Chapter 4 - SUBJECT SEVENTEENThe name emerged from an Orion archive.
Jonathan Vale.
Subject 17.
Identical twin of Thomas Reed.
Jonathan had spent his childhood moving through institutions secretly funded by Harlow.
Schools tracked him.
Doctors tested him.
Psychologists documented him.
Employers reported on him.
He believed he was living a difficult but ordinary life.
He wasn't.
He was being studied.
Then Jonathan became brilliant.
Particularly with navigation systems.
Orion eventually brought him inside its own operation as a consultant.
That became their mistake.
Jonathan discovered the files.
His own childhood.
Thomas's childhood.
Thousands of private records.
He learned he had a brother.
Then he discovered something worse.
Captain Malcolm Voss had accepted payments to protect the program.
Jonathan threatened disclosure.
Three days before Blackwater, an internal Orion memo appeared.
SUBJECT 17 HAS THREATENED EXTERNAL DISCLOSURE.
RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE CONTAINMENT AND TRANSPORT.
Transport meant the Harrow.
Noah stared at the screen.
“The ship wasn't carrying him somewhere.”
Shaw understood.
“It was removing him.”
“And my father knew.”
They found confirmation in the handwritten notebook of retired Chief Frank Deller.
Thomas had not been assigned to Rescue Six.
He forced his way aboard.
Why?
“My brother is on that ship.”
Deller had heard Thomas say it himself.
Thomas also warned that the beacon had been compromised.
Voss erased those statements.
Then Deller remembered one more thing.
Thomas had told him Jonathan had hidden evidence somewhere Orion could never retrieve without exposing what it had done.
Shaw looked at Noah's wristband.
Cheap plastic should not survive twenty-one years.
Yet this one had.
A laboratory scan revealed why.
Inside was a metallic filament.
Data storage.
May you like
The wristband wasn't merely evidence.
It was a vault.
Related Stories
