“Like you touched me last night.”
The word surfaced from a half-remembered briefing, years ago, when he had still been a legitimate field agent. Project Cloudlet . A rumor, officially denied, about a failed Cognizance Division experiment. Children exposed to raw memory-threads, meant to become living archives. But the threads had bonded wrong. Instead of storing memories, the subjects began to leak them—emotions, sensations, fragments of identity—into anyone they touched.
Kael nodded slowly, pulling his wrist from her grip. The ghost of her touch still tingled. “What are you?”
Lian hugged her knees tighter. “No. I’m not giving you my memories. I’m just… showing you what it feels like to be me. For a second.” Her voice dropped. “It’s usually enough to make people run the other way.” True Bond -Ch.1 Part 5- -Cloudlet-
For one impossible second, he had felt what she felt: the hollow ache of a stolen childhood, the razor-sharp focus of a mind hunted for ten years, and beneath it all, a small, fierce warmth. A memory of sunlight through leaves. A lullaby hummed in a language he didn’t know. It had lasted less than a heartbeat, but it had carved itself into his chest like a brand.
Kael leaned back against the wall, letting the silence stretch. Outside, a wagon clattered over wet cobblestones. Somewhere distant, a dog barked. Normal sounds. Human sounds. They felt obscene against the fragile strangeness sitting cross-legged on a pile of sacks in front of him.
He saw a small girl in a white room, hands pressed against a glass wall. He saw a woman with kind eyes— mother? handler? —singing a lullaby as the girl’s small body convulsed with pain. He saw years of running, hiding, forgetting. And beneath all of it, a single, unbreakable truth: I don’t want to be alone anymore. “Like you touched me last night
Kael squeezed her hand gently. “You’re not thrown away,” he said, his voice rough. “Not anymore.”
And the world had shifted .
Lian was crying too, silently, her fingers still intertwined with his. The cloudlet between their palms had grown brighter, steadier—no longer a stray wisp, but a small, steady flame. Children exposed to raw memory-threads, meant to become
Most subjects had died within a year. Their minds, the report said, simply dissolved under the weight of all those borrowed selves.
“You felt that,” she whispered. It wasn’t a question.
“Now you know,” she whispered. “The real me. The one they made and threw away.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned and led him into the abandoned weaver’s loft, her bare feet leaving faint, glowing prints on the rotten floorboards that faded after a few seconds.
