CLARA'S POV
The ceiling of the medical wing was white, a flat, aggressive, clinical white that seemed to pulse in time with the throb in my left shoulder.
I lay there, staring into that void, trying to remember the woman who had woken up in Alexandria forty-eight hours ago. That woman had a mortgage. She had a dry-cleaning ticket for a navy blazer. She had a belief, solid as a diamond, that the world was a series of chaotic events governed by a shaky but necessary framework of laws.
That woman was dead, and the monitors beside my bed were silent, but the air in the room felt heavy with the data Nate had shown me. I reached up with my good hand, my fingers trembling as they brushed the thick bandages on my shoulder. Beneath the gauze, the skin was angry and stitched, a jagged map of where the Board had lived inside me for six years.
A "Protocol 12" beacon.
