Sector Nine. Initiating lockdown."
Adelina froze.
Nathan cursed. "Someone's trying to stop us."
A low hum began, vibrating through the floor.
And then—
All the lights went out.