The metallic taste of blood jerks Elena awake.
Her cheek burns against cold concrete, fluorescent lights stabbing through her skull like ice picks. She pushes herself up on trembling arms, her lab coat twisted around her waist, dark stains spreading across white cotton.
The Blackwood Institute's neuroscience lab stretches around her familiar banks of computers, the hum of refrigeration units, the sharp scent of antiseptic. Everything exactly as it should be, except for the body slumped over the central workstation.
Dr. Richard Blackwood's gray hair hangs in crimson strings. The prototype memory-extraction headset dangles from his skull like a metallic crown, its neural interfaces still blinking blue. His fingers clutch a piece of paper, knuckles white with rigor mortis.
Elena's legs give out. She crashes into the nearest chair, her vision swimming as she focuses on her mentor's handwriting scrawled across the note:
I'm sorry. I had no choice.
Her own signature. Her own words. Written in her own hand.
She lunges for her phone. The screen shows Monday, 7:23 AM. But the last thing she remembers is calibrating the prototype Friday evening, Richard waving goodbye as he left for his weekend conference in Boston.
Three days. Gone.
Elena's hands shake as she dials 911, then stops. The note. The blood on her clothes. Richard's empty eyes staring at the ceiling
Sirens wail in the distance, growing louder.
Someone else already called.
Elena bolts for the emergency exit, her sneakers slipping on polished floors. The sirens crescendo as she reaches the stairwell, taking steps three at a time. Her badge still works the back entrance scanner beeps green, and she stumbles into the parking garage.
Blue and red lights strobe through the concrete pillars. Car doors slam. Heavy footsteps echo toward the building's main entrance.
Elena's Prius sits in its assigned spot, keys somehow still in her pocket. She slides behind the wheel, hands trembling as she starts the engine.
In her rearview mirror, uniformed officers stream through the entrance.
She shifts into reverse and nearly screams.
Detective Marcus Kane stands directly behind her car, one hand raised, the other resting on his service weapon. Five years haven't softened the hard line of his jaw or the intensity of those gray eyes that once looked at her with love instead of suspicion.
Their gazes lock through the rear windshield. For one heartbeat, she's twenty-seven again, standing in his apartment doorway with her suitcase in hand, choosing her career over their future.
Marcus steps aside and waves her forward with two fingers.
Elena floors the accelerator and speeds toward the garage exit, watching in her side mirror as Marcus pulls out his radio.
She has maybe sixty seconds before every cop in Seattle starts hunting her.
Her phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number: You can't run from what you don't remember. But you can't hide from what's coming next.
Elena's blood turns to ice as she reads the message again. Because beneath those words is a photograph that makes her slam on the brakes in the middle of the street.
It's her, standing over Richard's body, holding a bloody scalpel.
And she's smiling.