Page 96 of Operation: Defiance

Roughly every eighteen hours, there’s some sort of check-in. Terms like instruction adherence, authority acceptance, and medical compliance get logged with statuses ranging from passing to tolerable to failing.

I scroll to the last two entries.

Corrective intervention cycle: concluded.

Then, twelve hours later, there’s one final line.

Subject expired during post-cycle medical monitoring. Cardiac event.

My jaw locks.

Whatever happened to him, they made damn sure it never existed anywhere but inside those fucking codes.

Now that I have the shape of what happened to my target, I open Raine’s file.

Detainee ID: 3F-207.

Fuck. They didn’t even bother to log her name. There’s no lab work. Barely any vitals beyond blood pressure and heart rate.

Sex: F

Height: 5’8”

Occupation: Systems analyst

Risks: Advanced pattern recognition and predictive threat modeling under duress

There are so many fucking lines in her file, the screen blurs. The timestamps get closer and closer together.

I scroll back to the top. Then forward again.

Eight days.

They kept her for eight days.

Raine makes a small sound in her sleep, then settles. Curled on her side. Guarded, even now.

Eight days should have destroyed her. But she’s still here. Still fighting.

Whatever recovery periods they allowed collapsed so quickly they stopped being recovery at all. And like my target, when there are actual decipherable notes in her file, they’re all about control.

Subject demonstrates anticipatory patterning

Compliance is strategic only

Instruction adherence: consistent, but indicators of mimicry

Continue corrective actions

Near the end, I hit the status block that sent me off-book in the first place. It pisses me off even more now that I’ve seen the results of their methods.

Status: Compliance failure

Corrective intervention cycle: terminated

Medical complication reported

Subject disposal: pending